rohwer

Dybvig's compiler course was exemplary. Say what you may about Scheme, you learned so much more in those classes. His Scheme Programming Language book is highly recommended. Especially check out his extended examples chapter: http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/examples.html#./examples:h0

Great link. Just ran Ilya's first query--median time to first render--against September Pages:

"median": "2389", "seventy_fifth": "3543", "ninetieth": "5191"

How did the Internet page renders get slower since 2013?

2.2s median, 3.3s for 75th percentile, and 4.7s for 90th percentile in httparchive:runs.2013_06_01_pages]

Translate IDF to "how uncommon is this word in the corpus?"

TF-IDF is acronym soup, but mathematically simple: IDF is a scalar applied to a term's frequency. And in the comparison, the numerator is the document overlap score and the denominator is the square root of the two documents. For more, Stanford's natural language processing course is the bee's knees: https://class.coursera.org/nlp/lecture/preview

Yes, we have this in memory. And at the highest level, extremely important.

The more important lesson is to analyze the opening position for the plans and thematic patterns at crucial junctures. Then, with critical positions memorized, you can usually work through the necessary moves at the board.

They've drawn each game up till this win by Gelfand.

Beautiful mate at the end: Anand, the world champion, playing black, marched a pawn across the board, but Gelfand will checkmate in two moves regardless. The knight checks on G6, the King is forced to G8, then the Rook checkmates on G7.

Incidently, Kasparov just called out Anand as old'n lazy while visiting the match in Moscow. Gelfand came through candidate matches as a surprise challenger. He's been around forever in the top twenty.

Agree completely. I've attended both types. Even though, oddly, some state school campuses are being saved by online programs.

The free online education programs remind me of the initial chess online experience. Yes, it's different, but over time, the improvements in convenience, price and quality make online chess a forerunner of future online education programs. There is still a local chess club, but I can play against quality opponents anytime, online.

I'd say your circle of friends and programming languages researchers are the best part of universities. The fun part of exploring new ideas happens far more often at a university then at say, Accenture.

But the paper chase is utter horror. Crap papers and crap results are trotted-out as productivity in some sort of bibliometrics hell-scape.

Quantity rather than quality is part of the wrong path academia took. PG is right to focus on universities as ripe for a shake-up.

On the WTF Podcast by Marc Maron, he explains how his terrible buying habits with an Amex black card, including a new Mercedes, a sojourn at the Ritz, and a brass instrument, led to his inability to get a credit card for many years.

He basically lost his way after comedy clubs closed in the late 80's and had to reinvent himself. Youtube his old "I have a peach" routine to understand his reinvention. Here is a version of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmZfVCSzEw0

This programmer design fallacy got started by the Mormon church (not kidding): http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=169163

Gregg "Skip" Bailey, Manager of Human Factors, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Iterative methodology and designer training in human-computer interface design, Proceedings CHI '93

This pseudo-scientific study pitted Skip and his team of highly trained designers versus old mainframe programmers (two of whom graduated college). They used an interface design tool--Skip and his design team had prior experience with it--to create interfaces for retired Mormon volunteers. The retirees made more errors with the programmer's interface and presto.. the myth of poor programmer designers is born with all the statistical significance generally found in CHI papers.

As an addendum, the final round of the current world championship candidates matches are starting. See http://kazan2011.fide.com/ or This Week In Chess http://www.chess.co.uk/twic/

At the moment, it's being put to the test:

British hedge fund invests 25 million pounds for IU professor’s Twitter research http://www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=80469