christopheraden

16 ms·

91.
by christopheraden 13y ago
I think that in jobs where statistics is the main function of the job, you will often not find them using Excel. The business intelligence folks at my company use it for cursory analyses, but I often question the rigor involved in their pra
92.
by christopheraden 13y ago
They do one of these every iteration of Excel, and the results are usually similar. One day, Microsoft will make a good version of Excel, but I'm still waiting. http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~gmelard/rech/gmelard_csda23.pdf
93.
by christopheraden 13y ago
I currently use Dwolla for transferring funds over to Mtgox. Given this information, is there a better service for getting funds from a bank account over to Mtgox without doing a wire transfer?
94.
by christopheraden 13y ago
Because normalization reduces the influence of variables that have a higher variance. In raw data, if you have marathon times and heights for runners in a race, and you measure the times in minutes and the heights in inches, the influence o
95.
by christopheraden 13y ago
It is somewhat similar. The procedure I describe is normalizing (using z-scores instead of raw data) the data. The difference, as far as I can tell, is that normalizing retains the correlation structure of the data, while whitening uncorrel
96.
by christopheraden 13y ago
Yes, of course you will--because you've normalized the data. If you had run PCA on just ingredients instead of on the normalized ingredients, I would imagine the results would be different. I can't verify since I don't have matlab on this c
97.
by christopheraden 13y ago
While I agree with you, if the author believed the entire method is invalid in all situations, he could make a strong argument that it wasn't worth the space to put it in at all. It would be a long book if it was filled with all the methods
98.
by christopheraden 13y ago
There is actually a fix to this problem in classical statistics (as far back as Pearson in the early 20th century) if the object is to perform PCA on data matrices: Don't use the covariance matrix for PCA. The issue of units is only a probl
99.
by christopheraden 13y ago
A great point, but therein lies my biggest complaint with the simplification of statistics that I see in the startup world--sometimes the technical details are actually important. As an analogy, while mass-production has given us a car that
100.
by christopheraden 13y ago
Big ups on your use of GGplot--best R graphing capabilities around! In response to your update about the QQ Plot, I didn't compare against normality like you did (the article is comparing exponentials, so a normal QQ isn't the best choice)
101.
by christopheraden 14y ago
Interesting paradox. I haven't seen that many statisticians using just a histogram when determining whether a certain distribution fits data reasonably. Kernel Density Estimators are a much better choice (for continuous data, like the data
102.
by christopheraden 14y ago
There was always something very accessible about SCUMM games (not just LucasArts ones, but they certainly had some great ones). The story lines were simple and playful enough for kids to enjoy--even 8 year olds can understand the humor in a
103.
by christopheraden 14y ago
Are there any plans to put this package on CRAN?
104.
by christopheraden 14y ago
Sample size is something that must be interpreted in the presence of power. You can make a solid conclusion with a very small sample size if the true difference in arrival times is very large, given that the assumptions of the hypothesis
105.
by christopheraden 14y ago
You're going to open a big can of worms with that one ;). Tmux has quite a few more features than Screen, with Screen having a few features that are useful in edge cases[1]. It's hard to argue with tmux having bindings for vi/Emacs, as well
106.
by christopheraden 14y ago
The name choice seems bizarre to me. It's like a portmanteau of Fedora and Ubuntu, yet has very few of the features of Ubuntu. Judging by the default GUI, Facintosh seems more appropriate.
107.
by christopheraden 14y ago
Gelman really is an unbelievable Bayesian. I don't think I'd say the most important since Bayes himself (Jeffreys and Jaynes strike me as crucial to the Bayes movement, along with the computational folks, like Geman&Geman and Metropolis
108.
by christopheraden 14y ago
The argument seems very thin here. How is the mathematical equivalent of "blinding me with science" any proof that mathematics is not a language? I'm not arguing one way or another, but this does not demonstrate the proposition made in TFA.
109.
by christopheraden 14y ago
This is the main reason I use git on my personal projects. I've found that it's quite difficult to pitch this feature to my group. The cost of learning an entirely new tech solution outweighs the benefits of version control in their minds--
110.
Ask HN: How can I get my team to adopt SCM?
2 points by christopheraden 14y ago|4 comments
111.
by christopheraden 14y ago
Yes, there is. Link: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_thinkresearch.nsf/p... Not entirely related to Google's idea, but not completely unrelated either.
112.
Sad to see Google Reader go? Come on, folks...it's 2013.(zdnet.com)
2 points by christopheraden 14y ago|1 comments
113.
by christopheraden 14y ago
It's also much easier to release updates when all devices that run your OS are consistent, or at least largely homogeneous. Android smartphones have so much variety, both in terms of features and technical specifications, that it must be di
114.
by christopheraden 14y ago
ESL is pretty much the go-to text for statisticians interested in machine learning. The math in it might be a bit more difficult than some of the pages you see on HN, but you won't get much better than this for a survey-course on machine le
115.
by christopheraden 14y ago
"To be fair, they do have windows in their office." Nice wordplay. Not all work we do can be enjoyable, unfortunately. I bet this is a fun jab to bring up with him at parties. "Remember that time Wells made you make that security gif?"
116.
by christopheraden 14y ago
Hah! Tim Pope is a pretty funny guy. His Vim plugins are fantastic as well (Pathogen and Surround are indispensable).
117.
Yahoo’s broken glass ceiling(bostonglobe.com)
2 points by christopheraden 14y ago|0 comments
118.
by christopheraden 14y ago
I work at a Fortune50, and I have to admit that if Mayer manages to turn Yahoo around that this will set a dangerous precedent for other large companies. The ability to work remotely is a huge perk to having a tech job, and if other corpora
119.
by christopheraden 14y ago
Thanks for the info. I'll have to check this out.
120.
by christopheraden 14y ago
The interesting bit about this to me is not the interface, but the fact that they got it running on Android. I was curious in seeing if R could be ported to Android a few years back, and thought I remember reading there were some roadblocks

More ›