HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

JohnnyBrown

396 karma · joined November 28, 2009

submissionscomments
JohnnyBrown··on Dispositional mindfulness is associated with reduced implicit learning
Better: quote the actual authors.

> We therefore tested whether the mindfulness trait predicted a reduction of grammatically congruent preferences ... Mindfulness was shown to correlate negatively with grammatically congruent responses

> Mindfulness was measured using the Dutch version (de Bruin, Topper, Muskens, Bogels, & Kamphuis, 2012) of the 39 item Five Factor Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ, Baer et al. (2006)).

> Working memory (WM) performance over sessions was analyzed with repeated-measures ANOVA. WM performance (LEVENSHTEIN) was indexed by mean Levenshtein distance between target sequence and remembered sequence ... Low Levenshtein distances therefore represent good WM performance, and high Levenshtein distance poor WM performance.

The WM variable represents mean distance between target sequences subjects were exposed to before they were told there was a pattern, and the sequences they generated attempting to recall them after being told there was a pattern.

The phrase, "grammatically congruent responses" appears only in the abstract, but it probably refers to the same thing as WM.

Sometimes, it's best to let your pattern matcher do its thing. Label your axes, kids.

JohnnyBrown··on How to Be Happy
Is there an argument to be made why $HELL is not a problem for the human race?
JohnnyBrown··on Laravel Forge – PHP Platforms On Linode, DigitalOcean, AWS, Rackspace
Deploying a rails app to a VPS (e.g. digital ocean or linode) isn't that much harder than setting up a development rails server on your work machine. If you have some time in the next few days for a screenshare I'll walk you through it - johnnybrown<%= prime_numbers[3] %>@gmail.com
JohnnyBrown··on Tips: When starting a new job
If you liked this comment, you will most likely enjoy the prince. It's a pretty faithful homage to Macchiavelli's argumentation style
JohnnyBrown··on SpaceX CRS-3 Mission
I believe the 0 m/s refers to the boost stage's speed after a successful landing.
JohnnyBrown··on The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more
bandwidth is the derivative of transfer over time. It has the same relationship to transfer as speed has to distance.

bandwidth = d(transfer) / dt

JohnnyBrown··on Trapperkeeper is a new Clojure framework for long-running applications, services
I've been emailing one of your colleagues about working at cognitect - any chance you could help me get inducted into that software illuminati?
JohnnyBrown··on Oculus founder didn’t expect “so many death threats” after Facebook deal
Actually my first thought was also, "well, it is targeted toward gamers". But Starcraft? Was your handle "uglyblacklesbianexxonexecutive"? I play starcraft II almost every day and I find the community very polite. The worst I ever see is occasional gloating after a victory or accusations of cheating in defeat. Most matches the only chat is "glhf" and "gg".
JohnnyBrown··on Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?
> we’re getting roughly 80% less activity from Asia than we should in the absence of language constraints

Bit of an assumption here: absent language constraints, Chinese and anglophone developers would use Stackoverflow at the same rate. I'd say it's pretty likely that China has a popular programming QA site of its own.

JohnnyBrown··on The Techno-Militarization Of America
I believe you are speaking past my point. [repeats point]
JohnnyBrown··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (November 2013)
SEEKING WORK - Remote Bioinformatics software developer, experience with the numpy/pandas/scikit world, analyzing FASTA data, flourescence images from microfluidic arrays, and reliability information from lab processes (SPC). I've worked on software that dealt directly with experimental data, and also custom lab management dashboards. I've worked in environments requiring HIPAA compliance. Additionally, I have plenty of web development experience, with django, javascript, clojure[script], and d3.js. Get in touch with hire@thejohnnybrown.com and let's see how we can help each other.
JohnnyBrown··on Ocean acidification due to carbon emissions is at highest for 300m years
> ... nearly all agree that we need to move with great deliberation when altering the ecosystem of the ocean.

It's been quite a while since Humanity applied anything like deliberation to our ongoing alterations of ocean ecosystems.

JohnnyBrown··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2013)
SEEKING WORK - Remote

Bioinformatics software developer, experience with the numpy/pandas/scikit world, analyzing FASTA data, flourescence images from microfluidic arrays, and reliability information from lab processes (SPC). I've worked on software that dealt directly with experimental data, and also custom lab management dashboards. I've worked in environments requiring HIPAA compliance.

Additionally, I have plenty of web development experience, with django, javascript, clojure[script], and d3.js.

Get in touch with hire@thejohnnybrown.com and let's see how we can help each other.

JohnnyBrown··on The Worst Programming Environment in the World?
It's also interesting that whenever the subject of losethos is brought up, the discussions take a strangely reliable turn. Someone (or several someones) makes a comment that includes the words "mental illness", racist/racism, religous/religion, medication.
JohnnyBrown··on Members of Congress denied access to basic information about NSA
That's certainly one way to look at it. On the other hand, the same powerful army has struggled on several occasions recently to put down insurgencies from determined, armed local populations in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, and several other places. Of course, in a Civil War II situation, there might not be the same constraint to wrap up the operation before popular support dwindles.

Occupying a hostile United States could possibly be the quagmire to end all quagmires.

JohnnyBrown··on Members of Congress denied access to basic information about NSA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Malcolmxm1carbine3gr.gif
JohnnyBrown··on Biggest Risk Factor for Depression: Low Income
This is really interesting to me. How do you compare societies in terms of their materialism? Which are the most/least materialistic?
JohnnyBrown··on Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain
I've spent some time making web-based software while sitting across the lab from the scientists who use it. This looks like an interesting project, I'll email you for more info.
JohnnyBrown··on Halloween party-yacht in bay area: "Largest crowdfunded party to date"
The thing that excites me most (as a realist with a soft spot for anarchy) is the potential for crowdfunding to deliver public goods.

One example is a pitch I saw at DjangoCon, someone was running a kickstarter campaign for a detailed open-source tutorial for some software (if not a public good, open-source is definitely a commons). I just saw another on crowdtilt's [testimonials page](https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns). Apparently some enterprising Dallas residents have come up with a [direct, real-world response](http://i.imgur.com/1LI5U.png) to the ever-present whine, "but who will build the roads!".

JohnnyBrown··on Apple Rejects App That Tracks U.S. Drone Strikes
Apple is literally preventing lifesaving technology from being deployed into the world. Due to this politically-motivated decision, actual real live human beings are being denied a simple tool that could allow them to literally avoid death.

If we aren't civilized enough to distinguish between combatants and foreigners (is has been clearly shown that we are not), we could at least have the decency to give the spectators to our fireworks shows a warning.

JohnnyBrown··on What I Hate About Working At Facebook
Are women allergic to hot tubs or something? I wasn't aware there was anything particularly masculine about a hot tub.
JohnnyBrown··on Defining Property
As an anecdote, most of what I know about the Harry Potter universe comes from reading Elezier Yudkowsky's remix. I've never read the original and only seen two or three of the movies.
JohnnyBrown··on Call yourself a 'brogrammer'? Then get the hell away from me.
I've never met anyone who refers to himself as a brogrammer. Pretty much all I know about the term is what I get from it's construction and this article.

I take strong issue with the idea that celebrating masculinity is somehow automatically misogynistic. It seems to me that the term has absolutely nothing to do with women.

JohnnyBrown··on I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine
Good points. Also MLK and Malcolm X could stand as pretty prominent counterexamples to my argument.
JohnnyBrown··on I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine
Another key difference is that the set of thoughts whose public expression could get a person killed, and the actual danger from expressing them, has been much smaller in the US than in those two countries for the past hundred years or so.

We've had our inquisitions here, but I think people tend to recognize them and call them what they are pretty quickly. See Eleanor Roosevelt's very public comments about McCarthyism.

JohnnyBrown··on I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine
>Temporary staffers aren't legally entitled to decent health care because they are just short-term "contractors" no matter how long they keep the same job.

This to me actually sounds illegal. I've worked in other industries where significant hoops were jumped through to make it possible to call workers contractors. If I recall one test often used is whether the worker is on a set schedule, which the situation described would utterly fail.

IANAL

JohnnyBrown··on You're solving the wrong problem
So redefine the problem as "Use my software skills to address an unmet need in a sufficiently large market" or "find a scalable business model" or something else along those lines.
JohnnyBrown··on Visualization of U.S presidents' approval ratings
Perhaps this would work:

x-axis is time, y is approval/disapproval, width of line represents percent neutral. But then where's the excuse to play with the neat video library?

JohnnyBrown··on The currency in the developer community is enthusiasm.
I totally get and sympathize with the enthusiasm part. But the CL-specific parts (to an outsider) reek of megalomania and no-true-scotsman.
JohnnyBrown··on Ask HN: Who's looking for employment?
Hi, Johnny Brown. Looking for Data analysis/visualization or web dev in NYC. Graduating with math degree in May.

Experience with webapps in Python and Ruby/Rails. Used Java at ICPC competition and professionally.

Experience with bioinformatics in Python. Know my way around Numpy and Matplotlib.

Email: hire@thejohnnybrown.com portfolio: http://www.thejohnnybrown.com/?page_id=2

Page 1 of 5Next →