edtechre

You could claim the same about getting high off of glue since that affects the mind too. Seriously, what every day experience /doesn't/ affect your mind?

My point stands on its own. Taking action makes a difference, dropping acid does nothing for anyone. End.

Nowhere did I say I support the war on drugs, prohibition, or any such rubbish. You are free to engage in whatever stupid activity you so choose. Just don't try to claim it was some kind of fulfilling accomplishment, when it was merely shallow recreation.

Flawless logic here. I guess I should try crack, heroine, or maybe downing some motor oil before coming to the conclusion they're not for me?

I have no issue with whatever it is you posited after your masturbatory experience. It's just that I don't find your epiphany particularly deep, nor do I see how LSD was even necessary for you to arrive at your destination of nowhere.

You know what actually makes a difference in life? Acquire knowledge, apply that knowledge, make connections and use all of that to HELP other people and change the world. Tripping on shrooms by yourself or with your fellow dunderheads does nothing for anyone, yourself included. Stop pretending it does.

Instead of doing drugs to experience "enlightenment" (LOL), you could, I don't know... read a book and actually learn something of value.

How is that enlightening? The doc makes you sound like an imbecile.

Are you stupid? Zynga's not a young company at more than 4 years. And this is horribly detrimental for any prospect of IPO.

Same here. I'm thinking ML since it will have programming exercises. I'd likely forget all of the theory otherwise.

The course has some introductory Linear Algebra videos posted.

I don't think you'd be able to understand multiple regression without some basic knowledge of linear algebra.

Excellent, many thanks.

I've read O'Reilly's Collective Intelligence. It's a great introductory survey, but it was very light on theory.

I also own Collective Intelligence in Action. It had more explanation of theory than O'Reilly's offering, but most of the chapters devolved into how to use Java data mining framework X.

And on that note, does anyone have any other good book suggestions regarding ML?

That's partly why I bought it. My university didn't have a statistics department, so I never had the chance to take a statistics course that was worthwhile.

Statistics and linear algebra really should be required by all CS programs. It's funny that at many schools those courses are not, yet Calculus is. First, Calculus should have been handled in HS. Second, I've never had a use for Calculus professionally or for anything I've worked on in my free time.

Great book. But I made the mistake of buying this book on Kindle just a few hours before I saw it show up here.

:(

Nope. What I said is still true. Here is my code in Java:

public List<Integer> mergeSort(List<Integer> list) { // Base case // If list has one (or less) element, return list as is int size = list.size(); if (size <= 1) { return list; }

		// Partition list in half
		int m = size / 2;
		List<Integer> left = new ArrayList<Integer>();
		List<Integer> right = new ArrayList<Integer>();
		for (int i = 0; i < m; i++) {
			left.add(list.get(i));
		}
		for (int i = m; i < size; i++) {
			right.add(list.get(i));
		}
		
		// Recursively merge sort each partition
		left = mergeSort(left);
		right = mergeSort(right);
		
		// If the last element of the left partition is greater than the first element of the right partition
		// The left and right partitions need to be rearranged
		if (left.get(left.size() - 1) > right.get(0)) {
			return merge(left, right);
		// Otherwise left and right partitions are in the correct order
		} else {
			left.addAll(right);
			return left;
		}
	}
	
	protected List<Integer> merge(List<Integer> left, List<Integer> right) {
		List<Integer> result = new ArrayList<Integer>();
		// While both containers are non-empty
		// Move lesser elements to the front of the result, and remove them from their containers
		while (!left.isEmpty() && !right.isEmpty()) {
			if (left.get(0) < right.get(0)) {
				result.add(left.remove(0));
			} else {
				result.add(right.remove(0));
			}
		}
		// The container that still has elements contains elements greater than those in the other container
		// It is assumed that the elements in the container are also already sorted
		// So the non-empty container's elements should be appended to the end of the list
		if (!left.isEmpty()) {
			result.addAll(left);
		} else {
			result.addAll(right);
		}
		return result;
	}

The article is not "gobbledygook". A well known limitation of NodeJS is its lack of support for parallelism. You have to try to take advantage of parallelism of the OS itself by pre-forking the Node server.

NodeJS is great for applications with a lot of clients, but not for CPU intensive apps. That's why I predict similar technologies built on Erlang, Scala, and Go will have more longevity than NodeJS.

It /might/ be faster? What? Do you fully understand the invariant of the algorithm? The left should always be less than the right partition. There's no need to re-merge them each call. As it is, you are always comparing all elements in the left and right partitions with the merge when you don't have to!

Good thing TechCrunch isn't worth reading anymore, or I'd actually be upset.

The recursive merge sort is not quite correct:

function mergeSort(items){

    if (items.length == 1) {
        return items;
    }

    var middle = Math.floor(items.length / 2),
        left = items.slice(0, middle),
        right = items.slice(middle);

    return merge(mergeSort(left), mergeSort(right));

}

You don't need to run merge on the left and right partitions every call. You only need to do that if the left partition's last element is greater than the right partition's first element. Otherwise, you can just append the right partition to the left, since they are already in sorted order.

Let me clarify: competing ARM processors :)

Chances are it's not an Intel CPU you're using in your smart phone, tablet, or game console.

Not if ARM processors continue to gain ground.

And by technology company I mean:

Hardware (Apple, Amazon) OS (Apple, Google) Cloud services (Google, Amazon, Apple) Web services like email, maps, search (Google)

Facebook has a very large user base. Whoopee. But does that mean staying power? Nope. Just ask Myspace, Yahoo, and countless dot bomb companies. You need to invest in R&D, become a technology provider, and succeed in more than one market. Beyond social networking, what does Facebook have?

This is a horrible article, especially by the Economist's standards.

Facebook lasting a hundred years? WHAT?! I hardly see Facebook as being in the same league as technology companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon. In fact, I don't really see Facebook as much of a technology company at all, at least in comparison to those I mentioned.

I wonder if the author would have said the same thing about Myspace 5 years ago. I bet he would have.

And yet no one addressed my point. Vote me down, druggies.

Yeah, vote me down. But people have talked about having chronic "tracers" and random hallucinations years after doing LSD.

SF drug propaganda FTW!

Doing drugs for "enlightenment" is for the lazy and stupid. There are many other ways to achieve this. Just ask a devout Hindu or Buddhist monk.

Typical Westerner attitude...

Huh? How can LSD be "worth it" when it has been proven to cause brain damage and hallucinations?

(Good bye karma)

I am surprised the author did not mention eggs. A good source of protein, cheap, and they have a pretty good shelf life.

TIL there are still people writing web applications in Perl.

"Wait, ENCRYPT credit numbers? I thought you said decrypt!"

"But in the US, the places where high-speed rail will work already have high-speed rail."

Huh? What do you consider "high speed"?

That was utterly pointless. As China becomes the largest economy in the world, and its standard of living continues to rise, more Chinese will be able to afford to take high speed trains.

Meanwhile, the standard of living in the US continues to drop. And there are no high speed trains for Americans to take.

Another quality propaganda piece from TWP.