ericlavigne

Finding an optimal solution is much more computationally intensive than verifying that the solution is good enough (no collisions). If you don't really trust the RNN's work, then you can use a second algorithm just to check for collisions in the proposed plan.

I don't think this website uses SQL at all. :-)

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Hacker-News-technology-sta...

"Do you know of any resources to learn about tech lifestyle businesses?"

https://unicornfree.com/

http://courses.30x500.com/

Do you have a good description of hstore 2? A google search found a few references that there is an hstore 2, and that it might be related to PG 9.4, and that it might allow the values to be non-string, and it might allow nesting... nothing very clear.

Compared with adding multiple rows to a table to simulate one local variable? I expect readability and performance will both be greatly improved, but... it's hard to offer a good recommendation without knowing what sort of calculation you're trying to perform.

The extension you want is hstore. It allows you to create variables and columns of type hstore which is a (String -> String) hashmap. If you actually needed something more like (String -> Integer) or (String -> Decimal), then you'll just need to cast any values on their way out of the hstore.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/hstore.html

It varies by course, so you'll need to look through the catalog. The prices are monthly, and all courses are "at your own pace", but they give an estimate for each course of how long the course will take.

https://www.udacity.com/courses

Intro to Hadoop and MapReduce costs $150/month (or $105/month early enrollment) for a course that is estimated to take a month.

https://www.udacity.com/course/ud617

Exploratory Data Analysis costs $150/month (or $105/month early enrollment) and is estimated to take two months to complete.

https://www.udacity.com/course/ud651

Data Wrangling with MongoDB is $200/month ($140 early enrollment) for an estimated two months.

https://www.udacity.com/course/ud032

Mostly true. (They won't deny EVERYTHING because that wouldn't be believable.)

If this argument is made convincingly in Congress, the NSA could lose funding, but that's a hard decision to make. Even if I am opposed to individual wars, that doesn't mean I would support complete disarmament. Foreign intelligence (and counter-intelligence) is an important part of any modern military. There needs to be public oversight without crippling US intelligence efforts. It's not clear how to accomplish that oversight. That is the discussion we really need to be having.

====

Edit: Looks like there is an official effort to increase oversight of the NSA. Quoting from a Sept 4 article on http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/

   "On August 12, 2013 President Obama directed the establishment
   of the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications
   Technologies."

Link to the press release about this review group: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/12/presid...

This latest leak reduces the NSA's effectiveness at whatever they are doing. That is a good thing if, and only if, the NSA does more harm than good.

It tells us nothing about whether the NSA does more harm than good. That is the key point that distinguishes this leak from previous leaks. This leak does more to reduce the NSA's effectiveness than to improve the quality of public debate about NSA policy.

(Previous Snowden leaks make me suspect that the NSA does do more harm than good... but I can disagree with Kevin's conclusion and still respect his position.)

Whether it is acceptable for the NSA to eavesdrop on private messages should not depend on whether those messages are protected by encryption. If I send an unencrypted email to a friend, is the NSA allowed to eavesdrop and get a copy of that email? That is a policy question that can be discussed and answered without any knowledge of the NSA's decryption capabilities.

It sounds like you're misunderstanding Kevin Drum's statement.

The sentences that you quoted are examples of leaks that Kevin Drum believes were in the public interest. Kevin supports these leaks because they are about what the NSA chooses to do, and are therefore necessary for public debate about US policy.

Kevin clearly distinguishes between leaking NSA behavior (as in your quote) and leaking NSA capabilities (which is in the following paragraph). The ability to decrypt certain types of encryption is the sort of technological advancement that we should expect military and intelligence agencies to make and to keep secret.

Here's the part where Kevin talks about specific Snowden leaks (about NSA capabilities) that he disagrees with:

   "But the rest of it is a lot more dubious. It's
   not clear to me how disclosing NSA's decryption
   breakthroughs benefits the public debate much,
   unlike previous disclosures that have raised
   serious questions about the scope and legality of
   NSA's surveillance of U.S. persons. Conversely,
   it's really easy to see how disclosing them harms
   U.S. efforts to keep up our surveillance on
   genuine bad guys. Unlike previous rounds of
   disclosures, I'm a lot less certain that this one
   should have seen the light of day."

In the OP video, Hack Reactor claims an attrition rate of 10% and a placement rate (as software engineers) of 100%.

He's probably chosen to focus on his company's blog instead.

http://blog.getprismatic.com/

A followup to the AI class starts soon (I remember Feb 20 but can't find confirmation):

"Due to popular demand, we are teaching a follow-up class: AI for Robotics at www.udacity.com . Also due to popular demand, we now have a programming environment, so you can develop and test software. Our goal is to teach you to program a self-driving car in 7 weeks. This is a topic very close to my heart, and I am eager to share it with you. (This class builds on the concepts in ai-class, but ai-class is NOT required)."

The mucky mucks can have their answer today with a random subset of that data: 10,000 accounts and the corresponding addresses and transactions. We'll need map-reduce tomorrow if they want precision in the last decimal point.

The MIT article was submitted earlier. The Rice submission even emphasizes that by ending with "too".

So by the time I scroll down far enough to see the Sal@Rice article I am thinking, yeah I already know he's giving a commencement address soon, and having him deliver it twice doesn't make it much more interesting.

Basically, Sal@Rice could have been the top comment on the Sal@MIT article, instead of a separate submission.

Edit: Sal@Rice currently represents comments 2, 4, and 5 on the Sal@MIT submission. Also, Sal was an undergraduate at MIT.

"what it means to be a string includes styling (bold, italic, etc.)"

I would keep String and StyledString separate. Lifting to a StyledString is okay if you want to concatenate a String and a StyledString.

(plain "This is ") ++ (bold "GREAT!")

-> StyledString "This is <b>GREAT!</b>"

Strings are used for more than just rendering HTML, and I should be able to forget about styling in situations where styling is irrelevant.

"partial serialization of something..." ++ " another chunk"

-> "partial serialization of something... another chunk"

One immediate benefit of keeping String and StyledString separate, is that you won't forget which argument comes first in link.

link :: (String -> StyledString -> Element)

This surprised me: link has type (String -> String -> String), taking URL and label as arguments, and returning HTML code as a string (instead of as an Element).

Then you need to use the text function (String -> Element) to make that link appear properly on the screen.

This means that the text function (intentionally?) does not HTML-escape strings, even though examples suggest that it is the recommended way to put some unformatted text on the screen.

text seems very poorly named, especially if the goal is for HTML/CSS/Javascript to be treated like assembly. Maybe create a function called html that does what text does now, and let the text function be equivalent to (html . htmlEscape).

Looks nice overall, and I look forward to seeing how it develops. Is Elm available for download?

The AI class seems to be the exception. The AI class has a .com extension, while all the others have .org extensions. The AI class website runs on KnowLabs software, while all the others run on software developed by some Stanford students last summer.

The instructor emphasized the performance benefit of Octave's optimized matrix operations. Did you use Colt's matrix operations, or were you able to match the performance of vectorized Octave code with non-vectorized Clojure code?

It probably helps a lot that free apps are unloaded when idle, then reloaded on demand when someone is actually making a request. Ideally, the cost could approach the disk space of 30k small git repositories.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2606190/why-are-my-basic-...

Someone's been playing Pokemon :-)

Excellent news!

Heroku is the only reason I gave Ruby/Sinatra a try for a while. I love the idea of having Heroku-style deployment without giving up Clojure.

I would have considered this a bargain when I was doing a lot of Clojure programming. (I recently switched to Common Lisp for my first full-time Lisp job at MCNA.)

I'm very curious to see how/whether you include outside libraries later.

Good timing. You can also use the results of the Lisp Game Jam that starts today.

http://lispgames.org/

It sounds like you are referring to Project Lambda, which has been pushed back to at least Java 8.

http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/features/

Revenue of $100K is a lot less interesting if most of it is going towards iTunes gift certificates to convince people to continue using the application. Is this business at least profitable?

Early-bird registration in 2010 was $199.

"I really hope quicklisp fixes this but it isn't simple."

Clojure fixed (a) and (b) by taking most of the good ideas and repackaging them in a fresh design, and fixed (c) by building on top of Java's virtual machine and libraries. Come on in - the water's nice!

http://learn-clojure.com/

It seems that the inventor of object-oriented programming was one of those skeptics. Alan Kay apologized for his poor choice of words, for the resulting confusion, and for the widespread misapplication of his ideas.

http://bexhuff.com/2007/10/to-paraphrase-im-sorry-i-invented...

Unfortunately, many of today's common practices sound a lot like his description of how the term object-oriented is often misapplied. Most programmers that I have met still misunderstand object-oriented programming, and use it as an excuse for complicated or bloated code.