Viewing profile — tom_b

My BS in CS is from NC A&T. My MS in CS in from UNC-CH. Anybody who thinks the hackers from Duke/UNC consistently outshine the hackers from NC A&T is a damn fool. I was regularly F…

I think this a much more nuanced question than a yes-or-no answer can cover. Looking at LinkedIn or indeed.com with just a simple search for Clojure with no geographic qualifier (i…

I was unable to bring Datomic in-house. Mainly because our organization has a huge agreement with Oracle and all our database servers are essentially "free" to teams. So I cheated.…

Congratulations to Cognitect. Hopefully the acquisition will help Rich's retirement funding. (see 'History of Clojure' for the not-so-insider joke here) I have had the pleasure of …

I think much training for dog aggressiveness is more about helping people to understand drives and managing "triggers" than training them out of the animal . . . it seems underappr…

Thelios Major from System76. 64GB memory 8 GB GeForce RTX 2070 Super with 2560 CUDA Cores A couple of NVME SSDs. I install Centos as the OS. Setup, including Nvidia drivers was ver…

Tax policies to reduce smoking rates seem to show reasonable effectiveness: "the rule of thumb in the United States is that a 10 percent price increase on a pack of cigarettes resu…

I remember being at the first Clojure/conj - I had just spent some time learning a bit of Common Lisp and stumbled onto the conference announcement somehow. This was very fortunate…

I have enjoyed all of those and the Stockfighter attempt in this space as well. They all seem to have hit a hard obstacle in convincing the general, non-FAANG hiring market that th…

The response is enthusiastic, but kind of misses the point my original comment was making. All I was saying in that comment is that as a hiring organization, we bring in candidates…

But stats like that also can signal being over-selective. I would gently suggest that it is a mistake to think in terms of unqualified vs highly-qualified candidates and ML for "ca…

Matches my experience on the hiring side. In the group between "don't qualify" and "can't afford", we have a hard time with candidates who are unable (or maybe lack the communicati…

YMMV, but in my non-FAANG experience in the mid-/south- eastern US, tech managers seem to make at least 1.25X for X=senior dev salary. Maybe keep that in mind? My dev friends over …

We've found that graph-based community approaches have some really nice benefits in our bioinformatics data. In particular, we have found that these approaches seem to preserve ver…

Nope. But I think UMAP would be a dimensionality reduction step that you fed into a graph-based community extraction algorithm? In our current code experiments, we have been starti…

Glad to see the article mention dropping in the fastcluster package to replace the default R hclust. I would suggest using the parallelDist library as well instead of the standard …

Late 30's? Get off my lawn, youngster . . . I have had several conversations this year with project manager- or dev team manager-types that lead me to believe that non-software com…

I have been happily running Debian (with xmonad) on a 13 inch Macbook with 16GB of memory and the retina display for almost five years now. The screen works great and I have had gr…

Yep, my family had to do the same ER visit for our treatments. Immune globulin is a blood product and I was told it is atypical for any medical center outside of a hospital to have…

Yes, post-exposure costs in the US for human rabies immune globulin (antibodies isolated from the blood of a vaccinated person) in the United States is roughly a $10,000 to $15,000…

That sounds quite depressing. Would you be willing to share your problem description as given to candidates here? I will say that I have several friends who work in various industr…

The education model (immersive, time-intensive, mastery learning) Lambda School has in place seems like a very sweet spot between bootcamps and traditional university CS programs. …

FTA (examples of data science): targeting health-care customers for hospitals people who can turn social-media clicks and user-posted photos into monetizable binary code is among t…

Yes. I have taught introductory courses to undergraduate and graduate students with only a MS in CS. I think you would probably be able to teach upper-level courses if you could de…