mayanklahiri

6 ms·

1.
by mayanklahiri 16y ago
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 integrate Python with Sage
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by mayanklahiri 16y ago
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: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:h
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by mayanklahiri 16y ago
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.
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by mayanklahiri 16y ago
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, average-case and worst-case out
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by mayanklahiri 16y ago
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 (with VERY high proba
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by mayanklahiri 16y ago
> "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 adoption rate. I guess th
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by mayanklahiri 16y ago
> 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: here's a link to
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by mayanklahiri 16y ago
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 influence "normal" peop
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by mayanklahiri 16y ago
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.
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by mayanklahiri 16y ago
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 re-writing parts of th
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by mayanklahiri 16y ago
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 it's driving me nuts. Th
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by mayanklahiri 16y ago
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 checkin service, what
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by mayanklahiri 16y ago
I believe it's also called "fuzz testing"
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by mayanklahiri 16y ago
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 faster than BASIC int
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by mayanklahiri 16y ago
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 recommend it to e
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by mayanklahiri 16y ago
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, since the only expensiv