Beliavsky's comments

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: College, the Great Unleveler

"I feel like if we want to start addressing inequality in education, we have to start with private grade schools. In particular, I think that private high schools and grade schools should be stopped, and everyone should be forced to use the public system."

My three children are in public schools, although they all did KG and preschool in private schools. Since the government does not own our children, I don't think it has the right to compel our children to attend a certain school. Are you going to ban homeschooling too?

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: When May I Shoot a Student?

I think that mass shooters want to kill a lot of people before they die, so the prospect of being stopped before they can do so could be a deterrent.

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: When May I Shoot a Student?

Most professors will not carry guns, but knowing that some may be armed could deter massacres like the ones at Virgina Tech or Sandy Hook.

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

Can't you just browse and search "incognito" with Google Chrome?

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: Good math books / activities for children?

Art of Problem Solving is a good web site for math enthusiasts, and their "Beast Academy" books may interest your son. A math curriculum I like is Singapore Math.

I suggest searching the Davidson Gifted Forum http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ for posts about math resources and posting there.

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Pandora Knows if You Are a Republican

They can only do so with error, but I bet that a higher percentage of country music fans than rap music fans are Republican. Given racial voting patterns, "white" genres of music will tend to have more Republicans.

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Male, female or custom? Facebook adds options for users to self-identify

This change does not affect me, but I don't want to be pressured into referring to a male as female if he really is a male. Part of the transgender agenda is forcing others to accept such "gender identities". I don't want to endorse other people's illusions.

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Widespread sex differences in gene expression in the human brain (2013)

"All people are the same: race does not matter."

In the U.S. whites score about one standard deviation above blacks on IQ tests such as WISC and Stanford-Binet, and in adoption studies that try to control for environment, this difference does not go away. Race is more than skin deep.

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Tory Boss of Government Coding Education Initiative Can't Code

I wish Guido van Rossum had left well enough alone, so that the above line was valid code in current Python (it works for Python 2, not Python 3).

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Nadella as Microsoft CEO: A slap in the face for Indian system

The article's criticism of IIT and IIM (elite Indian universities) could be made of the elite U.S. schools too:

"The short point: our system is designed to keep people out, not get them in. The true value of an IIT or IIM is not the intellectual capital they produce, but their filtering expertise – which keeps all but the superlisters out of these institutions. When the people entering the institution are the best among the best, they will shine no matter what the quality of faculty or the curriculum."

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Sony in talks to sell loss-making Vaio PC business

I buy Windows computers from HP and Dell and hardly notice the difference between the two companies. I don't worry that they might stop producing PC's, because I am sure somebody will.

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Julia, the One Programming Language to Rule Them All

Fortran 90 and later versions of Fortran have array operations, as in Matlab, but you can also write loops and have the compiler optimize the code. There already is a high-level language for scientific computing with C-like performance.

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Why do dynamic languages make it more difficult to maintain large codebases?

Maybe 100K LOC in a dynamic language is more difficult to maintain than 100K LOC in a statically typed language, but what if the same functionality requires 500K LOC in the statically typed language? It is easier to maintain a small code base, other things being equal.

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

"They have an assload of cash on hand"

Companies with excess cash are supposed to pay dividends and/or buy back stock.

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Why I'm Betting On Julia

Btw, Fortran arrays start at 1 by default, but the lower bound can be specified by the user, for example

real :: x(-10:10)

is a real vector of 21 elements from -10 to 10.

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Why I'm Betting On Julia

"I want a language to be a tool that I can use to solve scientific and engineering problems with minimal conceptual overhead due to minding language features."

Among compiled languages, isn't that Fortran, especially since Fortran 90 on have multidimensional array operations, like Julia, Numpy, and Matlab.

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Announcing the Female Founders Conference (March 1)

The reason for a Female Founders Conference is presumably that women are under-represented among founders. A quote from Paul Graham may explain why:

http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html "One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you're not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon."

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Show HN: An Open-Source Data Science Curriculum

Arrays in Fortran 90+ are a powerful feature -- there are whole array operations and operations on array slices, as in Matlab and Python with numpy. It's easy to allocate multidimensional arrays. Compilers are good at optimizing code -- if it's easiest to do something with loops you can go ahead and not worry about vectorizing the code, as you might with R or Matlab. There is a lot of statistics code in Fortran, so it's good to have at least a reading knowledge of it.

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Show HN: An Open-Source Data Science Curriculum

I see many books on Python listed. It's a good language for data analysis and scientific computing, especially with scipy, but there are alternatives, of course. I like Fortran 95, which is available in gcc as gfortran. A relevant book for data scientists would be "Developing Statistical Software in Fortran 95" (2005).

Beliavsky | 12 years ago | on: Nassim Taleb: We should retire the notion of standard deviation

If data is drawn from a Laplace distribution of the form p(x) = exp(-|x|), the mean absolute deviation is more informative than the standard deviation, but if its form is close to the normal, p(x) = exp(-x^2), the standard deviation is more important. So whether to use the mean absolute or standard deviation depends on the distribution of the data. There is a field called robust statistics that looks at this question.