That does the same as this J code only it's much wordier:
fnames=. 'Alice';'Bob';'Charlie';'Deborah';'Eve' lnames=. 'Cooper';'Jones';'Smith' nPick=: (]{~[:?[$[:#]) shownms=: 13 : '}:&>,&.>/'' '',~&.>y' shownms nms=. 3 nPick&>(<fnames),<lnames Charlie Jones Eve Smith Alice Cooper shownms nms#"1~-.(1{nms)e.<'Jones' Eve Smith Alice Cooper
You _should_ be programming in APL - or maybe J - but only if you like to get things done quickly.
Not to slight any of the other high-level languages like Perl or Python. The main reason to prefer something like C is when CPU time is more precious than programmer time - something that's not true for 99.9999% of the work I find myself doing every day - YMMV.
Apparently, after SocGen's rogue trader Jerome Kerviel got caught, the legal system required that SocGen not have contact with him but the French employment laws forbid letting someone go without an exit interview, so they had to keep him on the payroll until they could resolve the legal issues.
IOW, they are blaming the coders for generating results that should have
failed even the most basic sanity checking. Indeed. This isn't a coding error, it's a testing error. Or perhaps a process design error.
Any professional knows that coding has a certain error rate. So you add practices, like pair programming, unit testing, acceptance testing, external code reviews, parallel implementation, and black-box testing until you get below the error rate you need.... None of these software practices will tell you that what you're rating AAA should really be BB. I work on this stuff and it's very complex. The way deals are structured makes them arguably "Turing complete" - the deals themselves are programs but with non-deterministic inputs.
I've been called maybe 10 times over the past 25 years in New York City. About 10 years ago, they abolished _all_ automatic exemptions. The jury pool went from typically 1 college-graduate (me) and the rest unemployed or city employess, to being a broad cross-section of the city.
Not only that, instead of being called every two years for the full two weeks, now I'm called maybe every five years and have only been up for about three days at a time.
The last voir dire I was on, there were PhDs and lawyers in the pool. The governor has been called up. Someone I with whom I worked in financial services served on a jury for a finance case where everyone on the jury had some background in equities, asset management or banking.
So why don't the rest of you quit whining and catch up?
I favor what seems to be the majority opinion here of light text on a dark background. Unfortunately, so much software fights my preference that often I have to give in to the naive, boring, and sub-optimal "black on white".
When I worked on a trading floor, the traders with a lot of monitors - some of them had six - with a few windows open on each, seemed to prefer light text on dark backgrounds as well _if_ the software they were using easily accomodated this.
I'll just mod myself "flamebait" here to save everyone some time, but I'm completely serious. The J language (see "jsoftware.com") will seem bizarre and intimidating to those of you who are computer literate*, but it's a great way to cut the chase and start actually using the computer instead of wading through unessential language junk. It's interpreted, so you get immediate feedback, and it incorporates a lot of important concepts succinctly.
*Computer Literate, adj.: Tame, tractable; willing
to compensate for software deficiencies.
- Gerald Weinberg
> A good first step for scientists would be to not consider all Christians as fundamentalist wackos.
I'm sure almost all scientists, many of whom are Christian or have family and friends who are, don't think this.
In fact, the only one who does think that way is that one standing very quietly over there. You see him? The one with the straw sticking out of his neck and arms?
> Making a couple mistakes or missing a couple counts...
As long as your counting mistakes are infrequent and random, it makes very little difference. But you're right that the edge it gives you is small. However, unlike every other "versus the house" game in town, it gives you a positive expectation, not a negative one. Playing craps because it offers the "least bad" odds just means you piss away your money more slowly.
One of the best managers I had was one who pretended no such thing. He gave us credit for being knowledgeable in our field and trusted what we told him. He saw his job as standing between us and higher management as a buffer and as an advocate (both ways).
The database they give you for the contest has no information about the movies other than their titles and release years.
The only other information is the rating people gave them and when they rated them. Even with this sparse information, even a simple clustering system seems to know a lot about the movies though it really doesn't. For instance, one of my early efforts to group "like" movies based on their ratings grouped together the "Buffy" series - but not the movie - with "Serenity". I happen to know that these have the common factor "Joss Whedon" but he's not in the database.
So, say it with me now: I welcome our corporate overlords and will assume the position.
(For those newbies (or non-Americans), "the position" is: bent over, trousers around the ankles, and nary a non-compliant thought in our little heads.)
The national anthem of the United States of America takes its tune from a drinking song of that era. A lot of music borrows from other music in this way.
Many Disney movies are based on old folk-tales that are part of our common heritage.
What I know is wrong is: stifling creativity and corrupting an honorable tradition in order to maximize profits.
> some religions are much more likely to lead to terrorism than others. Ever hear of a Quaker terrorist?
Yes, if you have a very limited knowledge of history, you can believe crap like this. In fact, you can personally help make it worse by lumping together all members of a religion with the extremists. This is exactly how terrorist gain power - by getting support from the moderates who feel unjustly persecuted.
Just a for instance, not to pick on any religion in particular, but Buddhists _have_ committed acts of terrorism: the Japanese nerve gas attack a few years ago was committed by a Buddhist sect.
Congratulations! You just struck your own blow for intolerance today! Mom would be so proud.
The biggest boost to small states is not in the House but in the existence of the Senate. Since each state has two senators, no matter what the population, this also helps bias representation against large - usually urban - states.
So, if anyone wonders why our government seems to be dominated by slack-jawed yokels, this is one reason.
> 1) You could already do the same -- I've never seen a polling place that prevents you from snapping a picture of your ballot with your cell phone.
So, I could have taken a picture like this http://www.flickr.com/photos/photonatic/2145033521/ to make you think I voted for Michael Bloomberg under the Independence Party? And I couldn't reset the levers after I took the picture?
> It just seems like a complaint blown way out of proportion, and insignificant in comparison to the problems that we've had in voting.
So, the phrase "Chicago-style vote-buying" is well-known for no particular reason?
> I would also point out that very few companies seem to want to build solar power plants,
> even in ideal places such as the vast tracts of desert wasteland in the US....
Or even in the vast tracts of fragile desert eco-systems in the US - far away from major population centers, requiring tremendous infrastructure investment to use an energy technology still more expensive than most others.
>> It's very likely that few documents exist in such old formats at this point.
> I can only speculate that you've not worked in any institutions that have persisted for more than 10 years?
Hard as it is to believe, not only have some institutions been around longer than that, they have legal requirements to access old documents. I used to work at an investment management firm that kept not only old records but the old machines to read them. In the worst case, this old machine was a Wang word processor - a behemoth (the size of four or five washing machines lined up) that read 8-inch floppies.
While it might make sense to convert these, it's not clear what the legal status is of such copies. Also, a conversion is not simple and may lose important information (like timestamps).
Slashdot Mirror
That does the same as this J code only it's much wordier:
fnames=. 'Alice';'Bob';'Charlie';'Deborah';'Eve'
lnames=. 'Cooper';'Jones';'Smith'
nPick=: (]{~[:?[$[:#])
shownms=: 13 : '}:&>,&.>/'' '',~&.>y'
shownms nms=. 3 nPick&>(<fnames),<lnames
Charlie Jones
Eve Smith
Alice Cooper
shownms nms#"1~-.(1{nms)e.<'Jones'
Eve Smith
Alice Cooper
You _should_ be programming in APL - or maybe J - but only if you like to get things done quickly. Not to slight any of the other high-level languages like Perl or Python. The main reason to prefer something like C is when CPU time is more precious than programmer time - something that's not true for 99.9999% of the work I find myself doing every day - YMMV.
Apparently, after SocGen's rogue trader Jerome Kerviel got caught, the legal system required that SocGen not have contact with him but the French employment laws forbid letting someone go without an exit interview, so they had to keep him on the payroll until they could resolve the legal issues.
I've been called maybe 10 times over the past 25 years in New York City. About 10 years ago, they abolished _all_ automatic exemptions. The jury pool went from typically 1 college-graduate (me) and the rest unemployed or city employess, to being a broad cross-section of the city.
Not only that, instead of being called every two years for the full two weeks, now I'm called maybe every five years and have only been up for about three days at a time.
The last voir dire I was on, there were PhDs and lawyers in the pool. The governor has been called up. Someone I with whom I worked in financial services served on a jury for a finance case where everyone on the jury had some background in equities, asset management or banking.
So why don't the rest of you quit whining and catch up?
All of which should highlight the fact that emphasizing the "safeness" of the programming language is fixing the wrong problem.
I favor what seems to be the majority opinion here of light text on a dark background. Unfortunately, so much software fights my preference that often I have to give in to the naive, boring, and sub-optimal "black on white".
When I worked on a trading floor, the traders with a lot of monitors - some of them had six - with a few windows open on each, seemed to prefer light text on dark backgrounds as well _if_ the software they were using easily accomodated this.
an ANSI committee has appointed a prize-winning team of Purdue engineering students to draft the new C++ standard.
They should use J instead.
I'll just mod myself "flamebait" here to save everyone some time, but I'm completely serious. The J language (see "jsoftware.com") will seem bizarre and intimidating to those of you who are computer literate*, but it's a great way to cut the chase and start actually using the computer instead of wading through unessential language junk. It's interpreted, so you get immediate feedback, and it incorporates a lot of important concepts succinctly.
*Computer Literate, adj.: Tame, tractable; willing to compensate for software deficiencies. - Gerald Weinberg
> If you're going to go through the trouble to shoot me for my password, you can have it.
Only if you remember to do the two things in the correct order.
> A good first step for scientists would be to not consider all Christians as fundamentalist wackos.
I'm sure almost all scientists, many of whom are Christian or have family and friends who are, don't think this.
In fact, the only one who does think that way is that one standing very quietly over there. You see him? The one with the straw sticking out of his neck and arms?
> Making a couple mistakes or missing a couple counts...
As long as your counting mistakes are infrequent and random, it makes very little difference. But you're right that the edge it gives you is small. However, unlike every other "versus the house" game in town, it gives you a positive expectation, not a negative one. Playing craps because it offers the "least bad" odds just means you piss away your money more slowly.
You're on the management fast-track, I see.
One of the best managers I had was one who pretended no such thing. He gave us credit for being knowledgeable in our field and trusted what we told him. He saw his job as standing between us and higher management as a buffer and as an advocate (both ways).
The database they give you for the contest has no information about the movies other than their titles and release years.
The only other information is the rating people gave them and when they rated them. Even with this sparse information, even a simple clustering system seems to know a lot about the movies though it really doesn't. For instance, one of my early efforts to group "like" movies based on their ratings grouped together the "Buffy" series - but not the movie - with "Serenity". I happen to know that these have the common factor "Joss Whedon" but he's not in the database.
The question is hoplessly vague.
It's like asking "How can I hire a superstar athlete?" without caring about the sport.
A better question in this case might be "How can I hire a clue about what's really important for doing this job?"
So, say it with me now: I welcome our corporate overlords and will assume the position.
(For those newbies (or non-Americans), "the position" is: bent over, trousers around the ankles, and nary a non-compliant thought in our little heads.)
The national anthem of the United States of America takes its tune from a drinking song of that era. A lot of music borrows from other music in this way.
Many Disney movies are based on old folk-tales that are part of our common heritage.
What I know is wrong is: stifling creativity and corrupting an honorable tradition in order to maximize profits.
> some religions are much more likely to lead to terrorism than others. Ever hear of a Quaker terrorist?
Yes, if you have a very limited knowledge of history, you can believe crap like this. In fact, you can personally help make it worse by lumping together all members of a religion with the extremists. This is exactly how terrorist gain power - by getting support from the moderates who feel unjustly persecuted.
Just a for instance, not to pick on any religion in particular, but Buddhists _have_ committed acts of terrorism: the Japanese nerve gas attack a few years ago was committed by a Buddhist sect.
Congratulations! You just struck your own blow for intolerance today! Mom would be so proud.
The biggest boost to small states is not in the House but in the existence of the Senate. Since each state has two senators, no matter what the population, this also helps bias representation against large - usually urban - states.
So, if anyone wonders why our government seems to be dominated by slack-jawed yokels, this is one reason.
> 1) You could already do the same -- I've never seen a polling place that prevents you from snapping a picture of your ballot with your cell phone.
So, I could have taken a picture like this http://www.flickr.com/photos/photonatic/2145033521/ to make you think I voted for Michael Bloomberg under the Independence Party? And I couldn't reset the levers after I took the picture?
> It just seems like a complaint blown way out of proportion, and insignificant in comparison to the problems that we've had in voting.
So, the phrase "Chicago-style vote-buying" is well-known for no particular reason?
So, in this case, "Anonymous Coward" accurately describes you?
Well, it certainly won't cost more than my car, a Bugatti Veyron. Of course, I don't actually own a car, but this is the one I don't own.
> I would also point out that very few companies seem to want to build solar power plants,
> even in ideal places such as the vast tracts of desert wasteland in the US....
Or even in the vast tracts of fragile desert eco-systems in the US - far away from major population centers, requiring tremendous infrastructure investment to use an energy technology still more expensive than most others.
>> It's very likely that few documents exist in such old formats at this point.
> I can only speculate that you've not worked in any institutions that have persisted for more than 10 years?
Hard as it is to believe, not only have some institutions been around longer than that, they have legal requirements to access old documents. I used to work at an investment management firm that kept not only old records but the old machines to read them. In the worst case, this old machine was a Wang word processor - a behemoth (the size of four or five washing machines lined up) that read 8-inch floppies.
While it might make sense to convert these, it's not clear what the legal status is of such copies. Also, a conversion is not simple and may lose important information (like timestamps).