HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

hbhanu

15 karma · joined April 3, 2012

submissionscomments
hbhanu··on A Simple Rule to Eliminate Useless Meetings
Surprisingly effective. :)
hbhanu··on Association between muscular strength and mortality in men (2008) [pdf]
Lifting also encourages proper posture and stretching, both of which work -wonders-. :) I'll have to look into this program, though, haven't heard of it before!
hbhanu··on Zero-Day vulnerability in Adobe Reader
I wonder if there are more Pokemon, or zero-day vulnerabilities for Adobe products... "Gotta catch 'em all!"
hbhanu··on Why Are College Textbooks So Absurdly Expensive?
I've had many teachers write their own books and give them to the local copy-shop for distribution to the students at printing cost (~$15). Or we can keep PDF copies of the books for free.
hbhanu··on PSA - Don't tweet photos of your credit/debit cards
My head... it hurts.
hbhanu··on Chocolat 1.0 Released
I don't know if it wins -everything-, but one purchase working on all my OSes? That's pretty awesome. And with the prices so close, I really can't justify buying Chocolat over ST2. :/
hbhanu··on Comcast Wins Protest Against “Shake Down” of BitTorrent Pirates
Haha, I did a doubletake, too - the background definitely helped.
hbhanu··on Confused in Class? There's an App for that
That's a lot more participation than I would have guessed, that's pretty awesome! Thanks for the info, and I look forward to seeing this getting more widespread use :)
hbhanu··on Confused in Class? There's an App for that
I can definitely see the appeal of this - like you mentioned in your blog post, there's always worry that others will think you're stupid or something for not understanding something.

That having been said, I had a few questions/concerns:

- How would it work when there were specific gaps? It might be helpful if comments could be included to the instructor when the rating is provided. That would allow the teacher to reinforce those particular topics.

- How would you guarantee participation? If, for example, only people that don't understand the topic speak up, wouldn't that skew the data presented to the teacher?

hbhanu··on On the making of a girl nerd
My freshman and sophomore years, I was taught Java... the rest of undergrad and grad, I was living in a world of C and Matlab. I have no idea why it was taught in that order, and I think they're in the process of fixing it, but I remember my first C course when we started doing pointer arithmetic... quite the experience!
hbhanu··on Zxcvbn: realistic password strength estimation
Huh, thanks! I suspected it was a security thing, but I've seen some sites where other non-alphaneumeric characters were disallowed as well. :/ At least this makes some sense.
hbhanu··on Zxcvbn: realistic password strength estimation
I cringe every time I see this happen... and always with websites where you -want- stronger passwords.
hbhanu··on Ask HN: Any real uses of Neural Networks?
I used growing neural gas ( http://web.cs.swarthmore.edu/~meeden/DevelopmentalRobotics/f... ) for my MS research dealing with keystroke dynamics (specifically, modeling Hidden Markov Models on interkey-delays to identify a user's language). When you have a large set of data and you need to identify exemplars for that data, it does a pretty good job. As _delirium said, though, it requires a degree of supervision and tweaking to get growth parameters, etc.

Edit: I use 'supervision' in a 'it might take a few tries to get it working ideally' sense, not a 'you need a priori knowledge of the data' sense.

hbhanu··on All The Cheat Sheets An Up To Date Web Designer Needs: CSS3, HTML5 and jQuery
It usually depends on what it's a cheat sheet about - I always keep an electronic copy, but specific ones get pinned to my cubicle walls.

These are the two big ones that I keep up at all times. I don't always use the VI/VIM one (a lot of the keystrokes become ingrained after repeated use, but when I have to switch environments, the transition back is always smoother with it).

VI/VIM: http://michael.peopleofhonoronly.com/vim/ RegEx: http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/regular-expressions-c...

hbhanu··on Free 18GB Dropbox account now possible through referrals
I was also wondering that... it'd be nice if they did, and made it retroactive. I didn't know about the Google Ads link that JonoW posted, I'll have to look into that!
hbhanu··on Ask HN: Hiring Practices for Recent Grads
Sure thing - yeah, it's scary. :/

Jos A Banks has a couple of sales going on right now, if that'll help? My dad tends to prefer Men's Warehouse (they have better service), but the suit prices alternate. MW will usually be cheaper if they're not in a mall, too.

If he had a good relationship with one of his professors, they might be able to help with the hunt. One of the interviews I had was because of that.

You might be able to get the ticket for free if you have some spare miles. It's still a pain, but marginally better. :/

hbhanu··on Ask HN: Hiring Practices for Recent Grads
That's odd... the interviews I've had to travel for were all compensated. The companies actually bought me the tickets, set up the hotel reservation, and got me a rental car, so all I had to worry about were the meals.

Edit: Just talked to a friend of mine who does interviews for her company, and apparently there's been a paradigm shift of late. Since grads want jobs more than employers need them, there's been a power transfer between the two. Instead of the employers courting grads, it's the other way around now.