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plam

247 karma · joined July 5, 2011

I am Paul, co-founder, data engineer, and a functional programming enthusiast. I am here to learn and share. My blog is at www.quantisan.com
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plam··on JWST Launch: Official Stream of NASA TV's Media Channel
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29682051
plam··on Live: Launch of the James Webb Space Telescope
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29682051
plam··on Hacker News Best – Highest-voted recent links
if you're interested in this, you might find this alternative interface useful -- https://hckrnews.com It keeps track of top links each day and you can scroll back in time. This has been helping me check HN less frequently as I don't feel like I'll miss out.
plam··on $1000 for making HTML5 supercomputing applications open source
It seems one of the biggest business issues is site visitor perception. I have a couple questions please.

What's your opt-rate rate so far out of the sites that have shown this option?

do you have any real data regarding hidden cost to a site visitor? like power consumption A/B testing or something?

plam··on Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits
email sent
plam··on Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits
That's a very real problem I totally forgot. We could do the same thing and have a small team of interns + mentor do maintenance mode work.... but not exactly exciting. I don't know. Any idea?
plam··on Cheap smartphones are about to change everything
You can buy all sorts of Chinese phones (with dual SIM) directly from China online on sites like Aliexpress.com. The thing is, US uses weird 3G frequencies or something from the rest of the world.

I bought my 3G MTK phone a year ago on Aliexpress.com. It worked fine perfectly while I was living in Europe. Then I came over and now I'm always on Edge network and network speed is significantly slower.

plam··on Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits
do you have a few minute to chat in the next few weeks? drop me an email please paul@quantisan.com
plam··on Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits
yes, a large part of it is figuring out the problems and where are the lower hanging fruits and what resources are needed.
plam··on Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits
drop me an email please paul@quantisan.com

I'd love to hear of your experience.

plam··on Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits
lots of great suggestions here! I'll reach out to local schools, bootcamps, etc. to get some feedback
plam··on Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits
what student would get is a tech mentor and a chance to solve real problem with a good cause. wouldn't that be a competitive selling point vs. a paid internship with perhaps a few thousand dollars? Perhaps I'm being naive / optimistic?
plam··on Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits
good question, I edited post to clarify.
plam··on Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits
not yet, but probably eventually. I'll start with just doing it for a project first to test out the model. I have a nonprofit on board with needs. I have connections with developers. I can find an intern. I can get most of it in place but lack time and experience (haven't done this before). So I want your help to iron out the model as much as possible to not waste time.
plam··on Ask HN: Charity to pair tech mentors with interns to dive into non-profits
that depends. to pay students I would need to source funding too. that is doable but does add another level of barrier to get things going. I'll probably start with finding unpaid to get a few batch going, gain momentum, then if all is well, we can start looking for funding.
plam··on An Introduction to Programming in Go
I did a piece on using Clojure with Go recently. For me, it wasn't a switch but using them along side each other to tackle different problems more efficiently. Here's the link -- http://www.quantisan.com/simple-easy-quick-using-go-along-wi...
plam··on Why functional programming?
Much of Clojure itself is written in Clojure. I would recommend going right to the source for idiomatic examples. https://github.com/clojure/clojure
plam··on Why I don't trade stocks and (probably) neither should you
I wrote some R scripts to perform historical data-driven asset allocation for long-only, low-load funds investment for the long term. This seem like a good time to put it here: https://github.com/Quantisan/touzi

It scrapes not only price data but management fees, etc to minimise cost and risk. The goal is not to make profit but just to keep up with the market but at a lower risk.

plam··on Autodesk's Idea to Knit the Hyperloop Out of Carbon Fiber
Regarding ground changes, we can look to current bullet-train rail systems. Nobody has ever died on a bullet train in Japan due to earthquakes. I saw on a documentary that Japan feed seismic sensor data into train control centers where any dangerous seismic event would trigger automatic stopping of the trains.
plam··on You Can't Fix People
I share your disagreement with the piece. Not everyone needs or wants to be "fixed". It took me years to realise that the best I can do for others is not to listen for a solution to "help" them, but listen just to listen.
plam··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (June 2013)
SEEKING WORK - Remote for companies on US times; local in London negotiable

Data consulting to make the most out of your data.

I am a full-time data scientist actively involved in the big data scene in London and is a core committer on an open source MapReduce tool called Cascalog written in Clojure.

I have delivered projects such as i) extracting features from our customer event data on Hadoop into Neo4J to drive a graph-based recommendation system to increase cross-selling, and ii) replaced our SQL servers data warehouse to one on Hadoop and Amazon Redshift to make messy data usable for the rest of the company.

See my blog and talks at http://www.quantisan.com

If you want to figure out what you can do with your data to grow your business, drop me an email at paul@quantisan.com

plam··on How to Learn Emacs: A Hand-drawn One-pager for Beginners
my whole office use emacs for clojure dev but I use vim. I tried emacs for a few days on more than one occasions but simply couldn't bear the physical awkwardness of the key combos (I did remap ctrl to caps).
plam··on HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?
do they?
plam··on HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?
I apologise for my naive misunderstanding of the Analytics metric. I've updated the post to point this out at the top of my post. Thanks for the explanation!
plam··on HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?
I assumed they have some fancy javascript thing to take care of that? what would you suggest to use to estimate actually readership?
plam··on HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?
good point, I'll keep an eye on returning visitor metric over the next few days
plam··on HN front page, 16000 visitors in a day, how many actually read the article?
at this rate, I'm now hoping that I can do an analysis of the analysis of a viral post that also have gone viral. how awesome would that be? :)
plam··on How a few screws cost $2000 and a 240GB multinodes cluster cost $50
thank you for understanding and clarifying my intent
plam··on Iron Ring
I never wore mine. Got one mostly to be able to go through the ritual with friends.

OT: Funny to see that the term 'engineer' is held in high regard in Canada but here in UK there's no such connotation.

plam··on What is probabilistic programming?
Correct me if I'm wrong, conceptually, probabilistic programming does to equation solvers what declarative language like SQL do to query data.

Say you have a model, y = mx + b, and you have some data. Normally you can solve this explicitly with matrices or whatever. But you'll need to implement the solution. With probabilistic language like BUGS, you can feed in the model and the data and it would return `m` and `b` as a probability distribution.

This is an trivial example. One example of where it really comes in handy is doing bayesian inference.

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