Hacker News Reader

pav3lon Is Python The New Basic? ("Python For Kids")

The biggest reason BASIC was popular to teach back in the day, is because it is very simple. You are allowed to use GOTO statements which will make (bad) programming a whole lot easier for absolute beginners. On the other hand Python is a well-designed language. It encourages both OOP and FP, and honestly I am not convinced that just because smart people are actively pushing Python to become "the next BASIC", it is going to be very interesting for absolute beginners with little exposure to math and logic.

pav3lon Windows XP drops below 40% market share while Windows 8 passes 1%

The thing about statistics is that it can be different depending on who measures it. According to StatCounter[1] Chrome's share has been rising from 34.21% to 35.72% in the last 3 months.

[1]http://gs.statcounter.com/

pav3lon Syrian Internet Is Off The Air

http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2019784835_apmlsyri...

pav3lon China Mafia-Style Hack Attack Drives California Firm to Brink

It doesn't work that way. If the U.S. government condones cybercrime, it cannot allow an NGO to engage in it towards a country that you have diplomatic relations with. I agree with "Kill that noise right now" comment above.

pav3lon How to record audio in Chrome with native HTML5 APIs

You can do that?

pav3lon In Silicon Valley, Technology Talent Gap Threatens G.O.P. Campaigns

Geeks tend to come in two forms - libertarians and equality oriented. Current GOP doesn't really appeal to either.

pav3lon Outlook.com breaks the 25 million active user mark, releases an Android

I have a very active hotmail account and it's actually amazing at filtering out spam.

pav3lon jStat: a JavaScript statistical library

A solid JS library for statistical computing is definitely long overdue. After skimming through it, JStat seems to only show some trivial examples, and it doesn't seem to be designed for being extended.

What I would really like to see some day is a JS library that extends D3 for graphics and controlling DOM events, that has a good standard library for common statistics (and that is easy to extend), and ideally a possibility to delegate computationally intensive tasks to C (perhaps FFI through Node.js?)

pav3lon A map of all Rolling Stones tours done with reveal.js and cartodb.js

Pretty neat. A suggestion: instead of having straight white lines connecting the nodes (cities), why not add color that will change (say from blue to red), parameterizing time, so the trajectory is clear. Also it could be more visually pleasing to "smooth out the kinks", e.g. use splines. Other than well done!

pav3lon Einstein's list of conditions for staying together with his wife

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1211594,00....

pav3lon Leaping Brain's "Virtually Uncrackable" DRM is just an XOR with "RANDOM_STRING"

Thanks for sharing! Hope you won't get in trouble for your post.

pav3lon Leaping Brain's "Virtually Uncrackable" DRM is just an XOR with "RANDOM_STRING"

I don't even know what's worse - their "proprietary encryption algorithm" or the fact that they used Python for a critical piece of distributed software that you don't want to be reverse-engineered!

pav3lon Leaping Brain's "Virtually Uncrackable" DRM is just an XOR with "RANDOM_STRING"

Can someone explain how he got a hold of the decrypted .mov files that he compared the encrypted ones with? It's not very clear to me from the post, and I'm not familiar with Leaping Brain.

Either way.. wow... XOR encryption with just such a short repeating string! I bet it wouldn't be too hard to decrypt it even without the original file, since the file signature alone would probably be longer than the string. DISCLAIMER: I'm just speculating, I don't know the .mov specs.

pav3lon Discussion on changing name from PostgreSQL to Postgres

This is just a wiki page, not an official announcement.

pav3lon The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur (2009)

>Randomization is not the way to select a population who by definition are outliers.

How should the study have been conducted? It is not obvious to me why selecting a random sample is not representative.

pav3lon Federal officials take down 132 websites in 'Cyber Monday' crackdown

Not sure what they achieved. Tomorrow the same people will register another 132 domain names and continue operating as usual.

pav3lon D3, Conceptually - Lesson 1

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/119969/javascript-chart-l...

pav3lon [dead]

They just don't allow any searches that contain "godaddy" in the string, including GoDaddyIsAwesome.com

pav3lon ML algorithm predicts human emotional response to abstract visual art

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628916.000-computers...

EDIT: These are the Google Scholar profiles of the two scientists mentioned in the article:

http://scholar.google.ca/citations?sortby=pubdate&hl=en&...

pav3lon ML algorithm predicts human emotional response to abstract visual art

Try the print version http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/140681-computer-ai-succes...

pav3lon The most interesting logs in the world

In grade school i was taught that ln is always base e, and lg is always base 10. log has to always come with a subscript, otherwise it's meaningless on it's own. In "real life" though, everyone seems to be using log and knows what it means, e.g. base 2 if it's information theory, base 10 if it's signal processing, base e if it's analysis, discrete logarithm if it's number theory, etc.

pav3lon ML algorithm predicts human emotional response to abstract visual art

The original title ("Computer AI successfully identifies why abstract art evokes human emotion") is a bit misleading, particularly the "why" part.

pav3lon On Being Not Dead

>Beethoven's Great Fugue is not a miracle of the universe.

No, but our ability to enjoy it is.

pav3lon Google Transparency Report – requests from government agencies for user data

Interesting how requests from Russia, Turkey and Hungary are consistently ignored, how China is not on the list, and how Brazil's requests have very high compliance rate (similar to the U.S.)

pav3lon More Fake jQuery sites

>We keep seeing fake jQuery sites popping up and being used to distribute malware.

Anyone has more info? What kind of malware? I'm assuming client side? Any 0-days? Unsurprisingly, both websites are blocked at where I am.

pav3lon The big data disaster

"Big data" technologies just help you perform data analysis on larger datasets. It can be anything from calculating some average to building advanced statistical models. If you are claiming it's useless then you're either claiming 1) that larger datasets don't add any value or 2) that data analysis in general is useless. It is not clear to me from the article which one the author claims. Either way, it reads like some unsubstantiated rant about a perceived buzzword.

pav3lon Ask HN: How can I identify which problems I should solve in my spare time?

http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

pav3lon Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

I remember that book being posted on HN, but was hesitant to order it. Has anyone here read it? What are your thoughts?

pav3lon How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting

I actually think of your first two points (optimizing...) as cost cutting services, while the other two are good examples.

pav3lon Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People

Thanks for posting this, I have had some very vague ideas about some cool music-related side projects that I could work on, but never knew how to go about learning the theory (enough to at least formulate some well-defined projects). This looks like a good start. Hoping the discussion here will pick up to see more suggestions for math/cs oriented crowd.