srean

By that logic one can justify any form of plagiarism cant one ? I am more concerned about helping yourself to the brand without permission than about using the code as its on git. It just reinforces t…

Is it only me who finds "Ask Prateek" tad conceited ? I am none too comfortable with the idea of helping oneself to someone else's work/brand unless it was expressly opened for that purpose. But then …

Statistical reasoning and Bayesian in particular, is frequently misunderstood in spite of its simplicity. It is also preferred that Bayes be spelled in caps. Just for arguments sake, let us assume tha…

Why wouldnt I ? Predictably enough, it seems the downvotes have started ringing in.

Despite the overwhelming possibility of being downvoted it needs mention that the Israeli model as practiced may not be that good an example for US to follow. It has been documented by several res…

Like many who have commented here I am a big time Arch linux fan. However if setting up X seems something that you do not want to deal with, you can give Chakra linux a try. Its based on Arch so you g…

Much as horrific that war crimes are, time to time it is perhaps important to remind ourselves that history is written by the victorious. Case in point the United State's human experiments on syphilis…

http://xkcd.com/541/ for the context

I am a serial tab abuser. Its my lazy Instapaper. As bad as that sounds on its own, I often would not close firefox, in fear of restarting it later and fire a cascade of page loads. After a few days F…

Infinite dimensional analysis is essentially functional analysis. A crude analogy is that a function is an infinite dimensional vector [...f(0),f(0+epsilon),...] so on. Although extremely interesting …

+1 We find similar things intriguing http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1848275 :) Though this might seem esoteric, this phenomena has practical applications. In the vector space model of informati…

Related to this is the amusing phenomenon of concentration of measure. Take a ball of dimension d and distribute points uniformly at random by area. Take any patch with an area that is half of the tot…

It all depends on the definition of "solved". I doubt whether the same standards of "solved" were applied to computers as well as to the bees. If one is willing to relax the standards, TSP isnt that h…

Now if only I could build a CM-5 clone for my home.

You may give http://www.plre.org/ or http://www.cdiggins.com/search/ a try to see if it helps. From the second link: "(PLRE.org) is a custom search engine created using the Google co-op service. T…

Apart from your first sentence, I completely agree with everything you said. My disagreement with your first is a partial one. What you describe is an ideal almost mythical free market. In such a ma…

Your comment seems to make the case that markets are competitive whereas governments are monopolistic. I feel reluctant to buy into that without an authoritative statistical study. My experience, thou…

Isnt that a Fresnel lens ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens They have been around for a while. I remember some plastic ones come free with books that have very fine print. So was the novelt…