brendano

This is on a slightly different statistical methodology issue, but quoting from Brad Efron (http://statweb.stanford.edu/~ckirby/brad/papers/2005BayesFre...):

The physicists I talked with were really bothered by our 250 year old Bayesian-frequentist argument. Basically there’s only one way of doing physics but there seems to be at least two ways to do statistics, and they don’t always give the same answers.

This says something about the special nature of our field. Most scientists study some aspect of nature, rocks, stars, particles; we study scientists, or at least scientific data. Statistics is an information science, the first and most fully developed information science. Maybe it’s not surprising then that there is more than one way to think about an abstract subject like “information”.

For example: this classic paper on compression http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee398a/handouts/papers/WittenA...

was published with a C, Unix-based implementation (I put it here http://brenocon.com/WittenNealCleary-ArithmeticEncodin-cacm-...)

which compiles and runs fine (just lots of compiler warnings) on modern Linux and OS X, 18 years later.

These things also intersect ... for example, you'd have to figure out how dialectical English verbal auxiliaries like "finna", or the second or so word in "imma", map to PTB tags. It's possible but just takes more work and thinking through the descriptive linguistics and what you want to use it for. Someday I'd like to update the whole thing for a more PTB-like POS tagset, if it can be done well. I feel like Chris Manning's whitepaper on issues in PTB POS data convinced us (well, it convinced me, at least) that it might be a good idea to focus on making high quality tag annotations. (http://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/CICLing2011-manning-tagging.pdf )

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiza...

    1 - why can't I import a directory full of jars? eg
       --classpath ./lib/jars/*
    or better yet, recursively descend
       --classpath ./lib/jars/**

   -cp "$(print -l ./lib/jars/**/*.jar | tr '\n' :)"

Lots of people here have raised concerns that the way Java forces class and static declarations is confusing for beginners. Interestingly, the instructors were concerned about that too, but found that students don't seem to mind.

http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~reges/sigcse/basics.pdf

http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~reges/sigcse/basics.ppt

The second major concern being discussed here, that functional programming isn't possible in Java, I think is a non-issue for a true introductory first-semester class, which needs to focus on more basic issues of procedural programming and abstraction. The SICP approach is beautiful and great for already advanced and highly motivated students, but that's honestly a small minority.

(You can find many more examples of reports like this if you search for "CS1", which is the shorthand for intro-to-CS that's used in the CS education literature.)

From this page, http://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en... , click "Subcategories" under "Engineering & Computer Science": for example, "Artificial Intelligence," "Computational Linguistics," or "Human Computer Interaction." It lists the most-cited-venues for each area, but if you click on a particular venue you get its list of most-cited-papers.

Here are a few that are also on Jeff Huang's list:

ICML: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_artificiali...

NIPS: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_artificiali...

AAAI: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_artificiali...

ACL: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_computation...

EMNLP: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_computation...

CHI: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_humancomput...

CVPR: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_computervis...

(Personally, when programming Java I find it more convenient to use primitive arrays as opposed to matrix libraries, but that might be dependent on the operations I tend to do: lots of increment/decrements and only occasional linear algebra. I guess this isn't exactly relevant to the R replacement question.)

There are many other R implementation efforts going on right now -- Radford Neal lists a few (as well as his own) here: http://radfordneal.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/deferred-evaluat...

The presentation focuses on the R programming language, which they nicely show has all sorts of misfeatures that impede rapid execution. If you're going to not try to have compatibility with R and CRAN, you might as well start from scratch with design and performance in mind, as in Julia: http://julialang.org/

Given that email address books are really large, only a few of them might give lots of these sorts of second-order connections.

Second order connections on the LinkedIn network could be driving these recommendations too. People's friend-of-friends sets can be really large, like typically tens of thousands if I remember right...

What else would you expect the corporation to do? Eventually, someone in that organization has to make a decision, and that requires the complex information about countries' human rights situations to be summarized in a simpler way -- for which a ranking is one approach.

It sounds like they wanted the NGO to do this summarization. If the NGO didn't do it, then they'd get someone else or from within their organization to do it.

Something like rankings are inevitable. They fulfill a huge information need. The fact there are lots of poorly done rankings out there won't change that. This just means, it's even more important to make useful rankings that reflect good information.

(And besides rankings, there are perhaps coarser-grained options, like making several tiers of groupings, only asserting each is an equivalence class ... or finer-grained options, like giving each country scores in three different categories. Etc. But in all cases, the incredibly rich and complex source information has to be summarized somehow.)

Why? Double floats don't overflow until 10^-300 or so, and RNG's give uniform numbers from 0 to 1 just fine...

On the below-market wages issue: I think Powerset's really crazy marketing/hype allowed it to hire stronger engineers than would have been justified given its product and technology. All the startup spinoffs he mentions (Serious Business, Crowdflower, Github... and later some more I can't even keep track of...) I think are an indication of that. I guess that's how you hire using equity. You could say it's taking advantage of the psychology of overvaluing low-probability, high-impact outcomes. Or you could say, those people were duped.

I'm just glad for all the folks who, like Cliff, were able to take the bonuses to help support families or later business ventures.

There are thousands of employees at Google. Maybe there are just are a lot of people reading HN during the day.

But economics is also saddled with crazy non-empirical theories they force everyone to learn in the first two years, and an anemic journal-centric research culture that requires years to get an article published. I mean, from the OP:

And after you pass the prelims, there is little risk of not finishing a dissertation; unlike in most fields, you do not have to publish to graduate.

That is insane. Talk about tyranny of low expectations.

I wonder if their centrally-planned job market hurts academic productivity. It lessens the risk to spending years with mediocre research -- everyone gets a job eventually.