Hacker News Reader

ravich2_7183on Retirement of Prof. Andy Tanenbaum

I wonder how sweetie 𝜋 will react to this news.

ravich2_7183on Torch7 – Scientific computing for LuaJIT

This is true, but there are a couple of easy workarounds for it: Cython and scipy.weave

http://wiki.scipy.org/PerformancePython

ravich2_7183on A Sound You Can't Unhear (And What It Says About Your Brain)

That was #&<%ing awesome!

ravich2_7183on Win $10,000 by creating a race car bot in haskell, scala or clojure

Another even better guess is that the udacity self driving car course [1] will see a huge upswing in enrollment.

[1] https://www.udacity.com/course/cs373

ravich2_7183on Win $10,000 by creating a race car bot in haskell, scala or clojure

If you want an open sourced car racing game server, you can always use TORCS [1] and SCR [2].

[1] http://torcs.sourceforge.net/

[2] http://scr.geccocompetitions.com/

ravich2_7183on Win $10,000 by creating a race car bot in haskell, scala or clojure

Its a good guess that the simulator or game engine behind this competetion is TORCS (The Open Racing Car Simulator) [1].

Simulated Car Racing (SCR) [2], is an existing annual AI car racing competition based on TORCS, though without the attractive prizes. It also has a client-server architecture with controls and sensor information sent over UDP using what seem like lisp sexps.

[1] http://torcs.sourceforge.net/

[2] http://scr.geccocompetitions.com/

ravich2_7183on Intro to (images in) Go

My first impression is that nd-array/matrix manipulation sucks big time in golang, compared to matlab or python/numpy. I'll go further and say it sucks even compared to C++ and vanilla C.

ravich2_7183on The Anglosphere miracle

What raised the English-speaking peoples to greatness was not a magical property in their DNA, nor a special richness in their soil, nor yet an advantage in military technology, but their political and legal institutions.

This is no doubt aimed at Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, (Geography) & Steel"

ravich2_7183on How Google’s Jeff Dean became the Chuck Norris of the Internet

If Dean has a superhuman power, then, it’s not the ability to do things perfectly in an instant. It’s the power to prioritize and optimize and deal in orders of magnitude. Put another way, it’s the power to recognize an opportunity to do something pretty well in far less time than it would take to do it perfectly.

The take away message is that Worse is Better!

ravich2_7183on Platonic Solids - Why Five?

Thanks for posting.

Now I get why Kepler was hell bent on trying to fit the orbits of the 5 known planets (at his time) with the 5 platonic solids [1]. This part of Kepler's life is very nicely depicted in Carl Sagan's Cosmos [2]. It seemed interesting when I watched it, but I didn't give it much thought back then.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Kepler#Mysterium_Cosmo...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLBA8DC67D52968201&featur...