@Evil it was a small exercise in scientific computing/ data science/ ML. its full featured. from scratch? aka "reinventing the wheel"? :(

@vzn Well, that would be cumbersome for some big tasks, but regression? I bet it would be faster to write it than install some nearly-a-day quirks-heavy unchecked library.

@vzn I like your blog posts and the fancy fresh articles / papers, but installing dubious library is not one of them ;). To remind some basics facts and fun of dissing, the statistics packages in ruby are slowish and recent events (huge mistakes in statistics software) shows it would be nice to check it.

@Evil yeah. and have you coded multiple regression from scratch yourself? ruby is an excellent/ very widespread language & think its kind of a shame if its this hard to do basic statistics. :(

@vzn yes, of course, otherwise it would be hypocrisy.

@Evil hypocrisy is a strong word. spectator maybe? :P ... what language anyway?

@vzn JavaScript, neat, showed to be extremely fast, and the code look like C anyway.

@Evil cool, EEG data presumably?

@vzn No, I was reading about algorithms in stats, wrote down and tested a bit. The easy way for me to learn something.

LOL

I'm sorry, but that is hilarious. I don't agree with it in any way, but how can you not laugh at that attempt?

@NicholasMancuso I am laughing, much longer ;) Hilarious.

Bravo D.W.

I have a small didactics problem and assume it is not proper question. What methaphors or examples can be used to teach someone what is a linked-list? To show passing by reference or value was easy, explaining pointers worked, the array addressing also, but one can cite how linked-list works, but does not understand it. I cannot get any example or drawing back.

Of course array idea is invalid - it is traversing the list and adding people to array =.=

Could you write some idea, please?

@Evil Couldn't you simply draw a linked list on the whiteboard or something like that? A "box" for each element, with arrows between them... (guess this is too obvious :-))

I was once teaching arrays by using a "physical array", which in this case was a very small drawer

@Juho I did this ;) This is the problem, whiteboard, animation, code just doesn't stick.

so that people could index different drawers, look inside etc.

something physical might work for a kinesthetic learner (if you believe there are such people or learning types to begin with)

@Juho I belive, there are such modalities but very hard to encounter person with such. Anyway, idea is good, I didn't gave much thought to that because some kind of random access is still there.

@Juho "index different drawers" - awesome -> beads with hooks and numbers on top with small reading device (small tube with hole for number). Thank you for idea. I'll build it, but in case it won't work maybe you have some methaphor also?

@Evil Hmm, well it sounds like you've already tried quite hard :-) So try the physical thing, maybe it works!

@Juho indeed, but the physical idea is awesome, thank you for that. Anyway I started to think how to prepare in advance for trees, the "reading device" will not work without cogs...