Viewing profile — pjin

A hearty second for mechanize. It basically wraps urllib2 which is neat. Although, I've encountered situations where language support for distributed systems would have really save…

Here's the original Nanex source in question: http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/4500.html

To me, the most interesting thing about PNaCl is that it'll be the first real test of LLVM as a portable assembly bitcode, rather than just a compiler IR. There are arguments for w…

It would be unethical to maintain a harmful allele of a gene, assuming that the particular allele is unequivocally harmful. But that is not always the case. The textbook example is…

A search on Wikipedia turned up this 1976 paper [1] (unfortunately, behind a paywall), which derived a memristor circuit emulating Hodgkin-Huxley dynamics, a good biophysical model…

There's a really cool experimental history behind understanding the cochlea, especially concerning George Zweig, once a particle physicist. A lot of this work was done in the 70s a…

To nitpick at the math: "No free lunch" results are asymptotic in the sense that they necessarily hold over the _entire_ domain of whatever problem you're trying to solve. Obviousl…

I'm not a condensed matter researcher, but from what I know these particular majorana fermions are quasiparticles, so it's a little misleading to directly compare this to the Higgs…

A more extreme example along the same lines as Watchmen is the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. NGE totally rips apart mecha anime and gives its characters psychological issue…

Looks a lot like TeX, which is a good thing. In fact this might even be better. I'm tired so I might be missing an obvious weakness but to take the analogy a bit further here are s…

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/natur... Dunno if there's a preprint somewhere.

Hmm, so gaussian distributions are easy to use and ubiquitous and all (they're the basis functions used in SVM), except that I don't see any reason for them to be priors here. But …

Betteridge's law of headlines: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4092880

From the whitepaper [1]: After an appropriate transport period, the brain is perfused, sectioned, suitably stained, and each section digitally imaged. These 2-D images are co-regis…

While it could be reverse psychology to troll HNers to linking their site, it's also bad publicity among hackers, and the argument breaks Occam's razor.

You didn't include an email. I've been having success with Go for backend work, and easy C integration in this kind of database like this would be useful for what I do. I'm not sur…

Have you tried just replacing redis' Lua dependency with LuaJIT yourself? LuaJIT 2.0 should be a drop-in replacement for Lua 5.1, it has the same headers and even builds the same w…

It's probably best to post this when people are headed to work in GMT or US timezones, or in the afternoon before they leave.