Hacker News: pseut

New comment by pseut in "Tarsnap: No heartbleed here"

pseut — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 23:37:37 +0000

And, just to go back to patio11's article[1] "replace OpenSSL for free" is something that Tarsnap could afford to do as a company, and might make business sense, if it were substantially more profitable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953https://news.yco...

New comment by pseut in "What Heartbleed Can Teach The OSS Community About Marketing"

pseut — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 16:39:17 +0000

I've seen people not know who "pg" is, so...

New comment by pseut in "What Heartbleed Can Teach The OSS Community About Marketing"

pseut — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 16:36:55 +0000

The one weak point of the landing page is that it didn't indicate who was not affected. I read to the bottom of the announcement and had to think a while on whether I had to update my laptop because, hey, this seems like a serious bug. Granted, I'm nontechnical... but that's kind of the point.

Edit: not sure why this was downvoted, but if it contains an error please add a comment pointing it out. If you just think it should be lower on the page, no worries.

New comment by pseut in "Python 3.5 to Ship with Matrix Multiplication Operator"

pseut — Tue, 08 Apr 2014 17:55:35 +0000

Usually the algorithm is described in another document without several expressions & lines. "Readability" in some of these contexts means verifying that you've correctly typed in the expression.

New comment by pseut in "Fourier series visualisation with D3.js"

pseut — Tue, 08 Apr 2014 16:18:53 +0000

You're right, thanks. But C-u doesn't seem to be necessary, unless I have a strange setup.

New comment by pseut in "Fourier series visualisation with D3.js"

pseut — Tue, 08 Apr 2014 05:26:53 +0000

I love Vim's digraphs!

In emacs it's

    C-| tex

then

    \phi → φ

etc, which can be quite a bit more typing but can be easier to remember if you already know the TeX instructions for everything.

Now we just need to convince other editors to add something similar...

New comment by pseut in "American Chemical Society bans university after "spider-trap" is clicked"

pseut — Sat, 05 Apr 2014 19:52:53 +0000

Konqueror on RHEL seems more likely than Lynx.

New comment by pseut in "2048 implemented in 487 bytes of C "

pseut — Sat, 05 Apr 2014 06:12:32 +0000

A reaction to the new moderation proposals, maybe?

New comment by pseut in "Learn C and build your own Lisp"

pseut — Sat, 05 Apr 2014 02:11:40 +0000

FWIW, cryptocurrencies are far more fiat than dollars. You can pay taxes in dollars, for example, so they're not even a pure fiat currency.

New comment by pseut in "How The Rise Of The "R" Computer Language Is Bringing Open Source To Science"

pseut — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 12:56:57 +0000

It's used consistently in the core language and in well written packages but very inconsistently across the ecosystem. I certainly don't use it in packages I write for my own use and it's pretty unused in most of the packages I download.

New comment by pseut in "How The Rise Of The "R" Computer Language Is Bringing Open Source To Science"

pseut — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 03:36:41 +0000

Did you write qplot? (rhetorical question) A lot of these "quirks" of R are nice for end users when they're implemented well, but are unintuitive to program and, as a consequence, are inconsistently implemented across packages.

Hadley doesn't write everything, you know.

New comment by pseut in "Twitter spam wave"

pseut — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 01:35:12 +0000

Yeah, I was just thinking that. About 90% of what I see on twitter I would consider spam if it were sent by email. :)

New comment by pseut in "How The Rise Of The "R" Computer Language Is Bringing Open Source To Science"

pseut — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 00:11:00 +0000

Not my area, but one starting place is http://www.andrewgelman.com

New comment by pseut in "How The Rise Of The "R" Computer Language Is Bringing Open Source To Science"

pseut — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 22:54:55 +0000

I more or less agree with your specific points, but in the larger scheme of things I'm more concerned that these hypothetical people don't understand the stats than that the tool won't scale or is badly implemented.

That said, it sure is a bitch of a language to try to develop for (since the consensus seems to be: write everything in C) and cran is a ghetto.

New comment by pseut in "What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap"

pseut — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 19:47:46 +0000

Nearlyfreespeech's homepage is infinitely more attractive and professional looking than tarsnap's.

And, no, the redesign in the article looks exactly like someone grabbed a $20 theme and didn't bother to swap in the image.

New comment by pseut in "What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap"

pseut — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 19:43:57 +0000

Things tarsnap would need to be anything like dropbox:

* Mobile support

* Windows support

* A web interface

* Any way of using it other than CLI

TFA left all that stuff in place. "tarsnap the software" does not change at all.

New comment by pseut in "What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap"

pseut — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 19:35:24 +0000

Unless I skimmed over part of the post, tarsnap is still run by crontab on a unix/linux box. So, still pretty geeky. And the idea that "affordable encrypted backup" can't be understood by "a suit" is silly.

New comment by pseut in "Why xkcd-style graphs are important"

pseut — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 19:25:53 +0000

From the first few graphs I've seen in the links, the shading is discrete and not continuous (e.g. p 40). Discrete shading does address my first point, and it can help somewhat with communication too. Personally, I prefer simulating from the implicit model and plotting, say, 1000 hypothetical sample paths; but I agree that discrete shading can be effective too.

New comment by pseut in "Why xkcd-style graphs are important"

pseut — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 04:23:21 +0000

1. If I want a confidence interval, I want to know the end points of the confidence interval. Trying to guess them from a plot like this is annoying and not helpful.

2. This doesn't work for bar graphs, lengths, etc. The uncertainty is often going to be symmetric around the point estimate, but your opacity forces an asymmetric representation of the uncertainty.

3. Box plots are great. If you want more detail than that, a thin vertical histogram or density is going to convey much more information than shading.

New comment by pseut in "Ask HN: MIT, Harvard, or Stanford?"

pseut — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 23:54:06 +0000

"Less elitist" may not appeal to someone who announces on HN that he or she got into these three colleges. Harvard it is!