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We use Riemann at Two Sigma to monitor/alert/heal our Mesos cluster [1], precisely because of above reasons to reject.

>- You must pick up Clojure to understand and configure Riemann (we're not a Clojure shop, so this is a non-trivial requirement) >- Config file isn't a config file, it's an executed bit of Clojure code

This is actually great -- static files quickly become their own franken-languages, with code generating config files.

>- Riemann is not a replacement for an alerting mechanism, it's another signal for alerting mechanisms (though since it's Clojure and the configuration file is a Clojure script, you can absolutely hack it into becoming an alerting system) >- Riemann is not a replacement for a trend graphing mechanism.

You probably don't want another alerting mechanism; you probably already have pagerduty or something else -- what you want is a rich way to create the alert.

[1] https://github.com/twosigma/satellite

sabrahamon Introduction to Apache Mesos

Mesos uses dominant resource fairness:

https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~alig/papers/drf.pdf

sabrahamon Introduction to Apache Mesos

To load the framework (application) with the logic with the concern of deciding what resources it wants. The scheduler shouldn't care about what you get, just fairness. Two-tiered scheduling achieves this:

Mesos decides how many resources to offer each framework, while frameworks decide which resources to accept and which computations to run on them.

http://mesos.berkeley.edu/mesos_tech_report.pdf

sabrahamon Oxford’s Oak Beams, and Other Tales of Humans and Trees in Long-Term Partnership

Great story, but total myth!

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2013/oct/02/david-c...

sabrahamon Protect Kids, Get F*cked

This sounds like the story Jessica Livingston mentioned at Startup School 2012 <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4699862 >, if I remember correctly -- business in Texas got a term sheet, moved to California, investors pulled out when their user acquisition metric changed. Anyone have more color on this?

sabrahamon Use long flags when scripting

http://xkcd.com/1168/

sabrahamon Scientists warn of sperm count crisis

Poor example-- the Famine should be known as the Starvation. There was plenty of food to ration to the Irish, even on Irish land; the British instead shipped it home, or fed it to cattle and then shipped that home, and let the Irish starve instead.

sabrahamon BranchOut Falsifies Wall Street Journal Quote

Typically newspapers omit the comma; my guess is to save ink/space, but if anyone knows for sure, I'm all ears.

sabrahamon $4,829-per-hour supercomputer built on Amazon cloud to fuel cancer research

Sorry to be late to the party-- xaa, could you explain a little more what you mean by

"Ultimately I believe the breakthroughs will come fastest if we can "close the feedback loop" by automating a lot of bench biology, and then have computers both generate and test hypotheses."

I don't know anything about bioinformatics, so I'm trying to see how this differs from vanilla automated model selection. I'm really interested, so please feel free to send me an email if you feel that's more appropriate.

sabrahamon Groupon Kidz Club

Definitely jokes.

I wasn't totally sure until I saw this: http://www.groupon.com/pages/kidz-club-games

sabrahamon The Invention of Waterloo (Canada’s Technology Triangle)

awesome, thanks

sabrahamon The Invention of Waterloo (Canada’s Technology Triangle)

have a link for the event?

sabrahamon Stanford Class: Probabilistic Graphical Models

Thanks for the insights! I appreciate it.

sabrahamon Stanford Class: Probabilistic Graphical Models

The other classes sent an email when registration opened; I think it's safe to assume PGMs will be similar.

sabrahamon Stanford Class: Probabilistic Graphical Models

Ah, so I used a 2-degree heuristic to come to that conclusion--I haven't had any first hand experience with her, nor do I have contact with her former students. A few stats professors independently recommended her to me as a supervisor, her students seem to do well, and her research page is more welcoming than most (versus, say Ullman's page: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/ or say, read Brian Ripley's posts on the R mailing list). The one thing I'd add: my experience has been that academics generally have less empathy than others; I'd be interested to hear from old students how she compares to other faculty.

sabrahamon Stanford Class: Probabilistic Graphical Models

PGMs don't get the same sexy treatment that ML and AI seem to get in pop science articles, so it may be worth stating explicitly that they're very much used in ML and are intellectually fascinating in their own right. A graphical model can fully describe the distribution and dependences of a model. Why this is important: a graphical model makes it very easy to give a computer your model, and there has been great success over the past two decades in doing just this [1].

Further, Daphne Koller is a serious force in the field, and seems to be a pretty good supervisor, so I'm guessing/hoping she is an interesting/engaging lecturer as well. Though, Stanford CS/Stats students are more able to comment on this last point.

[1] http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/bugs/winbugs/contents.shtml

sabrahamon 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance

It's around 40%.

sabrahamon XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

except in ultra-rare occasions they do not happen in first world countries

You've scuttled your own argument here.

sabrahamon XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

As to being bigger and stronger, perhaps we should look to the nation of Japan and the feats its military was able to achieve with men roughly the size of north american women. Women are perfectly capable of defending themselves, not that they should have to, just like smaller men are perfectly capable of defending themselves, not that they should have to. These are again averages and if you look at the deviances you'll see that there are a lot of women who are larger than a lot of men.

Also, keep in mind that a man is twice as likely to be assaulted as a woman so from a statistical perspective it is men who should be fearing for their safety as they post their gender online.

Blatant misuse of "statistics." Not all assaults are equal. How many assaults toward men lead to their having thoughts of or committing suicide? Also, the implication that we should train women to a military standard so they are ready to fend themselves off from attack is absurd-- by your rationale, we should put all be proficient with switchblades and blame ourselves if we were unable to stop an attack. The causal is the perpetrator, and the culture that breeds feeling of ownership by men of women.

It wasn't so long ago that the law explicitly treated women as property, so let's not forget that too quickly. In the UK, it was in our parents' generation that women were allowed to have a mortgage (Sex Discrimination Act of 1975) and only two decades ago that marital rape exemption was abolished (until 1991, in the UK, legally a husband could not be charged with raping his wife).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_United_States#Rape_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_English_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#Common_law_and_the...

sabrahamon Speaking of the British

That said, I'm American, went to Oxford and am now at Cambridge, and I can assure you that most Humanities graduates are shockingly innumerate--I seriously doubt most Arts students given the Math SAT would be able to do more than shake a stick at it. The best evidence is probably in PPE; the only people who stick with E(conomics) did Math/s at A-level. The system doesn't encourage it. You do your 3-5 A-levels, and people tend to focus on the Arts or the Sciences, with little to no overlap.

Also, I was never offered sherry at a tutorial, but I did have friends studying English who were offered wine~

On a related note, this is a good summary of the differences between English vs American values/elite educations: http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2010/apr/23/whats-better-o...

sabrahamon How to Unmask the Internet's Vilest Characters

The article said Private Voyeur removed the post. It's not in an easily accessible cache--a quick Google and archive.org search doesn't turn up anything--so naming the site, albeit unnecessary, probably didn't jeopardize anonymity.