shabadoop

It's not exactly a wrapper, since you presumably still use the generated NN in LuaJIT. AI isn't my field, but it seems like a useful tool - actually setting up a complex neural network seems to be a lot of grunt work, comparatively speaking. There's probably a place for a tool that nicely abstracts over that part of the process.

I think the idea is it sets up Neural Networks that are then run in Torch, with some nice diagram generating tools. I don't know if that's something people will actually use, but it looks like a pretty concise way to generate a pretty complicated Neural Network, which could be a worthwhile idea considering how complex the more advanced ones are.

It has 10 hours of battery life, so I think the idea is that you don't plug it in as often.

I knew a university athlete from the Congo with a tough to pronounce name. He started introducing himself as "Bob" during his flight to Canada.

I mean, it's well known but not well established - I highly doubt there's much sexual harassment in a typical corporate environment with an HR department.

Well, there is a huge surplus of PhD's in every field, and there is less industry demand for certain fields (French Lit, for example). This seems like a classic situation where certification in a professional association should be required to teach college, so there can be better collective bargaining at a national scale.

It's not anger - they have other things to do so they're late, I have other things to do so I can't afford to sit around waiting for an hour. If I'm going over to meet someone, I expect them to be ready, if they tell me it's going to be thirty minutes I'll adjust accordingly. It's the cell phone era, there's no real excuse for not giving someone a heads up if you're going to be late.

Also at play is the notion that there are people in computer science that fall more into the design disciplines (i.e. HCI, UI, UX people). Right now, we have nothing for these people except double majoring with art/phycology and the occasional HCI class, but this may change soon. There are certainly frontiers in this area yet to be explored!

Whenever I read articles about social network-type sites that are doing UI changes it seems like there's pretty extensive use of data analysis based on A/B testing for different changes that are being made. Wouldn't a practitioner still need solid coding skills and a strong base in statistics?

Actually, one might very well argue that you are the jerk, in your own example. Come on, what's one hour? Just do something else while waiting for the person to arrive.

What are they doing for one hour that's so important that other people should wait on them - if I have a meeting at 10 and they aren't there, can I just leave to handle other work and show up at 12?

Yeah, my supervisor for my undergrad thesis is a brilliant researcher who's still publishing good work 20+ years into his career. He was just a normal dude in undergrad who started in engineering but switched to math because he disliked project management, and he certainly wasn't in any sort of "young genius" program through grade school. But his PhD thesis was runner-up for best in the country, he consistently presents at all the major conferences in his field, and he has even won a few teaching awards.

I'm from Eastern Canada, right now a pragmatic student can go out West and work for two years, return to a community college with free tuition while drawing unemployment for a two year diploma where they learn a trade, and then transfer into a four year university to finish up a relevant bachelor's degree in 2.5 years.

My friend lives with a dude who took that route who's now doing his doctorate in English. He still goes and works on the oil rigs in the summer, then spends the rest of the year studying 19th century english lit.

CS entry level classes traditionally fell into the latter category. Demand has resulted in students treating them as part of the former.

I was in a funny position with this. In university, I had taken the engineering "Intro to C" class as a first year student, but when I switched to a math major, I had to take the intro level CS classes.

Now, the first year CS classes are required for math, physics and chemistry majors at my school so you'd expect the syllabus to take that into account. The class was almost entirely built around working with the Java API and object hierarchies and writing bloated Java programs to perform simple tasks. It was a huge waste of time, and I didn't have much time to spend on a freshman level general ed requirement. I like to think my whining was one of the reasons why the math department finally made the push to offer a scientific programming course for the rest of the science departments.

I don't mean to bash my school's CS department, either. I took some higher level Systems Programming and Algorithms courses and thought they were fantastic. They just treated their intro courses like software engineering weed-out courses, when other departments required them as general ed courses.

Which still means that, if you buy a 2014 model, you might get a machine that's slower than the 2013 model.

I think what you mean is "You might get a machine that's slower than _a_ 2014 model". Assuming every 2014 model performs at the baseline, unless that baseline is lower than the previous generation's you're still getting better performance than the _official_ 2013 model.

They all meet a baseline standard, it's just some people get machines that are above those baselines. Yes, sometimes the "good" machine from a previous generation will outperform the baseline from the next generation in a given benchmark, but that's an inevitability of having machines that outperform the baselines of their generation.

By that logic, why is Dennis Ritchie any more important than Steve Jobs?

And really, I've only ever seen rich kids with minor substance abuse problems get sent to private school.

I was thinking about working through the NLTK book once I'm finished with Bishop's Pattern Recognition, would you be able to recommend an alternative?

What this means is that, as a first approximation, it is Uber that sets the price, not "the market" (whatever that is).

The market is the aggregate of all other people providing a similar service. Taxi companies, other Uber-like services, are all competing for the same consumers.

If Uber is setting its prices too high, they'll lose customers to the aforementioned competitors and they'll potentially earn less money if the higher price doesn't offset the drop in customers. That's what people mean when they say "the market sets the price".

I'm sorry, it just sounds like you're giving a very cliched "the market doesn't exist" response in a situation where it just doesn't apply at all. This is a market with competing firms, not a monopoly.

It's a bit silly to only talk about the Anglosphere/West when the word is used in a global context.

That, and the fact that Julia has pretty good CUDA modules, makes it seem like Julia is perfectly suited for work with Neural Networks.