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babs474

426 karma · joined January 5, 2010

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babs474··on Announcing Docker ToolBox
I run into this. Files are only partially synced.

You end up with broken code. If you are lucky it has a syntax error. If you are not lucky you get mysterious bugs.

The work around is to go back and try re-editing the file to retrigger a sync.

There are lots recommendations to try Fusion over Vbox but I think this issue makes it a wash.

babs474··on Emacs IPython Notebook
I have been using the

  ipython console --existing
command to connect to the same kernel that the browser is attached to. I can do more complicated coding in that repl (inside of emacs). Then, when I need visual feedback, I do some kind of one liner plot and hit play in the browser.

It works pretty well, but maybe this will make the whole thing smoother.

babs474··on A new approach to uptime monitoring with Grails
>In general though Groovy/Grails is actually surprisingly good.

I'll second that. Groovy is amazing but under appreciated on places like hacker news. Interesting that you bring up python because I find groovy very pythonic in some ways. Even more so with the new type hinting stuff python is introducing.

Although for lighter weight web stuff I've been watching the http://ratpack.io/ project.

babs474··on The Miracle of Minneapolis
I think you are right that there are a lot of developer worker bees in MN who are not excellent.

However, there is a somewhat tight-knit subpopulation of developers that are forward thinking, talented and excellent at CS. You will find them at various tech meetups or at events like minnedemo. A lot of them are alums or connected to alums of some of the startups here (yes we do have them!). I'm thinking of Bloom Health, SmartThings, HomeSpotter, Code42, Gravie and a few others I'm forgetting.

The key to finding talent in MN is a little bit of networking, it is definitely out there.

babs474··on Apple, is USB allowed now?
It's fine if the rules change once in a while but apple should clearly and fairly communicate that to everyone.

Now you have to be a part of some good ol boy club with access to the right backchannels to develop software these days?

babs474··on Mixpanel (YC S09) Raises $65M to Build Predictive Data Tech
I think you are right they are targeting large advertisers with significant spend.

It's a unique approach in that they don't need a lot of granular attribution data, but instead use higher level aggregate data. As a result it's easier to integrate with all kinds of media campaigns.

You need to be able to provide impressions over time for your early funnel ads and conversions over time for your late funnel touchpoints. They use some econometric time series techniques to analyze and estimate the impact so you can focus on whats working.

babs474··on Mixpanel (YC S09) Raises $65M to Build Predictive Data Tech
A plug for a former employer but I'd like to add optimine, http://optimine.com/insight to your list of attribution platforms.

They've got an elegant and, as far as I know, unique modeling approach that avoids the first-touch/last-touch/path-analysis pitfalls.

babs474··on An underrated feature in Python 3
How about automatically giving you a repl context at the exception and letting you move up and down the call stack.

http://werkzeug.pocoo.org/docs/debug/#using-the-debugger

babs474··on Gradle 2.0
Very True. I'm pretty sure that quote wasn't meant to be a critique of the Groovy language, just an expression of interest in Scala. Yet its brought out every time somebody wants to dismiss Groovy.

Compare that quote to this[1] presentation where Paul Phillips lays in to scala for 50 minutes. Even when somebody does criticize their own creation I doubt they mean "Hey everybody, that thing I spent a bunch of time on? Throw it all in the garbage, its pointless".

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg

babs474··on Gradle 2.0
>Easy to learn for a Java person, but way more productive than Java.

Agreed, which is why it such a shame it isn't more prevalent.

Along with the features you mention, I'll add, good repl support, which is a must for modern languages in my book and is a huge productivity boost.

babs474··on Gradle 2.0
I find awareness of groovy very spotty depending on the crowd you travel in.

Enterprisey J2EE people regard it as a new fangled something they don't have time for.

More pragmatic, hip to it programmers seem to give more attention to scala, clojure, jruby.

babs474··on Gradle 2.0
Gradle is fantastic and hopefully it helps bring awareness to the under appreciated groovy language.
babs474··on An Introduction to Gradient Descent and Linear Regression
You need it for l1 and l2 regularization which is popular these days don't you?
babs474··on A Year of Functional Programming
I'm not sure about haskell, but in clojure the, run code, reason, run more code cycle is very much supported with the repl.

In fact I find the nature of functional code very much helps out here. With clojure, in a complicated system I can typically take any subcomponent and run it in the repl without much fuss/mocking or worrying about the state of the system. Since usually functions aren't modifying state I can rerun, modify, rerun over and over again without restarts.

babs474··on Getting started in data science
R and matlab are better, but those tools also have issues integrating into production depending on what you are doing. It's not so much the exact tool you use, but just having a little forethought about how your creation is going to interact with a production system.

A lot of people feel programming is undervalued in academia. For instance Hadley Wickham creator of ggplot2 probably hasn't gotten the recognition he deserves. With a prevailing attitude such as that is it any wonder academic code has such a poor reputation?

Whickham notes that he thinks tides are changing. I agree that it is, as a part of the datascience phenomenon. As part of the change you are going to see a few more macbooks, some cloud servers, maybe a guy with glasses talking about version control and software design. It is not all garbage, I hope you keep an open mind.

Q:Do you feel that the academic culture has caught up with and supports non-traditional academic contributions (e.g. R packages instead of papers)?

A:It’s hard to tell. I think it’s getting better, but it’s still hard to get recognition that software development is an intellectual activity in the same way that developing a new mathematical theorem is.[1]

1. http://simplystatistics.org/2012/05/11/ha/

babs474··on Getting started in data science
In practice I find the bigger problem is from analysts/actuaries/statisticians who have a disdain for programming, which sometimes is viewed as a task for mere technicians.

Typically your excel model/analysis has not even solved half the problem of a datascience system. It needs to be repeatable, it needs to be open to change (source control!), it needs to be integratable with the wider system.

These things need to be considered upfront. There are plenty of reasonable software tools for this. Yes hadoop shouldn't be your first step, but taking 5 minutes to put something on a server in ec2 (omg, the cloud) is not unreasonable.

There is a swallowing abyss between excel and production. That is where datascience projects die, its a shame.

babs474··on Removing User Interface Complexity, or Why React is Awesome
In the case of Om, I believe the immutability of clojure helps out and makes the diffing of databound elements a simple (non-deep) compare.

You can end up making an app with quite a number of elements flying around.

A neat pixel editor example: http://jackschaedler.github.io/goya/

babs474··on Searching 20 GB/sec: Systems Engineering Before Algorithms
This randomly reminded me of an ancient kuro5hin article that I found interesting back in the day. Where the proposal was to use brute force to implement comment search on kuro5hin.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/5/1/154819/1324

babs474··on Truthcoin: Trustless, Decentralized Bitcoin Prediction Marketplace
Prediction markets that don't involve money have also had some success recently. http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so-...

For an easy to join one that I work on shameless plug checkout https://scicast.org

babs474··on Ask HN: Interviewing, what did I do wrong?
I wouldn't frame the question as "what did you do wrong". As other people in this thread have pointed out you may have dodged a bullet. It could very well be that this company is in the "wrong".

A better question to ask is what can you do to make yourself more attractive and increase the probability of closing the deal with the next company. Think like a salesman.

The fact that you told him you currently make close to what their interns make jumps out at me. Perhaps you think that would make you more attractive, but it may have had the opposite effect.

The head of engineering may have been told by his team that you have a lot of expertise, skill and potential and then all of a sudden he finds out you get paid at an intern level. He is going to ask himself what am I missing? If you are so good why doesn't anybody else value you at that level. People want to have a good feeling in their gut when they make a big purchase and a large previous salary gap may have unsettled that.

A better head of engineering wouldn't we swayed by previous salary, but the truth of the matter is a lot of decision makers are not perfectly rational.

My advice to you is to google strategies for dealing with the "what is your current salary" question and be better prepared for that situation.

babs474··on Willem Pinckaers on Akamai's flawed OpenSSL allocator patch
tptacek, we all want to hear Willem Pinckaers' take, it is really good stuff.

I also want to hear ideas from Akamai, even if they aren't perfect. Perhaps they can lead to good things.

Unfortunately Pinckaers' commentary is a little bit too hostile and calls for Akamai to cease sharing ideas[1].

I'm sure Akamai's developers are "adult" enough, as you say, to handle it. However there is a trope in software development community that if you share something, you should be fine with being open to no holds barred attacks. Wouldn't the more "adult" behavior be to criticize in a more professional tone that is open to refinement of ideas and could spark further collaboration? I'd like to see this type of communication more in the software world, I think it would encourage more participation.

[1]"they should not be sending out non-functional, bug ridden patches to the OpenSSL community"

babs474··on Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money
I made this comment the other day in a thread about children accidentally clicking on google display ads, but I think it also applies here. The problem is measuring the effectiveness of early funnel ads from clicks.

Here is a good presentation from the quantcast guys about the "natural born clicker" problem. The people clicking on your display ad are probably anything but actual potential customers.

Clicks is just an easy holdover metric from the paid search side of digital advertising. It doesn't make sense in the context of early funnel ads. You need to measure the effect your display ads are having on your purchasing endpoints. Which is what the whole cross channel attribution industry is about.

Its quite possible your are getting good value from facebook ads, you've just inadvertently focused in on the worst subpopulation, the clickers.

[1]http://www.slideshare.net/hardnoyz/display-ad-clickers-are-n...

babs474··on Pissing Away Our Money With Google Display Ads
This problem extends to more than just kids playing around on mobile games.

Here is a good presentation from the quantcast guys about the "natural born clicker" problem. The people clicking on your display ad are probably anything but actual potential customers.

Clicks is just an easy holdover metric from the paid search side of digital advertising. It doesn't make sense in the context of early funnel ads. You need to measure the effect your display ads are having on your purchasing endpoints. Which is what the whole cross channel attribution industry is about.

[1]http://www.slideshare.net/hardnoyz/display-ad-clickers-are-n...

babs474··on A group of 3,000 citizens is making better forecasts than CIA analysts
For a prediction market anyone can join checkout https://scicast.org/

Whats neat about SciCast is you can make predictions based on the assumption of how other questions will turn out.

eg I think that if the price of bitcoin exceeds 1000 by 2015 at least one presidential candidate will accept bitcoin donations. If btc ends up being below 1000 I make no prediction.

babs474··on Ideas We'd Like to Fund
Also checkout minnedemo[1] for twin cities startups events.

And tech.mn[2] for news.

http://minnestar.org/minnedemo/

http://www.tech.mn

babs474··on Cryptocontracts Will Turn Contract Law Into a Programming Language
I've always wondered if some programming tools couldn't help out in the legal world.

It seems to me version control and diffing tools could be very applicable. I wonder if the concept of branching could help for very complex contract negotiations.

Also library dependency management. Contracts often include well established clauses that can change incrementally over time. Maybe even transitive dependencies?

From what I've seen the legal industry kind of sucks a technology and they tend to brute force things with hordes of junior lawyers and microsoft word.

babs474··on Ask HN: What Web framework do you recommend for a Java Shop?
I have heard very positive things about dropwizard, but also consider Grails.
babs474··on This App Trains You to See Farther
I have heard, and this article makes the case that reaction time for people is relatively constant, but that the pros are better at anticipating pitches. They read body and shoulder movements leading up to the ball release.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/more/news/20130724/the-spor...

babs474··on Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement
It is not that black and white though. So many comments are are deleted by moderators for baloney reasons. Moderators have become the new digg power users and they are really hurting reddit. See the recent standupshots controversy.

What about highly upvoted/downvoted comments that are then edited to reverse or change the sentiment. Other conversation participants have no right to see the original context?

To be fair there are good reasons to have some deleted comments and this is probably not the right place for a debate, but it is not that cut and dry.

As an aside, I've found the whole unedditreddit ride extremely interesting I hope its not the worst thing you had to deal with.

http://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/1ukgpm/the_moderator...

babs474··on Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement
That possibility probably didn't help, but eventually somebody from google told me they wouldn't bring the app back even if I changed the name.

You bring up another interesting point about impact to the yale site though. This app does impact the yale site, by having clients issue extra ajax requests. It not an unreasonable load but I wonder if that might muddle the issue again.

For unedditreddit I was able to completely prevent the app from creating extra load by distributing scraping among clients only already visiting the page. I wonder if the same idea could work for the evaluation data?

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