mayanklahiri

When Python's symbolic computation abilities are even at a tenth of Mathematica's (especially for discrete functions like we love in computer science), I'd be more than happy to switch over. Perhaps someone could integrate Python with Sage or Octave.

Wow that design really brought back memories of late-90s web design with the rounded image+text buttons.

Too bad the site is incredibly slow. Here's a link to the cached "Travel" page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

In some cases, including a timestamp in an ID can be giving away information considered private. Sure, you could just hash the resultant ID, but then you're getting back to random digits anyway.

Reducing a new problem to a special case of another, already solved problem is a wonderful skill. Not to mention that the analysis of algorithms can help you discern, at least conceptually, between best-case, average-case and worst-case outcomes to problems that aren't necessarily algorithmic, and react or plan appropriately.

You don't even need to go that far. For non-critical applications (i.e., your web app), you can randomly generate a small string, say 12 bytes, using base-62 characters (A-Za-z0-9) to serve as a probably unique user ID (with VERY high probability).

> "Hacker"-types and early adopters are necessary for any product to gain any traction. They hold early influence (which obviously varies depending on the product) which diminishes as the product gains a higher adoption rate.

I guess then my question is whether "hackers" as an early-adopter group are worthwhile for targeting. Anyone have any anecdotes where a mainstream product started as a hacker niche?

> R has some basic visualization libraries

If you include CRAN packages, then this couldn't be further from the truth: http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/

R can be made to produce beautiful visualizations.

Edit: here's a link to the top-voted thumbnails of R visualization: http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/thumbs.php?sort=votes

IMO, since it can be scripted from the command line, it's high time Gnuplot died a graceful death.

This raises the larger question about how much influence hackers and developers really have in terms of product adoption. There seem to be two schools of thought:

(1) Hackers/nerds are early adopters. Thus, they will influence "normal" people to use products that they judge to be superior.

(2) Hackers/nerds are a tiny proportion of the population with no real influence. They might push esoteric but superior technologies, but large-scale adoption will ultimately be driven by how quickly cat pictures can be shared with the largest group of people.

The author of the article clearly believes in (2), but Apple seems to be making money off (1). So which is it? Or is this some sort of false dichotomy to begin with?

Considering the type of people on HN to begin with, I'd be surprised if the moderation system wasn't regularly "messed with". All you need to affect a collaborative ranking system is one really good hacker shill.

I replied to you via email, but thought I'd post it here as well in case anyone else had suggestions.

I've been thinking about a general purpose experimentation framework for research. Over the last 5 years, I've been re-writing parts of this framework for different projects and wish I had spent some time generalizing and packaging it.

The workflow is:

dataset -> experimental parameters -> code+libraries (this is where the trouble often is) -> result files (plain text, hundreds!) -> analysis (generally in R) -> selectively plotting results

This is fantastic. I haven't tried it out yet, but I'll give it a shot for the paper I'm writing.

BTW, even with a "uniform" Linux environment, I've been finding so many differences in the behavior of libraries that it's driving me nuts. This will be a nice way to get past, for example, inconsistencies in wxWidgets.

A while ago I wrote a short piece about how location-based services will be 'hackable' for a long time (the specific piece was about gaming Foursquare with nine lines of Perl). Given how easy it is to game any location checkin service, what incentive will advertisers have when their deals are monopolized by a small group of Perl+wget armed, obsessive compulsive script kiddies? I don't know enough about marketing numbers--presuming that vendors give out deals to bring customers back to their store, do they care if the deals are systematically monopolized by freeloaders or bargain hunters?

I believe it's also called "fuzz testing"

The blog post is a little light on details. Just go to the source and demo on the original creator's site: http://liuliu.me/detect/detect.html

Canvas allows access to individual pixels in an image, and JS is arguably faster than BASIC interpreters of the 80s. Fun things lie ahead in client-side image processing.

EDIT: Incidentally, the code is pretty hairy and has about 3 comments. It's hard to figure out what ML approach he's using from a cursory look.

EDIT: Aah, definitely an image pyramid in there, so some multi-resolution stuff happening.

The advice looks familiar to W. Zinsser's "On Writing Well", which is the best book on writing I've ever read (even for writing academic papers). http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-25th-Anniversary-Nonficti... I try to recommend it to everyone, especially if they're not a fan of bullshit, since it's a book on writing that's written exceptionally well.

There was a good discussion about it on stack overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/548029/how-much-overhead-...

The bottom line is that with keep-alive connections, the overhead should be less of a problem, since the only expensive part is the initial RSA key generation.