doug1001

22 ms·

151.
by doug1001 10y ago
Mr Stein released the first version of SageMath some time ago--not sure how long but maybe 2007. among other things, SageMath reconciled the confusing namespace soup that is scientific python (numpy, scipy, and matplotlib--three brilliant l
152.
by doug1001 10y ago
i recall a chapter in Jimmy Carter's biography in which he summarises his interview with Admiral Rickover. According to President Carter (a Navy Lt at the time of the interview, i believe) during the interview, Adm Rickover asked him i
153.
by doug1001 10y ago
Brilliant. If i understand it correctly, the crucial insight is modeling a test taker's answer to a question as an adversarial game between the question and the test taker (eg, correct answer, the test taker wins). In the test-preparat
154.
by doug1001 10y ago
beat me to it. i have lived in downtown palo alto for the past six years during this span, University Ave seems to be slowly but surely transforming to a start-up office park. An example: on the NE side of University between Waverly and Cow
155.
by doug1001 10y ago
no need to speculate about this one; Jen from "IT Crowd" gave this dire warning during a presentation to the executive staff meeting ( http://tinyurl.com/zsfuutd ): "You...Can...Break...The...Internet."
156.
by doug1001 10y ago
this is a lucid step-by-step explanation of Paxos, which additionally doesn't seem to require any particular knowledge of consensus algorithms--it provides the background as needed. Engaging prose as well, eg: "Note that it is pos
157.
by doug1001 10y ago
articles with this identical thesis and conclusion have been published from time to time for the past 25 years. i started coding in the early 1980's and began coding professionally just after graduating from MIT in 1992. The "guid
158.
by doug1001 10y ago
profit's an opinion, cash (flow) is king.
159.
by doug1001 10y ago
- One-based indexing setting aside whether zero- or one-based indexing is 'better'; R and MATLAB have one-based indexing, so the convention is likely familiar to many in the Julia target audience. still, as the OP says, (relativel
160.
by doug1001 10y ago
"My nearest neighbor was Jerry Jerrell, who lived in a house he’d built with his wife. Jerry and Sherry had each been married before, and referred to themselves as “forced homebodies” because they couldn’t go to town without running in
161.
by doug1001 10y ago
The micro-benchmarks are impressive--eg, to join 1 billion records: Spark 1.6 ~ 61 sec; Spark 2.0 ~ 0.8 sec i assume results such as this are due various optimizations under the Tungsten rubric (code generation, manual memory management) wh
162.
by doug1001 10y ago
very well said--"no wall clock time" as you put it. I've done the Euston/Kings Cross -> Inverness and E/KC -> Ft William many times and i loved it. Inverness has an airport and it's only an up-and-down fl
163.
by doug1001 10y ago
if there isn't already a word/term for this, perhaps there should be soon enough. (not an OED word, but a developer-lexicon term like "heisen bug", "smug report", "hinden bug" Like "hey i googled
164.
by doug1001 10y ago
when i graduated from university, law was the coolest profession--there were tv shows about them and they got paid a lot. I don't know where cs grad/programmer was on this list but definitely not in the top 10 (maybe around 5,630
165.
by doug1001 10y ago
so i've never met the chap who does this blog (i think his name is Will), but i've been reading it for a while now. Don't let the post with pics of legos mislead you--this guy knows what he's talking about. In particular
166.
by doug1001 10y ago
some lucky 20-year olds at Bard college who happen to sign up for a class by Prof Justus Rosenberg are in for an intellectual experience that they will likely never forget. This NYT article is about the 95-year old professor, who During WW
167.
by doug1001 10y ago
thank you for sharing this; thank you for your extraordinary contribution to the open source community; thank you for writing so candidly and so eloquently about the process of building software; and thank you for making we want to be a bet
168.
by doug1001 11y ago
this is awesome. Eg, "There is a sad, persistent decrease in multicolored underwear, ending with none by senior year." Does "none" refer to NA (None, null, etc.) or to the lack of color in the respondents' underwear
169.
by doug1001 11y ago
i think this is a oblique way of saying the OP isn't going to open source their data visualisation code. :-)
170.
by doug1001 11y ago
(i have never met Michael Church nor have i ever had any direct communication with him.) I have read a few of his essays and each was thoughtful, tightly reasoned, and clearly evidenced an emotional stake in the subject matter. I'm not
171.
by doug1001 11y ago
+1 the OP offers not just their opinion about the quality of developers trained in developer bootcamps (versus all other devs) but also gives reasons why bootcamp-trained devs are better. It's not until the postscript, after the end of
172.
by doug1001 11y ago
insightful analogy. so then "Expert Beginner phase" = local minima, which might be reached quickly compared to a more systematic search (practice informed/infused with theory) and once in that local state, the "expert be
173.
by doug1001 11y ago
it's not. set aside for a moment the prose description, find an MH module in your language of choice and study the code then play around w/ it in the REPL. A couple of things will probably surprise you when you look at an MCMC imp
174.
by doug1001 11y ago
it's them that should feel humiliated. It's not like you showed up at their door right off the street; you successfully completed their take-home coding problem and i assume at least one prior telephone interview.
175.
by doug1001 11y ago
> many developers (and tech leads) can't separate [o]ptimization from design...." brilliant--a few words that belongs somewhere more conspicuous. 'make it work' then 'make it fast' makes sense of course, but
176.
by doug1001 11y ago
for anyone interested in learning Scala, i highly recommend this set of (~15 or so) blog posts. i started working through them in early 2013 as they were posted. The posts on path-dependent types and the post on type classes are particularl
177.
by doug1001 11y ago
> For example, my son usually goes right for my office when he gets home in the afternoon, standing with me at my desk rattling on about his day oblivious that he might be interrupting. [H]ow many more of those conversations will there b
178.
by doug1001 11y ago
> with that addition, it's jaw-dropping. absolutely right. So for instance, it's the difference between a high-quality mechanical watch costing $5K versus one that costs $100K.
179.
by doug1001 11y ago
assume "last 20" was on active duty? if so, seems like you and i joined the corps at about the same time. i didn't re-up after 4, but agonized over that decision for the last six months of my tour. in the end, obvious to me t
180.
by doug1001 11y ago
> Our little publishing experiment was not supposed to go like this. Largely by accident, we created a peer-reviewed outlet with impact that matches the top journals in linguistics, with time-to-publication that is almost implausibly fas

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