Hey thanks for sharing that. Glad to see there is some diversity when it comes to civil liberties advocates. (not that there is anything wrong with the ACLU as far as I can tell)
"Our four pillars of litigation are private property, economic liberty, free speech and school choice." - their website
What's the deal with school choice? Seems kinda random
One thing I wish advocacy groups allowed is donating towards narrower goals. For instance I support most of what the ACLU does, but I don't really care for their views on gay marriage and don't particularly want to fund that part. It would be great if I could donate to more specific parts of the organization (same goes for public radio, haha)
> What's the deal with school choice? Seems kinda random
There is a religious subset of the libertarian crowd that is all about those four issues. School choice means religious and/or home schooling (which tends to also be religion centered).
Their intersection with the civil liberties crowd is pretty small - they dislike acknowledging that there are systemic problems beyond their main issues. For example they don't believe in anti-discrimination laws because they say the market place (private property and economic liberty) will sort it all out - despite all historical evidence to the contrary.
For me, seeing that list would make me wary. My impression of such groups is that there are indeed some people who truly believe that but there are plenty for which it is simply cover for bigotry.
The enemy of my enemy isn't necessarily my friend.
There is a religious subset of the libertarian crowd that is all about those four issues. School choice means religious and/or home schooling (which tends to also be religion centered).
School choice can also mean vouchers for semi-public technical or accelerated schools.
ACLU does quite a bit more than just support gay marriage, though. If they do a lot of things you think are great, and a few you're meh about, it's still good to donate.
The people who donate primarily for the gay marriage fight don't get to earmark their money either.
I don't see why they don't make it possible to earmark money - I think they would end up getting a LOT more funding:
People that don't want to fund gay marriage advocacy would donate to the issues that they find more important, and people that feel strongly about gay marriage would donate more because they know it would all go towards their pet issue.
Umm... did you actually read the link that you just cited? “Multiple factors are involved, but in general, lower to middle income couples usually benefit from filing as a married couple, while upper income couples are often penalized.”
Why do you oppose gay marriage? I'm not looking to start a debate, I won't even respond if you'd prefer (tho I'm sure others will...). I'm genuinely curious about the reasoning from someone who has given it critical thought and can articulate their viewpoint well.
Hey, the original parent poster: (I figure I'd weigh in)
I'm not strongly against gay marriage. I simply don't support it. Sorry if my explanation is a little disjointed. There isn't one particular issue that explains it all.
I see the whole issue as completely artificial. It was almost entirely created and started by Gavin Newsom (former mayor of SF). It was a demogogic move on his part to try to get support for his run for governor several years later.
Aside: Ironic it backfired and ended up pigeon holeing him as a far left politician.
No one talked about or wanted gay marriage before he brought it up.
A more nebulous reason is that society is moving away from marriage. People are more and more living in civil unions. Marriage has become a religious/traditional thing. So revising/redefining antiquated traditions to appease a group of people seems unnecessary.
I think the idea of redefining a term like marriage is also rather problematic for me. It's always described a union between a man and a woman, since like the times of Hammurabi - and now we're just redefining it? It seems a little absurd.
The address the issue, we created a new term. "Civil Unions". But for some reason this isn't good enough - and I don't know why. Seems like the real goal is to redefine a several thousand year old term - which kinda seems revisionist to me.
Another argument I've seen and that I've never seen addressed is: why do gay couples get to marry and not polyamorous people? Seems like there is a double standard here.I personally feel like if they're going to go through all of this, they might as well allow all marriage.
At the end of the day I wouldn't really care if gay marriage passed. What bothers me the most is that so much time, effort and money is spent on something that is a rather insignificant issue.
The right to visit loved ones at a hospital and the tax benefits are more symptomatic of broken hospital/tax laws than a huge national issue on par with the civil rights movement. I think calling gay marriage a civil rights issue is hyperbolic and disingenuous (and is polyamorous marriage a civil rights issue too?). I think there are way way way more important issues currently to deal. Thousands of people are rotting in jails for non violent crimes, thousands of people have their lives ruined by medical bills, thousands of people are forced into plea bargains for crimes they never committed. There is so much suffering happening around us, and we spend out time arguing about redefining marriage. It's just really frustrating for me to see this artificial debate occupy so much of the collective unconscious of the country (and now the world).
> But for some reason this isn't good enough - and I don't know why.
The same reason "separate but equal" wasn't good enough for black people in the mid 20th century: It isn't equal at all.
It's not about redefining a term or forcing people to think a certain way. It's about being recognized on a legal level as being equal.
> why do gay couples get to marry and not polyamorous people? Seems like there is a double standard here.
There's a stigma against polygamy due to it being used almost entirely as a way to abuse and imprison women and children. That's also ignoring the legal hurdles; for example, power of attorney gets tricky when there is more than one spouse. Same with inheritance.
> What bothers me the most is that so much time, effort and money is spent on something that is a rather insignificant issue.
You think it's insignificant because it doesn't affect you. However, for a lot of gay and lesbian couples, it's a huge issue in their lives for many reasons. The fact that you can't even imagine this being a serious issue for someone else is quite telling, and it's something all too common amongst people who argue against gay marriage.
You should take some time and look into yourself to see why you have such trouble empathizing with others.
>The same reason "separate but equal" wasn't good enough for black people in the mid 20th century: It isn't equal at all
"Separate but equal" when it comes to schools is very different than equality under the law; the latter being much easier to achieve and can be rectified by law when it falls short. Separate but equal in schools is intrinsically unequal, this is not true for civil unions. I know that the attempts to hitch gay marriage to the civil rights wagon is a stumbling block for some people.
> Another argument I've seen and that I've never seen addressed is: why do gay couples get to marry and not polyamorous people? Seems like there is a double standard here.
Restricting marriage to pairs of opposite sex plainly discriminates on sex in the same way that restricting marriage to pairs of the same race discriminated on race. Who you are permitted to marry is determined by your race/sex.
Limiting marriage to pairs does not discriminate in the same way. It may or may not be an inappropriate restriction, but its not the same type of discrimination that is at issue with either the opposite-sex or the same-race restrictions, so there is no "double-standard" in eliminating either or both of those restrictions and not eliminating the restriction to pairs.
I'm inclined to agree with you. Gay Marriage isn't a civil right's issue, it's a solution to a set of civil rights issues. Legalizing gay marriage doesn't help the child raised by his mom and an unrelated "auntie" who can't visit the kid in the hospital. It doesn't help the two best friends who have been living in a non-romantic domestic partnership for 20 years who can't both live and work in the same country.
I would prefer if we just make it illegal for anyone (IRS, immigration, employers, etc) to discriminate based on marital status. Problem solved.
Interestingly, I agree with a lot of what you said. I never understood the resistance to "civil unions". Why try to co-op a word with an established meaning when civil unions are in all practical respects exactly the same? I voted for gay marriage in the most recent election, but its always seemed like a non-issue to me. As long as there is no legal discrimination, who gives a flying fuck what its called?
The reoccurring bifurcation of talent and resources in the open source community is really disheartening. Can't we focus on one or two libraries and make them actually good? Or at least fork off of something that already exists and add your own features. I look at benchmarks of the existing tools and one library will do one operation very efficiently, while another will work well with something. Often the differences in speed are huge (more than a factor of 10). So I end up having to flip a coin in choosing which library to use.
With all due respect, did you even read the title of the post? This is a distributed-memory library, unlike all of the ones you just mentioned. This is a fundamental difference in design and capability. The only related libraries are ScaLAPACK, PLAPACK, and DPLASMA.
Essentially all distributed dense linear algebra libraries are built on top of sequential dense linear algebra libraries (mine as well, but on the interface rather than the implementation). Distributed libraries are at least an order of magnitude more complex than their sequential counterparts.
the C++ linear algebra libraries are basically syntactic sugar for interacting with optimized Fortran libraries like BLAS, LAPACK, etc. (I'm sure I'm overlooking some complexity here, because the C++ libraries, while linking to the same Fortran libraries have very different run times)
Yours interacts with ScaLAPACK and other distributed memory libraries.
Why would it not be possible to simply extend say armadillo or eigen to interact with distributed memory libraries? If you need more syntax, then extend the interface.
Elemental implements, as opposed to wraps, the distributed-memory algorithms. In other words, it does not call any library like ScaLAPACK; it is an alternative approach. Elemental builds on top of BLAS/LAPACK/MPI in order to provide a nice interface to dense linear algebra on clusters/supercomputers.
The other major difference is that sequential libraries tend to get away with letting users not have to worry about where data resides. This is of fundamental importance in distributed libraries, and, for this reason, it is usually a bad idea to think of simply modifying sequential APIs.
So why not contribute to (or extend) say ScaLAPACK to make it do what you need and add a wrapped to an existing linear algebra library?
Looking at ScaLAPACK, it's been developed since 1995. I've never touched it, but it's probably many many lines of code (and maybe a few PhD thesis) with all sorts of kinks worked out that will take you decades to iron out yourself. To throw out all that knowledge/work/man-hours and to start from scratch seems like a waste.
Because ScaLAPACK has a cumbersome interface, poor internal design, relies on incorrect premises that affect performance (block cyclic vs. elemental cyclic), and is buggy. In contrast, Elemental is a joy to use and is almost always faster, often by a large margin (see the Elemental paper). Elemental is not a toy project by any means; it is already the basis for a large share of the interesting parallel linear algebra research and is used by many important applications. Jack is currently the best researcher/implementer in the direct linear algebra world. Anyone that knows me knows that I am a critical bastard that does not throw such praise around lightly.
I appreciate the complements, but I disagree with a few of your points:
1. What granularity to distribute the entries in the matrix is a long and subtle argument which doesn't provide a clear winner for every operation (the current conclusions are different for LU with partial pivoting vs. reduction to tridiagonal form). I would by no means say that the approach used by ScaLAPACK is wrong, but only that it is unnecessarily complex and only one operation purposefully targets the finest granularity case.
2. Again, I appreciate the complement, but I don't think that arguments from authority are valid, nor do I think that one can be the "best". I have a large number of colleagues doing wonderful work, much of which I find extremely impressive.
Also, it would be good to disclose that you're affiliated with the project you were promoting.
It is often unhelpful when people who have "never touched" a piece of software comment on it. If you had touched ScaLAPACK or Elemental, you would realize that the algorithmic know-how and performance engineering from ScaLAPACK has been absorbed into Elemental. However, ScaLAPACK was being hampered by the conscious decision to maintain interface compatibility with LAPACK. One of the most valuable things about Elemental is that it can dispense with this antiquated API. Moreover, Elemental has a modern configure and build system, I/O support, and a vibrant development community. I would recommend that you investigate the community resources to satisfy your strong curiosity in this area.
The research behind ScaLAPACK was very worthwhile and led to a huge number of algorithms and insights, and it took me several years of earnest weekend/late-night work to get Elemental to its current state (often drawing from the previous work on ScaLAPACK and PLAPACK). I have referenced a large number of their publications in my source code.
With that said, if you were familiar with the source code and APIs of both libraries, I think that you would see a clear benefit. This is supported by the way that Elemental is growing and arguably has more functionality than ScaLAPACK (with the notable exception being a parallel Schur decomposition). Over the past couple of years, the library has primarily been developed to support my research goals, but a large number of research groups are actively using it now.
The rules of HN state: "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."
I think you have unintentionally violated the last provision. Please don't post about things you have not taken the time to investigate at all, which is true by your own admission: "I've never touched [ScaLAPACK]".
Unlikely. And I believe that the issue is that some politicians still have an old school boy mentality where nerds/geeks are somehow lesser than them.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) famously said "Bring in the Nerds" during SOPA hearings. He then continued to call people in technology nerds multiple times. Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrrj9Wc2L84
Rep. Mel Watts (D-NC) made it a point in his opening statement during the SOPA hearings to mention that he "is not a nerd" and therefore doesn't understand the technological parts of the bill. Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6x1sYYqKLY
Until congress starts to realize that nerds are not basement dwellers, and instead are pop culture (Facebook, The Internship) they will continue to roll their eyes at any sort of lobbying.
Until congress starts to realize that nerds are not basement dwellers, and instead are pop culture (Facebook, The Internship) they will continue to roll their eyes at any sort of lobbying.
Good. That creates an opportunity for more enlightened people to challenge the incumbents, backed by the ample funding that the nerds are going to be throwing around increasingly in order to protect their industry from the incompetents.
A saying that begins "First they ignore you" comes to mind.
That seems like wishful thinking. Nerds don't run for office. They're not interested and mostly busy doing other stuff. Spending Valley lobby dollars might buy our industry a timeshare in a politician, but "our" rep won't have any more respect for nerds than anybody else in Washington.
It would, except that the JVM is short a stack -- Forth really likes having two. A Toy Forth is a great next step after writing a Toy Lisp. It's like exploring an alternate universe, where any sort of abstraction between you and the hardware should be knocked down in the name of simplicity.
A few great places to get started:
- Forth Warrior, a programming game using a java-based Forth machine with 2d sprites.
- Jones Forth, a literate x86 forth implementation (great for learning plumbing)
- Retro Forth, a minimalist little virtual machine and Forth image that targets it.
None of these are ANS Forth / FIG Forth / etc compatible, which I think is in keeping with Moore's tradition of just whipping up a new dialect whenever he has a new problem domain.
A Forth Haiku is an attempt to mix mathematics, art, and the
Forth programming language. It resembles a texture shader,
however, the emphasis is on direct expression in the
resulting image.
The Forth program describing each Haiku is run once per pixel
over a square image. Forth cells are floating point.
Conditions return 1 instead of -1. The position is available
from the words x and y, which range from 0 to 1, which the
origin in the lower left hand corner. The haiku returns the
desired color in (red, green, blue, alpha), with alpha being
topmost on the stack. If the stack has less than 4 items
default values are assumed: red:0, green:0, blue:0, alpha:1.
Like a traditional haiku, an ideal Forth Haiku has 3 lines
of 5, 7, 5 words. Compositions which don't fit the haiku form
are either 'short' (less than 140), or 'long'.
> Can someone actually explain to me what Cygwin does internally? Doesn't Windows already implement POSIX?.
Used to. Subsystem for UNIX Applications is now deprecated.
Cygwin runs on top of Win32, and its library functions call into Win32. Thus, it is strictly a compatibility layer.
Whereas SUA runs alongside Win32 and does not depend on Win32 APIs. Thus, it is theoretically a replacement for Win32, for people who wanted to run a UNIX environment on top of the NT kernel. Practically, however, it was used primarily for application porting.
Zeppelins can't really deflate because there is not pressure difference between the inside and outside of the zeppelin. If there were to be a tear in the fabric, gases would simple start mixing and the buoyancy of the aircraft would start to decrease. I suspect this would cause a rapid decent (but I'm not sure if it would be lethal)
"Personally I know I eat much more fries if I eat them with ketchup and I will eat much more steak if I eat it with steak sauce."
Not to detract from your other excellent points but:
1 - it makes it easier to eat more because it's less dry. If you eat a bunch of fries with nothing it will turn into a huge lump in your stomach and you won't want more.
2 - insoluble fiber in apples slows fructose absorption, but a hunk of fatty meat does not? Fat slows absorption through the intestine.
3 - Vinegar is supposed to suppress appetite. Eating a pickle when your hungry will 4/6 times make you feel a lot less hungry.
I'm not exactly an expert on this kind of thing, but from what I understand, Eigen and Armadillo [1] are the best performing libraries in this space. I'd probably go with Eigen, since it appears to be used in more high-profile places and thus more likely to keep being maintained.
uBLAS, on the other hand, does not perform that well in comparison, but it is more likely to keep being maintained as part of Boost.
Blaze [2] is supposed to be very high-performance, but it is relatively new, so there's no way to tell where the chips may fall on this one.
Armadillo is also used in pretty well known places: NASA, Siemens, Intel, Boeing, Stanford, CMU, MIT, Schlumberger, Deutsche Bank, US Navy, etc. (source: access logs for Armadillo website).
It's also the basis for the MLPACK machine learning library:
http://mlpack.org/
Additionally, there are Armadillo bindings to Python and the R language:
Well, I was comparing apples to apples (i.e., C++ expression template linear algebra libraries). Some (most?) of them [1,2] are linkable against BLAS routines from Intel MKL or ATLAS or whatever.
Choosing between two careers, say engineering and being a marine zoologist are equivalent in socially attributed worth and both require a similar amount of effort education-wise. Most people wouldn't argue that being an engineer is in an obvious way "better".
Choosing between going to college or not, for most people isn't an equal choice. The vast majority of people view going to college as a better option.
Slightly O/T. A buddy of mine was saying last night that his lady suggested looking at a hair regrowth product, on inspecting the packaging and marketing material he found the wonderful claim:
"Up-to 4 times more effective than a placebo in clinical testing"
You would be surprised at how many medicines on the market compare effectivity to placebo. It's mostly done in instances where there is a chance that the drug may not even work. By comparing it to a placebo, you're as close to as you can be to leveling the playing field to show it is more effective than doing nothing.
There are hair loss products, such as Propecia, that are effective. Unfortunately the side effects can be severe: low testosterone, loss of libido, infertility, erectile dysfunction.
Anyone considering hair loss medication should do some concerted research.
Anybody considering Propecia should SERIOUSLY consider the consequences. Losing your hair, especially as a young man, might be stressful. But consider the possible alternative of never again being able to achieve an erection. Multiple case studies have indicated that Propecia can cause indefinite sexual dysfunction, even after you quit taking the drug. The anecdotal evidence online is much worse.
So tread carefully. The set of women who are sexually attracted to bald men is much, much larger than the set of women who are sexually attracted to men who are unable to have sex.
Just try out Rogaine/Regaine (whatever it's called there). The active ingredients are minoxidil and cutane.
They're off-the-counter products, but you still might want to talk to your doctor about it, not because there are any significant side effects, but because it's a good habit.
There's a drug on the market that's taken by patients who had prostate cancer. It grows back your hair and is being bought off - label for it.
I forgot the name.
When (real) clinical trials are constructed against placebo, the statistical testing is constructed accordingly. If you were comparing against an existing drug, for instance, you might be testing to show it's equal-to or equal-or-better-than (perhaps your new drug is cheaper, or works on a different metabolic pathway, or has fewer side effects, that make it worth adding to the formulary if it otherwise has equal effectiveness). If an existing treatment doesn't exist, you'd compare against placebo, but now the stats testing would be specifically for superiority.
You know, upon thinking about it, I'm not sure that many (or even most) clinical trials use one-sided testing. It makes sense to do so, and would increase power for the particular side chosen, but I can't recall ever seeing it in a paper.
I've seen it in a couple of low-key (read: Non-FDA) trials, but for anything FDA-scale I think most people are wary about submitting studies that presume their subject can't possibly have -worse- results. If it's one of the early Phase 3's, it's just an unwarranted assumption, and people will be all over you for picking a more lenient study design without damn good reason to.
"Sometimes patients given a placebo treatment will have a perceived or actual improvement in a medical condition, a phenomenon commonly called the placebo effect."
A double blind study observing the placebo effect showed no statistical difference between those receiving the placebo and the control group receiving a sugar pill.
If you set up your experiment the 'right' way, there is a good chance it has.
Here is one way that I think has a good chance of working: have your subjects pay a fairly steep amount for the trial, the evaluate it by having them fill in a questionnaire.
The "pay to take part" selects for gullibility, and also makes the subjects feel stupid if they don't report improvement. The "self-reporting", of course, helps get rid of such things as objective measurements that would spoil the party.
Finally, pick a small test group. That's cheaper, and will give positive results if only a few subjects report actual improvement. And if your first test fails, run a second, this, etc. identical test.
"Our four pillars of litigation are private property, economic liberty, free speech and school choice." - their website
What's the deal with school choice? Seems kinda random
One thing I wish advocacy groups allowed is donating towards narrower goals. For instance I support most of what the ACLU does, but I don't really care for their views on gay marriage and don't particularly want to fund that part. It would be great if I could donate to more specific parts of the organization (same goes for public radio, haha)