That sounds like a result in itself. By packaging the problem as a game, he's managed to enlist free help from random people on the internet - crowd-sourcing, if I can use that awful buzz-phrase. Perhaps its a victory for scientific marketing more than science, but a better algorithm is a real result that speaks for itself.
We also shouldn't be surprised that an extra few thousand people looking at the problem can come up with a better algorithm than "the professionals". Maybe the researchers were too close to the problem, maybe the other guys had a different perspective, maybe they were lucky... it doesn't really matter.
The problem with doing that is that such a sudden change will make their motives clear. They have to use this frog-boiling approach - essentially a very gradual declaration of martial law - so that nobody will notice a sudden change and complain.
Pedants: Yes, I know the frog boiling thing is a myth.
I use CPython for performance dependent stuff and have found the loops themselves, even not doing anything, are surprisingly slow. Do you have a reference for your "200x slower than C" claim? I'd be interested to see if it tallied with my experiences.
You say that, but did you look at the numbers on that page? The OpenOffice recommendation has more than 100,000 upvotes. Why would 100,000 people who don't care show up on Dell's webpage to click on that arrow?
I work in a University where Dell is the main approved supplied for PC kit. I had to buy a work machine with XP even though the first thing I did was to install Linux. I wonder how many other forced-to-buy-Dell or don't-know-anything-but-Dell people there are out there who might buy FOSS if they could and it was cheaper?
Sure, a majority of people may not be interested in Linux or OpenOffice. But a significant minority might take the opportunity to go for an alternative to MS if one was made available.
My dad tried to make Christmas decorations out of the CDs. They looked hideous and cutting them out made really jagged edges that were pretty dangerous.
I guess I could have used them like ninja throwing stars to slay the call-centre staff. "Yes, I want to cancel my fucking account!"
There have been severalstories on Slashdot recently about the demise of newspapers. Commentary from blogs and elsewhere is fine, but somebody needs to be gathering the primary data. If AOL are willing to pick up the slack on this, I might just start to forgive them for all those damn floppy disks in the late 90s.
They talk about paying for it with syndication and distribution; I wonder if this model can be used to pay for proper long-term investigative journalism, the kind of stuff that is vital to democracy.
Man, there must be something seriously broken with my (vanilla Ubuntu) install. I regularly have to kill Firefox because it's causing my 8GB machine to hit the swap.
I only use AdBlock and NoScript and there are no issues listed.
I do run a lot of windows, rather than tabs - usually half a dozen, some with sub-tabs, spread across many virtual desktops. Still, I've been running Firefox for about 4 or 5 hours today and it looks like this:
I'm a not-very-happy Firefox user, since I find it has horrendous memory leaks. I can get it up to 2GB virtual memory in a morning's average browsing. Yes, I have tried the tips on the Mozilla site.
However, I have become addicted to a controlled web experience with NoScript and Adblock. I won't be switching to Chrome until I can get similar tools.
I guess you could convert a SAT problem into a Sudoku. However, I think a crucial pre-condition for Sudoku people is that the puzzle is solvable with the given information. Nobody is going to spend hours plugging away at a Sudoko in order to try to return an "it can't be solved" answer.
The problem is one of trust. These days, I don't trust my government (UK) enough to let them make decisions about what I don't get to see. If they wanted to keep this trust, all they had to do was not oppose the release of their expenses quite so vigorously.
I don't think the Slashdot crowd should need convincing that Wikileaks is a force for good. However, passive support won't be enough for such a contentious organisation, so do what I did and show them some love.
(Hmm, I just noticed that PayPal donation is currently down, which is rather awkward...)
You're right that this guy has flown the geek flag pretty high here; however, at least it's to some useful purpose. There are all kinds of facts about a country that are quite hard to discover just wandering about in it, and Wikipedia would be the ideal candidate to answer them.
Last time I went on holiday (to Australia) I came back with a dozen questions I wanted answering, just because I didn't have internet access while I was out there; Wikipedia access would answer many of these questions. Examples:
I heard that Beds Are Burning was about the Australian aborigines - I never knew this before and wanted to look up more details on it.
As a result of that, I wanted to know far more information about how well aborigines were integrated in Australia at the moment. Answer: badly, but again hard to find out just by wandering around in Australia and difficult to raise with a random Aussie.
Australia is experiencing a lot of drought at the moment, but while we in Sydney, it rained quite a few times. I wanted to know more about the drought and what parts of the country it was affecting.
...
I could answer these questions by going into an internet cafe, but this isn't always possible. A portable Wikipedia sounds like a great idea.
They still have something similar at the new BA Heathrow terminal. If you're a business or 1st class passenger you get your own special lane in the security checks where (presumably - I'm just an economy pleb) the line moves faster (fewer unwashed masses) and maybe the staff are less rude to you. I guess it's just another part of the "aspirational" nature of flying, where you wish you could afford to fly business because it might be a slightly less depressing and dehumanising experience.
The cynic in me says that this is a natural and welcome part of security theatre. Like forcing everybody to rebuy their bottled water every time they fly, this practice seems to have a lot more to do with making companies associated with flight security a pile of money than it does making anybody safe.
"Step into your fullness - the world needs you to be all you can be. Wake up. You are being called to reconnect with your true self. More then ever before, it is a critical time to follow the feelings already awakening within and realize your greatest potential."
To anybody who doesn't get this, it's a reference to The Tick, a brilliant super-hero/spoof TV animation. In one of the episodes, a super-villain called Chairface Chippendale tries to write his name on the moon. For some reason. I seem to remember that later in the series, you can still see the partially written word "Chairface" in the moon.
My favourite Tick episode is where he gets flu and, for some reason, has to fight a version of himself made out of snot. He wins by snorting it into himself and sneezing it into a dimensional portal. Nice.
Is Fortran really that much quicker than Python+Numpy? I'm genuinely interested. I do large data set numerical stuff with Python and I find the performance is pretty good. As an example, I can z-score an array of 40 million data points in less than 2 seconds.
There is also decent support for linking in more high performance stuff, using Cython or Swig. I'm also not convinced that the execution speed benefits of a dated language like Fortran stacks up against the convenience of programming in Python. I would not want to manage the kind of complexity and variety I need to deal with in a language without modern OO support.
I'd rather it took a few weeks to write and a few days to run than a few months to write and a few hours to run. I guess this depends how many runs you expect to do.
Without consultation, they may make a terrible choice, and unfortunately many doctors are not trained in genetics yet.
In this case, the problem is that Doctors are not trained in statistics. The example you quote, and many more, are reference in this excellent book about the irrational decisions people make, partly because they don't understand statistics.
Slashdot Mirror
Simpsons did it - "People like us can't afford justice".
That sounds like a result in itself. By packaging the problem as a game, he's managed to enlist free help from random people on the internet - crowd-sourcing, if I can use that awful buzz-phrase. Perhaps its a victory for scientific marketing more than science, but a better algorithm is a real result that speaks for itself.
We also shouldn't be surprised that an extra few thousand people looking at the problem can come up with a better algorithm than "the professionals". Maybe the researchers were too close to the problem, maybe the other guys had a different perspective, maybe they were lucky... it doesn't really matter.
Here is another example, where a presenter of newsnight mercilessly grills a man who is effectively her own boss.
The problem with doing that is that such a sudden change will make their motives clear. They have to use this frog-boiling approach - essentially a very gradual declaration of martial law - so that nobody will notice a sudden change and complain.
Pedants: Yes, I know the frog boiling thing is a myth.
I use CPython for performance dependent stuff and have found the loops themselves, even not doing anything, are surprisingly slow. Do you have a reference for your "200x slower than C" claim? I'd be interested to see if it tallied with my experiences.
You say that, but did you look at the numbers on that page? The OpenOffice recommendation has more than 100,000 upvotes. Why would 100,000 people who don't care show up on Dell's webpage to click on that arrow?
I work in a University where Dell is the main approved supplied for PC kit. I had to buy a work machine with XP even though the first thing I did was to install Linux. I wonder how many other forced-to-buy-Dell or don't-know-anything-but-Dell people there are out there who might buy FOSS if they could and it was cheaper?
Sure, a majority of people may not be interested in Linux or OpenOffice. But a significant minority might take the opportunity to go for an alternative to MS if one was made available.
My dad tried to make Christmas decorations out of the CDs. They looked hideous and cutting them out made really jagged edges that were pretty dangerous.
I guess I could have used them like ninja throwing stars to slay the call-centre staff. "Yes, I want to cancel my fucking account!"
There have been several stories on Slashdot recently about the demise of newspapers. Commentary from blogs and elsewhere is fine, but somebody needs to be gathering the primary data. If AOL are willing to pick up the slack on this, I might just start to forgive them for all those damn floppy disks in the late 90s.
They talk about paying for it with syndication and distribution; I wonder if this model can be used to pay for proper long-term investigative journalism, the kind of stuff that is vital to democracy.
Thanks for the tip. I'm using it now. We'll see how it goes.
Man, there must be something seriously broken with my (vanilla Ubuntu) install. I regularly have to kill Firefox because it's causing my 8GB machine to hit the swap.
I only use AdBlock and NoScript and there are no issues listed.
I do run a lot of windows, rather than tabs - usually half a dozen, some with sub-tabs, spread across many virtual desktops. Still, I've been running Firefox for about 4 or 5 hours today and it looks like this:
3206 pzs 20 0 1132m 639m 28m R 1 8.1 92:38.58 firefox
which seems very high.
I'm a not-very-happy Firefox user, since I find it has horrendous memory leaks. I can get it up to 2GB virtual memory in a morning's average browsing. Yes, I have tried the tips on the Mozilla site.
However, I have become addicted to a controlled web experience with NoScript and Adblock. I won't be switching to Chrome until I can get similar tools.
I guess you could convert a SAT problem into a Sudoku. However, I think a crucial pre-condition for Sudoku people is that the puzzle is solvable with the given information. Nobody is going to spend hours plugging away at a Sudoko in order to try to return an "it can't be solved" answer.
Somebody mod parent overrated - version numbers in TeX is mentioned in the TFA.
The proper way to use version numbers is to continually improve the precision of an irrational number, as in Tex.
The problem is one of trust. These days, I don't trust my government (UK) enough to let them make decisions about what I don't get to see. If they wanted to keep this trust, all they had to do was not oppose the release of their expenses quite so vigorously.
I don't think the Slashdot crowd should need convincing that Wikileaks is a force for good. However, passive support won't be enough for such a contentious organisation, so do what I did and show them some love.
(Hmm, I just noticed that PayPal donation is currently down, which is rather awkward...)
You're right that this guy has flown the geek flag pretty high here; however, at least it's to some useful purpose. There are all kinds of facts about a country that are quite hard to discover just wandering about in it, and Wikipedia would be the ideal candidate to answer them.
Last time I went on holiday (to Australia) I came back with a dozen questions I wanted answering, just because I didn't have internet access while I was out there; Wikipedia access would answer many of these questions. Examples:
I could answer these questions by going into an internet cafe, but this isn't always possible. A portable Wikipedia sounds like a great idea.
Dude, there are no water fountains at UK airports. Yes, I know that sucks. Why do you think I'm bitching about it?
They still have something similar at the new BA Heathrow terminal. If you're a business or 1st class passenger you get your own special lane in the security checks where (presumably - I'm just an economy pleb) the line moves faster (fewer unwashed masses) and maybe the staff are less rude to you. I guess it's just another part of the "aspirational" nature of flying, where you wish you could afford to fly business because it might be a slightly less depressing and dehumanising experience.
The cynic in me says that this is a natural and welcome part of security theatre. Like forcing everybody to rebuy their bottled water every time they fly, this practice seems to have a lot more to do with making companies associated with flight security a pile of money than it does making anybody safe.
"Step into your fullness - the world needs you to be all you can be. Wake up. You are being called to reconnect with your true self. More then ever before, it is a critical time to follow the feelings already awakening within and realize your greatest potential."
Yikes.
To anybody who doesn't get this, it's a reference to The Tick, a brilliant super-hero/spoof TV animation. In one of the episodes, a super-villain called Chairface Chippendale tries to write his name on the moon. For some reason. I seem to remember that later in the series, you can still see the partially written word "Chairface" in the moon.
My favourite Tick episode is where he gets flu and, for some reason, has to fight a version of himself made out of snot. He wins by snorting it into himself and sneezing it into a dimensional portal. Nice.
I really can't tell if this article is serious or not.
Is Fortran really that much quicker than Python+Numpy? I'm genuinely interested. I do large data set numerical stuff with Python and I find the performance is pretty good. As an example, I can z-score an array of 40 million data points in less than 2 seconds.
There is also decent support for linking in more high performance stuff, using Cython or Swig. I'm also not convinced that the execution speed benefits of a dated language like Fortran stacks up against the convenience of programming in Python. I would not want to manage the kind of complexity and variety I need to deal with in a language without modern OO support.
I'd rather it took a few weeks to write and a few days to run than a few months to write and a few hours to run. I guess this depends how many runs you expect to do.
Without consultation, they may make a terrible choice, and unfortunately many doctors are not trained in genetics yet.
In this case, the problem is that Doctors are not trained in statistics. The example you quote, and many more, are reference in this excellent book about the irrational decisions people make, partly because they don't understand statistics.