mjw

13 ms·

61.
by mjw 13y ago
These slides have a bit on this (although quite dense material): http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/teaching/courses/ml1-2011/lect5b... as part of http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/teaching/courses&#x
62.
by mjw 13y ago
Good to see Bayesian model selection get a mention. Bayesian model averaging is pretty interesting, too, in that it comes, in a sense, with built-in protection against overfitting. I still think there is something quite fundamental, though,
63.
by mjw 13y ago
Yes the London market is a bit nuts, but if you're paying anything close to 25k/year (that's 480/week!) for a 2 bed in a "not great" part of London then either you have very high standards or you're bein
64.
by mjw 13y ago
The coloured dots are cute and all, but if the goal is to make visually apparent the relationship between salary and union membership, some more traditional visualisations might have made this clearer. For example boxplots broken down by un
65.
by mjw 13y ago
For that suggestion I was just considering it a two-dimensional problem with a "sea or not sea" distinction, not using heights above sea level.
66.
by mjw 13y ago
So with a few minor complications convexity generalises to Riemannian manifolds like the earth. You need to replace "straight line" with "minimising geodesic" i.e. shortest path, which don't depend on the choice of
67.
by mjw 13y ago
Maths challenge: I wonder if you could prove this "probability of a random line segment violating convexity" definition equivalent to something given in terms of a ratio of different areas like the area to convex hull area suggest
68.
by mjw 13y ago
Yeah that was what I was expecting they'd do also. Maybe you'd want to compute the convex hull on a per-connected-component basis, though, to avoid allowing small islands to have undue influence. Either that, or say that any area
69.
by mjw 13y ago
Entirely anecdotal.
70.
by mjw 13y ago
An aside, but: > A Novel Method for Applying a Trivial Modification of an Already-Known Algorithm to Some Type of Specific Data Papers sharing empirical findings on applications of existing research can be very useful to those of us also
71.
by mjw 13y ago
On the subject of scraping data from OCR'd tables: I heard from a colleague who moved into finance, that there's a mini arms race going on between some funds(?) who are subject to regulatory requirements to release financial perfo
72.
by mjw 13y ago
Try http://www.neilmix.com/narrativejs/doc/ -- "a small extension to the JavaScript language that enables blocking capabilities for asynchronous event callbacks".
73.
by mjw 13y ago
Did you guys look at the core.matrix API? https://github.com/mikera/matrix-api
74.
by mjw 13y ago
As a programming analogy: imagine mathematics is a big codebase and "prime" is a commonly-used function defined within that codebase. You could refactor "prime" to allow 1, provided you refactor all the call sites to wor
75.
by mjw 13y ago
This isn't a surprising result though, it's a surprising (to you) definition . You could redefine "prime" to include 1 if you wanted to without changing the fundamental truth of important results about the natural num
76.
by mjw 13y ago
Yep I figured this would probably not be very efficient. About lazy sequences: sometimes you want to avoid the allocation of lots of intermediate cons cells when mapping/filtering/etc. The reducers framework for example manages to
77.
by mjw 13y ago
Aha, thanks for the pointers, that helps. I suspected something simpler might be possible using these ioc macros but was frankly a bit scared off by them at first :) It'd be nice if the coroutine/inversion-of-control stuff was giv
78.
by mjw 13y ago
Oh for sure, more as an exercise in curiosity than anything else. (Although I am also playing with generator- and iterator-like abstractions as part of a resource-scoped foldable stream abstraction to help process big files.) Looks like I m
79.
by mjw 13y ago
Quick question for anyone here familiar with core.async: Would it be possible (and if so what would be the simplest way) to implement something like Python's generators and `yield` statement in Clojure using core.async? I'm thinki
80.
by mjw 13y ago
> One trap that people fall into is equating what people say they want with what they actually want - at least as expressed by what they are willing to pay for Another trap people fall into is equating what people are willing to pay for
81.
by mjw 13y ago
Firstly, if google sees its only responsibilities as "maximize shareholder value" and "obey the letter of the law" then perhaps they should officially give up on the "don't be evil" thing. Secondly, it's disingenuous of them to ask the taxp
82.
by mjw 13y ago
Fair point, although it's rather disingenuous for multinationals (not singling out Google) to say to taxpayers: "don't like our tax avoidance? well just change the rules then!" Arguably one of the main reason we're not able to change (or
83.
by mjw 14y ago
Have to admit that has also been my reaction to some of these javascript async frameworks based on promises or deferreds. Congratulations, you've reimplemented a quirky ad-hoc variant on the continuation and error monads. Perhaps people don
84.
by mjw 14y ago
I'll have a crack at some suggestions, as a Clojure user (nice work on core.logic!) with some Haskell familiarity. For logic programming: you might find Control.Unification [1] interesting -- and of course if you don't need unification then
85.
by mjw 14y ago
> It reads raw input and tries to evaluate it Not quite. It reads raw input and tries to build a syntax tree from it. Unfortunately reader macros in clojure allow all sorts of objects to form part of said syntax tree and arbitrary-ish c
86.
by mjw 14y ago
I was wondering this too, and deliberately tried to break something using the clojure 1.5 reader with read-eval false. (Makes a change from building things all day!). Result: user=> (binding [*read-eval* false] (read-string "```
87.
by mjw 14y ago
This is a really nice proof, and I love this kind of "you could have discovered X if you'd just had this core idea!" kind of exposition. Perhaps a hard ask, but do you know of any similarly explicable proofs for transcendental-ness of "well
88.
by mjw 14y ago
In the sense of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry–Howard_correspondence , the theorems are the type signatures of the API, and the proofs are the implementations!
89.
by mjw 14y ago
Not quite, I'm talking about replacing the various important java interfaces in clojure.lang (IFn, ISeq, IPersistentMap etc) with protocols, so you can implement them yourself without using any Java-specific language features. Dunno how fea
90.
by mjw 14y ago
You have to use the java interop facilities if you want your own types to implement these abstractions though right? I recall some debate about changing this so you can implement them using the native abstraction facilities in clojure (prot

More ›