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pseut's comments

pseut | 12 years ago | on: What Heartbleed Can Teach The OSS Community About Marketing

The one weak point of the landing page is that it didn't indicate who was not affected. I read to the bottom of the announcement and had to think a while on whether I had to update my laptop because, hey, this seems like a serious bug. Granted, I'm nontechnical... but that's kind of the point.

Edit: not sure why this was downvoted, but if it contains an error please add a comment pointing it out. If you just think it should be lower on the page, no worries.

pseut | 12 years ago | on: Fourier series visualisation with D3.js

I love Vim's digraphs!

In emacs it's

    C-| tex
then

    \phi → φ
etc, which can be quite a bit more typing but can be easier to remember if you already know the TeX instructions for everything.

Now we just need to convince other editors to add something similar...

pseut | 12 years ago | on: Learn C and build your own Lisp

FWIW, cryptocurrencies are far more fiat than dollars. You can pay taxes in dollars, for example, so they're not even a pure fiat currency.

pseut | 12 years ago | on: Twitter spam wave

Yeah, I was just thinking that. About 90% of what I see on twitter I would consider spam if it were sent by email. :)

pseut | 12 years ago | on: How The Rise Of The "R" Computer Language Is Bringing Open Source To Science

I more or less agree with your specific points, but in the larger scheme of things I'm more concerned that these hypothetical people don't understand the stats than that the tool won't scale or is badly implemented.

That said, it sure is a bitch of a language to try to develop for (since the consensus seems to be: write everything in C) and cran is a ghetto.

pseut | 12 years ago | on: What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap

Nearlyfreespeech's homepage is infinitely more attractive and professional looking than tarsnap's.

And, no, the redesign in the article looks exactly like someone grabbed a $20 theme and didn't bother to swap in the image.

pseut | 12 years ago | on: What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap

Things tarsnap would need to be anything like dropbox:

* Mobile support

* Windows support

* A web interface

* Any way of using it other than CLI

TFA left all that stuff in place. "tarsnap the software" does not change at all.

pseut | 12 years ago | on: What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap

Unless I skimmed over part of the post, tarsnap is still run by crontab on a unix/linux box. So, still pretty geeky. And the idea that "affordable encrypted backup" can't be understood by "a suit" is silly.

pseut | 12 years ago | on: Why xkcd-style graphs are important

From the first few graphs I've seen in the links, the shading is discrete and not continuous (e.g. p 40). Discrete shading does address my first point, and it can help somewhat with communication too. Personally, I prefer simulating from the implicit model and plotting, say, 1000 hypothetical sample paths; but I agree that discrete shading can be effective too.

pseut | 12 years ago | on: Why xkcd-style graphs are important

1. If I want a confidence interval, I want to know the end points of the confidence interval. Trying to guess them from a plot like this is annoying and not helpful.

2. This doesn't work for bar graphs, lengths, etc. The uncertainty is often going to be symmetric around the point estimate, but your opacity forces an asymmetric representation of the uncertainty.

3. Box plots are great. If you want more detail than that, a thin vertical histogram or density is going to convey much more information than shading.

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