rflrob

57 ms·

631.
by rflrob 16y ago
> They're all right, of course: you can't simply infer bias from statistical underrepresentation Technically speaking, if something is statistically under- or over-represented, then there is a source of bias ("an extraneous latent influ
632.
by rflrob 16y ago
When the original "If Feynman Applied for a job at Microsoft" was posted ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1866305 ), a lot of people commented that this doesn't actually sound like something Feynman would say. Sheldon Cooper, maybe, b
633.
by rflrob 16y ago
Just leave off the trailing slash. Once someone pointed out that the sed syntax works for replacing, I started doing that.
634.
by rflrob 16y ago
It's actually not all that difficult to measure the data of a painting in computer terms: get a high resolution scan and store it as a JPEG. Of course, this is open to some reasonable disagreements about what constitutes a "high resolution
635.
by rflrob 16y ago
So Google, by doing this, has created up to a hundred or so bogus entries in the Bing database, to which I say, "big whoop". If Google had to pay damages for the extra infrastructure that Microsoft requires, the stamp to mail the check wou
636.
by rflrob 16y ago
I haven't downloaded either of them, but at least on the App store page, iCoder's Lugaru isn't accompanied "with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically per
637.
by rflrob 16y ago
>Whether it was a type of attack also known as “click fraud,” or not, it does appear to be an attack. I disagree with describing this as an attack. Based on the kinds of search terms Google has said they used, they aren't attempting to
638.
by rflrob 16y ago
> Hopefully they do if they are using user clickstream data. Each domain should have something like a page rank to determine how trustworthy it is. If there's some algorithmic reason to believe that Google gives more trustworthy results
639.
by rflrob 16y ago
I remember figuring out how to make a turtle graphics sailboat, faking the curved surfaces by stepping a bit then turning a bit.
640.
Correlated genotypes in friendship networks(pnas.org)
1 points by rflrob 16y ago|0 comments
641.
by rflrob 16y ago
Quoth a friend of mine: "it's only a flaw if it's undocumented. when it becomes documented, it becomes a feature"
642.
Cloud Computing—What's in It for Me as a Scientist?(sciencemag.org)
1 points by rflrob 16y ago|0 comments
643.
by rflrob 16y ago
I'm curious what kind of sensitivity and specificity qualifies as "good enough". Here's the prize's website: http://www.heritagehealthprize.com/
644.
by rflrob 16y ago
Is there a reason that web browsers these days don't do hyphenation? It's not like the algorithms to do it are at all new, and while I can see it adding some amount of time to the rendering process, my intuition is that time ought to be sma
645.
by rflrob 16y ago
I think exposing average karma as a metric reflects the values of the community: better to have insightful comments that lots of people find helpful than to spam the boards with as many posts as you can to see what sticks.
646.
by rflrob 16y ago
Fortunately (at least for me), biomedical research these days is largely an exception to this. Thanks to a Bush-era appropriations bill, anyone who takes NIH funding must ensure that their articles are published open-access on PubMedCentra
647.
by rflrob 16y ago
> Groovy, I hope they don't sue your ass. I'm not sure what they could get sued for. Libel? The only statement about UtilityBuilder is that they refused to pay their developer. Breach of contract? This seems more likely, though I haven
648.
by rflrob 16y ago
With regards to the join and capitalize examples, once you consider the existence of the string module, the current way actually does make more sense. Capitalizing things only makes sense on a string. Having a builtin function that could ca
649.
by rflrob 16y ago
Having not thought deeply about big-O runtimes since Freshman year, are set operations usually harder to evaluate? Half of them don't have "wort-case" times, and Symmetric Difference just has a "?" for the average case.
650.
by rflrob 16y ago
>It just looks a lot nicer. Maybe I'm just not used to it yet, but I liked the way Vimperator did it: having the hinting number also be in yellow made it easier to see. It's possible there are ways to configure this; I haven't checked t
651.
by rflrob 16y ago
I concur. Fortunately, the Drake equation gives us separate variables for "develops life" and "develops intelligent life". The value I used for f_i was somewhat lower than they gave, but I also thought that f_c was higher, so it worked out
652.
by rflrob 16y ago
When the equation was first proposed, I'd guess they assumed Sol is an "average" solar system, and given that we have Earth, which is by definition Earth-like, and Mars, Venus, and several of the Jovian moons, which could all fit a suitably
653.
by rflrob 16y ago
I'm okay with the Field of Dreams interpretation of astrobiology: "If you build it, they will come", so to speak. All you need is for life to take hold once and it'll take over a planet in just a few billion years. Of course, my own hunch i
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by rflrob 16y ago
I, for one, tend not to even read comment threads larger than a certain size, unless I want to see specific reactions to an article. I think jedsmith has it partially right up above when he says "it's about contributing to the conversation
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by rflrob 16y ago
> People then upvote it even though it isn't related because it might be insightful. What if we, as a community, decided that deliberately trying to float with highly rated comments by posting completely unrelated "responses" is not som
656.
by rflrob 16y ago
The problem with a vast majority of these Doom and Gloom articles about grad school is that they implicitly lump in all subjects together. The subtitle on this site at least says "its focus is on the humanities and social sciences," but I
657.
by rflrob 16y ago
> It's a little unfair to compare it [MATLAB] to something that came much later. You're certainly right that's it's not really a fair fight between the languages. WRT Octave, though, anyone for whom a MATLAB license is too expensive pro
658.
by rflrob 16y ago
The main reason to use Octave over Scipy is direct compatibility with Matlab code. Installation may also be a hair easier (I'm not sure on this point) As someone who switched from Matlab (student license) to Scipy, I've come to the conclus
659.
by rflrob 16y ago
>>"If even HALF of those people who downloaded my book that week had bought it, I would have hit the New York Times Bestseller list." > >Yeah, that's a BIG hint that piracy and sales aren't linked in any useful way. There wa
660.
by rflrob 16y ago
I would guess it's a combination of Not Invented Here syndrome and different problem spaces. Despite the fact that ITK seems to focus on very small things, while NASA tends to focus on the quite large, I've found that image processing, by

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