Hacker News Reader

thesnarkon What are my options for email if I don't want to use GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo etc?

It looks like your emails are stored on their servers? My desire is to have more control over my data.

thesnarkon What are my options for email if I don't want to use GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo etc?

This was my first thought, but after researching for a while it seems pretty complicated. The tutorials I found literally have hundreds of steps to configure everything properly.

thesnarkon Data Science of the Facebook World

Is there a description available of the algorithm used to generate the 'cluster diagrams'?

Really nice work.

thesnarkon D-Wave quantum computer solves protein folding problem

Hard not to scoff at with that sensational title.

thesnarkon D-Wave quantum computer solves protein folding problem

So they can fold a 20 residue protein on a lattice using the coarse grain HP model, competing squarely with 1970s tech.

thesnarkon My next text editor

I would be interested to hear what modern features are not possible in vim or emacs.

thesnarkon How to Build a Portrait with Dice (using Photoshop)

I am the guy who wrote the original post, I think this is great work, I wish I could use photoshop as proficiently!

I should say that for my part, I drew inspiration from flight404: http://www.flight404.com/blog/?p=131

and a paper I read where someone wrote an algorithm to do this with dominos.

thesnarkon Cinder: open-source creative C++

I wonder what a fair benchmark test would look like. Would it boil down to an argument of C++ vs Java for floating point operations?

thesnarkon Cinder: open-source creative C++

Having never used Cinder before, why would someone choose it over processing?

thesnarkon 1Gbps fiber for $70—in America? Yup.

Novus in Vancouver is pretty awesome, 40/10 for $65/mo

thesnarkon Why astronomers (and other scientists) should program in Python

In my experience 90% of scientific data analysis work is: getting the data, cleaning it and transforming it into a form suitable for analysis. MATLAB fails miserably at these tasks.

thesnarkon Why astronomers (and other scientists) should program in Python

MATLAB is a bad choice for science. It is proprietary, making it difficult to share work among people who do not own a license, therefore making it more difficult to reproduce results.

Not to mention the fact that the MATLAB language is extremely awkward anytime you want to work with something that isn't a matrix.

thesnarkon Slaying the Cable Monster: Why HDMI Brands Don't Matter

I like to take advantage of this by approaching the salesman while holding about $300 dollars worth of cables, negotiate a lower price on the tv and then return the cables the next day.

thesnarkon Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (April 2011)

Hi,

This sounds really interesting to me, and I am in Vancouver too. Would you consider putting your email address in your profile? I have a quick question for you.

thesnarkon Will the real Silicon Valley North please stand up?

What about Montreal?

thesnarkon I'm finally doing it: bootstrapping my start up.

What would the tattoo have been? :)

thesnarkon What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

That we are star dust.

thesnarkon Bots playing the market make some bizarre patterns

Did you read about this:

http://www.businessinsider.com/huge-first-high-frequency-tra...

thesnarkon Ask HN: Where can I find someone who makes info-graphics?

Ben Fry (of processing fame) has a group that does this:

http://fathom.info/

Can you give more details about the project and the data set?

thesnarkon Ask HN: What does your development environment look like?

This post can answer far more completely than I can: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1565375

Vancouver gets a nod from pg as one of the best places to do a startup outside of the US.

I only recently moved here, so I am not very involved in the local scene, although I would like to start meeting people.

thesnarkon Ask HN: What does your development environment look like?

http://i.imgur.com/ZCADh.jpg

Beautiful Vancouver weather today...

thesnarkon Extreme Productivity with Screen and Vim

I would watch such a video if you made one.

thesnarkon Ask HN: What should we eat?

I would just like to point out that oatmeal has a glycemic index of about 50 (out of 100). That's for plain oatmeal with nothing added, not the instant stuff or the sugar laden version most people end up with.

thesnarkon Ask HN: How Do I Get Math?

I agree with this. For me, math started to make sense when I saw it applied to problems, especially simple physics problems that explain things you can directly observe. The Feynman lectures were an especially rich source of these types of problems.

My favorites: at what angle will a marble rolling down the side of a bowling ball leave the surface?

when you observe water flowing out of your tap, the stream tappers and becomes more thin as it falls, can you derive the formula for that?

thesnarkon OpenSolaris governing board threatens dissolution

Out of curiosity, does anyone here use OpenSolaris for anything?

thesnarkon Why Learn R? It's the language of Statistics

I certainly agree that coming up the learning curve with R has greatly improved my working knowledge of statistics. However, lately I find myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the language itself as my projects grow in complexity. Of course this could be due to my lack of skill with R or programming in general... Does anyone else have this issue?

thesnarkon Ask HN: Who's using Clojure, and to do what?

Gotcha.

How do you think it would hold up to larger, say intraday data?

thesnarkon Ask HN: Who's using Clojure, and to do what?

Can you tell us more about your data set?

thesnarkon Why R Doesn't Suck

Plots in R are far superior to those generated with matplotlib or other packages. Take a look at ggplot2.

thesnarkon Why R Doesn't Suck

I agree with all of your points, yet I still find myself using R on a day to day basis instead of python. My reason for doing so is the large number of statistical packages that exist for R. I know that scipy exists, but it does not seem to have nearly the same coverage as CRAN + base libraries... Are there other python libraries I should look at?