viergroupie

>Is the putative student "bad at math" or "bad at math the way it's taught in high school, perhaps even by a certain teacher"?

It could also be a mismatch between someone's personality and the sort of math kids get taught. I did poorly in most of my math classes in high school and college. After failing a few classes, decided I was hopelessly "bad at math", and left the topic alone. A few years I took an abstract algebra class on a lark and really enjoyed it. In hindsight, I did poorly in my earlier math classes because I was undisciplined and really disliked memorizing disconnected tricks and formulas. Abstract algebra, on the other hand, was more elegant, conceptual and fun to learn. Doing well in one class punctured my myth of inability and gave me the confidence to properly learn linear algebra (and take some other interesting classes).

>The remaining intelligences have nothing to do with intelligence or cognitive skills per se, but rather represent personal interests (for example, musical represents an affinity for music; naturalistic, an affinity for biology or geology) or personality traits (interpersonal or intrapersonal skills, which correspond best to the related concept of emotional intelligence).

Hidden in the article is a sneaky mismatch of definitions. Isn't it a tautology to argue that intelligence is singular by using a narrower meaning?

Oh God, the horror. Almost every time neural network library I've seen manages to obscure a very simple idea in piles of useless objects.

"Neural networks" are just the composition of several nonlinear regressions. There's nothing particularly "neural" about them.

Here's a typical 3-layer network:

f(x,Wh,Wo) = tanh(Wo * tanh(Wh * X))

Wh, and Wo are the hidden and output weight matrices respectively. Fix some loss function (ie, L(x,Wh,Wo,y) = || f(x,Wh,Wo) - y||^2), get the gradient of this function, and a take step down the gradient. There's your learning rule.

Now, I understand the desire for flexibility/modularity, but (1) what's the sense of trying to house supervised and unsupervised methods in the same hierarchy? and (2) what could possibly justify Connection and Weight objects?

>What about evidence of design patterns? Does it look like the person who wrote the code doesn't know about things like Observer, Visitor, and Decorator patterns?

This is his criterion for a research position? Understanding of the unsolved problems in a domain? "Irrelevant."

Mathematical sophistication needed to abstractly model complicated-seeming scenarios? "A dime a dozen."

Know the decorator pattern? "omg, you're hired!"

No matter which language you choose for productivity, I would start with the exercises in the Little Schemer or Little MLer. They're disarmingly simple while still challenging your brain to shift into a recursive/applicative mindset.

As for what functional language you want to end up using...well, it depends on your goals.

I'm personally partial to the family of languages which use ML-style type systems, which include OCaml, F#, and Haskell.

The core of F# and OCaml are very similar. F# has better libraries whereas OCaml has both a more powerful type system and more powerful module system.

Haskell is less straight forward than OCaml and F# and has many more esoteric features you need to learn before being considered an expert. Nonetheless, many have found the process of learning to be a mind-expanding process. Also, the Haskell community is much larger and more vibrant than what you'll find with any other statically typed functional language.

I think you're misunderstanding the role of "neural networks" in academia. NIPS has a lot of value to the machine learning and AI communities but, beyond vague inspiration, it has almost no connections to neuroscience. There is a substantial body of work in computational modeling of neuronal behavior, but this stuff is much messier (PDEs with biologically determined constants) and limited in scope than the papers that appear at NIPS.

edit: Relevant conferences in computational neuroscience -

* http://cosyne.org/c/index.php?title=Cosyne_09

* http://www.cnsorg.org/2009/

* http://icms.org.uk/workshops/mathneuro2009

Is that a map of population density I see?

>Adam Leibsohn, a 27-year-old communications strategist who makes roughly $60,000 a year and pays $1,650 a month for his own apartment in the East Village...“It’s kind of a spartan lifestyle,” he says.

We admire your frugality.

The machine learning lectures here are of fantastic quality. I hope this is the future of academia.

Other questions for PG:

- Why does God allow evil?

- Does P = NP?

- How does it feel to be so gosh darn awesome?

Anything specific?

>There is a political swing towards what were once considered the ideas of the political left such as minimum wages, benefits and so on,' said Holgar Schaefer, labour economist at the Cologne Institute of Economics. 'It is a tendency that is only likely to become more obvious in coming years.'

Uhhh..isn't tight regulation of the economy what fucked up their job markets in the first place?

First of all, kudos on the turnaround. I think the most important thing to keep in mind is except for a few scattered geniuses, no one is inherently good at math. I know it sounds like a tired metaphor, but math really is a different language (which takes a lot of study and practice to achieve fluency).

If you lack fundamentals, skip the sources and look for the people. Find a good teacher and take their class. This will probably entail an intense week of course shopping at a local school. Friendly fellow students can be a huge boon, at least for me, since I solidify concepts best in conversations with peers.

If you, for some reason, absolutely cannot take a class in person, I would encourage you to find a study partner and watch online lectures together. I really like MIT's Linear Algebra and Differential Equations videos (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/av/index.htm#Mathemati...), but but I don't know if those are at your level.

Yes.

An article on CSS layout with overflowing text and a search box several ems too long?

(firefox 2.0.0.6 / linux)

I wish I could search the database without having to give you my email address.

also: I find the high contrast a little painful to look at.

I just updated linkherd.com and urls are now stripped of spaces and underlines. Please let us know if you spot any problems.

Yeah, not dumb at all. It's on the to-do list, thanks.

I know this is supposed to be a startup echo chamber, but come on...

I feel silly even contemplating spelling out the many reasons (beyond loss aversion) why not everyone starts their own company.

It's pretty well established in the psychology literature that the effects of money on happiness are relative. You're happy (for some short time) if you make more than you expected, and you're (often) happy if you make more than your peers. Absolute quantity of money doesn't really do much for us humans, and I think the "irrational" test subjects were aware of that.

There is no such thing as public domain for software. If you simply give your software away, it's still your copyrighted work...just without a license for other people to use it.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6225

I second zlib. It's slightly more restrictive than MIT, but in a very sensible way. I don't think preventing modified sources from masquerading as the original Arc, or maintaining author attribution will impede adoption overly much.

Fantastic video, thank you!

Praise [God|Jesus|Allah/|Turkey Baster]!

Oh right, I'm an idiot.

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I don't quite get the faith Lush seems to inspire in some of its users. It's terribly documented, has antiquated semantics (no closures), and isn't even type safe (you can segfault if you pass an object of the wrong type). I might consider using Lush when performance was absolutely critical, but otherwise I don't think it holds a candle to Matlab for prototyping.

I can't speak for you, but I find that working crazy hours is a big waste of time in the long run. My health, happiness and mental soundness all deteriorate due to a screwed up sleep schedule and lack of socialization. Aside from the long-term consequences to body and mind, all this deterioration adversely affects the quality of my work. I spend a lot more time chasing dead ends when my life is out of whack. So take a break, have a drink with friends, maybe even get laid. Your project will thank you later.

The problem I had with Scheme was that it doesn't stay simple. The core is certainly more elegant than Common Lisp's, but all the cruft has a nasty way of sneaking back in through SRFIs and big hairy macros.

If you're looking for a big data cruncher on the cheap, I think your choice of programming language becomes important.

Ditch Python for something a little snappier. There's a discussion of languages for Machine Learning at http://hunch.net/?p=230.