probdist

No. Pao lost.

1) Pao lost the case and as a result was found to owe (part) of KP's legal bills. 2) KP has filled something with the court indicating that they don't need enforcement of that any more. Indicating either Pao paid them, or they came to an agreement to not get paid in full in exchange for Pao not appealing or related things like agreeing to not discuss them further publicly.

All the court filings really indicate is that KP considers the matter closed.

Haven't tried ADVI yet, but I think it is (likely) a great idea. In general automatic differentiation is a wildly powerful technique and is underutilized in computational science. Even in pure optimization problems people rarely leverage it to get J or H information as often as they probably should. I'll admit to not being super familiar with all the machinery under the hood in the ADVI paper [1]. It wasn't out when I started working on my current project.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.03431

Stan is best viewed in my mind as a successor to BUGS (Bayesian Inference Using Gibbs Sampling) which more people may have heard of. In fact, there are lots of players in the probabilistic programming space now, personally I like the model of "Infer.NET" [1] from Microsoft Research, as I find variational and approximate variational inference a good solution to my problems and I like coding models in nearly C# more than in Stan format.

If you want to get started as fast as possible with computational Bayesian inference and don't need the performance and advanced features Stan, I'd recommend emcee [2] which is a lightweight python MCMC sampler.

Final recommendation to the HN crowd: Bayesian Data Analysis 3rd Edition [3] should be on your desk if you are thinking about using any of this software.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/in...]

[2] http://dan.iel.fm/emcee/current/

[3] https://www.crcpress.com/Bayesian-Data-Analysis-Third-Editio...

I guess I don't really understand this at least with respect to bothering to change the name. I'd try to draw a parallel to what Google did in becoming Alphabet but that doesn't seem to be a congruent situation.

The organization of the company around developers as core users makes sense. Not sure if a name change is supposed to do much for the average developer in caring about their product offerings more or less.

Not entirely. For example many forms of music are subject to either compulsory or statutory licensing. Also, the United States government has long held that it does not need to comply with patent law for its own internal use (e.g DoD can ignore your patents).

If you write/compose a song, and/or record a song for the public in the United States you do not have complete control over it anymore.

Well twitter has just recently restructured the product team so maybe big things are in-store: http://recode.net/2015/09/02/twitter-restructures-product-te...

Netflix is still running its own CDNs / using CDNs outside of Amazon.

"The company, which competes with Amazon in the video-streaming business, elected to keep control of its own content delivery network."

So Netflix is still probably doing the bulk of their traffic themselves. Application servers with AWS is probably not a huge bill versus massive video traffic.

The credit card data derived real time sales estimates were criminally insider information when individual people at firms were doing it (see Capital One case). It is okay for entire firms to be based around this same type of data stream?

Especially as an invitation only "not public" offering.

This isn't that surprising as a thing that generates value. My questions are 1) how is this legal, and 2) what kind of agreement was forged with the credit card providers to make this possible?

If we recall back a few months, analysts at Capital One were investigated and charged by the SEC related to insider trading of consumer stocks by examining very similar information streams.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-23/capital-one...

Yes. The appeal (Court of Appeals Docket #: 14-35576) and the district court case (Docket #:3:14-cv-00146) are both accurately categorized as huge messes.

The allegation that Plunkett actually sent the "threat" flowers to herself (allegedly backed up by the credit card data and order history from the merchant) is noteworthy for the utter wildness involved.

But it looks like nothing has happened recently in the cases (since June 25th) while waiting on part of the appeal. So GGP's line of inquiry seems to be answered with a probably not?

The classic venn diagram of data science is still helpful: http://drewconway.com/zia/2013/3/26/the-data-science-venn-di...

This article reads like a way to find yourself in the danger zone.

Reddit's r/all page is in completely covered with reactions to this. This is perhaps the most controversial move made yet by Reddit staff.

In case anyone's interest was piqued by the complicated reaction mechanisms involved in even relatively simple combustion problems, you can automatically generate these mechanisms using software called "Reaction Mechanism Generator" http://rmg.mit.edu/ produced by a group in MIT's department of Chemical Engineering.

You wouldn't want to have to determine parameters and pathways for a 53 species 300+ reaction mechanism except in a highly automated fashion.

If I was involved in payment processing, I would not want to even distantly be associated with that industry. The federal regulatory authorities have not been kind to banking efforts in the space.

I've never had to turn to Octave because I've always had an employer or University sponsored access to MATLAB, but I'm incredibly grateful this project exists. There is a ton of permissively licensed code written targeting MATLAB that is released for scientific and engineering purposes that would be DOA for many people without this project.

The origins of Octave are pretty amazing. Created essentially to support a single textbook and class in Chemical Engineering at UT Austin/UW Madison it is now nearly code compatible with a major commercial product and has been under continuous development for over 20 years.

Kudos to the developers/maintainers.

MIT's OCW offering offers more on the subject of automatic control: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-0...

I find it wildly perplexing that there are so many frameworks and libraries for javascript graphics and data visualization.

Wikipedia has a comparison matrix of 37 different libraries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript_charti...

Here is a list describing briefly at least 50 libraries: http://techslides.com/50-javascript-charting-and-graphics-li...

The doctoral thesis already is already essentially universally several papers stapled together in experimental science and engineering. The shortest compelling way to explain your results is a paper. Furthermore, the notion that your work over 3-8 years is one cohesive story has been violated by every graduate student I've ever met.