Viewing profile — sbirch

You might conclude that the only real option is to buy a positive pressure fresh air system, but this comparison doesn't match my experience. I have no trouble driving the PM2.5 ve…

I think you've mixed up relative and absolute differences. Both of your examples are in terms of absolute percentage points (pp, sometimes ambiguously labeled %), but relative chan…

This has actually been done before, awhile ago: https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/

I enjoyed reading some of their results. I see some methodological issues here, however: 1) The test makes you distinguish between real words and a set of words they've made up in …

My favorite explanation of this (posed instead as the Locomotive problem) is in Allen Downey's "Think Bayes," pp.22 It's online too, and worth reading! http://www.greenteapress.com…

An interesting bit on the computational complexity of solving this problem (with a slightly different scoring function): http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1854/is-finding…

http://js1k.com/

I think linking accounts to debit cards is pretty valuable on it's own. It opens the door to making payments for a lot of people much easier down the road.

I think they've done something quite clever by (I infer) getting people to join up when they receive money. Venmo puts up an unnecessary wall by requiring that the payee sign up be…

You could also replace this website with a sentence: Dwolla is always the cheapest payment gateway.

This is true, but there's a lot to be said for native libraries which can be used more naturally. More important for things like frameworks, etc. than algorithms / highly technical…

"In academic research and in entrepreneurship, you need to multiply your effectiveness as a programmer, and since you (probably) won't be working with an entrenched code base, you …

Yes! I want an API!

"With the visibility API, you can gracefully pause or degrade the timer to a much longer poll when the tab is in the background." Note that this is already enforced for setInterval…

"Have we become so culturally invested in the allure of the Free Agent, the lone wolf, the techno-rebel with a cause, that we are prepared to shower millions of dollars (maybe tens…