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joshuaeckroth's comments

joshuaeckroth | 8 years ago | on: Introducing extended line endings support in Notepad

Almost feels like an April Fool's joke. For 30 years Notepad had this bug and I've always wondered why they never fixed it. It was just "one of those things" like the unusual arguments to Unix find or tar commands. I find it very surprising that someone finally bothered to fix it!

joshuaeckroth | 8 years ago | on: Lessons for Building AI-Driven Products

Their lesson, "Build Breadth-first (Data/Pipeline/Model) instead of Depth-first (AI model)" is insightful. Once the pipeline/etc. are built perhaps the AI part is not even needed any more. Finding this out early can save you a lot of trouble.

Another perspective, in which we talk about on integrating AI into existing workflows, among other lessons:

Smith, Reid G., and Joshua Eckroth. "Building AI Applications: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow." AI Magazine 38.1 (2017): 6-22.

https://www2.stetson.edu/~jeckroth/downloads/smith-eckroth-2...

joshuaeckroth | 14 years ago | on: I have written a textbook. Now what?

For what it's worth, your alisp ("Arrow Lisp"?) implementation and Sketchy Lisp book were my introduction to Lisp. That was a decade ago and it "changed my life" in the way that learning Lisp can. Thanks for writing such interesting material!

joshuaeckroth | 15 years ago | on: The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle

The last bundle was fantastic. My wife & I are still playing World of Goo, Osmos, and Braid. We're both busy people so these are exactly (and only) the kinds of games we enjoy.

joshuaeckroth | 15 years ago | on: Self-Taught Programmers vs CS-Educated Programmers

As a PhD student myself, I've realized that working through the program is only half "reading research papers and arriving at some unique insight," which you could say is self-teaching. The other half is presenting your ideas to your advisor, peers, faculty, etc. and handling significant criticism. This occurs in higher-level classes, as well, in which the feedback from the prof. is a very important part of the experience. That, of course, is not "self-teaching," far from it.

On a more general note, I think people should not make claims about what happens in situations (e.g. PhD programs) that one has not experienced herself. Claims like "whatever that person learned in college could have been learned outside college" is too often false simply because no one person can experience both sides of the debate.

joshuaeckroth | 15 years ago | on: Joy of Clojure – In the Books

I was commenting to my wife the other day that while JoC does not seem to be written for complete beginners, that fact is actually a very good thing. There is a lot of Beginning Clojure / Beginning Lisp / etc. material out there. What I really wanted was a book for those who have already seen the light, so to speak, of Lisp. I've read The Little Lisper. I've read Lisp 1.5 Manual. I've written a Lisp interpreter in C. And so on. I'll use Lisp as long as I am still allowed to do so (I'm a grad student, so no issues yet!).

So I love Lisp and I love Clojure for being a new Lisp.

JoC talks directly to me. It references works and people I know about, but most of which I do not know enough about. It talks about how amazing Lisp is but tells me even more than I already knew. Much more. It's written as if the authors are saying, "Yes of course Lisp and Clojure are great, but here are all the reasons WHY." For example, the section "nil Pun With Care" is obviously written for someone who knows the variations on 'nil' found in different Lisps. JoC's style is similar to Rich Hickey's famous presentations ("Yes, nil is different in Clojure... ok, let's just get through this slide, you knew we'd have to at some point...").

JoC really takes Lisp appreciation to the next level. I was waiting for something like this!

joshuaeckroth | 16 years ago | on: The Future of Computer Science, and Why Every Other Major Sucks By Comparison

I'm not sure slide 6 counts as a positive viewing of women. The Facebook page is obviously doctored (such as "Sex: San Francisco, CA"). Her "Activities" are "food stuff, art, fixing up the house, friends." She is supposedly a Stanford Alum but remember this talk was at MIT. She also works at "NoddaCorp."

I also feel slide 6 is generally a negative view of CS, since it refers to "The Matrix", and the joke in the notes is about how people already upload their brains to the web and escape "real-life". Finally, "these are some of the LESS interesting things we talk about in computer science!"

This slide does not show that creating tech is for everyone, simply that, in this case women at least, make significant use of it (for better or worse...).

joshuaeckroth | 16 years ago | on: The Future of Computer Science, and Why Every Other Major Sucks By Comparison

I don't know about "an obsession with 'diversity'" but that was not the point of my comment. The point was to find ways to avoid isolating women. It may happen that in completely "politically correct" disciplines there are, say, more men than women (or vice versa) but why would that be the case? Because of something biological? That's a bit absurd.

It's perfectly ok to value competence and interest-level over diversity. But why are there significantly fewer women in computer science? Because they are less competent or interested for some biological reason? Absurd.

Few women are in computer science for a host of reasons (and probably more we do not know about). Perhaps the slides I pointed out in the presentation are part of the reasons. It's hard to be sure but when we give presentations about joining CS, perhaps we can specifically try to avoid isolating women. (Of course, I have not solidly argued that those particular slides do isolate women.) And I mean specifically, intentionally avoid isolating women. That is, read over the presentation twice; the second reading is to find such issues.

joshuaeckroth | 16 years ago | on: The Future of Computer Science, and Why Every Other Major Sucks By Comparison

Bringing women into computer science is also an important task. Of course we need also to address keeping women in computer science, but since this presentation is about admittance, we need to be sure women are not isolated.

Slide 6 represents Facebook with an attractive woman. (why?) Slide 13 compares steak to salad. (why?) (and note that it's not as if women do not eat steak, but culturally steak is a more "manly" food than salad)

joshuaeckroth | 16 years ago | on: Why Men's Friendships Are Different

"'I wouldn't talk about my insecurities with the guys,' says Mr. Schulsinger, a consultant. 'All my real insecurities about work, finances, the kids those I share with my wife.'" - i.e., the wife bears it all, and the guys just have fun. Of course, the wife is usually uncredited for this work.
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