oddthink

33 ms·

91.
by oddthink 9y ago
I work at Google, though not in the Bay Area, in Maps, and we recently had a program where every engineer was encouraged to participate in a user study on features they worked on. The goal was just watch regular people sit down and use the
92.
by oddthink 9y ago
Me, I long for the days when I could just download a tarball and be done. :-) Seriously, as a mostly C++/python/R developer, maven was a PITA to set up for experimenting with Java, and I still don't feel like I entirely under
93.
by oddthink 9y ago
I agree that Go makes infrequent use easy. That was part of why I went for python over perl; I just didn't use perl often enough for it to stick in my head. There are similar issues with Haskell, just because of all the many libraries
94.
by oddthink 9y ago
Thanks for the links. I've been looking for something where I can save executable snippets (shelling out to things or making RPCs to services) in a smalltalk-like browser, and it looks like this might work. I tried Amber a few months b
95.
by oddthink 9y ago
Yep, all corporate use. Subway works pretty well to get people there. And honestly, I'm pretty pessimistic about just building enough housing capacity to be comfortable. There's been a ton of residential building in NYC, but it&#x
96.
by oddthink 9y ago
But even in the US, there are other options. I'm in the Google NYC office, which occupies most of a building that's a full city block and 15 stories high ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111_Eighth_Avenue ) and
97.
by oddthink 9y ago
Whenever I look at the Tcl source code, I'm impressed by how clean it is: https://github.com/tcltk/tcl
98.
by oddthink 9y ago
Yeah, I have a hard time imagining this working. If anything, I'd like to be able to get back to working the 8-6 days I could before I was doing school dropoff in the mornings. It's not like there's any dead time, for me at l
99.
by oddthink 10y ago
Yeah, the ML parts aren't in Go. I'm working in TensorFlow, so it's C++ scripted by Python. But there's a lot of incidental stuff that needs to be done, most of which I don't want to spend cycles on thinking hard ab
100.
by oddthink 10y ago
I like it. My brain's already pretty full with trying to get a ML pipeline optimized and launchable, and if I need to write something to read a CSV file, make some RPC calls to a service for each row, and dump the results to a file, go
101.
by oddthink 10y ago
I agree, I don't know why they make it so easy to wipe everything. I was thinking of getting my son (8) a chromebook, install minecraft on it, basic Linux, etc., but that splash screen makes it a non-starter. It's almost guarantee
102.
by oddthink 10y ago
Yep, you're right. I was playing too fast and loose there. The Bernoulli likelihood definitely suggests the odds as a natural space, but it's not required.
103.
by oddthink 10y ago
I'm sorry, that seems like the most backwards explanation of logistic regression I've ever seen. It uses the sigmoid function because it's logistic regression . The statistical model is a Bernoulli distribution. Write down t
104.
by oddthink 11y ago
Type information is one. CSV is slow, since it has to parse everything on load. CSV has no random access, since rows can be arbitrary length. CSV takes up a lot of disk space, since a 8-byte double gets expanded into a 15+ digit string.
105.
by oddthink 11y ago
Interesting. In what industries is Oracle so dominant? You say government is one, but where else? In industry, all I've ever seen is Sybase, SQL Server, and MySQL (ok, technically Oracle). (My background is finance and technology.)
106.
by oddthink 12y ago
Adventure playground is there, but most of the tunnels are blocked off. You can't go inside any of the pyramids any more. It's still a great space, but it's not a free-wheeling as it was perhaps intended to be.
107.
by oddthink 12y ago
If you have a seminar-like class with a different lecturer every week, then, yes, it's a problem if they can't get consistent notation. I'd hope that's rare in undergraduate courses, though. And meaningful variable name
108.
by oddthink 12y ago
I doubt it, to be honest. In my experience, universities are locally consistent: the E&M class isn't going to contradict quantum, at least by much. And once you're out of undergrad, it's pretty easy to figure out what&#x2
109.
by oddthink 12y ago
I use it in little ways, here and there. Its syntax inspires any tool-command syntax I write (see http://yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html ). I have a few Tk scripts around to launch tasks (generate
110.
by oddthink 12y ago
I'll try to give a pragmatic example. At work, we've got a lot of analytics code in C# for model-estimation, pricing, etc. I spend a lot of time tweaking models, running them, then extracting and analyzing the results. F# works ve
111.
by oddthink 12y ago
I knew of it, yes, but thanks for mentioning it in this thread, since I don't know how well-known it is. For my purposes, kx got it entirely right: I can barely scratch my own nose with <2 GB of data. :)
112.
by oddthink 12y ago
IMHO, q's (and K's) big advantage over J is that they have tables and dictionaries as an available data type. This makes basic tasks like reading csv files and merging different data sources much easier in q. q also has a nicer sy
113.
by oddthink 12y ago
I do that all the time in the interpreter, especially when slicing pandas DataFrame objects, e.g.: df_subset = df['date buyer nwidgets'.split()] That is far easier to type than the explicit list, with all its punctuation.
114.
by oddthink 12y ago
Nope. In GR, energy has as much "gravity" as the equivalent mass, so it won't affect anything. (Energy is more tied to the expanding universe, though, as the wavelength increases too, so it's an important distinction in
115.
by oddthink 12y ago
Rest mass is mass. Photons have zero mass. "Relativistic mass" is more confusing than helpful and is generally not used in modern GR. Cite: ask any actual physicist. I hate to appeal to authority, but this is the view I was taught
116.
by oddthink 12y ago
"Relativistic mass" is one of those concepts that was considered, bandied about in the 70s for a while, then ultimately discarded as not helpful. Photons have no mass, period. An ensemble of photons may have a non-zero invariant m
117.
by oddthink 12y ago
Wait, what? Photons have no mass, but they have energy. Ergo, that "both of which have mass" is flat-out wrong. Methinks wikipedia has problems.
118.
by oddthink 12y ago
It's definitely encouraging. I don't know what the current state of the art is, but one of the main conclusions of the NIST Java Grande working group back in 2000-2003ish was that lack of a complex type was one of the big things h
119.
by oddthink 12y ago
Well, in emacs you can try out evil-mode, which will get you the basic vim commands. I flip back and forth between the two: the vim commands are great when I'm focused on a single document, usually a hunk of code, and just have to mak
120.
by oddthink 13y ago
The real problem with data.table is that it has too much magic. It's great for interactive use, but it's hard to program to. If, for example, you want to aggregate a table using a list of supplied variable names, like if you wante

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