textminer

This is a common generational worry, right? We learned X a certain way, that pedagogy was necessarily linked to the technology at the time, we worry in retrospect that that specific technology was a necessary condition for ever learning X.

I'm only 28, and I do it, too-- e.g., how will kids expand their imagination and learn about the world without only having paper books to immerse themselves in for hours at a time? How will anyone learn the basics of programming without finding QuickBASIC on an old Packard-Bell 386, playing around with Gorillas or Snakes, or entering their own code from books in the library?

I think there will be a sufficient number of hacker types around for the cynical and simple reason that corporations need to inspire kids to learn how to code so that they can hire folks in two decades. This ought to inspire a token amount of educational support and tool building so that entry-level development will always be accessible to kids.

I thought those seemed part and parcel. :) "I'm in the gravity well of a star" leads to "this alters the geodesic of spacetime that the I tumble down", which made me wonder "wait, why does it tumble down geodesics to begin with".

The answers seems to be "physics doesn't have to abide by your intuition or need for narratives, human"

Good discussion of your question: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24359/why-do-obje...

I went for Jill Stein. After hearing nothing of substance in the Romney/Obama debates, the third party debates were a breath of fresh air. How I wish they had electoral clout, or that we had a system which encouraged voting one's preference.

One can ABD almost anywhere! Usually requires paying a nominal maintenance fee while you do other things.

If you've never read this article in Jacobin magazine, I think you'd quite like it: http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/

Yeah! Modes of centrality can mean lots of things. It's why it can be so frustrating when media folks casually toss out "average" for long-tailed things that require way more specificity.

The median is not found by (H-L)/2+L. Read that Wikipedia entry again.

Disproof: 1, 1, 2, 10, 101. The median of this list is 2, not 51.

"vimtutor" is pretty gentle. Alternatively, http://vim-adventures.com/ is just fun.

HN-as-a-hivemind really should approve of this sort of snark. It's nerd-snark!

SVMs are lickety-split simple. You're drawing the best line/plane/hyperplane between some points. You can turn this into a nice convex optimization program, given some conditions. If this thing isn't fully separable, you can fudge it a little with some penalty terms, or you can cheaply project these points into some space where such a separation does exist. The hard part will always be your feature extraction, labeled data collection, and the parameter tuning for everything I just waved my hand at.

Nice write up! I'd caution just checking for an exactly-zero determinant. Read up about ill-conditioned matrices, and maybe check that conditioning number (or a determinant below a certain threshold) first. Also, work hard to never, ever have to actually fully invert a matrix.

It can be hard to sell those shares when there's no market, no? I recently left a small startup in which the AMT hit would've been $26k, with no possible way to recoup that from selling the shares themselves (outside of a scheme like the ESO Fund, which issues non-recourse loans on the upside of a stock option sell, covering you for the tax and exercise costs.)

LSA and truncated SVDs on a user-item matrix date back to the 1980s, don't they?

I've noticed that to correlate with local population. E.g., University towns having plenty of great Dover prints on Algebraic Topology versus my mid-Michigan industrial boomtown mostly having a huge Spiritual/Christianity section.

Presumably you'd then have many more possible patentable, innocuously "different" molecule patterns, ruining the competitive edge.

I've moved recently from building data manipulation and machine learning systems in Python to a stack that's primarily C++, and it's striking how much less nimble I now feel transforming that data or in building machine learning pipelines.

I suppose building basic tools as Apache Thrift services would allow one the ease of prototyping ideas in Python before building a performant system in something like Java or C++.

I commute from Oakland to Menlo Park. It's kooky how it's either a 40 minute drive (consistently) or a 100 minute bike->BART->shuttle, the latter being way more stressful due to transitions and multiple failure modes.

Traditional well-regulated customer-supporting carriers don't have the margins that black market dealers do?

Are you a Software Engineer in the United States? I've never heard of unionized programmers (at least within the Bay Area, which I shouldn't presume you're in.)

Why is that not Twitter?

I'm gay. Was making a joke at "fruit fly". Will save the one-liners for Reddit and Facebook posts.

She was being homophobic. :\

Live in "NOBE" now (or Longfellow, or Gaskill, or Golden Gate, whatever it's really called), but I regularly see car windows smashed in when I head over to Temescal's 50th/Telegraph area for dinners out. Loving my own apartment, but wishing more and more I had searched harder for a place near the walkable parts of Grand Ave or Piedmont Ave.

Love El Cerrito, and even Richmond. Contra Costa County is way overlooked by the tech community. But sorta hope it stays that way for a while, in case I want to buy a house in a few years...

Yes, a friend's motorcycle was severely damaged last week from someone trying to steal it. He was upstairs in our apartment eating dinner. Nine more months on the lease!

Actually live in Oakland near Emeryville. Not sure why I wrote Berkeley, except for misguided attempt at identity obfuscation. But used to live up in Contra Costa county, and the mornings I'd drive into SF-- boy howdy, 580/80 along the coast near University was an absolute disaster.

I wonder if, as "Oakland becomes the new Mission", if we'll see more of the tech giants sending shuttles up to East Bay. I know Google has at least one going to West Oakland, but Facebook does not yet.

You've just broken my heart. My timing's basically based on two 9 AM drives that hit traffic/construction, but took no more than 45 minutes.

I start tomorrow.

I feel like it'd be affine, so the floor buying power of each individual wouldn't be zero, but some offset of zero that nonetheless has buying power (even if that marginal amount is less than in the original system).

I've just timed it out for about 45 minutes in the car, and an hour and fifteen for the BART/shuttle combo. I also quite like podcasts, so am all right with having just my ears free while driving.