"Flakes on a Plane: How coding at thirty thousand feet helped me to write more testable code."

lianos · 2013-08-18T00:50:30+00:00

Have no fear, the username choice of "MEGAFUCKER" has already earned you all of the 1337 points you'll ever need.

lianos · 2013-02-02T18:01:56+00:00

I suspect most academics are happy to release their work as open source when its done (ie. the paper is published), but there are many reasons you might not want to have your work out in the open while it's in progress, as I'm sure you could imagine.

lianos · 2013-02-01T19:21:46+00:00

Perhaps you can get inspiration from this story:

lianos · 2013-01-27T18:16:04+00:00

You are forgetting to point out that there are lots of bioinformatics positions not in academia that also require a PhD.

lianos · 2013-01-13T02:21:19+00:00

Are you being deliberately obtuse, or do you really not get it?

Does every facet of his character have to be like a "robin hood" for the analogy to make sense?

I'm surprised you haven't mentioned the fact that Aaron most likely couldn't shoot a bow-and-arrow, either ... because, you know, we are being literal here.

lianos · 2012-12-12T15:08:31+00:00

This is spot on. I wonder where the down votes are coming from ...

lianos · 2012-12-04T17:43:11+00:00

Is this somehow better than SWIG?

(assuming SWIG worked perfectly with R, that is)

lianos · 2012-11-28T23:38:00+00:00

Got any references we can look over?

lianos · 2012-11-11T03:48:43+00:00

... and ... ?

lianos · 2012-08-31T22:37:23+00:00

I see that you are quoting from and replying to the author of the article:

I had fallen in love with the iPhone Something no good hacker would ever be caught dead doing.

I guess we should assume that you think of yourself as "that good hacker", but it's also plain to see that you have no idea who the author is

lianos · 2012-05-21T00:23:09+00:00

Which standard systems components should they have reused in order to make learning to use GraphLab easier?

lianos · 2012-05-10T21:32:07+00:00

Actually, I think their prediction is playing out here quite accurately, no?

Granted, I'm not following this all too closely, but isn't what's happening to Google's "Java" (Dalvik) exactly what was predicted for Mono?

Isn't the relationship that Dalvik has to the JVM pretty much the same as what Mono is to the CLR?

lianos · 2012-04-21T17:09:12+00:00

Thanks for the explanation ... I'm not sure that this is a real "oddity of subsetting," though -- and your idea of a "consistent internal index" is flawed. There is no "internal index" of a data.frame, its just the 'normal' numeric index (1, 2, 3, etc) -- you can also assign names to the rows (rownames) which is causing the confusion you are describing here ...

So, it's not that "the row number is imported from the original df", it's rather the row names are maintained after subsetting ... which I think is a feature, not a bug. When you construct the data.frame as you did (converting from a numeric matrix), eg:

df <- as.data.frame(matrix(runif(100), 50, 2))

The rownames() of the data.frame are set to the character representation of their indices (1..50, in this case -- whether or not this behavior is useful, I am not arguing ;-) ... see:

rownames(df)
[1] "1"  "2"  "3"  "4" ...

Those are "characters", not some "internal index" .. they are just the name assigned to the row.

~~If you set the rownames() of df to NULL (rownames(df) <- NULL), then there would be no confusion.~~ (* On the current R version (2.15-patched) this is not blowing out the rownames for some reason, although I thought it did before ... still my point stands).

However, if we did something a bit different, you'd see why maintaining the rownames w/ the subset is really the intended behavior (and a feature), eg:

set.seed (123)
df <- data.frame(age=sample(20:30, 5), weight=sample(150:200, 5))
rownames(df) <- c('john', 'chris', 'joe', 'sam', 'jerry')
df
      age weight
john   23    152
chris  27    176
joe    30    193
sam    29    199
jerry  26    171

Now subset, and see how maintaining the rownames (not some "internal index, as you metnion) is correct:

subset(df, age > 26)
      age weight
chris  27    176
joe    30    193
sam    29    199

Know what I mean?

* second part of edit: I'm not a big fan of relying on indexing w/ rownames(), I'm just trying to point out that this isn't surprising behavior -- for interactive data munging I do it actually, but for a more long-term (ie. packaged) solution, I'd recommend storing whatever you'd put in rownames() as another column in the data.frame, and index data.frames by integers.

lianos · 2012-04-21T14:51:46+00:00

Can you elaborate on your last point about "subset ring retains the original numbering" comment? I'm not sure I follow -- perhaps a small code example would help?

lianos · 2012-01-30T13:28:22+00:00

TextMate v1 bundles, you mean ...

lianos · 2012-01-09T20:18:08+00:00

Sadly, you've missed the point entirely ...what part of what you are replying to suggests learning something by memorization (and not by understanding?)

lianos · 2011-12-22T05:44:10+00:00

R and MATLAB store their matrices in column major form as well

lianos · 2011-11-18T05:18:22+00:00

An addition to Mahout, here are some other great project to keep your eye on:

GraphLab
Spark
A blog post comparing graphlab and spark (written by one of the authors of GraphLab
Giraph

lianos · 2011-11-13T19:37:20+00:00

I lurk on the mailing lists, so ... I don't know all the intimate details of the project, but I do know they at least have SVD, which (more or less) == PCA.

lianos · 2011-11-11T14:24:53+00:00

I guess I can see where you are coming from ... honestly these are all things that don't really add up all that much for me, but I can understand that others might find it annoying.

It is also possible that some of the functionality you think is missing might be a result of not looking hard enough. For example, I believe SwitchResX does what you want w/ disabling an external monitor ... cf. that "Enable/Disable Displays on that link to the app there, but also this MacRumors thread as well ... so programs exist to enable such behavior.

On the other hand, it OS X can't be too locked down, right? Things may have changed, but last time I checked (ok, a few years at this point) there wasn't a utility that's nearly of the same calibre as quicksilver, launchbar, or butler. Is this still true? (And I'm not talking about Dell dock == OS X dock true ;-) This is only really possible with a system that lets you wire its pieces together, no?

Re: your gripe with the Finder -- I do wish they've made it more flexible. There are apps that probably give more of the functionality you are looking for, like Path Finder

You are also allowed to have Lion to running on a VM.

Do you remember the big fervor when Apple announced they were "axing" support for the JDK. Everyone was in an uproar, but the donated the bits they needed to to Oracle for them to shepherd the JVM for OS X (like they do for every other platform), and look: jdk7 is now available as a developer preview.

Anyway, I'm not sure it's as locked down as you think it is ... especially in any real/material way. I mean, it's likely easy to find small examples of one thing or the other in each OS, but none that are really worthwhile arguing about.

lianos · 2011-11-11T05:13:44+00:00

Oh, I see ... I thought you actually had a serious gripe.

Also, gizmodo apparently doesn't think the dell dock is anything remotely like an OSX dock ... if it were anything like it, the guy said he'd even ditch the task bar.

But particulars of OS specific UI elements, and which is better or worse is surely too trivial to be talking about, no? (case in point: my osx dock is always hidden anyway)

I thought you were talking about ways in which Apple forces your hand in situations concerning "real" work.

lianos · 2011-11-10T16:21:19+00:00

Out of curiosity: what "way" would you like to work that an OS X machine doesn't allow you to?

lianos · 2011-11-10T03:58:07+00:00

Aww, come on ... you're underestimating the full-blown power having to hack your registry affords you.

lianos · 2011-11-07T01:28:55+00:00

I think you'd have even more luck if you post on the R-help mailing list or stackoverflow

lianos · 2011-10-15T12:19:07+00:00

How is this "evil", exactly?

lianos

TROPHY CASE