Hacker News Reader

santigepigonon If a mathematician wants to cross a road

I do remember my high school physics teacher mentioning this during optics... he used an example of the most optimal path for a lifeguard.

santigepigonon Choosing Minecraft over Disney

He's right :( just checked, and it's available until 5/22/13.

santigepigonon Choosing Minecraft over Disney

I second that. Avatar: The Last Airbender deals with a lot of potentially serious material deftly, with humor and grace to match. All three season are on Netflix's Instant Streaming.

santigepigonon Why I wear the same shirt every day

Or a Power Ranger.

santigepigonon Doctor Who goes back in time to beat TV pirates

This rather funny cartoon sums up the difference between Tennant's Doctor and Smith's: http://hi3ei.deviantart.com/art/Differences-201740537?moodon...

santigepigonon A First Course in Linear Algebra

What impresses me is the accessibility of this textbook. Not only is it available online (via XML and MathML) but you can download the TeX source and multiple PDFs optimized for printing or on-screen viewing [1].

Bravo.

[1] http://linear.ups.edu/download.html

santigepigonon Internet Archive Starts Seeding 1,398,875 Torrents

Yes! A lot of the audio is available via torrent now [1].

"Decent chilean electronica" nice, but the Internet Archive has an impressive collection of live music; you can thank the Grateful Dead for letting people tape their concerts [2].

[1] http://archive.org/details/bittorrentaudio

[2] http://blog.archive.org/2012/03/27/sharing-works-100000-conc...

santigepigonon What college rankings really tell us

It always seemed to me that his dad cared more about the prestige factor than the actual quality of education his son received.

Sadly, the prestige factor doesn't end when one enters college. My sister and I are Asian American and our parents emigrated from the Philippines. My sister's majoring in Urban Studies at Stanford. Despite this, my father insists on telling family, friends, co-workers, etc. that she's studying law.

Quite a shame indeed.

santigepigonon The No Excuse List: The Best Place On The Web To Learn Anything

Don't forget the continued discussion on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4240007

santigepigonon Slime Molds solve the travelling salesman problem

Fascinating! My interest in slime now biological, no longer bound to Emacs and Minecraft!

santigepigonon An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem

Has anything been added to the article? Or is this simply a repost--albeit, a welcomed one--as the URL's query string suggests? [1]

[1] http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes?repost3yearslater

santigepigonon A Different Road To Work, Bypassing College Dreams

I can't help but be reminded of PG's essay, "Why Nerds are Unpopular," where he talks about teenage apprentices in the Renaissance. Also, his point about specialization seems appropriate here.

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

santigepigonon Physical assault by McDonald's for wearing Digital Eye Glass

France's McDonald's operates like an entirely different restaurant [1].

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/01/24/145698222/why-mc...

santigepigonon Google now answers "what is my ip"?

DuckDuckGo also has this feature for the privacy-concerned.

santigepigonon Poll: Greatest productivity app on Mac?

If you like, there are configurations that make vim act like conventional text editors[1][2]. To paraphrase Umberto Eco, I like vim for the same reason other people like football or pedophilia. People have their preferences[3].

[1] http://arstechnica.com/open-source/guides/2009/05/vim-made-e...

[2] http://cream.sourceforge.net/

[3] http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,659577,...

santigepigonon Poll: Greatest productivity app on Mac?

Yes it's for code, and also a little more. I've come to learn that vim is quite the powerful editor. I use it to avoid internet distractions while writing code or even prose.

santigepigonon Clever phishing attack using the BBC News URL

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/-/ automatically redirects to any site it's prefixed before.

santigepigonon Poll: Greatest productivity app on Mac?

Quicksilver, Evernote, SelfControl, and Terminal. On the web app side of it, I turn to Google (Gmail, Docs, Calendar), and Remember the Milk.