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mkartic

37 karma · joined February 2, 2013

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mkartic··on You are probably sitting down for too long
Both 'sit up' and 'stand down' mean very specific things. But yeah, unqualified 'sitting' & 'standing' definitely don't need that disambiguation.
mkartic··on Google is shutting down the QPX Express API for airfare data
Looks like the post means 'either already burnt or will be burnt easily'? So what exactly is your nitpick here?
mkartic··on The next version of Safari will let users block ads on iPhones and iPads
Netflix - Essentially a paywall for great CONTENT. You subscribe to their service with regular payments.

Youtube - Ads for free content.

Both seem to be working just fine as far as revenue is concerned. Can you elaborate on why you find only sites like SE or GH "content"? What's your definition? Are you suggesting entertainment doesn't have a value of its own?

mkartic··on Xfce 4.12 released
I don't think the OP has a problem figuring out how to try a new DE. The question was whether it's worth it. The nuanced answers of users with considerable experience is more valuable (IMHO) than just firing up Xfce for a session or two.
mkartic··on Show HN: App for Falling in Love
To help you out, "Couples therapists estimate that only 5% of relationships ever break out of the power struggle and into true intimacy and self _actulization_." s/actu/actua/ I guess? In the page titled "Warning!".
mkartic··on How to Write a Spelling Corrector
A "confusion matrix" is statistical analysis you're looking for. An entry (i,j) is a score on how much the ith character is mistakenly typed (inputted) as the jth character. This can be easily adapted to various input devices.
mkartic··on Two new subatomic particles discovered at CERN
Are the particles found first and retrofitted into the Standard Model? Or does the model act as a map of sorts by telling us where to look? If latter, does that mean we're not looking for particles outside of the standard model?
mkartic··on The Indian Miracle-Buster Stuck in Finland
Going to Tirupathi is a pilgrimage. Its misrepresenting religion. Faith by itself isn't irrational. You're putting 'Going to Tirupathi' and 'Not cutting your hair on Tuesdays' in the same bucket. This will only hinder progress in dispelling actual superstitions.

Categorizing all religion as superstition seems to be some sort of atheist superiority complex. (I'm an atheist too, btw.)

mkartic··on All of Bach
no RSS? :(
mkartic··on Firefox 29
That argument doesn't really help the discussion. Except for very sensitive data, usability is generally a bigger factor. And anyway, its not like you have a lot of options to choose from.
mkartic··on Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?
If you're able to pull it off, good for you. Rest of us, as this and numerous other discussions here on HN show, find it hard. Its a pretty big deal. You don't really have to complain about it. You're probably the exception, not the rule. :)

In fact, it would be more useful if you can tell us more about how you it.

Is it just an innate ability you've got or something you learnt to do? Do you have any hacks/system like the pomodoro technique?

Do you have off days?

How often do you get 'into the zone' a day? Because, if you can only last a couple of hours in the zone (like me), then to get 8 hours of productive work would take me 12-13 hours to accomodate breaks, food etc. Do you have the luxury of not having to check your mail too often?

If you work with other people, do you notice them working less/more than you?

mkartic··on Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?
Its like how you're asked to restart your computer everytime you call the support with an issue.
mkartic··on Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls
thanks! Will check it out. I use noscript, which is a slightly easier option in this case than a text based browser. :) But having a very strict whitelisting policy, I have to allow 3-4 sites to run JS temporarily everytime I decide to read something on blogger.
mkartic··on Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls
My interpretation of that rule. I think the author is only asking readers not to goof off or postpone work that can be right away. Like mentioned very often, getting into the right context for a task takes some time. So working till 8.15PM instead of leaving at 8.00PM, but completing the task at hand is better than having to come an hour early the next day. I find that even very incomplete insignificant tasks keeps nagging away in your head until you actually get around to do it.
mkartic··on The incredible stock-picking ability of SEC employees
Isn't that a bit extreme? I'm not saying there should be implicit trust or that there is no risk of insider trading, but still. Its not right to deny them of all rights to have other sources of income apart from their job. I mean, having to sell all their stocks of a certain company before investigation is forfeiture enough.

My two cents,

D: Some sort of anonymized peer review of transactions? Maybe even automated.

mkartic··on Uzbl – Web interface tools which adhere to the Unix philosophy
It would have been really true if it had said, > "Any program can be really useful if it complies with the Unix philosophy." (sans "only").
mkartic··on IBM layoffs strike first in India; workers describe as 'slaughter' and 'massive'
Er, are you saying they were incompetent because they were Indians?
mkartic··on Brain Hacks Top Founders Use to Get the Job Done
If you're telling me about hacks, I want them to be short and to the point. This article seems to go on and on.
mkartic··on Brain Hacks Top Founders Use to Get the Job Done
wow, now i'm running through all possible parses of that title to figure out the funniest interpretation. The longer I think, the less funnier its getting. :|
mkartic··on Why Don't Schools Teach Debugging?
Why the bitterness against CS?

As jarvic says,

> However, CS and software development are not the same thing.

A lot of schools offer a separate degree in Software engineering as opposed to CS (or at least separate tracks). So the distinction is pretty clear. Where I studied, there are separate degrees for CS and IT. You seem to be fudging the two. Do you expect physics majors to be mechanical engineers automatically?

CS degrees teach you algorithms, not how to write code in Java. Doesn't matter what IDE/language you're using, bubble sort is going to be slower than quicksort for large lists.

Yes, unfortunately most people who do CS end up becoming IT drones. That's the nature of the industry, not the CS program's fault. As a matter of interest, what do most physics majors become? I'm sure there aren't enough professorships available.

Or in the words of E.W.Dijkstra: “Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”

mkartic··on Programmers At Work: Bill Gates (1986)
In this context, taking help shouldn't be considered cheating. Its better that s/he looks up the API calls. It wouldn't be a comprehension test if all that is required is knowing a few API calls. Isn't the whole point of the exercise to see if the candidate can get past the API calls and understand the big picture?
mkartic··on Nadella as Microsoft CEO: A slap in the face for Indian system
Comparing IIT/IIM entrance exams to caste system is a very cheap shot. IITs are no more exclusionists than Harvard or MIT. Its the country's premier place for education, so everyone is going to want to study there.
mkartic··on Light Table is now open source
why are they 'aesthetically ugly'? do you mean they don't have windows with glossed borders?
mkartic··on After working +1200 hours in oDesk
USD20k is a very large sum. It works out to just over 1.2million in INR. Now that's a lot. If all it took to make USD20k a year was 40-50hour work week, I wouldn't feel underpaid at all. And I would be living a life of luxury.
mkartic··on Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?
very well put. Both obscure and implicit/obvious information can be very hard to find by just reading the manual.

(Aside from above) I love Python. I only know enough to get by though. I have this program that runs for a really long time, storing the results of each iteration in a dict. These results are complex python objects, and are meant to be processed later on.

Naturally, I tried pickling them. As the file grew, Pickle quickly became cumbersome. It was a bad idea to read and write something that big every iteration. I started wondering if there was some way to write pickle objects incrementally. Then googled it, and an answer from SO led me to the 'shelve' module. It does exactly that, pickling objects incrementally. Its part of Python's standard library. But it didn't turn up on the first page of google's results. It is described in the docs as a 'persistent, dictionary-like object'. Well, if not for SO, I would have been stuck with the wrong set of keywords to search with. So, my point is, even if things ARE in the manual, it takes some effort finding it. And SO does an excellent job of leading you on to the right places in the manual/reference rather than just looking down upon you for not grokking the entire manual.

mkartic··on Coursera-dl – A script for downloading course material from coursera.org
why can't they charge the universities instead to put up their own courses? It'd be a good advertisement. Like how everyone knows about Strang's linal courses. The complexity of the courses are limited by the number of people attending it, so anyway, things can get only so much advanced. And use it as a platform for getting into more advanced courses in physical classrooms.
mkartic··on A Tmux Crash Course (2011)
man pages aren't tutorials. While it pays to go through the man pages of certain essential utilities, not all man pages are created equally. Try reading ffmpeg's man page to learn how to use it. But its indispensable once you learn your way around the command.
mkartic··on The Sun's Magnetic Field is about to Flip
> What makes you think it does not?

Its mostly my own ignorance I am admitting. :) I believe the true spirit of the 'Causation is not correlation' phrase is that if the mechanism isn't obvious, don't jump to the conclusion. As your link points out, correlation is a good reason to carry further investigation.

mkartic··on The Sun's Magnetic Field is about to Flip
But the GP's mention of the 'correlation is not causation' is completely warranted in this case. He doesn't think 'geopolitical happenstance is affected by solar magnetism' either. And that's exactly what is said. Though there seems to be a correlation, politics is not actually affected by the phenomenon.
mkartic··on YouTube adds Play icon to page titles so you can see which tabs are making noise
I wish they'd fix the buffering issues.
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