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jsyedidia's comments

jsyedidia | 6 years ago | on: ACM Prize in Computing Awarded to AlphaGo Developer

Also, he's written an incredible series of groundbreaking papers throughout his career, going back to 2005. His papers tend to hold up very well. At this point, I carefully read any paper with his name on it, and I believe he very much deserves the honor.

jsyedidia | 6 years ago | on: US now nation with most coronavirus cases

One should of course normalize by population. The USA has a population of 327 million. Eight nations in Western Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany) which are the core of the EU, have a population of 303 million. The US has 82,612 cases today according to worldometers.info. Those eight nations in Western Europe have a total of 289,767 cases today, which is about 3.78 times the US rate on a per capita basis.

jsyedidia | 10 years ago | on: Visualizing popular machine learning algorithms

That's why we developed the "Boundary Forest" algorithm which is a fast nearest-neighbor type algorithm with generalization at least as good as K-NN, while being able to respond to queries very quickly.

It maintains trees of examples that let it train and respond to test queries in logarithmic time with the number of stored examples, which can be much less than the overall number of training samples. It thus maintains k-NN's property of very fast training time, and is also an online algorithm, and can be used for regression problems as well as classification.

See our paper that was presented at AAAI 2015 here: http://www.disneyresearch.com/publication/the-boundary-fores...

jsyedidia | 10 years ago | on: Udacity Says It Can Teach Tech Skills to Millions, and Fast

I would not lump edX in with Coursera and Udacity. As noted in Wikipedia: "EdX differs from other MOOC providers, such as Coursera and Udacity, in that it is a nonprofit organization and runs on open-source software."

At first, it seemed to me like Coursera, Udacity and EdX offered similar quality courses. But at this point, I think that, on average, the EdX ones tend to be significantly better. And that difference does seem to me to be related to the fact that EdX is not a for-profit institution trying to extract money from you. Also keep in mind that the EdX systems were largely developed at MIT, and EdX was originally intended as the improved version of OCW.

jsyedidia | 10 years ago | on: Paris Is Sharing Electric Cars by the Thousand—Will It Play in Indianapolis?

They are responsible for approving funding, and the mayor appropriated $6 million for the project without getting their approval. They would now have to find a way to pay for it, but their main point is that he overstepped his authority. It is unlikely to have been approved by the council if it was brought to them, because probably a majority of the council believe it's a poor use of Indianapolis' funds.

The above information is based on a quick Google search.

jsyedidia | 10 years ago | on: Literate: A Modern Literate Programming System

One difference is that Literate isn't tied to a particular text editor like org/babel is tied to Emacs. You can edit .lit files in any text editor. That said, while there already exists a Vim plugin to handle .lit files, there isn't yet any Emacs mode, or plugins for other text editors. Such contributions would be welcomed.

jsyedidia | 10 years ago | on: Literate: A Modern Literate Programming System

The output is basically designed to look like the output of Knuth and Levy's CWEB tool. Maybe a better example to look at on the "try it" page is the wc.lit example, which makes a word count program. It's based on Knuth and Levy's wc.w tutorial example, and gives a similar output.

Of course, there are advantages of Literate's output compared with CWEB's; it's more flexible in that you can embed arbitrary HTML in the output, so you can easily put images into your explanations, and you can put as many code blocks and text blocks as you like in each paragraph.

jsyedidia | 10 years ago | on: Literate: A Modern Literate Programming System

Thanks for the comment. Because this "Literate" software outputs nicely formatted code (including automatically included comments identifying code blocks) in the target language, it's not too big a deal, you can just see what line the compiler errors are referring to in the target source code. CWEB's approach of treating the tangled code as only intended for machine reading has the major drawback that you can't share the target source code with others and expect them to be able to read it; they need to buy into CWEB too. So there's a trade-off here.
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