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antoinehersen | 14 years ago | on: What really happened aboard Air France 447

The fact that the heating element was not effective enough was a known fact. Since similar incident of lost of air speed had already happened. Pitot were being replaced with beefier heating elements. It was just not considered a high priority.

antoinehersen | 14 years ago | on: How Doctors Die

The message is that there is another choice.

I read it as giving people a different perspective on end of life care. The system is heavily biased toward all out medical care. This article show the other side, using as examples people who have a better understanding of the tradeoff.

This decision will always be a personal one, there is not right or wrong answer, just different possibilities.

antoinehersen | 14 years ago | on: How Doctors Die

It is obviously a personal choice but situation #2 may be worse than you imagine.

You can write, read, and interact but only for a few hours each day. Pain and fatigue take over the rest of the time. There is also so many little things you take for granted you will not be able to do anymore, or will require assistance to perform. Eating can become a chore, you may have to be regularly plug to some gruesome apparatus, also loss of mobility. Think about the last time you were sick, or injured, think of the worse moment being your new normal. I personally can`t imagine being happy in those circumstances. I choose #1.

Each person choices should be respected, and people should be better informed on the tradeoff of each choices, which I feel is not the case in our health care system.

antoinehersen | 14 years ago | on: Over 80% of students unlikely to scan a QR code

Most QR codes are tied to advertisement. I assume most students ignore them so they will probably not bother with all the energy required to read a code. Engagement will probably be higher for more valuable information.

antoinehersen | 14 years ago | on: How can I teach a bright person with no programming experience how to program?

I am helping a friend learn to program. He was doing "Learn Python The Hard Way" but was loosing steam. I created a project for him to do, a simple ASCII game: https://github.com/antoinehersen/ASCII-Dungeon-of-DOOM. Having a project with visual and interactive elements is far more motivating. Also it push you to learn the real skills needed for programing, not only knowing what a loop is or how to open a file, but figuring what to use when, and how to organize and connect it all. This experience will create a reference frame for everything he might subsequently read in a book.

I strongly believe that accomplishing a small scale project that as some value is the best way to learn.

antoinehersen | 14 years ago | on: WikiLeaks: Out of time and money

I think Assange took to much of a central role, creating a huge weakness that is being successfully exploited. I personally want to support wikileaks, but I have mixed feelings about Assange.

antoinehersen | 14 years ago | on: Six Ways to Overcome the Urge to Procrastinate

My favorite way to procrastinate is to read online article about procrastination. I also bought a book about it, one of the few I never finished. If you procrastinate too much there is usually a reason for it, try to find out why, and what you can do about it. For me it is ambitious project that are ill defined. Breaking them in smaller task that can become daily achievements helps a lot.

antoinehersen | 14 years ago | on: Can Yahoo Be Rescued?

The debaters suggestion is that Yahoo need a miracle, aka a Steve Job to bring innovation and focus. Sounds like the leaked memo urging employe to "accelerate innovation, reignite inspiration, and give our users what they want now". If only someone sent that memo sooner !

antoinehersen | 14 years ago | on: Harvard Grad Starts Math Museum Helped by Google, Hedge Funder

I fear that the beauty of mathematics is hard to easily communicate. It is not in pretty pictures of fancy functions, but in rediscovering theorems and their proof. The most awe inducing results during undergrad was Galois theory, but you need quite a bit of mechanics to be able to understand the proof. I remember an exhibition on Gödel, it completely failed to communicate how ground breaking and fundamental his achievement were.

antoinehersen | 14 years ago | on: Free Stanford AI Class is a “Beta” for a Commercial Launch?

I do not want exactly to complain since the class is currently free and I am enjoying it quite a bit, but there is a lot of issues. The integration between the Youtube video and the quizz is poor, no official forum for the student, no lecture notes. Everything as a very beta feels to it.

On the contrary the platform for the ML class is of very high quality and the content more polished. I especially like the possibility to speed up the video lecture, having programming assignment, and how easy it is to submit them.

antoinehersen | 14 years ago | on: HP's new ARM-based Servers

From the Register article: "The hyperscale server effort is known as Project Moonshot, and the first server platform to be created under the project is known as Redstone, after the surface-to-surface missile created for the US Army, which was used to launch America's first satellite in 1958 and Alan Shepard, the country's first astronaut, in 1961."
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