alextp

20 ms·

151.
by alextp 16y ago
I'm not sure I agree that they have a right to exist, hence to have a business model. A good inspiration (on a smaller scale) can be the ACL and the recent open access journals (JMLR, JAIR, etc), that are mainly university-sponsored or univ
152.
by alextp 16y ago
I refuse to be a member of the ACM for this very reason---I don't think people should be expected to pay a few hundred bucks a year to access scientific papers. I think the ACM does more to obstruct progress in CS than to advance it, in gen
153.
by alextp 16y ago
Skipping questions shouldn't be that hard. I don't care for either Peet's or Starbucks, nor do I care for Ke$ha or Kate Perry.
154.
by alextp 16y ago
The solution to this is to reserve a time and space (maybe with a TA) when/where the students are expected to do the work, instead of doing them at leisure. Few people would say it's wrong to not be able to google during an exam, but most w
155.
by alextp 16y ago
Agreed. This was a really creepy read precisely because of her black-and-white perspective, and the overemphasized near-religious importance her past self put on not eating meat (to the point of considering eating only bad meat, as if pleas
156.
by alextp 16y ago
The New Yorker predates its issues, as they might theoretically take until Nov 29 to arrive in some people's houses (over here in brazil it takes longer than that, usually). It's an odd practice, but most magazines do it in some way.
157.
by alextp 16y ago
This is in the webpage of a professor at my university. His class was entertaining, and he is clearly really smart, but he scared off most of the students by asking them questions about the material, and teaching only the minimum necessary.
158.
by alextp 16y ago
I love clojure, but to be fair it took me a lot longer than that to get up and running, specially considering that I had no idea where to put the dependencies and how to compile things.
159.
by alextp 16y ago
This is not quite true. It's a mapping, but it's not a hash table because the mapping is bijective (while hash tables just project the keys into the table space). So there is no possibility of collision, the number of keys is fixed, etc. It
160.
by alextp 16y ago
As an anecdote, I'm teaching my first class this semester, and had a similar-ish experience, but with a much worse outcome for the students. To avoid this issue of people not knowing how the test is going to look like (and hence not knowing
161.
by alextp 16y ago
This only works if someone has added such an interface to every object in the programming language, the user is familiar with the dot-calls-method convention (and the state-is-modified convention), etc. I think to do actual programming it's
162.
by alextp 16y ago
I know programming, and I find wolframalpha far more intuitive than the standard interface in mathematica because I need to remember less commands, and often I can just guess what should work. With the interactive nature of this thing peopl
163.
by alextp 16y ago
Have you ever used Wolfram's Mathematica? He may be a huge crank, but the software is really awesome for doing mathematics research and learning. It can do all sorts of calculations automatically, but you can also easily program it to do th
164.
by alextp 16y ago
From the article, 600 for a bedroom in the notoriously dangerous Bedford-Stuyvesant doesn't sound like either Manhattan or cheap.
165.
by alextp 16y ago
I kind of agree; it annoys me to meet people who emigrated and after years still speak with a thick accent and make strong grammar mistakes. I'm brazillian, and I observe this phenomenon both with foreign people in brazil (who apparently re
166.
by alextp 16y ago
So far I've observed a strong correlation between cooking my own food (as opposed to eating at the university cafeteria) and getting way fatter, although part of this should be atributed to my moving around less (since I can stay home all d
167.
by alextp 16y ago
For most research purposes this is awful, though. Usually one's a lot more interested in this or that specific paper than in a random journal edition, as it is well known that both (1) academic journals end up having a low signal-to-noise r
168.
by alextp 16y ago
To be honest, a devaluing currency is precisely what you want to invest in a country, as it makes exports from that country way cheaper.
169.
by alextp 16y ago
Indeed. A lot of the junk food culture comes from agricultural subsidies, not just the obvious corn syrup. I recall (but can't find the link) a study showing that a really high proportion of supermarket products had traces of corn (even mea
170.
by alextp 16y ago
Re "Could you provide easy examples where you would use a pair-wise approach, and a list-wise approach? Like, let's say I wanted to build a recommendation system for college football pick-ems (Ie, will Iowa beat Michigan State? Etc.). Which
171.
by alextp 16y ago
If you do anaphora resolution you should maybe look at this recent paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.154... it's simple enough to get running, fast, and outperforms the state of the art of a couple of years a
172.
by alextp 16y ago
You can do greedy feature selection: make a stable train and development and test (and maybe another truer test set, for use later) sets and define an appropriate quality measure. Then implement the simplest thing you can think of, train on
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by alextp 16y ago
A nice middle ground is a whiteboard + a digital camera. That sort of plot list I would draft in a whiteboard, first the global, then the specifics, and later worry about making sense of it in excel or something.
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by alextp 16y ago
Replace muslim by whatever (asian, nigerian, haitian, mexican, brazillian) and you have a generic immigrant profile. The only slightly unusual thing about this is being linked to another person of interest, but then with this loose definiti
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by alextp 16y ago
How can this replace a crowded subway; that is, how can this move more than 1 million people in roughly the same direction at peak time? It certainly seems more suited to leisure than the common scenario of lots of people commuting in the s
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by alextp 16y ago
The article is full of hype but nell is a serious project. Tom Mitchell is one of the pioneers of machine learning as a field, and there's still interesting research coming from his lab. Information extraction is not a new thing, and even u
177.
by alextp 16y ago
Also, a lot of today's robotics (like anything from anybots, or from Andrew Ng's group at stanford) would be scary AI a few years ago. In this sense AI can be seen to be similar to philosophy.
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by alextp 16y ago
Dick Lipton's blog ( http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/ )does this as well, and I think this is an essential part of it being as successful as it is. People like being mentioned and like reading about other people, and humanizing ideas goes a
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by alextp 16y ago
Is this an "in-your-face" resignation letter?
180.
by alextp 16y ago
One of the best things about working in machine learning and natural language processing is that the best conference and journal archives are already open access ( books.nips.cc , usually ICML publishes the papers online, there's the ACL an

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