imurray

38 ms·

361.
by imurray 17y ago
Nice. The "law" got the rough shape of the distribution, but (unless you have a very small filesystem) these numbers are statistically significantly different. Your files must have been made up ! ...or you have a nice demonstration of how
362.
by imurray 17y ago
Suggested exercise: Predict and then create a histogram of the leading digits of the file sizes of the non-zero-length files on your computer. [ SPOILER: when I did this once I found sharp peaks around digits that weren't 1. You are likely
363.
by imurray 17y ago
The title means "justifaction" as in typographic alignment, rather than a full treatment of the differences between using pdfLaTeX and LaTeX. I was initially disappointed, but just tried adding \usepackage{microtype} to a document. N
364.
by imurray 17y ago
More gentle introduction in this (free to download) text book: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html — it’s by one of the authors responsible for rediscovering Gallager codes
365.
by imurray 17y ago
I was suffering horrible hangs will some sites updated, notably Facebook. On upgrading Firefox to 3.6 I had to edit the install.rdf of the "It's all text" extension to allow it to work. I noticed a comment on the Mozilla add-ons site saying
366.
by imurray 17y ago
The soft maximum often comes up when dealing with probabilistic models and in neural networks. I'm surprised that a blog that has been highlighting numerical issues hasn't pointed out how the soft maximum should be computed . If x is vecto
367.
by imurray 17y ago
If I use this: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/18798-ti... which warms up the function, averages over repetitions and tries to account for various overheads, the ratio states about the same (1:1.5 ish). I would normall
368.
by imurray 17y ago
A Matlab/Octave example of inv being slower and less accurate: >> A = randn(100); x = randn(100,1); b = A*x; >> tic; x1 = inv(A)*b; toc Elapsed time is 0.142381 seconds. >> tic; x2 = A\b; toc Elapsed
369.
by imurray 17y ago
One can pay for mp3 (and other) codecs with Ubuntu too, if one is so inclined: http://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?products_id=244
370.
by imurray 17y ago
Equivalent perl one-liner (Perl regex may be more convenient): perl -e 's/pat/rep/g' -p -i file -i.bak instead of -i works the same to create backups.
371.
by imurray 17y ago
In place operations have been implemented as a standalone utility: sponge from moreutils. sed 's/blah/foo/' file | sponge file
372.
by imurray 17y ago
Google Chrome can check that a website you are about to visit isn’t a known attack site, without needing a copy of the black list or sending the URL to Google, by checking: ~/.config/google-chrome/Safe Browsing Bloom
373.
by imurray 17y ago
From optipng’s todo.txt: - Compression improvements: Use zlib's deflateTune(). Use 7zip's powerful deflation engine. (This is not possible with libpng, so a custom encoder is needed.) AdvanceCOMP uses the same deflate cod
374.
by imurray 17y ago
If that desperate, one could also try: for a in 0 128 192 256 512 1024 ; do pngout file.png -b$a ; done (Or the equivalent for your favorite shell.)
375.
by imurray 17y ago
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/jobs/intern/faq.aspx The majority of our interns are PhD candidates, however, we also accept some master’s students who demonstrated a serious interest in research. Point taken. The poster needs to de
376.
by imurray 17y ago
Obvious choices are big firms with machine learning research groups: Microsoft Research, Yahoo Research, (Google, but I've had a poorer personal experience getting people from there to tell me what they're doing) You could search for funds
377.
by imurray 17y ago
The idea of some of these packages (Blog, BUGS, Church, HBC) is that you describe how you would generate synthetic random data if you had to. If you don’t know any intermediate quantities, you specify distributions from which plausible va
378.
by imurray 17y ago
That link says nothing about electronics, the headline claim. The sources for banning electronics all seem to refer to Twitter, which may result from isolated incidents, or speculation.
379.
by imurray 17y ago
There are far more valuable “100 million pound” sterling banknotes known as Titans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_pound_sterling
380.
by imurray 17y ago
I found it surprising that PunyPNG beat OptiPNG on every single benchmark, given that the first/only png I uploaded was reduced into exactly the same file with the same number of bytes by PunyPNG and OptiPNG. In most of the benchmarks the
381.
by imurray 17y ago
I was really referring to the ease of making figures in the right format, as the poster made a particular point about including figures. When I used to use MikTeX on Windows (8 years ago now) saving figures to .eps or .pdf from most applica
382.
by imurray 17y ago
Like Word, it probably isn’t the best tool for something book length. It’s really designed for letters and short reports. It can be done; I know brave souls who have written theses with Open Office. I just wouldn’t personally give up the st
383.
by imurray 17y ago
Academics from mathematical fields tend to use LaTeX. One way to compile a PDF is with pdflatex, which can import .png, .jpg, and .pdf images. This means you’d need to be able to get your vector images into .pdf format conveniently. This te
384.
by imurray 17y ago
For me the best bit on that page was in the comments: “I’d be very careful not to underestimate kids. If you don’t tell them something is supposed to be hard, they will astound you.” Yes! The first step to achieving something, is believin
385.
by imurray 17y ago
The original blog post was posted yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006497
386.
by imurray 17y ago
It has had a fair few mentions on this site: http://www.google.ca/search?q=www.jwz.org%2Fdoc%2Fgroupware.... Some filtering or a more refined search might give the actual (much smaller) number of posts.
387.
by imurray 17y ago
Here’s a user script that does a similar in thing for several browsers: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~murray/code/#googleviewer
388.
by imurray 17y ago
He could put the passwords on a piece of paper in his wallet. If paranoid, or worried about “shoulder-surfing”, the passwords could be obfuscated in some simple way. Examples: swap the first pair of digits, or swap case, or add a constant t
389.
by imurray 17y ago
Easylist, the standard list for Adblock plus, contains the rule: <pre>/affiliate*.php?</pre> You might question whether the race/ethnicity box makes any sense if you don’t know the country that the person is from. If you are
390.
by imurray 17y ago
Comments to submitter / author: The Race / Ethnicity box is US centric. The music genres choice is limited (classical?) and not everyone listens to any music. “I don’t know” (a proxy for other, or not interested) isn’t a real option, it jus

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