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I think the idea is it sets up Neural Networks that are then run in Torch, with some nice diagram generating tools. I don't know if that's something people will actually use, but it looks like a pretty concise way to generate a pretty complicated Neural Network, which could be a worthwhile idea considering how complex the more advanced ones are.


Ah I see. I guess Haskell wrapper for Torch with diagrams doesn't sound as impressive.


It's not exactly a wrapper, since you presumably still use the generated NN in LuaJIT. AI isn't my field, but it seems like a useful tool - actually setting up a complex neural network seems to be a lot of grunt work, comparatively speaking. There's probably a place for a tool that nicely abstracts over that part of the process.


This is a great service actually. Visualizing network architectures is good for teaching and discussing things. I use json in deeplearning4j and it's crazy hard to keep track of all the possible combinations of nets so it gets messy quick.


It has 10 hours of battery life, so I think the idea is that you don't plug it in as often.


I knew a university athlete from the Congo with a tough to pronounce name. He started introducing himself as "Bob" during his flight to Canada.


I mean, it's well known but not well established - I highly doubt there's much sexual harassment in a typical corporate environment with an HR department.


Well, I'm not sure I agree that not much harassment goes on in more established companies, but you're absolutely right that at least they're more likely to have procedures in place for dealing with it.

This is why I'm astonished to see such strenuous effort go into confecting explanations why there might not really be a problem in startup culture. You've got young, inexperienced founders and a tendency to dispense with formal HR practises in favour of "cultural fit" - the ingredients are all there for horrible abuses of power, and yet when said abuses inevitably surface, there's an almost desperate effort to hand-wave them away as isolated incidents. It's bewildering, it really is.

Model View Culture have been publishing some superb work in this area, most relevantly in this article:

http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/hr-antipatterns-at-startu...


Well, there is a huge surplus of PhD's in every field, and there is less industry demand for certain fields (French Lit, for example). This seems like a classic situation where certification in a professional association should be required to teach college, so there can be better collective bargaining at a national scale.


>Also at play is the notion that there are people in computer science that fall more into the design disciplines (i.e. HCI, UI, UX people). Right now, we have nothing for these people except double majoring with art/phycology and the occasional HCI class, but this may change soon. There are certainly frontiers in this area yet to be explored!

Whenever I read articles about social network-type sites that are doing UI changes it seems like there's pretty extensive use of data analysis based on A/B testing for different changes that are being made. Wouldn't a practitioner still need solid coding skills and a strong base in statistics?


>Actually, one might very well argue that you are the jerk, in your own example. Come on, what's one hour? Just do something else while waiting for the person to arrive.

What are they doing for one hour that's so important that other people should wait on them - if I have a meeting at 10 and they aren't there, can I just leave to handle other work and show up at 12?


This attitude is exactly what I have in mind when I'm saying the jerk might not be the initial late person.

If they're late they probably have a reason for it (you might not think they have a good reason though, but who are you to judge that?) they're not doing it for the purpose of annoying you, even though you two might have a meeting you still aren't the centre of the world. So don't leave just to retaliate (because that is why you are talking about leaving and showing up even later) because that will accomplish nothing at all.

Once they arrive you can even tell them they're late, and they will apologize. Anger on the other hand will just leave you both miserable.


I think we all can tell the difference between a good excuse and a lame one. But I think we also all know people who perpetually show up late with excuses, and we also all know people who have their jawns together and ordinarily show up on time. Are you saying that the perpetually late people are just cursed? Because I'm saying they're not cursed; they're at best undisciplined and at worst selfish and inconsiderate.


If you know they perpetually show up late, why don't you plan for that?

I don't know, it's slightly annoying when people are late, but I find even more annoying when people rant to no end about late people.


You could invert your argument to: If you know that people are going to rant when you are late, why don't you try to be on time.


You don't have power on the other people. So do what you can instead of wishing they did what they could.


We're not talking about imposing a 2pm meeting... we're talking about two people who agreed to a 2pm meeting. (Imposition is something else entirely.)

Also, one thing I'd observe is that there's a difference between social occasions and business. Even as an American, when my family says they're going to show up at 2pm, I don't sit there at 1:59 at the door tapping my foot. However, business is different; if you've mutually agreed on 2pm and you come in at 2:40 pm without having checked or communicated, there is a problem there in many cases. There may have been further scheduled events for 2:30 (odds are good you're meeting with someone who has lots of meetings, statistically), or whoknows what. The casual approach to time risks having three unrelated meetings that were scheduled to be separate trying to happen all at once.

Whether firm or casual time is abstractly "best" is a hard problem, but when it comes to business effectiveness I don't have a problem saying punctuality is a benefit to getting more stuff done. "What if I don't want more stuff done because even that is an American thing to say?" Well, surely we'd all rather then get our things done so we can hit the bar freely later? And it isn't an American truth that businesses really need to accomplish things to survive and thrive, it's the nature of the Universe we live in, where we must work for our sustenance, however distasteful you may find that.


> We're not talking about imposing a 2pm meeting... we're talking about two people who agreed to a 2pm meeting. (Imposition is something else entirely.)

On the face of it, I agree. However, I think this whole thread is neglecting an important dimension by only mentioning "the" time of the meeting. No one ever expects a person to arrive at the exact instant of the scheduled event. There's an interval implied by "the" time, and it's quite possible that the difference here is in cultural expectations regarding the size of the interval or its placement relative to the stated time (US Military culture, for example, seems to have an implied tolerance of -5 min / +0 min).

It may even be the case that your hypothetical second party thinks the first is a bit quirky for insistently describing the meeting as occurring at a particular time, when it is "obvious" to them that what is meant is "we'll meet this afternoon".

Edit: moving scare quotes ("the time" -> "the" time)


This is actually a weird quirk of mine but I try very hard to, if I have a meeting scheduled at e.g. 2pm, to show up at exactly 2pm according to my cell phone, which is more likely to display the same time as their cell phone. Same if I'm visiting somebody's house; if they tell me to show up at 8pm, I'm likely to walk slowly from my car so I can be knocking at their door right as the time switches over from 7:59. Unless they're a very good friend of mine and I'm confident they won't mind me being there early.

The way around this is for people to tell me to show up "around" 8pm or whenever.

I fully recognize that this is something peculiar to myself, and I would never begrudge anybody else for showing up at e.g. 2:04 for a 2pm meeting. But I would definitely apologize for being a few minutes late if I did the same.


Related:

"Michigan Time — The tradition of starting every class, meeting or event 10 minutes late."

http://www.hr.umich.edu/um/um-isms.html


And it isn't an American truth that businesses really need to accomplish things to survive and thrive, it's the nature of the Universe we live in, where we must work for our sustenance, however distasteful you may find that.

It's neither an American truth nor the nature of the Universe, it's a story. Older than America (not the continent nor the people in it, but the idea), to be sure, but not that old. The necessity of work, indeed the celebration of it, is obviously interesting to discuss in the age of automation.


However, business is different...

...in the West culture.


Here's the thing, though. Maybe I don't have a business meeting; maybe I'm supposed to go watch my kid's soccer game and I allotted literally an hour for a fifteen minute meeting, because I know this guy shows up late, and here he is an hour late. Am I supposed to tell the kids to just play soccer an hour early so I can watch the game? Should I miss the game just because this guy can't be bothered to get somewhere on time? Should I allot two hours for a fifteen minute meeting?

At what point does that become less reasonable than expecting other people to show up at the time they agreed to show up?


Isn't that exactly the point I made? You mentioned that people who rant about people being late annoy you. You don't have the power to change them, but you can adjust your own action and be on time. I am not saying you should btw, I am just saying your argument could be interpreted in this way as well.


It's not anger - they have other things to do so they're late, I have other things to do so I can't afford to sit around waiting for an hour. If I'm going over to meet someone, I expect them to be ready, if they tell me it's going to be thirty minutes I'll adjust accordingly. It's the cell phone era, there's no real excuse for not giving someone a heads up if you're going to be late.


You could, but if you were doing that to spite the other then it wouldn't be a very fruitful business relationship.


Yeah, my supervisor for my undergrad thesis is a brilliant researcher who's still publishing good work 20+ years into his career. He was just a normal dude in undergrad who started in engineering but switched to math because he disliked project management, and he certainly wasn't in any sort of "young genius" program through grade school. But his PhD thesis was runner-up for best in the country, he consistently presents at all the major conferences in his field, and he has even won a few teaching awards.


I'm from Eastern Canada, right now a pragmatic student can go out West and work for two years, return to a community college with free tuition while drawing unemployment for a two year diploma where they learn a trade, and then transfer into a four year university to finish up a relevant bachelor's degree in 2.5 years.

My friend lives with a dude who took that route who's now doing his doctorate in English. He still goes and works on the oil rigs in the summer, then spends the rest of the year studying 19th century english lit.


Of course, working oil rigs is inherently dangerous work. People die or get permanently disfigured doing that work. Not everyone of course, but enough that you should strongly consider if that's a risk worth taking.


>CS entry level classes traditionally fell into the latter category. Demand has resulted in students treating them as part of the former.

I was in a funny position with this. In university, I had taken the engineering "Intro to C" class as a first year student, but when I switched to a math major, I had to take the intro level CS classes.

Now, the first year CS classes are required for math, physics and chemistry majors at my school so you'd expect the syllabus to take that into account. The class was almost entirely built around working with the Java API and object hierarchies and writing bloated Java programs to perform simple tasks. It was a huge waste of time, and I didn't have much time to spend on a freshman level general ed requirement. I like to think my whining was one of the reasons why the math department finally made the push to offer a scientific programming course for the rest of the science departments.

I don't mean to bash my school's CS department, either. I took some higher level Systems Programming and Algorithms courses and thought they were fantastic. They just treated their intro courses like software engineering weed-out courses, when other departments required them as general ed courses.


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