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dropdownmenu··on World's Top Arms Exporters Visualized
Visualizations like this are always awesome, but it would also be interesting to see the inverse of this chart.

Where do countries import arms from?

dropdownmenu··on A Raytracer Implemented in LOLCODE
I love the effort, it is absolutely worth praise. That being said, this is one of the last things I expected to show up on the internet.
dropdownmenu··on Have I been pwned? Check if you have an account that has been compromised
What is more interesting is that I can see anyone who has had their accounts breached.

I now know that I can collect one of my friend's cell number from the snapchat breach or that an other famous person had his info leaked by Gawker.

(edit - punctuation)

dropdownmenu··on Ask HN: My 16 year old brother is job shadowing me, what should I do with him?
Is it possible to include him on some sort of design / architecture meeting with your team? That might give him enough to think about and learn from while keeping him engaged.
dropdownmenu··on The Man Who Invented Modern Probability
27 would be correct if each side were independent random variables rather than the cube of a random variable. The way the problem is set up you are suppose to solve for E[a^3] (the third moment of the random variable) rather than (E[a])^3.
dropdownmenu··on Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard
It is important to note the sample set of the survey: "The researchers surveyed 655 students entering Berea College, a private liberal arts college located in Kentucky, in the falls of 2000 and 2001."

I have a feeling that the results of the survey would be different at a public university with strong science and engineering programs.

My personal experience has been that many people will change their intended degrees, but rarely have I seen someone completely withdraw from science or engineering programs

dropdownmenu··on Google paid AdBlock Plus to get its ads whitelisted
I can understand google trying to protect their revenue source, but actions like this undermine the openness of the platforms that they are trying to promote.

Open and free platforms need to allow people to say no.

dropdownmenu··on A Dark Room - minimalist text-based game
This is a very cool use of html as a medium to tell a story and keep the player involved. Defiantly want to see more games in a similar style!
dropdownmenu··on Bitcoin In IRS Crosshairs
It was really only a matter of time before this happened, regulation of trade (and the taxation thereof) is one of the main tasks of a government.
dropdownmenu··on Pithy.js - An internal DSL for generating HTML in JavaScript
Pretty cool project, but I feel kind of dirty having js and html being so tightly bound to each other. Do you have a specific use case where pithy would perform faster or be more cleanly implemented than standard templates?
dropdownmenu··on Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
Awesome idea to help make capturing data more easy, but how will you deal with the problem of the curse of dimensionality? As you start to capture more variables you data begins to appear far apart leading to less meaningful results.

Also, while 'capturing everything' sounds like an awesome idea it can lead to worse performance if you don't take into account that your data now has more variables that can each introduce noise.

dropdownmenu··on Book of the Day: Effective JavaScript
I have not read this book, but I can say that javascript powerful when you ask the question: what can I do with a closure?
dropdownmenu··on Visual Task Management for Individuals and Teams
Be careful to not get caught up in making something too pretty. It might help get some initial sign ups, but people will leave quickly if the app is not useful.
dropdownmenu··on The 50 million dollar lie
The author's argument for this post is rather poor. He states that the raw data plot is noisy and weakly correlated, thus no relationship can be drawn by averaging the data into sets of buckets.

While the author is correct in that averaging hides the variance of data, he does not try to answer the question of "Can a trend be found from noisy data?" or show other accepted statistical methods that show no correlation in the data.

Instead the author dismisses the report from Gates through name calling: "It seems like the point of this ‘research’ is to simply ‘prove’ that Gates was right about what he expected to be true. "

dropdownmenu··on Show HN: iOS app. Snooze this alarm clock and it will humiliate you on Facebook
My problem with this idea is that I don't care if people on facebook know I hit the snooze button and I figure that they would block such notices as spam anyways.

Why not just have a more annoying alarm clock? Or one that is harder to snooze?

dropdownmenu··on Java is not JavaScript - tell your friends
I have to explain this difference to my dad about once a week.

Can't we just start calling javascript awesomescript?

dropdownmenu··on Squash
Just as a heads up, I cannot scroll to the bottom of your page. I keep bouncing as I hit the bottom and end up with 'Start using Squash' being cut in half. Screen res: 2560x1440
dropdownmenu··on Proposition HN: I will pay $8000 for you to build your side-project/MVP
Interesting idea, but it sounds like you are just trying to have someone make a product for 8k which you can go and sell.

Can you specify ways that you will be involved to justify the 50-50 split?

dropdownmenu··on How to Make Your Site Look Half-Decent in Half an Hour
I never knew that I should use bootstrap and then extend it with custom CSS to make my site look better. I would have never thought to do that! /sarcasm
dropdownmenu··on Scroogled, new campaign by Microsoft
Regardless of the message the Microsoft is trying to deliver here they could at least make a website that does not make me close the tab in the first 10 seconds. What a mess.
dropdownmenu··on Poll: Do you use an Adblocker?
I use an adblocker for everything. I do try to buy stuff from the stores of websites that I like to support them and encourage a revenue model that does not annoy me.
dropdownmenu··on Understanding The Fourier Transform
Very true, and if you want to be more specific my definition only works for finite duration continuous time signals with finite second moment. I use this definition as it also works well for understanding other transforms such as the Laplace transform.
dropdownmenu··on Understanding The Fourier Transform
You can also think of the Fourier Transform as a projection (dot product) of a signal onto the space of all sinusoids. That's the explanation that made everything click for me.