hdivider

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361.
by hdivider 14y ago
"Seeing possible evidence of extraterrestrial life in every unexpected observation is nothing more than a superstition." I agree, and I hope I didn't give the impression that this is what we should be doing. This thing is still just an ob
362.
by hdivider 14y ago
I'm certainly not an expert on this, but I'd say the most important number to think about when looking at rover images is the scale . "the little protuberance is probably about 0.5 cm tall, or even smaller." Five mm is obviously tiny. Ke
363.
by hdivider 14y ago
"For the programmer who is truly interested in improving their mathematical skills, the first line of attack should now be obvious. Become an expert at applying the basic methods of proof" This may be good advice if you want to get into p
364.
by hdivider 14y ago
I can't speak for everyone, but personally I distrust schemes like this for one simple reason: creativity loss due to undetectable exhaustion. The more burned out you are, the less likely it is you're going to come up with something creativ
365.
by hdivider 14y ago
Memorisation sucks - I remember having to memorise a similar number of proofs, years ago. (And then again a year or so later, in electromagnetism.) Here are some things that helped me, personally: Proofs usually have two things that you can
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Rogue Planet Confirmed Orbiting Around ‘Eye of Sauron’(wired.com)
2 points by hdivider 14y ago|0 comments
367.
by hdivider 14y ago
This could be great, but I doubt maths-heavy subjects can be studied effectively with an iPad. This is kind of sad, because maths-heavy textbooks could be vastly improved if they were properly implemented for tablets. Man, if I had the time
368.
by hdivider 14y ago
Almost complete agreement here. There seems to be a 'shortcut mentality' among some hackers - the idea being that if you are faced with a difficult subject, begin with the assumption that standard learning material is padded with lots of us
369.
Top Scientific Discoveries of 2012(wired.com)
3 points by hdivider 14y ago|0 comments
370.
by hdivider 14y ago
Agree completely. It's not like people need to discuss what to do about the things they're 'sick' of - the mechanism for getting rid of stuff like that is already in place. Another thing: make a habit of browsing /newest. I actually have t
371.
by hdivider 14y ago
Really cool. It's good to know that there are hackathons for this kind of thing. Ignoring, for the moment, all the overbearing ethical problems with factory farms (those kinds of discussions are almost never constructive), I wonder if a fir
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Microsoft's battle for consumers: it's time to drop the Windows name(theverge.com)
3 points by hdivider 14y ago|0 comments
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The most convoluted systems failure I've ever experienced - and how I prevailed(hdivider.com)
1 points by hdivider 14y ago|1 comments
374.
by hdivider 14y ago
Stuff like this is why I still love HN, for all its flaws. :) This is pretty interesting - I'm going to start checking Maker Time regularly, and see if my perspective on things changes. One's perception of the passage of time surely has an
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by hdivider 14y ago
I'm willing to bet that short attention spans play a significant role in making karma less meaningful - in the sense that it can penalise more extensive and thorough comments in favour of short, snappy one- or two-liners. Take the following
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DNA Directly Photographed for the First Time(livescience.com)
2 points by hdivider 14y ago|0 comments
377.
by hdivider 14y ago
I find much confused logic in Nick Bostrom's argument, and huge assumptions: "I will return to this scenario shortly, but first I shall say a few words about another theoretical possibility: that the extraterrestrials are out there, in abun
378.
by hdivider 14y ago
Why only make things better for humans? There are other things one could be doing to improve the lot of life on Earth, and it doesn't have to involve startups or anything to do with the economy. For instance, everyone can plant trees. Over
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by hdivider 14y ago
I think one of the only things we can be reasonably certain about is energy. Many or even most of the changes Charlie listed would require changing much of the technology deployed on our planet (except of course those changes that are more
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by hdivider 14y ago
Gamification quite rightfully takes a lot of flak. Earning meaningless shiny coins in order to compete for some position in the leaderboards makes the process feel somewhat shallow, even silly. Successful games don't have this problem. Howe
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by hdivider 14y ago
If this thing will actually be released, I hope it won't be locked down so that only Xbox LIVE certified developers can publish games on it. That's currently one of the major turn offs as an indie dev on Windows 8: the lack of a more merito
382.
by hdivider 14y ago
Learning for exams and learning for yourself are obviously different kinds of activities, even if the level of depth and rigour are similar. For maths-heavy subjects, I'm not really inclined to believe that traditional exams are the best wa
383.
by hdivider 14y ago
This discussion seems to focus on the mostly-saturated iOS App Store, which is fair enough, given the money being thrown around there, but I wouldn't write the Windows Store off just yet. We've got just over 800 indie games in the Windows S
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by hdivider 14y ago
Useful resources - thank you for that. "with techniques like problem-based learning, challenge-based learning, service learning, project-based learning, learning by design, learning through games, simulations, modeling, programming, etc." I
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On thinking probabilistically [pdf](atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk)
10 points by hdivider 14y ago|1 comments
386.
by hdivider 14y ago
"The expected value isn't flawed, but it's often not an useful guide to what action you should take." Yeah, I agree with that - if good decisions could be made that easily we'd all be phenomenally successful. There are mountains of complica
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by hdivider 14y ago
Nice calculation, but it doesn't contradict the 'rational' argument at all. Slightly disappointing: looking at the title and first paragraph I expected some weird statistical wizardry on why the calculation of expected values is fundamental
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by hdivider 14y ago
So Windows 8 is the end of Windows because people apparently aren't talking much about desktop PCs anymore? That seems like an awfully weak argument, given that there are still countless millions of desktop PC users, many of which run Windo
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by hdivider 14y ago
Complain about the archaic teaching methods if you will, but having trawled through substantially similar texts in the past (some writing styles truly haven't changed in centuries), I'm quite sure that this stuff improves both reading compr
390.
by hdivider 14y ago
Funny, I'm actually working on a game that intends to teach some of this stuff to a non-mathematical audience. Linear algebra is so far-reaching, I find it surprising that other branches of mathematics often seem to get preferential treatme

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