foob

32 ms·

331.
by foob 15y ago
Thanks, good catch. I'm used to thinking about the limit where you have so many bins that the Binomial distribution can be approximated as a Poisson distribution without thinking twice. 10 is sort of borderline but I probably should have be
332.
by foob 15y ago
Just so you know, GNOME stands for GNU Object Model Environment. Not that that negates your point, but I still disagree with you for other reasons. Firefox is in no way part of the operating system itself. I would argue that Bash and the co
333.
by foob 15y ago
It's a fun little visualization but it's also worth noting that a chi square test would achieve the same result but in a much more quantitative manner. Using his example, we'll generate N integers ranging from 0-9. Let n(0) denote the numbe
334.
by foob 15y ago
The scribd paper link is broken but you can find it here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/... . It's very interesting and definitely worth a read in my opinion. You've got to hand it to Microsoft, we've seen a
335.
by foob 15y ago
I upvoted this because I think that it needs attention, especially amongst the more tech/science savvy population of society. Nuclear power has the potential to meet the energy needs of the human race for well over a century while in the me
336.
by foob 15y ago
I find it very useful when dealing with unit conversions and fundamental constants. Google is fine for simple stuff but Alpha really excels when you have extremely complicated combinations of units. This probably doesn't matter much outside
337.
by foob 15y ago
I'm always happy to see new devices like this because I think that having a single phone act as the central computing device for all of our electronics is a good direction to move in. That said, if I can plug my phone into a television and
338.
by foob 15y ago
So, from Honeycomb onwards, Android is no longer open source aside from the places where they are forced to be That's factually incorrect and sounds like flamebait. They've stated that they're going to begin releasing the code again with
339.
by foob 15y ago
I agree with this completely. My bike commute makes up a large portion of the exercise that I get and it's always nice to kill two birds with one stone.
340.
by foob 15y ago
This site just got submitted in the last couple minutes: http://hackermentors.com/ (HN link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2596024 ). It might be worth a try.
341.
by foob 15y ago
That's very cool but it's still difficult to tell which part of the music is coming from which track. I personally would find it very helpful if mousing over a circle of a certain color would make all of the other tracks much quieter. That
342.
by foob 15y ago
Has "Enter your own data" been working for other people? I've gotten "Oops! Please try again later." consistently since it launched.
343.
by foob 15y ago
I think that you'll need to be more specific to get the answer that's right for you. Are you talking about the hardware, OS, or both? What languages do you program in? Are you planning on developing for mobile devices and if so what sorts?
344.
by foob 15y ago
Two months ago we had a story that 14 qubits was the largest quantum computer yet ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404470 ). This one now has 128? Is this just a money difference, was this a huge engineering breakthrough, or is there
345.
by foob 15y ago
Putting aside the fact that I don't agree with software patents in general I still don't like what Microsoft is doing. I think that it's not right for Microsoft to force companies using linux into these licensing agreements without making i
346.
by foob 15y ago
In high energy physics we've recently completed a big transition from FORTRAN77 to C++. PAW and CERNLIB were standard in the 90's but now most major experiments use ROOT. You can use ROOT with Python but most people don't bother. Programmin
347.
by foob 15y ago
You should make the photos on the front page links to actual user pages or in some way make it easy to get to example profiles. I tried searching for common names (Kelly, Sarah, Tim, etc) to see what a profile looked like but eventually gav
348.
by foob 15y ago
What actually happened was that they placed a new upper limit on the electric dipole moment of electrons. This has implications for physics beyond the standard model. You can't be a "sphere" unless you have a finite and well defined radius,
349.
by foob 15y ago
These voids are actually full of a crazy mess of virtual particles that exist within time/energy uncertainty. Empty space isn't really a meaningful concept when you're dealing with field theories. When you study quantum field theory one of
350.
by foob 15y ago
'Spaces' aren't new They aren't new but they've been fairly common in Linux desktop environments since the 90's while OS X didn't introduce them until 2007. I'm not sure where they first appeared but at the very least they've certainly be
351.
by foob 15y ago
You can't really blame Apple/Microsoft for not experimenting to the same extent that a GNU/Linux desktop environment or window manager can. In GNU/Linux you have countless options ranging from small fast tiling window managers to more compl
352.
by foob 15y ago
I once had an office with chalkboard paint on all of the walls and it was terrible. The rough surface tears apart chalk much more quickly than a real chalkboard and the result is chalk dust absolutely everywhere. It would cover desks and la
353.
by foob 15y ago
I don't like them more than 2D movies but I also don't dislike them as much as a lot of people around here seem to. How to Train Your Dragon and Coraline come to mind as a couple movies that I really loved and particularly enjoyed the 3D as
354.
by foob 15y ago
I read through the terms, privacy policy, and dmca information because this site will obviously be used for piracy and where there's piracy there's lawsuits. It was kind of long so here's a tl;dr for anyone wondering about them. The terms p
355.
by foob 15y ago
I think that it's reasonable if Apple doesn't want to provide support for fixing malware problems on systems that they've sold regardless of how any other company chooses to handle such issues. Also, this issue is obviously independent of O
356.
Apple to support reps: 'Don't confirm Mac infections'(theregister.co.uk)
135 points by foob 15y ago|120 comments
357.
by foob 15y ago
This could very well be true but I would've assumed that the dev version is always greater than the beta version? I just remember having to wait around 3 days before I could download a dev version after I switched.
358.
by foob 15y ago
You can't just switch to the dev channel and immediately update. You need to wait until the next dev version releases to download it.
359.
by foob 15y ago
I'm not convinced that the dangers of a kid browsing the internet are significant. I think that they are significant. I'm saying this as someone who grew up during the time period when parents had little to no idea of what sort of derange
360.
by foob 15y ago
Do you think that apps using NaCl will be more deserving of being treated as something different than a website? As browser technologies get more advanced it becomes increasingly possible to make things that seem more like a traditional des

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