Hacker News Reader

restofuson Show HN: Raspberry pi based ping pong robot

Nice, I was looking for one sometime back and the app based ones like amicus and robo pong cost around $2000

restofuson Study suggests that the “brain training” industry may be a placebo

Are you referring to space fortress [1]?

[1] https://www.brainturk.com/space-fortress

restofuson Show HN: Multiplayer Brain games

It would be great if you can add a few of those word games you have on the games page to the wars page

restofuson Show HN: Brainturk cognitive games app

This looks great. Why have you priced the app at $2.99 I have been using Lumosity and they charge $79.99 per year across their website and app and they have very limited games on their app.

restofuson Ancient languages: Perl (2004)

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.in/2006/10/egomania-itself.html

Here he talks a bit about the perl community

restofuson Is this considered creepy in all cultures?

Additional discussion http://blogs.perl.org/users/steven_haryanto/2012/07/so-appar...

http://blogs.perl.org/users/michael_g_schwern/2012/07/how-no...

restofuson Ask HN: Possible to take automatic screenshot of webpage at same time each day?

Selenium is another option http://seleniumhq.org/

restofuson Ask HN: How can I improve my knowledge in Security

This class might be of interest to you http://www.security-class.org/

restofuson Perl 6 in 2011 - A Retrospection

The good thing about perl 6 is that lots of ideas from there are getting back into perl 5 and believe it or not Haskell got a bit of a boost because of perl 6 (when the pugs project was in full swing).

Even if one of the projects implements the full perl 6 spec that exists today, there are very few perl 5 devs that will switch over ,If I were asked to guess it would be less than 5 %. Perl 6 as a language has to start at the bottom with other programming languages . The name perl6 was used because one of the reason (I am not sure of this) was to retain the name to get perl5 devs to move to the next version of the language and at that time perl5 was a dominant language.

Another perspective to look at is that perl6 was announced in early 2000 clojure came around 2007 , scala appeared around 2003. There are other languages like go and dart which have google backing that have come out.

So IMHO if you want to learn language design and the other things around it perl6 is a good playground you will learn and easy to get into the community but you will not get a job because of it. If you are a user of programming language who wants to use a language for solving a real world problem today (with libraries and get questions answered) or learn a language which will get you a job you will be better off with perl5 , php, ruby, python, scala, clojure or <insert your lang>

restofuson Perl 6 in 2011 - A Retrospection

"real world" means different things for different people.

At this point how many companies do you know of that use perl6 to solve their business problem (may be as simple as a web app) ?. Has there been any job posting anywhere which are looking for perl6 devs?

restofuson Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

I do not think structured classes is equivalent to being treated like a child.

It was intended as a general comment that some people might not like it and equate it like that based on his comment that only a fraction people actually attended it and maybe if it was made compulsory they might not like it and there is a probability that they will say that.

Just a point that what ever you do there will be some group that will not like it .

restofuson Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

You say encourage to challenge themselves (Internal) and then say the course must challenge them (external factor). In any course the basics are thought and the student must take it on themselves to learn more and ask when they do not understand. If you have played any sport the basics are easy but you spend time and practice so if your coach says hit the ball from 10 yards and if you feel that is easy you can move back to hit the ball from further why do you expect the coach to tell you that.You can ask the prof for more complex examples or use the homework in a real world example. This seems to be a case about he gets the same marks as me and I know a lot more than him.

restofuson Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

I disagree I do not know calculus and would not have done this class if that was the case. I am now implementing ML in my day to day work . Anybody can make ML difficult , the greatness is in making it easy for people to use it and that makes a real world impact IMHO

restofuson Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

If you want to know how the guy came up with it , do you think someone taught him that or he delved into the topic deeper by himself and figured it out .The professor makes it clear that you can do the derivates if you know so I do not understand how the course would be better if that was given as a assignment. Also if the professor thought the same way why would he want to teach a class instead of working for a bigco or a research firm ?

restofuson Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

Really principles be damned, they are doing it for free

restofuson Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

<i> Selfstudy is great, but sometimes the best way to learn is from a structured class</i> Well lots of people might like to be treated like grown ups and not like the structured classes and who knows they might even write a letter asking for refund

restofuson Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

This was an initial experiment so I am pretty sure they will change the format a little bit later. lots of people signed up for all the classes and it was difficult to do all the three at the same time but if given the option of doing it at your own pace I do not think it will go down.

restofuson Stanford Free Classes – A review from a Stanford Student

tldr; The experts make it look impossible but the masters make it look easy and actually teach you

Just ranting out here so feel free to ignore :-)

This is not really aimed at the author but towards the "elite" group. There was another elite commentator in one of the other thread who said he dropped out of ML class because This course included gems such as "if you don't know what a derivative is, that is fine" and he thought math was important in ML. Before the ML class I could not even argue with these guys because I did not know squat about AI and talking to these experts their advice was to take a year off and learn math and then start learning AI which in my case was not possible. Today after a couple of months of online classes I am actually using ML in my daily work and its not magic that only the elite with deep profound math knowledge can use. Another programmer who is working in khan academy actually had a blog post about how he implemented ML by learning from Prof Andrew's class now that is real world impact. I may be missing something but can one of you experts please explain why you need deep math knowledge when the professor who has been doing a lot of research in this field a lot more than you does not think so ?. The professor in his classes keeps reassuring that even after using it for so many years he has difficulty in the subject but I'm guessing these experts know it all :-).

This is the reason in my opinion even though wall street is full of smart people they do not care about the rest of the population or the general masses the attitude is we are smart and we can do what we want you guys are dumb and deserve what you get and if someone outside of their elite group starts talking their language they do not like it.

On a similar note when you look at the people complaining about khan academy most of them are these so called smart people.

Let me talk about my background I have been working as a programmer for around 11 years , no math background though thought myself math by using Khan academy and before my layoff (now am working on my own startup ) used to make 90K (in a southern state).

So guys you are not the center of the world we are crashing into your fraternity you are no longer the only experts who can talk about ML , the guys at stanford are smarter than you and know what they are doing and FYI they don't need you its the other way around. Another interesting thing is that mostly the current students seem to agree with the author, If you are smart you should probably take the effort to learn more rather than asking them to tailor the classes to what you think matters . Also ask yourself this question if you were the Professor what do you think is more satisfying teaching 40 full time students or 20000 who are in the field already and make more impact in the field ?.