Viewing profile — pbh

You're probably in a much better position to evaluate than I am! My guess is that more Octave-based classes would translate into more users and more code written for Octave down th…

I've always been a bit sad about it, but everyone involved is probably a rational actor. Computer science professors probably view a couple hundred dollars per MATLAB network licen…

This is a great description of R usage (import, clean, fit models), but I think a slightly erroneous explanation of R history. John Chambers created "S" at Bell Labs. S was a progr…

ezl does not seem to have gone all the way down the rabbit hole with the oDesk tracking link. (I work at oDesk, but not on this, so I was really curious.) After about 3 HTTP redire…

Actually, I thought his comment was quite delicate. I used to think that DB comparisons were bad because of vested interests, like Oracle refusing to allow anyone to benchmark them…

I think the most succinct response to this question I've found comes from the Starcraft II casting archon, "Tastosis" during one of those filler periods where nothing is happening …

Is there a way to fix the recursion depth problem with this solution? To me, the memoized version is more clear and should be just as efficient as the iterative version. However, t…

This tutorial was a few months ago, though it was quite good. The slides are here if anyone is curious: http://www.slideshare.net/ipeirotis/managing-crowdsourced-hu...

I know a lot of Daphne's former and current students and she seems to be a great advisor who genuinely cares about producing both excellent research and top quality research talent…

Is this a CVPR reference, or just an amazingly accurate comment?

Yes, I think computer vision is a common term for the area (at least, among academics and researchers), and CV is a common abbreviation. Examples include Intel's OpenCV and the CVP…

I agree with your point, but with an important caveat. You are right that application developers should not be ignorant of databases, and DBAs should not be ignorant of what applic…

Unknown. However, the three classes are intended to match up with Database Systems: The Complete Book (which, in the interests of full disclosure, is written partly by my former ad…

To answer a few of the database questions that keep popping up in this thread: 1. Is it worth understanding relational algebra? Yes. Definitely. It's not that hard, there's more or…

Sure, of course, premature optimization is the root of all evil and all that. I presume you're reacting to a bad experience in the past you had with some young developer not unders…

I'm not an expert, but this is what I've cobbled together as a fellow Ruby/Rails startup person. Fault Tolerance : Just use Heroku. We've seen maybe an hour of downtime in a few mo…

Nobody seems to have picked up on the "external" spam filter part of the response. My guess is that Y! uses some somewhat dodgy external providers of spam/content filtering. Histor…

This is really helpful. I will definitely check it out. Also, I'm really amused that apparently the creator of DataMapper is (a) selling me on using Sequel and (b) the testimonial …

SQLAlchemy (and its excellent documentation) is the reason I switched to using an ORM. (Now that I am in Ruby land though, I am a little sad that arel/ActiveRecord/DataMapper do no…

What's most interesting to me about this article is that the management of GAE seems to actually be getting worse over time. GAE has always had two main disadvantages. First, there…

I went through this thought process. I really liked Python and auto-scaling, so GAE seemed really appealing. But the combination of lack of SQL and inflexibility of architecture le…

Somewhat related, I found Arrington's talk at Startup School '08 to be pretty good for getting an idea of how he views the startup tech press. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbUnat…

Sorry for the delay! We actually got a bunch of orders, so we're in the process of running brainstorms for all of them. Since the blog post said that most of the iterations were a …

This is definitely a direction we're considering going in, but we're not quite sure exactly what people want. Are there particular features we should provide, constraints on domain…