oddthink

15 ms·

121.
by oddthink 13y ago
It's great for basic data-analysis tasks, where you just want to slurp in a few CSV files, join them together, filter out some rows, and spit out the results. Sure, you can do the same in R or python, but the whole process is very quic
122.
by oddthink 13y ago
From the parent, "not-quite-as-good-as-haskell-but-more-industrially-acceptable language". Not intending to be obscure.
123.
by oddthink 13y ago
I just started at a Microsoft shop a few months ago (first time for everything), and I actually quite like F#, now that I've had a little while to play with it. It's a good contender for the NQAGAHBMIAL throne. Having used CMUCL&#
124.
by oddthink 13y ago
I'm slowly moving my elaborate data-cleaning system from R to python. I never got the hang of R packages and ended up rolling my own "import" scheme, but now it all seems like I've passed some critical complexity point.
125.
by oddthink 13y ago
I would be shocked if those survey results were statistically different from "the same." The spread from the top (YouTube) to the bottom (Facebook) is 0.11 on a 1-5 scale, with a sample size of 395. If I assume a std deviation of
126.
by oddthink 13y ago
Nope, aside from marching band road trips. Ithaca was too far away, for a PA kid. New Jersey was as far as I managed.
127.
by oddthink 13y ago
Thanks, that's fantastic. It's funny, I found it to be very emotionally evocative. I loved my IIci so, back in the day. The tinkering with the background images, recording everyone on the dorm hall making funny noises, replacing t
128.
by oddthink 13y ago
I use the ipython notebook sometimes, but I almost always use something similar. (In my case, I often use emacs org-mode files to make basic literate program-style documents.) I keep these things in a dated "Notebook" file, like &
129.
by oddthink 13y ago
Sure. At MS, I used it while working on mortgage prepayment and default models. Before we got the K license, I had been using SAS and R. There, I had been dumping aggregated (or sometimes not) CSV files from the database (Sybase) and runnin
130.
by oddthink 13y ago
I definitely miss having the Morgan Stanley site license for K at my disposal. I can't quite justify the money to get a license, just for me, so I've been slowly assembling a poor-man's substitute built on numpy, pandas, and
131.
by oddthink 13y ago
Or, you know, you could just use Notepad as Notepad. Or a real text editor, or something like Simplenote. Snark aside, this would be a more interesting post if the author gave some reason why this was a good idea. As far as I can tell, it&#
132.
by oddthink 13y ago
I suppose I don't find it surprising, because I've used a lot of R, and R can't even optimize the simple case. There, it's for good reason, since you can extract the environment of any function, so once a closure escape
133.
by oddthink 13y ago
But you're still clearly retaining a reference to the lexical frame, so I'd think the "zeroth-order" assumption would be that you'd be keeping everything in that frame. It's nice that JavaScript will do enough
134.
by oddthink 13y ago
You might not like it, but if they're not doing it under false pretenses, it isn't phishing. Now, if they pretended to be gmail and asked for your password, that would be phishing. Note that I'm not saying it's a good pr
135.
by oddthink 13y ago
I'm sure there are many places where other pointer types would be better, but, like I said, I only tend to see shared pointers, usually typecast to something like FooPtr and used indiscriminatly. It's an uphill battle to even use something
136.
by oddthink 13y ago
It's hard to talk about philosophy. I liked my philosophy classes in college (one overview, mostly with a Hume/Kant/Wittgenstein/modern analytic bent, and a philosophy of quantum mechanics class), and I like reading Peter Singer, but the ol
137.
by oddthink 13y ago
In every C++ project I've worked on, the vast majority of allocations go immediately into a shared_ptr. This article seems to assert that most C and C++ programs stick to malloc/free or auto_ptr-style semantics. This seems to be a contradic
138.
by oddthink 13y ago
Interesting. I've heard good things about the Windows Azure program, but I don't think any cloud-based option will work for finance. People generally want to keep their servers and data in-house, for trade secret protection and regulatory p
139.
by oddthink 13y ago
Do you know whether numerical analysis has improved with .NET? I know Morgan Stanley was evaluating it a few (4? yow) years ago, but there were two main problems: - There were very few numerical libraries, and those that existed either had
140.
by oddthink 13y ago
I think most places enforce the opposite. There's a strain of very-little-space style out there, but I'm not sure where it comes from. Maybe Pike, for all I know: http://www.literateprogramming.com/pikestyle.pdf is certainly rife with it.
141.
by oddthink 13y ago
Emacs. Aquamacs was just too weird. scratch wasn't in lisp-interaction mode, I had to change too many things to get normal behavior (opening multiple frames vs just buffers, etc.), and so on.
142.
by oddthink 13y ago
For me, it's not compatible enough. At work we have a few batch scripts that set up the path and set some environment variables, so we can launch compiles/tests/etc with a short command. These work under cmd.exe, but not under powershell. I
143.
by oddthink 13y ago
I've been on LinkedIn for a while, without engaging with it that much. In the early days, if someone sent you an invite to connect, there was an option "I don't know this person," with the implication that they would be somehow censured for
144.
by oddthink 13y ago
I don't think either of those books is very good, so try to borrow before you buy. The best of a bad bunch is still bad. I never look at Fabozzi's book these days, but I still break out the Guide to MBS for its appendix on mortgage amortiza
145.
by oddthink 13y ago
Not really. Lakhbir Hayre's Guide to Mortgage-Backed Securities isn't bad. Fabozzi's MBS book is okay, but a bit of a cut-and-paste job. I don't know of anything that deals with the post-2007 environment. Otherwise, just a combination of st
146.
by oddthink 13y ago
#3. Definitely #3. I mostly model mortgage prepayments and defaults, the housing market, and do econometrics-style forecasts. That's not in any of those books.
147.
by oddthink 14y ago
Usenet also didn't have a good way to deal with spam, at least not one that I knew about. It steadily became harder to find the signal in the noise. It still had the best reader experience. I don't know why modern email clients, for exampl
148.
by oddthink 14y ago
Ok, maybe I'm missing the point of this, but aren't phone numbers, by their nature, mostly public information anyway? There's this big fat book that maps name to phone number, and I'm sure there are a few online versions as well. If you're
149.
by oddthink 14y ago
Aside from the performance differences, data.table makes it very easy to do interactive manipulation, at the cost of making it hard to program. Pandas currently goes in the opposite direction. I'd rather have R/data.table at the prompt and
150.
by oddthink 14y ago
One thing that was conspicuous for its absence was the "Law of Demeter." Is this not considered a good practice any more? It's trickier to use, because blindly applying it can lead to immense classes, but I find it a useful thing to keep in

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