iansinke

UPDATE: Thank you for this advice. My girlfriend was able to recover her account by telling Oculus support that she wanted to buy a product, but wouldn’t commit to it unless she knew her account would be usable.

Around that age, I read "The Heart of Mathematics", by Edward Burger and Michael Starbird. It's a really fun book which introduces a wide variety of math concepts while being amusing to read.

https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Mathematics-invitation-effectiv...

I've been playing the piano since I was 4. Learn from my mistake: don't "cheat" by skimping on scales and other technical skills! I know it's not as fun as playing actual music, but as with anything, there is no royal road to piano proficiency. Now that I'm at a more advanced level, I really regret that I didn't put better effort into my scales when I was younger.

That is exactly correct, for wind instruments at least: and in fact, some wind instruments have more than 10 holes or keys. But many combinations produce identical sounds, limiting the range of the instrument. The limiting factor on a wind instrument is the fact that it can only play a single note, (yes, with resonant frequencies, of course) and the length of the instrument, which determines the lowest note it can play.

The graph is just slightly misleading -- the horizontal scale starts at 20, not 0.

Their site is absolutely hammered right now. The live video feed here (http://live.reuters.com/Event/Boston_Marathon_Explosion?live) has details. They have video of 2 suspects, one of which set down an "unusually heavy" backpack.

I just found it ironic -- and possibly suspect? -- that 1 week after this XKCD What If? article (http://what-if.xkcd.com/40/), something like this happened. Could the XKCD article possibly have inspired the method of execution?

My Nexus 4 arrives this week... :)

> Take risks and have fun.

I'd love to take risks and have fun, but when you're in college, looking for good, steady, well-paid, full-time summer employment, it's just not very appealing to take risks with your finances. I'm there right now (although an ECE major, not CS) and I wouldn't trade anything for the paid co-op placement I have right now.

I wouldn't ask those questions point-blank, but if you are reasonably personable and chatty, it's usually pretty easy to lead the conversation in that direction.

I guess the Python 3 team is in South Africa, and the Python 2 team is on the East Coast...? ;)

How many companies offer internships longer than a summer? I have a co-op position for this summer but after my 3rd year I'm hoping to get something longer, a 12 or 16 month position.

Also -- are many American companies friendly towards Canadians who happen to have dual citizenship? To be honest ideally I'd work in Waterloo or Toronto (both are driving distance, ish, from my home) but I'd love to spend time in NYC or the Bay Area too.

Maybe I'm reading the graphs wrong, but they seem somewhat misleading to me: shouldn't the average (top of the blue bar, bottom of slightly greener blue bar) be what you're comparing to the others? The other columns are all strictly averages too, even though the prices are centrally set for many of the other countries.

The US does come out more expensive, but not as much as the graphs might lead you to believe. It's like saying: In Australia the average student scored 43 points on a standardized test, but in the US, students in the 95th percentile got 150 points! Yeah, not so convincing.

n.b. I say this all as a Canadian.

The fact that he was reading his entire presentation verbatim should have tipped everybody off in the first minute or so. Nobody who's "at the forefront of the most advanced mathematics ever known to mankind" needs that much notes to talk about it. Shoot, I've never had a prof that needed that kind of help... and they're teaching 2nd year courses.

Being in my second year of Electrical (and Biomedical) Engineering at McMaster University, I have to say I love CircuitLab.

My advice would be: Buy all the EE textbooks (they're expensive, I know...) and make sure that all the problems in the textbooks can be done with CircuitLab. Make it really easy for PSPICE instructions to be converted to CircuitLab. The education market is a huge one for you and I think you can really win out over PSPICE/MultiSim here.

You've already done a great job with PSPICE compatibility in terms of terminology. And I love how easy it is to modify MOSFET/BJT models. I'd prefer a bit more customization of the simulation plots, though.

I agree -- I've found myself in that exact case that he described (mindlessly adding and subtracting one on various loop indices until it worked) more than once.

My experience is that, if you're in a place where you want to work on a laptop, that place will probably have wifi. Sure, in the park, on the street, your chances are lower -- but that's where you'd be pulling out your phone or tablet instead of your laptop.

A one-second video is seldom going to show more than a single photograph. Sure, there's a little motion, but the quality is worse and if you want to stop and take a look you have to pause the video. I'd stick with taking one photo a day.

I know there are counterexamples. But for those things, you'd probably want to take a longer video anyway. What kind of events is a 1-second video the best way to capture, anyway?

"How I Pivot-tabled Into The NFL"

I would have to disagree with the general statement that "textbooks suck". Stewart's calculus ("the violin book") is really a great textbook, and it's used very widely. Serway Jewett is a superb Physics textbook. The examples, in particular, are excellent (sometimes humorous or intriguing.)

Also, textbooks are long. But most courses don't use the entire textbook. I took 3 math courses and 2 physics courses in first year using those two textbooks and we didn't use every section, nor did we have to read every page.

I think having example problems which have stood the test of time (more than 20 years for those 2 textbooks, I think) is worthwhile.

The integral evaluates to 2012.93.

Wouldn't that be November 11?

Or perhaps September 3...

There's probably a lot of complicated ways of doing this, but to keep it simple you could probably just downscale the image, convert to black and white, and have an array which maps lightness ranges to ascii characters

Am I the only one who finds a capital "T" very non-intuitive for "Dictionary"? Likewise "V" for "University"? That part of the whole logo branding I found unnecessarily concise.

Install the SublimeREPL plugin from Package Control. Works like a charm!

In which number system is 8 odd?

One thing I've always wondered about is the dials or sliders for temperature settings in the car. Many of them (especially the linear sliders) seem to be set up in a logarithmic way rather than a direct linear scale. Although I'm not sure whether I'm basing that on the scale of the tick marks next to the slider or on my actual perception of the temperature -- probably the former...

Sure, that's a big issue. But it might not be as bad as it seems. The reason a native Gmail app is such great news is because of the special way in which we read and organize our Gmail accounts: Priority Inbox, tags rather than folders, stars, etc.

There will probably be nothing special about the native app's compose interface, though, so I don't see that it will be a problem to keep the account registered in both clients, but only to sync regularly with the native Gmail app, and to use whatever app iOS picks (undoubtedly MobileMail.app) when composing.

Agree completely. As a proof-of-concept it's amazing. But practically speaking, SVG is a far better way of doing this.

Really, they call this Hacker News and yet a headline with a blatant disregard for as simple a concept as relative error and significant figures makes it to #7 on the front page? What are we coming to?

tl;dr: Firefox is 2, Chrome is 2.5, IE is 4. (Out of 4, of course. And assuming latest versions.)