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index.xml
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<channel>
<title>Noam's Website About Software</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/</link>
<description>Recent content on Noam's Website About Software</description>
<generator>Hugo -- gohugo.io</generator>
<language>en-us</language>
<lastBuildDate>Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000</lastBuildDate>
<atom:link href="http://noamswebsite.com/index.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
<item>
<title>Conway's Game Of Life In 298 Characters Of Julia</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/conway/</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/conway/</guid>
<description>Yesterday I got distracted playing around with Julia and ended up making this little Conway&rsquo;s Game of Life. Would fit into a tweet if not for the pretty-printing / animation loop!.
Works using matrix operations. Parameters by line (uppercase are matrices):
d = size of board (dxd). S game / map state in 1 and 0 values for on/off. U = shift board up if left-multiplied, right if right-multiplied. D = down, left.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Math/ML Resources</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/ml/ml_resources/</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/ml/ml_resources/</guid>
<description>Math Title Format Notes What Is Mathematics BOOK Probability Through Problems PDF ; BOOK Best introductory probability book out there. Learn by discovering! Essential Linear Algebra with Applications: A Problem-Solving Approach BOOK Learn linear algebra through problems. Principles And Techniques In Combinatorics BOOK ; PDF Beautiful book: simple, clear explanations, no filler, challenging problems Putnam And Beyond BOOK Lots of challenging math problems from various competitions.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Science Resources</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/science/science_resources/</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/science/science_resources/</guid>
<description>Biology Title Format Notes Robert Sapolsky: The Biology Of Human Behavior YouTube lecture series You are not in control. Molecular Biology Of the Cell BOOK Cellular And Molecular Immunology BOOK Great overview of ummunology at a reasonable price. Cancer Title Format Notes The Biology Of Cancer BOOK Comprehensive review of basic cancer biology up to latest cancer research.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Stuff I Recommend</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/r/recommended/</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/r/recommended/</guid>
<description>This is a list of my 100% must-reads. For more cool/useful stuff I find, follow the recommendations tag.
Video Talks Justice: What&rsquo;s the Right Thing To Do?. Amazing Harvard lecture series on Ethics that got me into the subject. Robert Sapolsky: The Biology of Human Behavior. Stanford lecture series. Are you in control of your decisions and personality? Maybe not as much as you think. Everything is a Remix.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Noam Chomsky</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/chomsky/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 11 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/chomsky/</guid>
<description> The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex)</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/scott_alexander/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 11 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/scott_alexander/</guid>
<description>Ask me what changed my mind, and I’ll shrug, tell you that I guess my priorities shifted. [&hellip;] How sure am I that this is the right path? [&hellip;]
Sometimes I can almost feel this happening. First I believe something is true, and say so. Then I realize it’s considered low-status and cringeworthy. Then I make a principled decision to avoid saying it – or say it only in a very careful way – in order to protect my reputation and ability to participate in society.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Susan Sontag</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/susan_sontag/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 11 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/susan_sontag/</guid>
<description> Ten percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and ten percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Plato</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/plato/</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 17 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/plato/</guid>
<description>The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>John Stuart Mill</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/john_stuart_mill/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 16 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/john_stuart_mill/</guid>
<description>On Liberty in its entirety is available here for free here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm
Main Reasons For Protecting Free Speech JS Mill presents the reader with four principal arguments. It should be of note that he does not appeal to man&rsquo;s natural right to free expression, or romantic notions of &ldquo;Truth&rdquo;: Mill is solely concerned about the far-reaching societal consequences of impeding dissent. The four arguments are as follows:
First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Martin Luther King Jr.</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/mlk/</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 28 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/mlk/</guid>
<description>On The Effectiveness Of Bad Men More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will.
The Purpose Of Nonviolent Direct Action I must confess that I am not afraid of the word &ldquo;tension.&rdquo; I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Arthur Schopenhauer</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/schopenhauer/</link>
<pubDate>Sun, 16 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/schopenhauer/</guid>
<description>Health In general, nine—tenths of our happiness depends upon health alone. With health, everything is a source of pleasure; without it, nothing else, whatever it may be, is enjoyable; even the other personal blessings, &ndash; a great mind, a happy temperament &ndash; are degraded and dwarfed for want of it. [&hellip;] It follows from all this that the greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness, whatever it may be, for gain, advancement, learning or fame, let alone, then, for fleeting sensual pleasures.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Random</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/random/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 10 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/random/</guid>
<description> If there&rsquo;s one lawyer in town, they drive a Chevrolet. If there are two lawyers in town, they both drive Cadillacs.
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Information Theory Overview</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/ml/information_theory_overview/</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 28 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/ml/information_theory_overview/</guid>
<description>Roadmap based on youtube introductory series.
Compression (efficiency, source coding) Error Correction (reliability, channel coding) Information Theory (Math) Losless: source coding theorem, Kraft-McMillan inequality Lossy: rate distortion theorem Coding Methods (algorithms) Symbol Code: Huffman codes Hamming codes, BCH codes, Turbocodes, Gallager codes Stream Codes: arithmetic coding Information How many bits are needed to encode information:</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Calculus Cheat Sheet</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/ml/calculus_cheat_sheet/</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/ml/calculus_cheat_sheet/</guid>
<description>Gradient A vector field in the direction of steepest ascent.
$$ \nabla f( x_{1}, x_{2}, \dots x_{i}) = \begin{bmatrix} \frac{\partial f}{\partial x_{1}} \\ \frac{\partial f}{\partial x_{2}} \\
\vdots \\
\frac{\partial f}{\partial x_{i}} \end{bmatrix} $$</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Linear Algebra Cheat Sheet</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/ml/linear_algebra/</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/ml/linear_algebra/</guid>
<description> Multiplying Matrices </description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Chemistry Cheat Sheet</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/science/chem_cheat_sheet/</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 26 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/science/chem_cheat_sheet/</guid>
<description>TOC How To Read The Squiggles Is A Chemical Bond Polar? How To Read The Squiggles In order to make shorthand easier, chemists omit C and H atoms from its structural formula. There are two simple rules for adding them back in:
All sharp corners represent carbon atoms. Hydrogen - carbon bonds are implied (so if a carbon atom has less than 4 bonds, the rest are H).</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Memory Accessing Alignment</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/alignment/</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/alignment/</guid>
<description>For any data type that requires N bytes, its starting address should be a multiple of N. In most x86 processors the memory interface is designed to read/write blocks that are 8 or 16 bytes long2.
Unaligned memory accesses occur when you try to read N bytes of data starting from an address that is not evenly divisible by N (i.e. addr % N != 0). For example, reading 4 bytes of data from address 0x10004 is fine, but reading 4 bytes of data from address 0x10005 would be an unaligned memory access 6.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Self-Employed Taxes (Canada) tl;dr</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/career/taxes_tldr/</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/career/taxes_tldr/</guid>
<description>CPP CPP is payed at the end of the year. Save 6% of your gross income for this.
Income Taxes Payed at the end of the year. These are bracketed by income, but to make calculations simple I just keep a flat 29% of my monthly income.
HST If you are operating as a freelancer or small business and are expecting to make over \$30_000, register for an HST account here and charge the customer directly on top of net fee (13% in Ontario).</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Computer Science Articles / Books</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/cool_articles/</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 11 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/cool_articles/</guid>
<description>General Title Format Notes Build Your Own Text Editor HTML Really great tutorial (and introduction to C programming and terminal programming). Data Structures For Text Sequences PDF Handmade hero YouTube series Dude builds a complete release-quality video game from scratch in minimal subset of C++ before your very eyes. Online Computer Science Courses With Video Lectures HTML (community git) Giant collection of free video lectures.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Napoleon Bonaparte</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/napoleon/</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 11 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/napoleon/</guid>
<description> When the enemy is making a false movement we must take good care not to interrupt him.
You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Gottfried Leibniz</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/leibniz/</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 10 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/leibniz/</guid>
<description> When a rule is extremely complex, that which conforms to it passes for random.
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>John Von Neumann</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/von_neumann/</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 16 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/von_neumann/</guid>
<description>When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language of the nervous system.
If one has really technically penetrated a subject, things that previously seemed in complete contrast, might be purely mathematical transformations of each other.
From Lectures On Self-Replicating Automata (1948?) An automaton cannot be separated from the milieu to which it responds.
It is therefore quite possible that we are not too far from the limits of complication which can be achieved in artificial automata without really fundamental insights into a theory of information, although one should be very careful with such statements because they can sound awfully ridiculous 5 years later.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>A Bug</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/w/a_bug/</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 10 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/w/a_bug/</guid>
<description>(Unfinished Sketch / In Progress)
It happed one day that through a thick-leaved forest wandered I And in that dark buzzed what I thought an ordinary fly ... "If not to pester me, foul creature, why fly thus at night?" "Let me demonstrate," I heard, and sure enough: a light! "An ordinary bug I am, invisible, by day; So when the sun is hid I wake", it said, and lit my way; And before soon the stars and moon we spotted merrily.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Marcus Aurelius</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/marcus/</link>
<pubDate>Sun, 05 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/marcus/</guid>
<description>Selections from his meditations (Available here for free. One of my top 10 favorite books. I re-read them every time I disappoint myself.
II A limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return.
Through not observing what is in the mind of another man, a man has seldom been seen to be unhappy; but those who do not observe the movement of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Friedrich Nietzsche</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/nietzsche/</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 07 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/nietzsche/</guid>
<description>Anti-Semitism (In letter to his sister.)
Now it has gone so far that I have to defend myself hand and foot against people who confuse me with these anti-Semitic canaille; after my own sister, my former sister, and after Widemann more recently have given the impetus to this most dire of all confusions. After I read the name Zarathustra in the anti-Semitic Correspondence my forbearance came to an end.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Self-Employment Resources</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/career/startup_resources/</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/career/startup_resources/</guid>
<description> Personal Finance (Will mostly apply to Canadians.)
Title Format Notes Make Sure It&rsquo;s Deductable BOOK Must-have saving and tax tips for Canadian freelancers and small business owners. Reddit: Personal Finance Canada HTML Self-Employment / Remote Work Title Format Notes Awesome Remote Job HTML ; Git Community curated list of useful links Startup Stuff Title Format Notes What I Wish I&rsquo;d Known Before Joining A Unicorn HTML </description>
</item>
<item>
<title>It Sort Of Alliterates</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/w/it_sort_of_alliterates/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 14 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/w/it_sort_of_alliterates/</guid>
<description> I'm a cheerful ball of clay See me rolling down the slope Tumbling forth stochastically Slowly gathering full shape My only maker gravity Molded of some dust and rain And salt and pressed to solid form Out of which grass blades cut through And another and more still Softening the tumble more They extend toward the sun Growing roots that soak and feed That chip and crack me outside in Turning clay to dust again </description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Blaise Pascal</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/pascal/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/pascal/</guid>
<description> All of humanity&rsquo;s problems stem from man&rsquo;s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Epictetus</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/epictetus/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/epictetus/</guid>
<description>Enchiridion X On the occasion of every accident (event) that befalls you, remember to turn to yourself and inquire what power you have for turning it to use. If you see a fair man or a fair woman, you will find that the power to resist is temperance (continence). If labour (pain) be presented to you, you will find that it is endurance. If it be abusive words, you will find it to be patience.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Geoffrey Chaucer</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/geoffrey_chaucer/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/geoffrey_chaucer/</guid>
<description>Advice Whoso that nil be war by othere men, By him shal othere men corrected be. &ldquo;He who isn&rsquo;t warned by other men&rsquo;s example, will himself become an example for other men.&rdquo;
Truth Flee fro the prees1, and dwelle with sothfastnesse, Suffyce unto thy good, though hit be smal; For hord hath hate, and climbing tikelnesse2, Prees hath envye, and wele blent3 overal; Savour no more than thee bihove shal; Werk wel thy-self, that other folk canst rede; And trouthe shal delivere, hit is no drede.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Hannah Arendt</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/hannah_arendt/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/hannah_arendt/</guid>
<description>Understanding When I am working, I am not interested in how my work might affect people. [And when I am finished] I am finished. What is important to me is to understand. For me, writing is a matter of seeking this understanding … certain things get formulated. […] What is important to me is the process of thought itself.
You ask about the effects of my work on others.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Henri Frédéric Amiel</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/amiel/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/amiel/</guid>
<description>He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions, &ndash; such a man is a mere article of the world&rsquo;s furniture &ndash; a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being &ndash; an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air at rest, and the weathercock the humble servant of the air in motion.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>James Baldwin</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/james_baldwin/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/james_baldwin/</guid>
<description>Spoken / Video Buckley Debate At Cambridge
&ldquo;Baldwin&rsquo;s Nigger&rdquo;
Debate With Malcolm X (Audio Only (Can anyone find the full recording? It cuts out at the end.))
Sentimentality Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mark of cruelty.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>John Locke</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/john_locke/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/john_locke/</guid>
<description>The Difference Of Wit And Judgement Men who have a great deal of wit, and prompt memories, have not always the clearest judgment or deepest reason. For wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy; judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully, one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Old Norse Sayings (Vikings)</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/vikings/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/vikings/</guid>
<description> From Hávamál Praise no day until evening, no wife before cremation, no sword till tested, no maid before marriage, no ice till crossed, no ale till it&rsquo;s drunk.
Only a fool lies awake all night and broods over his problems. When morning comes he is exhausted. And his troubles are the same as before.
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Sweep</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/w/sweep/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/w/sweep/</guid>
<description>I was on my regular afternoon bike ride when I noticed a crowd of people sweeping the walkways. I leaned my bike on a tree and went to the first man and asked &ldquo;Why do you sweep?&rdquo;
&ldquo;I sweep because I resign,&rdquo; he said to me.&ldquo;I used to go blue in the face with how dirty these streets were. But it was no use, they paid no attention, and I would go mad each day when upon arriving I would dirty my carpet.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Yutaka Taniyama</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/yutaka_taniyama/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/yutaka_taniyama/</guid>
<description> About Him He was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes. But he made mistakes in a good direction. I tried to imitate him. But I’ve realized that it’s very difficult to make good mistakes.
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Adam Smith</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/q/adam_smith/</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/q/adam_smith/</guid>
<description>On Stoicism Human life the Stoics appear to have considered as a game of great skill; in which, however, there was a mixture of chance [&hellip;] In such games the stake is commonly a trifle, and the whole pleasure of the game arises from playing well, from playing fairly, and playing skilfully. If notwithstanding all his skill, however, the good player should, by the influence of chance, happen to lose, the loss ought to be a matter, rather of merriment, than of serious sorrow.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Elixir/Erlang Resources</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/elixir_resources/</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 04 Jan 2017 16:11:51 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/elixir_resources/</guid>
<description>Learning Title Notes Elixir In Action (book) My go-to recommendation for getting started with Elixir. Writing A Blog Engine in Phoenix Great first tutorial for Phoenix framework Erlang In Anger Great guide for when stuff goes bad. Memory / GC For articles on GC / compilers in general see compilers section.
Title Notes Erlang Scheduler Details and Why It Matters Erlang Garbage Collection Details and Why It Matters Simple introduction to Erlang GC concepts.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>React Resources</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/react_resources/</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 04 Jan 2017 14:41:18 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/react_resources/</guid>
<description> Title Format Notes A Comprehensive Guide to Test-First Development with Redux, React, and Immutable tutorial Great comprehensive introduction to the whole ecosystem. Redux, Re-fram, Relay, Om/next, oh my! video Setting Up Absinthe Relay In Elixir </description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Separate Ecto From Phoenix In Umbrella App</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/phoenix_no_ecto/</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:52:25 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/phoenix_no_ecto/</guid>
<description>First, create umbrella application:
$ mix new --umbrella my_app $ cd my_app/apps Next create Phoenix app, excluding Ecto:
$ mix phoenix.new web --no-ecto Now we create a new mix project for Ecto, with supervision tree:
$ mix new db --sup Finally we need to set up some configuration files.
Setting Up Db Project $ cd db First in the db project (following the getting started docs for Ecto:</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Using The Same bashrc / zshrc Across Computers</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/sync_bashrc/</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:19:02 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/sync_bashrc/</guid>
<description>Here is a simple method I use to share the same .bashrc / .zshrc / .bash_profile on multiple computers, while still retaining unique settings where I need them.
Suppose you want some special setting to apply only to your linux laptop, but not to your mac laptop.
$ mkdir ~/configs $ touch ~/.is_linux Next:
if [ -f '.is_linux' ]; then echo &quot;This message only shows on my Linux laptops!&quot; fi Now with different config files you can configure different environments from is single universal *rc file you keep in a dotfiles repo.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>My Dearest Zuckerberg #2</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/w/zuck2/</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 05 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/w/zuck2/</guid>
<description>My Dearest Zuckerberg,
I think the elderly grocerystoreman has lost his mind. Why is it that whenever I visit his store so that I may purchase one of his goods (puddings by the pound and junk and spiced killgrinded cow in an addictively unsatisfying stale orange envelope made of, presumably, wheat, or corn? (The kind that when I bite on it it sticks to my teeth and stains my palate with thoughts of factory-cookeries somewhere in a third world country)) UP pops he like a wildly flankhaired coocoobird, sharp hairy ear and nosetendrils protruding at the dent of his upper lip reminding one of&hellip; of, DEATH!</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Ecto Callbacks Macro</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/ecto_callbacks/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 22 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/ecto_callbacks/</guid>
<description>Ecto callbacks (before/after) commit hooks have been deprecated, for a general good reason. Using callbacks is generally bad and you should never do it. But sometimes you need to do it because real life.
I wrote this macro this afternoon that implements both atomic and non-atomic callbacks. Here it is in all its glory. I won&rsquo;t make it a hex package because it&rsquo;s probably a bad thing to do.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Books</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/r/books/</link>
<pubDate>Sun, 17 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/r/books/</guid>
<description>There&rsquo;s something about learning from a physical object that makes things &ldquo;click&rdquo; better in my head (it has volume, texture; a particular smell); and I doubt I&rsquo;m an oddity in this respect &ndash; the root of this effect may be biological: For example, when recalling some piece of information, often I can remember where &ndash; within some textbook I read half a decade ago &ndash; the subject is explained. And I do mean, a literal, physical &ldquo;where&rdquo;: a page, (a thing,) which at all times can be found tucked somewhere within a physical stack of bound paper, which I can touch and feel; I might even remember where I was sitting (or standing, or lying), as I held that particular book, open at that page, when I studied the subject, and what it felt like to the touch, and how the lighting in the room fell on the paper; maybe I jotted some note on the margin, maybe I spilled tea on the pages before, giving that &ldquo;where&rdquo; its own unique irregular texture and color &ndash; all of which my brain will forever associate with that information.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>A Pair Of Dirty Shoes</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/w/shoes/</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 05 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/w/shoes/</guid>
<description>A second pair stacked on top. Dirty socks. Dirty shirts. Piles of them. That chair I don&rsquo;t even like. Too many cups. A clean bedroom, the bed made. Clean dishes, one of those pluggable scented candles. His records. My records. Too much space.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Sorting By Relative Popularity</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/ml/sorting_by_relative_popularity/</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 08 Dec 2015 17:45:08 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/ml/sorting_by_relative_popularity/</guid>
<description><p>Hey, looks like I&rsquo;m sorting user content again! <a href="https://noamswebsite.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/sorting-posts-by-user-engagement-level-with-elasticsearch-implementation/">last time</a>, I sorted user posts by &ldquo;interestingness&rdquo;; this time around I&rsquo;ll be sorting players from a set of sports teams. Once again we&rsquo;ll look at why sorting things based on popularity alone is a bad idea, we&rsquo;ll get a primer on standard deviation, and finally a bit of scripting to put it all together.</p>
<h3 id="the-task">The Task</h3>
<p>To drive up user engagement at <a href="http://www.thescore.com/" target="_blank">theScore</a>, we introduced an onboarding screen that&rsquo;s shown when you open the app for the first time.</p>
<p>First, you get a list of sports teams that are popular in your area, and the option to subscribe to some of them.</p>
<p><img src="http://noamswebsite.com/img/team_select.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>Now based on the teams you choose, it would be nice to also recommend some players for you to follow. So how would one go about choosing which players to recommend out of all those teams?</p>
<p>Let&rsquo;s assume we have three six-player teams, where each player has the following number of subscribers:</p>
<pre><code>big_team_1:
1. 100 000
2. 110 000
3. 90 000
4. 80 500
5. 140 000
6. 140 500
big_team_2:
1. 120 000
2. 250 000
3. 180 000
4. 135 000
5. 157 000
6. 202 000
small_team:
1. 3 000
2. 100
3. 234
4. 301
5. 250
6. 400
</code></pre>
<p>Now let&rsquo;s consider some properties we want from our algorithm:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><strong>A compute-once, static value:</strong> we don&rsquo;t want to run our algorithm on every user. We want to give each player in our database a static <code>recommendation_score</code>; a numeric value that is cheap to index.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Simple:</strong> the algorithm should be simple and use elementary methods. Recommending players is a small part of the app; there should be little code maintenance involved.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Variety:</strong> The purpose of the onboarding process is to get you engaged, so we want to recommend a variety of players from different sports and leagues.</p></li>
</ul>
<h3 id="the-naive-approach">The Naive Approach</h3>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>NOTE:</strong> I will be using the <a href="http://julialang.org/" target="_blank">Julia programming language</a> for all my examples. You can find the complete implementation at the bottom of this post.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The first obvious solution is to simply sort players by their <code>subscription_count</code>. The more popular the player, the more recommendable he is. Here is our naive sorting function:</p>
<pre><code>function naive_sort(teams)
Base.sort(
[[team.players for team in teams]...],
by=x -&gt; x.subscribers,
rev=true
)[1:5]
end
</code></pre>
<p>Which yields:</p>
<pre><code>5-element Array{PlayerRecommender.Player,1}:
Big Team 2 Player | subscribers: 250000
Big Team 2 Player | subscribers: 202000
Big Team 2 Player | subscribers: 180000
Big Team 2 Player | subscribers: 157000
Big Team 1 Player | subscribers: 140500
</code></pre>
<p>The problem with this approach is that we only get results from the most popular teams. So if you&rsquo;re a fan of both a very popular NFL team and another team that is not as popular (your local basketball team, perhaps), even the least popular player from the NFL team will be recommended to you, whereas the most popular player from your favorite local basketball team will not show up in your list at all!</p>
<h3 id="a-better-approach">A Better Approach</h3>
<p>What are we really looking for?</p>
<p>Well, I think the players we want to recommend are the not necessarily the ones who are most famous, but rather, the ones who are most popular <em>compared to the rest of their team</em>, regardless of how popular that teams is (we already know you&rsquo;re a fan of the team or you wouldn&rsquo;t have subscribed to it in the first place).</p>
<p>In other words, we want an algorithm that answers the following question:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Which players <em>deviate</em> the most in popularity from the rest of their team?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Luckily, there&rsquo;s a mathematical tool for figuring out just this: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation" target="_blank">standard deviation</a>.</p>
<hr>
<h4 id="standard-deviation-tl-dr">Standard Deviation tl;dr</h4>
<p>Standard deviation is a pretty straight-forward concept: Take a set of values, and figure out the average value for that set (also known as the <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_mean" target="_blank">arithmetic mean</a></em>). The standard deviation simply tells us by how much the value of the typical element in our set deviates from the average.</p>
<p>The mathematical representation of this calculation is:</p>
<p>$$ s_N = \sqrt{\frac{1}{N} \sum_{i=1}^N (x_i - \overline{x})^2} $$</p>
<p>Where $N$ is the population size, and $\overline{x}$ is the arithmetic mean, which itself is represented by:</p>
<p>$$ \overline{x}_N = \frac{1}{N}\sum_{i=1}^{N} a_i $$</p>
<p>For example, the following two sets have the same average value, but clearly the values are spread out differently:</p>
<pre><code>close_to_average = [11,8,9,12]
spread_out = [0,1,19,20]
average(close_to_average) == 10
average(spread_out) == 10
standard_deviation(close_to_average) == 1.59
standard_deviation(spread_out) == 9.51
</code></pre>
<hr>
<p>Thus we arrive at our simple scoring function. All we need to do is find players whose deviation from the average is substantially higher than that of their teammates:</p>
<pre><code>function recommend(player, team)
player_dev = player.subscribers - team.average
if player_dev == 0
player.recommendation_score = 0
else
player.recommendation_score = player_dev / team.std_dev
end
end
</code></pre>
<p>Using this scoring function on our original teams, we get the following results:</p>
<pre><code>5-element Array{PlayerRecommender.Player,1}:
Small Team Player | subscribers: 3000 | score: 2.2276261544470644
Big Team 2 Player | subscribers: 250000 | score: 1.749555170961297
Big Team 1 Player | subscribers: 140500 | score: 1.3134034577576315
Big Team 1 Player | subscribers: 140000 | score: 1.291753950212176
Big Team 2 Player | subscribers: 202000 | score: 0.6445729577225832
</code></pre>
<p>Much better. This time around, our top player actually has the least number of subscribers, but this makes sense, because even though he belongs to a team that is not very popular, his subscription count is tenfold that of his teammates; clearly someone to keep an eye on! (perhaps a rising star in a college league? Certainly wouldn&rsquo;t want our recommendation script to ignore that one.)</p>
<h3 id="limitations">Limitations</h3>
<p>This algorithm has many limitations.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>New players won&rsquo;t be very well represented (they will by nature have low subscription counts).</p></li>
<li><p>All-star teams might result in nobody being particularly recommendable. Though this one might be less of a problem: thanks to our good ol&rsquo; friend the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_function">bell curve</a>, even among rare anomalies, there are <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lionel-messi-is-impossible/" target="_blank">rare anomalies</a>.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>While there are ways to address these limitations and improve the accuracy of the algorithm (for example, taking into account the rate of change in <code>subscription_count</code>), one has to remember the purpose of this feature: to drive up user engagement during onboarding. Is the added complexity of such changes worth the minimal improvement in the recommendations?</p>
<p>Point is, it&rsquo;s Friday night and I should go out for a beer now. I&rsquo;m also looking forward to testing out the enormous Chinese fermentation jug I bought yesterday. It looks something like this, but a LOT bigger:</p>
<p><img src="http://noamswebsite.com/img/ferm_crock.jpeg" alt="" /></p>
<p>And it was only \$30. What a bargain.</p>
<hr />
<p>Here is the code used in these examples (working as of Julia 0.4.1). Our actual code at theScore is in Ruby.</p>
<p></p></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Stones</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/w/stones/</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 05 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/w/stones/</guid>
<description>I was at the lake last Summer. I picked a mossy old bench to sit, when a group of adolescents gathered to throw stones into the water. For an hour they busied around, making loud gestures and arguing over whose stone made the bigger splash. They would try every angle, and then bicker about which one spattered out the widest, or which one sent the water flying the highest, and how could they agree on what they&rsquo;d seen if in a moment it was gone?</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Eigengoogle: How the Google PageRank Algorithm Works</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/ml/eigengoogle/</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 27 Jan 2014 18:06:24 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/ml/eigengoogle/</guid>
<description>While we&rsquo;re on the subject of sorting things online, we might as well talk about Google: the 93-billion dollar company whose main export is taking all the things ever and putting them in the right order. If there&rsquo;s one thing Google knows best, it&rsquo;s sorting stuff.
I was curious how it all works, and it turned out really interesting, plus I got to learn a bit about Markov chains. It all starts with an algorithm called PageRank1.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Sorting Posts by User Engagement Level</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/user_eng/</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 23 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/user_eng/</guid>
<description>At Functional Imperative we&rsquo;re building the new CanLII Connects website (a social portal for Canada&rsquo;s largest database of legal cases), and this week I was given the task of figuring out a sensible way of sorting posts.
Figuring out how to sort user-generated content is a common problem that many social websites face.
Here&rsquo;s Reddit&rsquo;s scoring equation for &lsquo;Best&rsquo; (source and explanation):
Not all scoring equations are that hairy, here are a few more.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Amdahl's Law</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/amdahls_law/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 05 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/amdahls_law/</guid>
<description><blockquote>
<p>As multicore computing becomes the norm (even my phone is dual core!), it&rsquo;s important to understand the benefits and also the limitations of concurrency. Amdahl&rsquo;s Law addresses the latter.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Let&rsquo;s imagine a simple program. It prints &ldquo;Hello World&rdquo; 100 times, then quits.</p>
<p>Our first version of the program is written as a single sequential task: it prints one &ldquo;Hello World&rdquo;, then another, then another, 100 times, then quits. This program takes some unit of time, $t$ to execute.</p>
<p>Now say we have a dual-core machine at hand. (My phone, perhaps).</p>
<p>Cool, now we can spawn <em>two</em> tasks that print &ldquo;Hello World&rdquo; 50 times each. And, because our magical imaginary computer experiences no overhead, it takes us exactly $\frac{ t }{ 2 }$ units of time to run our second program.</p>
<p>So we keep adding more and more processors, until we have 100 concurrent threads printing one &ldquo;Hello World&rdquo; each, and our program runs 100 times faster.</p>
<p>At this point we stop: &ldquo;Ah, the trend is clear: more processors equals more speed! No point in continuing this experiment.&rdquo;</p>
<p><strong>A naive (wrong) first guess:</strong> Given $n$ processors executing a program, the maximum boost in speed is $n$. (That is, we can get our program to run $n$ times faster).</p>
<p>Cool! This means that, given enough processors, we could make <em>any</em> program run almost instantly. Right?</p>
<p><img src="http://noamswebsite.com/img/more_cores.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<p>(<a href="http://forums.pureoverclock.com/amd/21809-rumor-mill-amd-iv-x12-170-12-cores-24mb-cache-6ghz-2.html#post169754">Pic original source</a>)</p>
<p>Of course this is not the case! Enough daydreaming. Let&rsquo;s figure out a more realistic estimate.</p></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Rice's Theorem</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/rices_theorem/</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/wiki-main/computers/rices_theorem/</guid>
<description>Rice&rsquo;s theorem can be stated thus:
Every non-trivial semantic property of a program is undecidable.
Before we prove the theorem, let&rsquo;s break down that statement:
&ldquo;Semantic Property&rdquo; A ssemantic property is a property of the language, not the machine that is computing it. For example, this is a semantic property of a language:
All strings in language $L$ are of the form $1^n0^n$. This is not a semantic property:</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Girl On A Train Asks About The Book In My Bag</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/w/traingirl/</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/w/traingirl/</guid>
<description>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s that book you&rsquo;re reading?&rdquo; she asks.
&ldquo;Ernest Wattle: the story of a man who falls in love with the statue of an ancient goddess.&rdquo;
&ldquo;Sounds strange.&rdquo;
&ldquo;Depends how you read it. It&rsquo;s also the story of Almendra, an ancient goddess who creates a man just so he would love her. But then, through prayer, he brings her statue to life, but she falls in love with someone else.&rdquo;
A quaint-looking pig farm, like something out of a picture book, whizzes across the window.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Bursts</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/w/bursts/</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/w/bursts/</guid>
<description>The first time he fell in love it was with a girl who always smelled like fresh laundry, and her name was Anna and it was love at first sight, or not quite so, because it wasn&rsquo;t really all at once that he fell in love with her, but in little bursts rather, like the steps up a ladder, or grains of sand piling up at the bottom end of an hourglass, the first of which was him falling madly in love with her back, which was all he could see from where he sat, and all he wanted to see, entranced as he was at that moment by its smooth shape and tender flesh and by the contours of her spine and ribs, which traced sensuous grooves along the pink fabric of her tanktop whenever she took a deep breath, or spoke, or hunched over slightly in order to write something in her notebook, at which point long locks of black hair&ndash;black like tree branches after a forest fire&ndash;would fall and unravel, revealing for him, like curtains being fluttered by a morning breeze, which let slip a first ray of light into the room and wake the dreamer within from his slumber&ndash; yes, exactly like that, they would fall and unravel and reveal to him her neck, her perfect neck, he thought, which was the next thing he fell in love with, followed by her dainty hands, and then the freckles on her face, which she hated, which he loved, adored, and, this is true, that very same winter he even fell in love with a certain bubbly noise her nose was making because she was trying to be as quiet as possible when sniffling every so often because she had had a cold and a runny nose, so he offered her a tissue, but really it was just so he could lean close enough to smell her, and to look into her eyes, which, he thought, gazing, small and dark and rounded, were like an infinitely dark abyss that gazed also into him, which he knew, of course, because the only reason he had read that damn book was because he had seen it poking out of her bag that one time.</description>
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<title>I Wouldn't Mind Floating Downstream</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/w/downstream/</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/w/downstream/</guid>
<description>"I would not mind floating downstream; End up among the fish and whales. Of the ocean waters, dark and deep, I'm not afraid, for I do know That, once you've lived among the corals, The muddy currents, pebbles and rocks, And parlous contours of the stream Against whose tide you'd rather swim Are banes you'll gladly leave behind; For deep at sea you're not confined By rocks and edges that grind and rasp-- The river's water may be sweet, But just as sweet, the river's shallow; I'd rather down its torrent follow, Follow to the salted sea.</description>
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<title>A Bird By The Window</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/w/bird/</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/w/bird/</guid>
<description>acu riousblue li ttlewing i sawta pingon mywindow like asif onstrings sheelin gered glo wingsof tlyin thesun sowith myfin geri tappedtoo what afun andglad somejoy theli ttleblue birdsang asong tobuoy myheart andbring mecheer not thenlong shestar tedflying there andhere andca lingmee pla yingcir clesin thesky andsaid sheedlike toplay withme: oh penup andcome outside! oh penup and chaseme! idlike tojoin itlooks likefun but alas ican notopen: oh penup youwill enjoyit! and thebreeze isso inviting!</description>
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<title>Roomly I Dejected Your Enter</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/w/roomly/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/w/roomly/</guid>
<description>Roomly I dejected your enter. We bedded on your sit; Did you kiss to want me? I wanted to bad you kissly, sure. I loved you to make want to too. Real buttly, I felt near you just to get lucky. And your lovely open looked so wide, sweet eyes. Your sweet strawberry tastes like a juicy mouth. O, I'm so long for you, I how in pain! And I want to proclaim my love for my pride, but you swallow.</description>
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<item>
<title>Words</title>
<link>http://noamswebsite.com/w/words/</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>http://noamswebsite.com/w/words/</guid>
<description> Words don't listen Words don't talk Don't do nothing You write them down They just kind of sit there </description>
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