Viewing profile — amstr

I fear that if the technosphere continues to use "privacy" and "freedom of expression" as fig leaves to protest any kind of anti-IP-theft laws, the public will eventually get disen…

You're right -- HIPAA et al only cover data that could be traced back to the individual, and this set clearly cannot. Interestingly, there was a similar dataset presented at PSB (p…

Sorry, just saw this reply. Hadoop comes with a distributed cache that is generally used for small files -- a common example would be doing a large join against a small table that …

I have one, and it's OK -- you can notice broad differences with different activities or different mental states. The video game that comes with it is supposed to allow you to cont…

The two things missing from Cascalog that would take it from great to godlike are 1) an easy way to use the distributed cache and 2) a way to run Cascalog jobs on the cluster witho…

No problem! This sort of thing is what Hacker News (should be) all about :)

Interesting video -- watching it made me realize that my ad-hoc "electrodes" were too small (2x2 cm), explaining the mild skin irritation. I wonder if it's common also to have a te…

So, after reading this account, I felt compelled to wire up my current-limited power supply at 1mA and ranges from 6-9V using saline-soaked paper towels. Got some mild phosphenes d…

According to http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00763230 , 2 mA is quite safe and actually more effective than 1 mA.

I actually agree with the overall thesis -- Google is integrating its services in emulation of Facebook and Apple in order to become more profitable. The "poor" parts are 1) the ov…

Yes, I'd agree with you that tight integration for Apple and Google provide different kinds of "systemic risk". For Google, the risk is they control too much of your information. F…

Apparently when Apple has a unified ecosystem, the purpose is to "perfectly tailor its devices to its users" but if Google does it, it's "maniacal" and "tyrannical"? The state of t…

Regarding SEO: The Facebook "Like" button for instance has been embeddable on any page for awhile now and affects results for FB searches, ads, etc. So people have been playing the…

The disturbing thing is that people here at news.yc -- hopefully a fairly informed bunch -- seemingly aren't able to see past the infuriatingly self-serving nature of a "Don't Be E…

This timeline seems to be unaware of package.el, ELPA, etc, by proposing bundling MORE packages by default in Emacs (IMO Emacs' default installation is already huge). Also, I don't…

Jurafsky and Martin's Speech and Language Processing complements ESL and Introduction to IR well by focusing on 'high-level' NLP, but its downside is that it focuses perhaps too mu…