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mx12

160 karma · joined November 6, 2009

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mx12··on Turntable.fm is back from the dead – and now there are two
Wow, this really brings me back. Found so many great songs/albums.

A fun story. A friend and I created a chrome extension called Turntaste [1] that would help suggest what to play based on what was previously played and help avoid songs to play. Basically, we used everyone who used the chrome extension to scrape the play history and stats. I was hoping to apply some cool ML... well cool for 2011 ... as I was doing my PhD in ML but ended up just using some simpler statistics based approaches. My favorite room was something like “Trending Indie - No Mumford & Sons”.

It was also used to generate a few cool playlist like a trending indie Spotify playlist [2]. It’s a bit frozen in time since it stopped working whenever the site went down.

[1] https://turntablefmfans.wordpress.com/tag/turntaste/ [2] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/63h132rkg3oNhirWbJqGWZ?si=...

mx12··on Learn TensorFlow and deep learning, without a Ph.D.
I have been doing the same thing. I've also augmented each section with video lectures from Khan academy or other sources. For instance, their videos on the Jacobian were excellent for getting an intuitive understanding of it [1].

I also search for problems on the topic to help solidify my knowledge. You can almost always find a class that has posted problems for a section with answers.

[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/math/multivariable-calculus/mult...

mx12··on New Chrome for iOS scans for beacons broadcasting URLs
It works by RSSI [1], and I believe you can calibrate it with your antenna/case design. Not to mention any attenuation by the phone's antenna or your hand/body.

Quote:

"Phones or other smart devices can pick up the beacon’s signal and estimate the distance by measuring received signal strength (RSSI). The closer you are to the beacon, the stronger the signal. Remember that the beacon is not broadcasting continuously—it’s blinking instead. The more frequent the blinks, the more reliable the signal detection."

[1] http://developer.estimote.com/

mx12··on Google Is Now a 'Tier Two' Employer, Says Recent Comp-Sci Grad
Speaking as someone who just left a startup to join Google, I was excited in getting really stock options that after vesting could be exercised and sold.

It's a long road to go from options to real money. Something I didn't realized before joining a startup. There are many points at which you could be locked in if the company is sold or other events happen.

mx12··on Show HN: Tinder++ – Tinder for Desktop (plus extra features)
That's awesome that you made it open source!

Maybe I'll to try implement one of my ideas for Tinder. That is A/B testing of profiles in different locations. Let's say I live in SF and could set up a weeks worth of testing with various different profile pictures and determine which one gets the most swipe rights in different parts of the country. Then I could use that profile in my own location.

mx12··on Machine Learning Showdown: Apache Mahout vs. Weka
IIRC the MINST data has a mix of style of 4's. I tried it with an open top, and it worked correctly. I wondering if they just happened to sample a majority of 4s that have an open top.

Example: http://imgur.com/mRRz1L3

mx12··on Hacking the Samsung NX300 "Smart" Camera
If you're interested in more camera hacking, here is a very interesting talk from last years black hat about hacking security cameras.

Title: Black Hat USA 2013 - Exploiting Network Surveillance Cameras Like a Hollywood Hacker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaI0xjeefpg

mx12··on Software of the Apollo guidance computer was hand-woven into rope core memory
Here's a link to the full video:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxxiij_moon-machines-2008-p...

Around 37 minutes they talk about the alarms on approach and how the dealt with them.

mx12··on The MIT Lockpicking Guide
After I saw this guide a while ago, I got really interested in lock picking and ended up buy a kit. There a decent subreddit and it's a good resource to get started. I purchased the kit they recommend PXS-14, and it works great. I remember I picked my first lock in about 5 minutes and then spend another hour trying to do it again. It takes a while to feel right and become consistent.

Subreddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/lockpicking

Plus there getting starting guide:

http://www.reddit.com/r/lockpicking/comments/bzq80/where_do_...

PXS-14 Kit:

http://www.lockpickshop.com/PXS-14.html

mx12··on Apple's Cyclone Microarchitecture Detailed
I don't think that Apple will completely get away from x86 for a long time. Attempting to emulate the x86 on an Arm would be terribly slow.

I do however, think that they will eventually include both arm and x86 processors in the Macbook Air. That way, backwards compatibility is preserved and low power apps can run on the arm. In the current Macbook Pros they have dynamic switching of GPUs, there's no reason they couldn't use the arm as a coprocessor or even run the full OS.

Here a few technical points:

* LLVM - You can compile once for both both architecture and then the JIT will take over compiling for the specific architecture (Take a look at llvm for the OpenGL pipe line in OSX)

Full screen app- When an app is full screen (if it's a low power app) then the x86 could sleep and the arm could switch to running the app.

App nap - If all x86 apps are a sleep, switch over the running the arm processor exclusively

*Saving State - It's possible to save the state of apps in OSX, a similar mechanism could be used to seamlessly migrated between processors.

This is pure speculation, but it is feasible. There would be many technical challenges that Apple would have to solve but the a capable. The advantage Apple has is that they have absolute control over both platforms.

mx12··on Markets will punish Apple for the loss of its master magician
Why did't they do this on Friday evening? That would have given enough time for people to fully understand what this means. Instead, there is going to be a big sell off tomorrow morning. I understand there would be a sell off tomorrow, but maybe not as big. The stock has dropped nearly 20 points in after hours.

http://www.nasdaq.com/quotes/after-hours.aspx

mx12··on Ask HN: who launched something in July?
A friend and I launched a chrome plugin/bookmarklet for recommending songs for turntable.fm at http://www.turntaste.com. It also gives you a list of rooms that are similar to your current room, and shows the top songs played in those rooms.
mx12··on 555 Timer footstool
This reminds me of Radio Shack's Engineering's Mini-Notebook series. I still have a copy of the 555 timer one that was given to me by my high school electronics teacher.
mx12··on 2-D Glasses
IMAX 3D uses linear polarized light, whereas RealD uses circularly polarized light.
mx12··on AT&T Cracking Down on Free Tethering via Jailbroken iPhones
The interesting part of the email was where they said they would enroll you automatically into the DataPro plan. Can they really change your contract without your permission? Would this be grounds of canceling your contract for free? I know that when the iPhone first came out, I was on Sprint, and people would watch for when they would change their contracts and you were allowed to cancel your contract free of charge.
mx12··on An Open Letter to Apple on the Readability App rejection
After reading this, I am struck with the idea that maybe Apple's reluctance to support flash, is not just motivated by the performance issues. That it could also be that the DRM support in flash would mean that companies could just abondon the app model and just use flash (i.e. Netflix or a flash based Amazon ebook reader).
mx12··on Haystack: A small utility helping to protect your searches
Why not just use scroogle (http://scroogle.org/)?

Even if it randomly searches for stuff, the searches are still linked to you, and I would be concerned over what terms it was searching for if my search history were ever subpoenaed. I could images several cases where this could get you into trouble.

mx12··on Tenacious C: Cool C IDE
Just from the screenshots it looks like it might be a good tool for teaching students learning about pointers.
mx12··on There is a puzzle embedded in this page...
I always enjoy a puzzle. This reminds me of when I had free time and spent days on notpron.
mx12··on Ask HN: Is Facebook benefiting from a ponzi scheme? a bubble?
The only problem is that you are assuming continual growth. While they are the cool place to be now, as soon as the become the uncool place to be, then they will be screwed.

If I was facebook, I would be very afraid of this happening. I understand facebook has some patents on the news feed an other minor aspects of facebook, but their basic feature set is somewhat small, but reproducible.

I think that any social platform faces the problem, that people will jump ship to what ever they think is cooler. Look at Myspace, that was hugely popular and suddenly it become the uncool place to be and then everyone and their moms, jumped ship to facebook. History is bound to repeat itself.

mx12··on Ask HN: Learning advanced math
I would recommend video lectures from the Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/). They are organized in nice little chucks of topics and have a large range of topics in math.
mx12··on I'm an introverted hacker. I want to join a frat.
A) From what most of what my friends have said, pledging isn't that bad, but it depends on the frat

B) Attend something outside of your normal circle of friends. Join a student organization or club sports team if you like sports. I graduated with a EE degree and I did cheerleading (At a big ten university :) my sophomore and junior year of college. It was a great experience to meet people outside of other engineers.

As a side not, when I was a freshman I thought about joining a frat, but the reason why I didn't join was because people tend to label you based on what frat you belong to. This is especially true if you meet a sorority girl, they will instantly know the reputation of your frat. So just know the reputation of the frat you want to join first before joining.

mx12··on Rackspace Shuts Down Koran-Burning Web Site
I would disagree. They signed the contract with rackspace that said they would abide by their polices and if they violated them, they would shut down the site. Nothing is stopping the church from hosting their own website.
mx12··on Ask HN: Is Perl dead?
I would say that it is absolutely not, at least in my experience. In my lab, which is a bioinformatics lab, perl is still being used heavily. Perl is a great tool for dealing with text files, and little pieces of code that you need to do something quick.
mx12··on Why People Initially Suck at Programming
One of the biggest mistakes I see a lot of beginners make, is that they don't break the problem up into sub problems that they can easily solve. What I always tell students is to write some code, and then test it right away. Too many students try and solve the entire problem without compiling once, and then they are bewildered when they have 1000 errors because they forgot a semicolon at the end of each line.
mx12··on Ask HN: College Hack
Not sure what degree your going for, but I just graduated from college with an EE degree, and I'll be starting grad school next week. Here's my advice:

-Have fun and enjoy classes (Go to them!) You'll learn a lot from your professors and other students even though you may initially feel like they are a waste of time. Also in smaller classes the professor notices.

-Also on classes, it's important to make a good grade, but it is also important what knowledge you take away. There are quite a few fundamental classes that I got an A in, but I retained very little that I am regretting now.

-If you are not being challenged in a class, esp. programming. Talk to the professor, and they will probably find a way to make it more exciting/interesting.

-Like you said, meet as many people as you can. This is esp. true the first semester. Everyone is excited about meeting new people.

-I would also recommend finding something outside of you subject area to balance your life out. For two years I was a cheerleading at my school. Met a lot of cool people/girls.

-Depending on what your major is, you may want to talk to a professor you like and see if you can get a job with them. This will cut down on your personally time for hacking and relaxing but makes up for it with great experience and recommendation letters.

-Once again, if you are doing C.S. or engineering look into REU's, Research Experience for Undergrads. I spend a summer at USC in their robotics lab for an REU, with housing, meals and a stipend paid for by the REU. Awesome time and I got a lot of letter of recommendations.

-Finally, be safe and have fun!

mx12··on Parents suspect Wi-Fi making kids sick
This is an example where everyone needs a fundamental lesson is statistics: Correlation does not imply causation.
mx12··on Ask HN: What's been your best investment?
Here is my best and worst investments. When I was around 14, I wanted to get into the stock market. So, I heard that AMD had beat Intel to the punch with x86-64 chips and Intel was planning on licensing the technology. So I invested in AMD at around 10 and I ended up selling it at around 18. Then took that money and invested in a treasure hunting company at .70 a share and it dropped to .10 a share. They had claimed to have a new technology for finding gold that did not disrupt the reefs, so they would be able to get permits to look for sunken Spanish galleons. Didn't really work out for me, but I was young and I thought it was cool to say that I invested in a gold mining company.
mx12··on Apple’s Antenna Design and Test Labs
You think that they could use something other than rubber bands to hold the phones!
mx12··on Apple’s New Campaign: 4 Ads About iPhone 4 Video Calls
Somewhat weird to me, they really don't feel like an Apple commercial to me. Why isn't Apple talking about its speed, the camera/video recorder, or the "retina" display... Maybe they are trying to make the whole family interested in getting one, or maybe it because everyone still compares every new phone to it so they really don't have to rehash its technical merits. That means they can show off its emotional appeal.
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