fgimenez

My problem with Inbox is that it doesn't let you easily delete emails. It's 2 or 3 actions to delete, which is unreasonable with high mail volume. The Google party line is that you should never have to delete, but I don't care to have old quora digests in my archive when I'm searching for actual relevant mail.

In addition, the snooze feature for Mailbox is extremely helpful.

Regarding the research program, what sort of research projects are you looking at? While you are putting a considerable amount of money into the project, it obviously won't be able to fund experimentally expensive projects.

Also, many research projects (like bioinformatics) require enormous amounts of difficult to obtain data (e.g. Hospital records, blood samples, etc...). Do you have a plan to help those kinds of labs build collaborations, or do you expect to bring in researchers who will be able to "figure it out"?

Finally, are you looking specifially for trained PhD researchers, or is this open to anybody?

Have you used spacy.io for comparison? The author seems to enjoy trolling about the faults of CoreNLP, but the license is very agreeable and the results seem on par.

I had similar empirical results on one of my PhD projects for medical image classification. With small data sets, we got better results on 8-bit data sets compared to 16-bit. We viewed it as a form of regularization that was extremely effective on smaller data sets with a lot of noise (x-rays in this case).

Rob Tibshirani at Stanford had a funny slide about the this phenomenon when all the ML researchers started getting more grant funding than statisticians:

http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/stat315a/glossary.pdf

I don't say this enough to people like you, so THANK YOU SO MUCH!

This is somewhat off topic, but a friend of mine is working on something that sounds similar to what you described. I don't know their regulatory hurdles though. It might be worth it to contact them:

http://crohnology.com/

I'm a colleague of the author, and I have talked to him quite a bit about C-Path since I work on something related. While I agree with much of what you are saying, I disagree slightly with your comment that the article is "principally, about a new morphological feature that the researchers believe is tied more strongly to survival according to their computational model."

The significance here is that he extracted 6000 low-level morphological features without any pre-conception about their usefulness. He then used GLMNET (logistic regression with L1-regularization) to automatically pick which of these features was important. Then, the craziest part is that the most informative features were not even cancer cells, but rather, surrounding stromal tissue. To quote from the paper, "Pathologists currently use only epithelial features in the standard grading scheme for breast cancer and other carcinomas. Our findings suggest that evaluation of morphologic features of the tumor stroma may offer significant benefits for assessing prognosis." He essentially took a completely blinded, machine learning technique to find features that have been relatively ignored in pathology.

I think this is more indicative of a new paradigm in computer vision and machine learning in general that finely-tuned, human-crafted features can be beat with more automatic methods. Whereas before, we have tried to program features that characterize what we see, now we are finally looking at image features that can characterize what we're missing.

Life360 (www.life360.com) has such a feature. It is essentially a safety app so families or groups of friends can keep tabs on each other.

Full disclosure: I interned with them a few years ago when they were a startup out of Berkeley. Looks like they've grown a lot since then.

I surf plenty. While this idea seems nice in theory, community surf reporting is very tricky. The entire culture of surfing is an exclusionary one. People do not want other surfers on their break taking their waves. There is no incentive to tell everybody that your particular spot has excellent conditions because you want the least amount of other people around.

The only site that I have seen that is able to somewhat get people to provide reports is www.stokereport.com, a bay area surf/social networking site. They had to institute a word filter that masks the specific names of breaks, and they will ban you if you repeatedly violate calling out spots [1].

[1] http://stokereport.com/content/what-are-community-standards-...

Like a few other people here, I took this class recently. I did well, but I don't feel like I truly understand material until I teach it.

That being said, if anybody here has questions on the material, I'd love to help you out in some way. Unfortunately, there is no personal messaging feature on HN, so we might have to resort to emails (or maybe a subreddit?).

I realize there is an official class forum, so please tell me if you have any interest in some sort of 3rd party support system :-)

Here's a relevant article that convinced me how awesome Cython is:

http://www.perrygeo.net/wordpress/?p=116

Basically, if you are doing any work that requires heavy numerical processing, Cython is the way to go. On the other hand, I was playing with it to do some basic text processing and the improvements were negligible.

I KNEW that nick looked familiar. Though this probably isn't the place for it, I felt the need to tell you that your "Advice for Grad School Applications" essay was my bible for apps last December. I just moved to palo alto and will buy you a beer any time you want.

Our lab's main focus is targeted delivery to the brain which can be used to treat a lot of neurodegenerative diseases. Specifically for Parkinson's, we infuse an AADC vector into the putamen to break down L-DOPA into Dopamine. Further down the road, we are looking at using GDNF to save dying neurons that convert L-DOPA into Dopamine. The specifics are here: http://neurosurgery.ucsf.edu/bankiewicz/parkinsons.html

Regarding massive information, I analyze a lot of the data we generate in order to optimize our delivery platform. Since there are few labs that do this kind of work, all the data I work with comes from us.

My lab brought me on because they realized that they needed to use computers more effectively with the amount of data they generated. I came in with little bio knowledge, but they did a good job of filling me in very quickly.

I'd suggest getting involved in any lab doing any form of computer work. Lab meetings are a great place to find out what problems people are having, and most of the time you'll be able to use your skills to solve them. After taking on a few projects, people will start to realize what you can and can't do, and they'll start to give you a lot of related work.

Good luck!

I'm a computer scientist working in a Parkinson's lab that is very closely tied to the names in the article. My main duty is data analysis simply because there is so much information to process. If you want some more information regarding state of the art treatments, our website is http://neurosurgery.ucsf.edu/bankiewicz .

I also maintain our website, so if you see anything that needs fixing, drop me a line :)

As a Berkeley grad from NorCal, your attempts were futile. ;)

Plus, hella was not nearly as annoying as SoCal kids who complained how bad Mexican food is NorCal. All they would do is go on and on about putting french fries in their burritos.

Wow, I might actually start clicking the [scribd] link now!

Sounds almost exactly like Reddit.

I emailed you with some basic info. I hope this works out, and you aren't a crazed murderer.

What do you get if you cross an elephant with a banana?

Elephant Banana Sin(theta)

Trying to learn math from Wikipedia is like trying to learn English from the dictionary.

As far as the subject matter goes, a convex function can just be thought of as a function with a global maximum/minimum and no other local maximum/minimum. I.E. The derivative is zero in only one place which is the global max/min. These functions can then be easily optimized by taking their derivatives and finding the zero. It is a really nice way to optimize a problem.

Keep in mind that Mike Jordan is a superhuman math machine. I remember his undergraduate research assistants at Cal were telling me that it would take grad students days to understand 5 minute proofs he would do on the fly.

Well don't leave us hanging! What is the textbook?

I had to upvote simply because of how brilliant the text width resizing mechanism is. Hint: click the radio inputs at the top of the text.

The entire Algorithms book is available here: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html

I was taught under this book, and it was amazing. My professor told the class that while CLRS was an encyclopedia of algorithms, Algorithms was their poetry. It is so simple and concise, yet explains everything with just enough detail for you to grasp it.

For the record, this chapter is based on Shor's Algorithm.

OnLive (http://www.onlive.com/) is doing exactly that. My brother was looking into doing cloud gaming, but this company was so far ahead of him that he moved onto different ideas.

Look, I understand that any good movement needs eyes, but it's infuriating when you hear people state "nobody knows what we're doing, we're just running around and chanting." It's just plain irresponsible when people who have nothing to do with this protest, and moreover people who condemn the protest, are forced to suffer from the opinions of a very vocal group. The situation is akin to that Mitch Hedberg joke "I'm against picketing but I don't know how to show it." A large portion of students really do not believe in this cause. And an even larger portion, myself included, is willing to sympathize only a valid argument is given; an argument that has yet to surface.

Does California need reform? A resounding YES! But nobody here at Berkeley seemed to care until their tuitions were raised. Prop 13 is 31 years old (no palindrome intended) but it's only now that people think it was a bad idea. Hell, 6 years ago Arnold almost had his campaign derailed because Warren Buffet dared to question California's sacred initiative. Of course prop 13 is awful, the prison system is crowded, and California's finances are a mess, yet none of my peers deemed it prudent to protest in Sacramento.

This was a ridiculous protest. Doe and Moffit (the two main campus libraries) were shut down, students created do not cross lines, and a bunch of idiots pulled the fire alarm in all the big buildings. Berkeley students with technical majors who were too busy working to protest had to evacuate buildings because protesters kept pulling fire alarms.

If you walked through Barrows or Dwinelle (humanities buildings) they were empty. Conversely, if you took a stroll through Soda or Cory (CS and EE respectively) they were packed with students finishing final projects.

I once had a professor who stated that no matter what, Californians will always vote for less taxes and more services, which is exactly what is going on now. I don't understand how they can chant "End Budget Cuts, Don't Raise our Fees!" in the same sentence without the cognitive dissonance making itself blindingly obvious.

I took a stroll to see the actual protest today. It was a bunch of kids who wanted to feel like they were part of something; a large group of people who wanted to scream and cheer as if this was a football game. Students were trying to shout over each other to lead cheers to get their own little slice of revolution. In the end, they presented no solutions besides "Cut Executive Pay" and have contributed nothing to either cause they were fighting for.

OpenDNS can filter all your internet traffic to block out any websites you choose. You can choose preset block lists such as phishing or scams as well as select specific domains to block.