Hacker News Reader

pav3lon Australian software engineer got asked algorithm question when entering US

One of my math professor (Canadian) once told us a story (~10 years ago) that the US border control asked him to "state and prove Rolle's theorem" after he had told them he was traveling to a math conference. Apparently he answered "it's something to do with the mean value theorem, right?" and that was good enough.

pav3lon Probablistic Programming and Bayesian Methods for Hackers

Thanks for the answer, I deleted my original question shortly after posting because I thought it was abit disrespectful.

For those who are curious, the question was: is "for Hackers" a new way of saying for those who don't feel like actually studying the math, going through the proofs and working through the problem sets?

pav3lon Climate science: A sensitive matter

"Peer-reviewed" does not mean correct, or vice versa. The study they are talking about was done by the Research Council of Norway. I am assuming the goal was to inform the public, not to get published in a scientific journal. It was not an academic exercise. I, for one, am very happy that the Economist included this study in their survey.

pav3lon HTML5 Snake Game with source code walkthrough

Funny how even after years of Vim-ing, using "hjkl" in a video game still trips me up.

pav3lon R and pandas and what I've learned about each

I am in the process of migrating all of my analyses from Matlab and R to Python. I have been meaning to do this for quite some time and finally pandas is mature enough to be able to completely replace both Matlab and R for straightforward tasks. If I need something Python doesn't offer, it's still fairly simple to do isolated tasks elsewhere. For me the biggest reasons for change are easy integration with the web and better language features (for Matlab, R language is great, just terribly slow for intensive tasks).

What I miss the most:

- Matlab <--> Excel link (on Windows) - an excel add-on that lets you send back and forth arrays very easily. You need a spreadsheet when you work with datasets, and interchanging data through files just isn't that convenient.

- Matlab's IDE features (debugging, documentation, publishing, variable inspection).

- ggplot2

pav3lon The best programmers are the quickest to Google

>why in the world would you want to spend 2 hours trying to figure it out yourself?

I am sure a large portion of HN-ers (myself included) enjoy doing exactly that. I want to spend my day solving problems, not googling shit.

pav3lon Posterous will turn off on April 30

>Can you do a writeup/tutorial for your setup?

Actually, Flask tutorial uses a blog application as example

http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/tutorial/introduction/

pav3lon Ask HN: What is the most impressive thing "other than this startup" you've done?

I have planted over half million trees.

pav3lon Happy Valentine's Day

You too!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Plot%5BSqrt%5BCos%5Bx%5...

pav3lon Zero-Day vulnerability in Adobe Reader

I am pretty happy with SumatraPDF on Windows. Orders of magnitude faster than Reader too.

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-read...

pav3lon Incredible Secret Money Machine

Exactly, start-up entails growth. http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

pav3lon Octave for Android

Ask HN: Who uses Octave? If you had access to Matlab, would you use it instead? Why not Python/R/Julia?

pav3lon Julia, I love you (2012)

Finally there are downloadable binaries for Windows and OSX! http://code.google.com/p/julialang/downloads/list

Also, previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3784349

pav3lon For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact

Endurance hunting is rarely a straight line race. Here is an example of a route for one of those hunts (it's from my first link): http://www.jstor.org/literatum/publisher/jstor/journals/cont...

As you can see, even though the overall distance is 25.1 km, the straight line distance between the start and finish is less than a mile.

pav3lon For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact

Whoever is interested, here are two very good academic articles about persistent hunting (subscription required):

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/508695

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248408...

Also, here is a video of a modern persistent hunter http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o

pav3lon Why Philosophers make formidable entrepreneurs (2010)

>Philosophy of mind is probably the dominant research area in contemporary philosophy, and I think you'd find a lot that doesn't overlap at all with empirical psychology.

It's not really my area of expertise, but maybe the reason that philosophy of mind is such a big research area in contemporary philosophy is because we haven't figured out how to study mind yet. Once we figure out the correct questions about things like consciousness, we should be able to address them scientifically (much like we are doing with perception, learning, etc. through neuroscience), or figure out why it can't be addressed scientifically, or come to some kind of other logical conclusion.

pav3lon Why Philosophers make formidable entrepreneurs (2010)

I disagree with your comment completely. It's not that philosophy teaches us how to think, and sciences teach us what to think. Philosophy teaches us how to pose questions. As soon as we are able to address those questions the problem becomes science (e.g. natural philosophy--> physics, philosophy of mind--> psychology, etc.)

pav3lon D3, Conceptually - Lesson 2

http://vimeo.com/45558674

pav3lon University of Waterloo Students Win Facebook's Hackathon

Waterloo is well known in Canada for having an exceptional Mathematics program (if I'm not mistaken you graduate with BMath, not a BA/BSc with a math major).

pav3lon Save Your Kisses For Me

I agree, even if you don't agree with Adam Curtis's politics, his documentaries are very thought provoking and well worth watching. Some of my favourites include "The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream", "The Century of self", "Pandora's Box", "All watched over by Machines Loving Grace". If you enjoyed this particular blog post, check out "The Power of Nightmares".

pav3lon Ask HN: what was the best life/programming choice you ever made?

Smart people can waste time too.

pav3lon HTML5 Datalist

http://caniuse.com/datalist

Unfortunately still not supported on safari or IE9. Don't rush to throw away those Javascript widgets quite yet.

pav3lon Facebook Makes A Huge Data Grab By Aggressively Promoting Photo Sync

Facebook is not going anywhere. These are all smart business moves to make it an almost necessary part of our lives. "Facebook is like chairs" seems to quite literally describe the end goal of their campaign. I would argue they are doing a very good job, perhaps on par with De Beers and Coca Cola in their time.

pav3lon Ask HN: side projects: quantity vs. quality?

For what purposes?

pav3lon Father builds automated drone to watch son walk to the bus stop

In case anyone is interested in tracking their kids, the drone software is open source: http://code.google.com/p/arducopter/

pav3lon Show HN: FilmBreak is launching a fully integrated virtual film studio

Any project challenging RIAA's monopoly is getting my upvote. Looks very well thought through and nicely executed.

pav3lon A tour of the world in d3.js

Thanks for D3, learning it now and it is awesome!

pav3lon Lindsey Graham wants ability to lock you up forever without trial

Everything is evolving, people should be able to amend the Constitution. What you're proposing would make that illegal.

pav3lon Lindsey Graham wants ability to lock you up forever without trial

Inappropriate comment to an inappropriate article (Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, [...] unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon[1]).

[1]http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

pav3lon Multitasking makes you dumb

Ok, here goes my highly controversial sweeping generalization: men suck at multitasking, women are actually much better at it. My source? Just years of active observation. I'd be very interested to see any actual research on the subject.