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pallandt

260 karma · joined July 6, 2013

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pallandt··on PowerDNS.net down for more than 11 hours
There's a notice on their website homepage, something about a 3rd party's services being down, although not worded very politely. I presume lots of other people attempted to contact them about it. PS: Are you with Trilab by any chance? Look on https://www.powerdns.com/about.html "Trilab hosts a PowerDNS based DNS hosting service called "PowerDNS.Net Hosting". This is a service of Trilab, and not of PowerDNS.COM BV."
pallandt··on Ask HN: Is it me or ...?
The healthiest approach is to make time for side projects or other non-software related hobbies you may have.

You're being unrealistic. Try lowering your expectations of other people and if you can't find complete fulfillment in your job, just search for it in something else. A job is just a job at the end of the day, you're primarily doing it for money. Not everyone is lucky to both have money and the ideal job at the same time.

It really isn't worth filling your mind with negativity about aspects that aren't fully under your control, which usually is the case when you're working for other people.

Just do your best, let the higher-ups worry about the rest, continue growing professionally through your side-projects and take good care of your health. It may sound silly, but going to the gym for instance, eating healthier, having a regular sleeping schedule can do a lot to lower your anxiety and in turn make your less than ideal job(s) easier to bare.

pallandt··on Protocols.io – Life Sciences Protocol Repository
Some free protocols, but most are not/are available on a subscription basis, but http://www.springerprotocols.com/ could be a much suitable alternative. However, I'm sceptical that your company hasn't heard of them, perhaps it's an issue of available funds for it unfortunately.
pallandt··on Protocols.io – Life Sciences Protocol Repository
There's already Springer Protocols (http://www.springerprotocols.com/), not free, but IMHO, universities and research facilities already have it better than whatever free alternative may come up in the future. This is not the sort of project that requires only upfront costs, this is why I unfortunately don't think it will live for long, if it ever gets completely funded.
pallandt··on Show HN: Coderust – Prepare for Programming Interviews
Can you deal with Python? This is free and available on-line as just a regular static site. (http://interactivepython.org/courselib/static/pythonds/index...).

From what I could tell, it's the full version of 'Problem Solving with Algorithms and Data Structures Using Python 2nd ed', 2011. I haven't read it cover to cover, but it seemed well written. You can read some reviews on the printed version at http://www.amazon.com/Problem-Solving-Algorithms-Structures-...

pallandt··on Show HN: Coderust – Prepare for Programming Interviews
You should consider listing the topics it helps you cover, I think it would be a great selling point and help convert visitors to buyers faster.

I noticed one of the slides (not the 1st) contains a blurry phone image in the right corner with what I think might be some sort of table of contents: linked lists, trees, stacks & queues, etc.

Perhaps to keep the description terse you could group the features using something like: 'the most important data structures, problem-solving heuristics and math'.

pallandt··on How Understanding the Process of Enlightenment Could Change Science
This is only vaguely scientific and that only in the beginning of the article. It then progressively reads more like some excited, clueless retelling of other people's psychotic-like experiences. I can't even begin to understand the parallel to set theory mentioned in the piece.
pallandt··on Project Marilyn Part I: Non-Patented Cancer Pharmaceutical
For anyone else wondering on what types of cancer this might work on, from [1]:

Q: Which cancers will 9DS work on?

A: We don't have a definitive answer, but initial tests show that it's strongest against some forms of renal (kidney) cancer, melanoma(skin) cancer, and triple-negative breast cancer. We have reason to believe that variants of 9DS will target different cancer types, as well.

[1]: http://www.indysci.org/details.html "Details"

pallandt··on Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from Elsevier
If I remember correctly Elsevier's rules, in case the article is from a subscription-based journal (non-open access) they retain copyright to the final published peer-reviewed & formatted article. The author is allowed to share their final published paper only in a 'scholarly' context, which seems to mean anything but mass dissemination; you're allowed to share it with your peers privately, but not post it on your site for example. I've just re-checked and it seems this rule is still enforced: http://www.elsevier.com/journal-authors/author-rights-and-re...
pallandt··on I Spent A Month Living In A Romanian Sexcam Studio
I think it's possible it might've happened although I don't know a specific case. I have read about several instances of gamers having died as a result of prolonged sitting and developing deep vein thrombosis though. Here is an example: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/xbox-addict-chris-stan...
pallandt··on How LinkedIn screwed up our friendship
I don't know anyone personally that uses LinkedIn as a medium for establishing a friendship.

People already have Facebook for that, or even Twitter, Tumblr, Google+ and so on. I generally never turn down connection requests from LinkedIn (even if I don't know the person) unless the requester is interested in ridiculous stuff such as 'advancing our careers by giving each other endorsements'. Yes, someone specifically sent me such a message and it made me remove them from my connection list.

I've also connected with quite a lot of people I 'met' through various Coursera courses I took and that seemed smart/interesting, but not with the intention of friending them. They sometimes make insightful comments to LinkedIn groups they're subscribed...I can read this in the Updates section. Sometimes they launch new business ventures and I'm happy for them they put the Startup Engineering course to good use. None of these people have bothered me with anything, but I have the opportunity to learn something by watching them evolve.

pallandt··on Epic Fail: The Rise and Fall of Demand Media
They're charging for convenience and the ability to download a tutorial in pdf format, it's not like user experience is sabotaged for everyone. Assuming they don't get enough revenue from advertising, it's a decent monetization strategy.

They're not actually impeding anyone from viewing content, say for instance like Quora blurring posts or similar.

Nothing wrong with that, I wished people were more understanding of how companies sometimes need to do mildly unpleasant things in order to keep a product afloat so that everyone can enjoy it. Some of the things on Instructables are pretty awesome, especially a few years ago I would've had a very hard time in finding an equivalent for their various technology tutorials.

pallandt··on Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS
I think the big problem with PHP is the fact that you can find so many tutorials online still not having caught up with current practices, not just in terms of language updates or security, but in terms of software engineering. Not knowing any better and how to distinguish between quality learning material, newcomers will happily put into practice what they've learned on good 'authority' to be correct. Same applies for many books on PHP. There's one particular very prolific and popular author, whose PHP books are always revelled, yet if you read them, he's not actually teaching at a standard a lot higher than what you can find other places. You end up having to spend more time having to re-learn stuff and trying to forget bad approaches...one of the downsides of it being a language with a longer history that Ruby+Rails.
pallandt··on Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS
If you were to start with a nearly blank slate in regards to your PHP knowledge + Laravel as a framework for example, throw in Composer, learning about Eloquent ORM and so on, you'd likely be facing the same reaction.

I'd like to also point out that if you want to do software dev by the book applying various sofware engineering principles and not just stringing something together that works, you're pretty much forced to use a framework. (either due to lack of time or lack of skills for building one the right way).

Sure, sometimes the most important thing is rolling something up quickly, but other times your project will be used by more than a handful of people, and/or you'll have expectations of producing monetizable value and anticipate regular maintenance/upgrades for which a different strategy is required.

pallandt··on Bootstrap 3.0.3 released
Sigh...I'll probably have to do it in LESS as well. Do you have any tips on good typography mixins for LESS, if any? I'd miss Compass and Typeplate very much if I end up switching. Thanks to everyone that replied btw.
pallandt··on Bootstrap 3.0.3 released
Wonderful, perfect timing. I've tried hard to stay away from Bootstrap for various reasons, but I really need to use it for a project I'm working on currently. Can someone more familiar with its history (and planned future) please give me a recommendation in regards to what implementation I should use, LESS or the SASS-ported version? Have there been any talks of considering SASS for future Boostrap official releases? Is LESS still active and evolving? I'm obviously strongly in favour of SASS, but I'm not the end-user of the project.
pallandt··on Kima15: $150K for 15% in 15 days
You're overestimating and underestimating a lot of things at the same time. $150k is not 'tiny' by any measure, raising this much from family alone would mean you have a pretty well-off and trusting, loving family to begin with, not all developers reside in SF, U.S.A to demand or even need such a yearly salary etc. etc. I don't want to start tearing too much into your argument because I kind of like it that people are still able to think so...rosily on average.
pallandt··on How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang
I think the URL was changed, it used to be this one if I remember correctly: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/inside_higher_ed/2013/11/... I saw this post on the /newest page earlier today.
pallandt··on Ask HN: Why does Facebook respect my data more than HN?
I imagine pg has more pressing matters to deal with. Better email info@ycombinator.com instead if you need something deleted. A YCombinator employee confirmed to me recently that this is the address to contact in case you absolutely have to, so it obviously shouldn't be abused.
pallandt··on Started a stupid company. Failed.
Thanks for doing this, Zed!
pallandt··on Started a stupid company. Failed.
You should comment with a list of skills, maybe either a fellow HN-er offers you a job, or knows someone else that might be able to.

It's close to Christmas guys, help this person if you can.

Edit: Also, I noticed you said you're pretty sure you're the opposite of 'us', I can assure you, there's at least another 'failure' to join you, me. I've failed plenty of times in various ways. I used to have a company (not a startup in the common sense though, just a small business) as well some time ago, it didn't fail per se, but I ended up closing it voluntarily because things weren't going in the direction I wanted them to, lots of external factors out of my reach. I felt terrible about it for quite a long time though...now I'm better.

pallandt··on An understated job advertisement
Soo...lots of responsibilities and a warning to probably not expect an adjusted salary to match them ('Annual Salary: Negotiable, but you should know up front we’re not a terribly money-motivated group'), with these 2 as a minimum:

- A BA/BS or greater degree in Computer Science or a related field

- A minimum of 3 years in development and project management, preferably in a professional workplace

In Seattle no less, with the expectation that you'll be on call 24/7 should they need you to fix something. I don't live in the U.S, but I have a hard time seeing how a truly qualified professional with a minimum of 3 years of experience in all the domains they mentioned would sign up for such a job if they really cared about their career progression, even if it is for Penny Arcade. This type of position sounds like it was almost intentionally designed for a high turnover of employees.

pallandt··on How to share data with a statistician
It's rare (unfortunately), but Dr. Jeffrey Leek isn't the 1st proponent of sharing raw data, or otherwise a believer in reproducible results. Dr. Eamonn Keogh has made very important contributions in data mining and is also a huge advocate of reproducibility. See for example 'Why the lack of reproducibility is crippling research in data mining and what you can do about it' dated 2007 @ http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1341922
pallandt··on Bitcoin Payment Processor BIPS Attacked, Over $1M Stolen
They seem to be currently worth more than $1 million USD though. Maybe the USD equivalent was chosen for the title because more people would be able to immediately relate to it as a value.
pallandt··on Kern Type, The Kerning Game
This is very, very pleasing visually.
pallandt··on Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto
2 possible situations I can think of, based strictly on 'Among their discoveries was a particular transfer to an account controlled by Mr. Ulbricht from another that had been created in January 2009, during the very earliest days of the bitcoin network, which was set up the previous year.':

- the bitcoin wallet, although said to be associated with SN, has changed ownership since its creation in 2009

- SN purchased something from DPR, perhaps something DPR himself was selling on SR, either a legitimate buy or for some other purposes; SN was just a regular customer in this case

In the meantime, I'm eagerly awaiting their paper. Ron and Shamir have previously co-authored another bitcoin related paper titled 'Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph'. There's a very interested overview of it in this Gist: https://gist.github.com/jgarzik/3901921 It appears to have some flaws.

I don't know how accurate this statistic is, but the last Gist comment mentions that 22% of bitcoins are held in reused addresses.

pallandt··on Sudden Progress on Prime Number Problem Has Mathematicians Buzzing
Were you being sarcastic? I've heard this before and it's usually considered that once someone gets married/has a family of their own, they simply will have to devote much less time to their profession/'hobbies' (like math) because of time constraints, and then they just start degrading due to lack of practice etc.

One of the times it was specifically brought up in reference to a known mathematician. The takeaway being that getting in a relationship, or even married, automatically disqualifies you from achieving anything of great importance in the future....made me pretty sad that it's such a common pattern of thought.

pallandt··on Addressing Questions about the Salesforce $1 Million Hackathon
Random fact: you may know Turian, part of the winning team, by being the man who used to have this impressive moustache: https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1206193071/turian-profi...

I remember his writings or events that he was involved in have popped up on HN several times in the past.

pallandt··on Machine learning is easier than it looks
It's actually incredibly hard, especially if you want to achieve better results than with a current 'gold standard' technique/algorithm, applied on your particular problem.

While the article doesn't have this title (why would you even choose one with such a high bias?), I presume the submitter decided upon this title after being encouraged by this affirmation of the article's author: 'This data indicates that the skills necessary to be a data “wizard” can be learned in disciplines other than computer sciences and mathematics.'.

This is a half-baked conclusion. I'd reason most Kaggle participants are first of all, machine learning fans, either professionals or 'amateurs' with no formal qualifications, having studied it as a hobby. I doubt people with a degree in cognitive sciences or otherwise in the 'other' categories as mentioned in the article learned enough just through their university studies to readily be able to jump into machine learning.

pallandt··on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
Chiming in with some more appreciation! Great stuff!
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