langreiter.com plain, simple: 2007-03-08

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2007-03-08

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 635 days AGO

John Langford: All Models of [Machine] Learning have Flaws

Great summary.

2007-03-08-maleMaLe

Joe Armstrong in Programming Erlang: "Handling errors in Erlang is very different from handling errors in all other programming languages [...]. One of the most important rules we'll learn is not to program defensively. The idea of defensive programming—checking all arguments to a function—is alien to Erlang. So much so that we say that if the arguments to a function are incorrect then you should just let your program crash."

"This approach will seem very strange at first, but don't worry. The benefits are worth the effort. To start with, your programs will be a lot shorter. Sometimes as much as 30% of a conventional program can be devoted to defensive testing of function arguments—there is no such code in an Erlang program. Secondly writing the error correction code will force you to think about how to repair a broken system, rather than worrying about how it broke. The error recovery code can be triggered in ways and circumstances that you had never imagined and is the basis for writing highly reliable programs."

2007-03-08-erlErr

Russell Williams interviewed about incremental development at Adobe.

"We had been trying to make the change for a couple of versions but hadn't really been able to make it stick. Nobody on the team had experience using an incremental development process, and we kept sliding back into our old ways because of our own habits and [internal] pressures [...]. We'd always successfully delivered using the old method, so when things got difficult, we'd revert to things we knew would work."

2007-03-08-incShop

'The observation that the concept of "brain area" is ill-defined means, in part, that current attempts to analyze whole-brain connectivity using [create Graph Theory] are based on incorrect data and incorrect assumptions, since we may legitimately question whether the nodes in the graph have any real meaning. So claims like "the brain is a small-world network" purported by some are empty, and are merely the consequence of following the recent fad in "network science", where anyone and everyone attempts to show that their favorite system is a so-called small-world network.'

2007-03-08-brat

An Open Letter to Google: Google University on YouTube

"In a word, despite college propaganda to the contrary, at current rates, a four year degree at a typical college or university dramatically decreases a family’s overall lifetime wealth rather than increasing it."

Amusing; projects to effect the changes projected have been underway for a long time, tho (OCW certainly being the most prominent example; find more in video-lectures).

Also, Phil Dawes: "[...] [H]aving spent a bit of time watching videos recently I've got to wonder if the video presentation is the future of university-level computer science education. I get so much more out of watching technical videos and then looking stuff up in Wikipedia than I ever did out of going to undergrad lectures."

What requires work is the social substrate (and of course the credit-granting system).

2007-03-08-goooo