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…
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:…
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,…
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…
> "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…
> 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:…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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:…
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,…
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…
> "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…
> 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:…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…