The h Bar

8:00 PM

Not unless my chief title gives me the ability to bring in more data

I've actually been looking for a data science job, but it looks like all of them want more education or more experience. I'm split between getting a data engineering job where I can get the experience or trying to find the spare time to do more Kaggle stuff

enumaris

hmmm

I get messages from recruiters pretty regularly

and I technically only have 6 months of "data science" experience within a company

danielunderwood

I get messages from recruiters for software positions, but haven't gotten any for data positions

enumaris

so it doesn't seem like the experience requirements should be all that hard? A lot of jobs will list crazy requirements cus they know people will inflate their qualifications.

Just last week I got contacted by a recruiter from Alibaba and one from Midea...I think people on linkedin are catching on to the fact that I'm Chinese...lol

danielunderwood

Yeah they may not be. I've even seen education requirements be ignored. Maybe I should just apply for them and see how it goes lol

enumaris

You should

danielunderwood

8:07 PM

I did see a posting for a "recent undergraduate" with 3 years of experience in Spark, Hadoop, and Hive lol

I have no idea where that's even coming from. The handful of people I know that work in data don't actually use those

enumaris

I mean, the Midea job offering was like "we need you to be an expert in Java and work in Java IDEs and be familiar with package managers in JAVA e.g. Maven"

and then I told the recruiter I wasn't an expert in Java

and she's like "it's not really necessary, actually the role is more for Python"

LOL?

danielunderwood

wow

enumaris

people copy paste stuff like that all the time too

so the requirements might just be from another role

I'm pretty sure they copy pasted the JAVA req. from a software engineering role

who the hell does data science in Java?

danielunderwood

Whenever I graduated I applied for a backend developer that was listed as an entry position. The interview went quite strangely. Then I talked to someone I knew who worked with the guy who interviewed me. Apparently the position was looking for someone with 5-10 years of experience in erlang

enumaris

lol wut

danielunderwood

8:10 PM

I think most of the Apache stuff (Hadoop, Spark, Storm, etc) is written in Java. Maybe that's why?

Yeah it was weird to say the least

enumaris

I feel like at that level it should be more software engineer's jobs to figure those things out

ACuriousMind

@danielunderwood "Whenever" you graduated? Did you graduate very often? Did you forget when you graduated? :P

Anonymous

@danielunderwood It's very weird for them to demand something so specific as "3 years of Spark, Hadoop and Hive" from a recent undergrad

Anonymous

Are data science job listings more or less always that vague?

Anonymous

I don't have much idea

enumaris

8:12 PM

nobody knows what they want from a data scientist

danielunderwood

I also had one for a physics programming position that pretty much listed my experience. The posting seemed to list my experience, but disappeared on the morning of the interview. Evidently they changed it to a quite different software role

enumaris

apart from like a couple of companies at the forefront of data

e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Google those guys

danielunderwood

@ACuriousMind I'm bad with words sometimes

enumaris

but if you're going for data science in like an insurance plan...they don't know shit about it lol

danielunderwood

Yeah I guess it's true that there are a good many places that were told they need a data scientist, but have no idea why or how

Anonymous

8:13 PM

@enumaris Who does the interviewing then? :P

enumaris

A manager who doesn't know data science lol

Anonymous

Damn

ACuriousMind

What is a data scientist, actually?

enumaris

stand back, I'm doing science!

but with data

danielunderwood

A dataologist of course

datologist?

A scientist that ignores all scientific standards!

enumaris

8:15 PM

@ACuriousMind generally someone who builds data-centric predictive or analytic models...

Anonymous

It should be called "business statistics" I guess. Makes more sense

ACuriousMind

@danielunderwood I think you're looking for 'dadaist' ;)

Anonymous

Unless of course, you're doing some real research

enumaris

"Business statistics" sounds a bit more like "data analyst" which is more for looking at summary statistics, reviewing metrics and the like...

well I didn't do "real research" but I have built my own models for the job...e.g. my deep learning based spelling corrector

Anonymous

@enumaris I doubt those companies know the difference anyway XD

danielunderwood

8:16 PM

I guess it's probably also worth pointing out that a lot of people doing the hiring probably have no idea of the difference between data scientist, engineer, and analyst

enumaris

Yeah, the difference between "data analyst" and "data scientist" is kinda subtle and not overall understood

danielunderwood

Or the dreaded "data science engineer"

enumaris

@danielunderwood most of the companies don't even have a well defined data and analytics strategy enterprise wide

Or are just beginning to implement it

It's why I'm reading up on that stuff right nowlol

ACuriousMind

The only time I have to deal with data is when the database admins complain that our persistent data is taking too much space :P

danielunderwood

I've heard a bit of "data science is the future" from my company, but I don't think they have any idea of what to do with it

ACuriousMind

8:18 PM

@danielunderwood I think that's generally the case with the future ;)

Anonymous

@danielunderwood That's.......so cliché ;)

danielunderwood

@ACuriousMind Isn't SAP the type of company that should have tons of storage?

On the bright side, they also seem to think people with a physics background are the key and I'm the only one of those at the moment

enumaris

I once advised my consultant friend to do a query

ACuriousMind

@danielunderwood Sure, but the individual systems/servers aren't necessarily all king-sized.

enumaris

that would construct

a temp table

of over 10 trillion rows

we got HP's SQL servers to run out of memory

that was fun

danielunderwood

8:21 PM

Let me introduce you to iterators, generators, and cursors

enumaris

they have those in SQL?

danielunderwood

They generally have them in clients. I have no idea how the servers handle them though

ACuriousMind

And essentially, we store the same kind of data at the customer's systems. Given that HANA is in-memory so storage is more expensive than in traditional disk-based DBMSs, they don't like an additional TB lying around for no discernible reason :P

danielunderwood

I don't get the resources to put anything in-memory other than a cache :(

Well I heard of fixed-size databases today and suppose I could do that, but I don't really have any need for one of those

enumaris

I've run out of memory for displaying rows at my job...but the rows can be pulled through in python or tableau so it seems the "out of memory" error I get is simply for displaying it within my SQL client

danielunderwood

8:25 PM

Well yeah if it's trying to load all the rows to display

You generally get a cursor if you're using a db client in python and that loads one at a time

Unless you dump them to a list. Then it would be all of them. But the normal thing would be to build a sequence of generators for processing

enumaris

it's only 18 million rows or so tho

not even 1 billion

sigh

Emilio Pisanty

2

danielunderwood

Well that's going to be 18MB at least just to get the IDs. 180MB if you have 10 columns with a byte each. If your columns have text, that can easily jump a couple orders of magnitude

huh I've never thought of an ellipse as a "circle" with constantly changing radius...neat

enumaris

o.O

any shape is a "circle" if you allow a constantly (and not necessarily continuous) changing radius...

2

That's just saying you can draw shapes using polar coordinates, no?

Anonymous

Indeed

enumaris

8:35 PM

whelp, finished reading the whitepaper

ACuriousMind

@enumaris I think you mean differentiable instead of continuous. If you allow non-continuous changes, the circumference is not closed and it's not really a shape...

danielunderwood

Well I guess you have to constrain an ellipse a bit more to be smoothly varying

enumaris

@ACuriousMind right, I thought of that, but then...I wanted to be more inclusive :P

Sir Cumference

@ACuriousMind Yeah I was gonna say

danielunderwood

I guess that wouldn't even restrict it down to an ellipse since ellipses need a sort of symmetry

Anonymous

8:37 PM

focus, directrix, blah blah... :)

ACuriousMind

@enumaris Wikipedia: "White papers may be considered grey literature."

Good naming.

@danielunderwood Yeah, smooth just gets you something without corners

enumaris

@danielunderwood the way the radius varies as a function of angle is quite constrained for the case of an ellipse - it has equation $r(\theta) = b/\sqrt{1-e^2\cos^2\theta}$

ACuriousMind

But, as differential geometry taught me, a "manifold with corners" doesn't need to be a manifold, so I'm fine with calling arbitrary polygons "ellipses with corners".

enumaris

Where $e$ is the eccentricity and $b$ is the semi-minor axis

@ACuriousMind I call them circles with variable radius and corners

danielunderwood

@enumaris I feel like I should probably know ellipses better than I do

ACuriousMind

8:41 PM

Let's just call everything "fat points" and call it a day :P

enumaris

sounds good :D

@danielunderwood gotta pay more attention in high school algebra class

(why was it in algebra class? no idea)

danielunderwood

We never covered them in high school though

Anonymous

More like coordinate geometry class?

enumaris

conic sections weren't covered??

Anonymous

We had a whole book on them ;_;

enumaris

8:42 PM

I had conic sections covered in my "advanced algebra" class

Anonymous

BORING...well, at least when they stretched it that much

enumaris

cus parabolas were covered

danielunderwood

Nope. I had no idea what a conic section was until after I graduated college

enumaris

then they went into hyperbolas, ellipses, circles...

@danielunderwood well then...

blame your school

ACuriousMind

@Blue ...you had a whole book on conic sections?

danielunderwood

8:43 PM

I evidently went to one of the top public schools in my state...so they say

I don't really agree with that as far as math/science goes though

enumaris

to be fair, I didn't understand much of it in high school lol

Sir Cumference

@enumaris in high school? lol

Anonymous

@ACuriousMind Yeah, a big fat one!

ACuriousMind

@danielunderwood Maybe you were looking at the football rankings? ;)

enumaris

@SirCumference yeah...they went over directrix and foci and all that whole shebang

Sir Cumference

8:44 PM

i don't think i learned anything in high school geometry

it was a quagmire

danielunderwood

We were a tiny charter school without a football team unfortunately

enumaris

my high school geometry was mostly on trig and stuff like that

no conic sections in geometry oddly enough

@danielunderwood how does a charter school get classified int he best public schools rankings?

danielunderwood

Yeah our geometry class was pretty much all triangles. I have no idea how they spent a whole year on triangles when you should pretty much be done after right triangles

Maybe the rankings were just non-private schools? Not really sure

I still don't really know what the difference between public and charter is aside from local funding

enumaris

me neither

I thought charter schools were private lol

my cousin asked me a bunch of questions about biology yesterday...I had to try to remember back to high school...

ATP -> ADP

Krebbs cycle...Calvin Cycle...which one is which?

one's for plants and one's for animals right

lol

danielunderwood

I think they're just independently formed schools. At least ours didn't have tuition and had to let anyone attend. The charter did restrict the number of students and growth per year, so they had to do a lottery if too many people applied

And ours had state, but no county funding. We had students from multiple counties though

enumaris

8:49 PM

According to wiki: A charter school is a school that receives government funding but operates independently of the established state school system in which it is located.[1][2] Charter schools are an example of public asset privatization.[3]

there ya go

danielunderwood

Looking something up to figure out what it is? Now that's a crazy concept

There are unfortunately also charter schools that are more or less "we formed a charter school so our kids were only around other white kids"

enumaris

and apparently I was right

Krebs cycle is for aerobic organisms and Calvin cycle for plants and photosynthesis

woohoo, I still remember something lol

Anonymous

I don't know much about the American school system, but aren't they all supposed to follow a common syllabus in all schools? At least from grade 9 onwards?

enumaris

uhhhh

It's at a state by state level I think

there's no federal school regulation afaik

danielunderwood

I think the state makes a list of available courses here and it's up to the high schools to choose which ones to offer

Emilio Pisanty

8:54 PM

enumaris

(curriculum wise)

Emilio Pisanty

it's not always written in stone

danielunderwood

I think AP courses may have some national oversight, but I'm not 100% on that

Emilio Pisanty

see what I have to do to make sure it passes the line?

Anonymous

Eeeeh

Anonymous

8:54 PM

I did that once to get a badge

ACuriousMind

@EmilioPisanty ...did you purposefully save those accepts for an emergency like this? :P

enumaris

omg my package is still stuck at the distribution center

:(

Emilio Pisanty

(no way in hell am I taking a five-rep-short-of-the-cap day. I want my gold badge.) (In about two years' time, obviously.)

enumaris

how much effort did you put into SE to get your 70k+ rep?

Emilio Pisanty

@ACuriousMind no, I was either not fully satisfied with the answers or just didn't get around to doing it.

enumaris

8:56 PM

cus I've answered quite a few questions it feels like and I'm only at 2000 lol

Anonymous

@enumaris He actually would have approx 100k if not for the bounties he gave away

ACuriousMind

@enumaris He's also offered bounties worth almost 20k

enumaris

hmmm

that seems like a ton of effort lol

Emilio Pisanty

@ACuriousMind though then again I did write a query to find questions with not-yet-accepted answers, and I am actively saving the rest for a future emergency =P

ACuriousMind

@EmilioPisanty Ah, the wonders of gamification

Emilio Pisanty

8:57 PM

@enumaris this has been my primary source of procrastination for 6+ years

@ACuriousMind indeed.

enumaris

XD

danielunderwood

I wish my procrastination was that productive

Anonymous

You could also...like go and do some minimal edits and get a +1 by un-downvoting

ACuriousMind

@Blue That...might just cross the line into behaviour I'd have to look into

Emilio Pisanty

@Blue if I downvoted instead of editing at the time, then it's extremely unlikely that I'd be willing to undownvote now.

Anonymous

9:00 PM

lol, that's for extreme emergency situations when you're just 1 point short of the rep cap :P

Emilio Pisanty

plus, going and actively looking for answers that you disagreed with earlier is an excellent recipe for getting yourself angry.

Anonymous

And when time is running out

enumaris

Just ask John Rennie to not answer a question so you can answer it and reap the rep

Anonymous

Hmm, where's Balarka these days. Hasn't popped up here ever since he joined uni

user1732

probably found a girl friend :P

Anonymous

9:07 PM

@user1732 Girls are a rare species in ISI Bangalore....so I doubt that :P

user1732

right, right

enumaris

o.o

dmckee

I have a question about ... data management and or user interface, but I don't even know how to say what I want to ask yet.

vzn

Jul 19 at 11:26, by Balarka Sen

It's all bullshit anyway. Not even sure why I am going to a university.

dmckee

I looked in at the User Experience chatroom, but it is dead as a door nail.

So I'm going to ask you folks and hope that someone has at least heard of the right search terms.

enumaris

9:13 PM

o.o

swing away

bolbteppa

Calculus I at university level is a shocker compared to lower level math ;)

user1732

^

danielunderwood

I specialize in asking questions I'm not sure how to ask

dmckee

I'm writing a tool which is suppose to allow users to rapidly try out things.

Semiclassical

What I personally always find funny is the various meanings of 'linear algebra'.

enumaris

9:14 PM

It's not a good name imo

ACuriousMind

@dmckee Call it "ThingTryer". Next question, thank me later.

Semiclassical

At the high school level, it means "solving systems of linear equations."

enumaris

I kept thinking "linear algebra" should just be a subset of the "algebra" that we took in high school but for only functions like f(x)=ax+b

lol

dmckee

This is accomplished by defaulting a lot of picky little stuff (and hiding that behind a "experts only" interface), while making most of the big decisions accessibly through pop-up menus and other simple interfaces.

Only at one point I ave a set of three interrelated properties.

Semiclassical

At the intro college level it goes to matrix algebra, and at the upper level it goes to vector spaces

dmckee

9:15 PM

Let's call them car models, trim packages and color schemes.

bolbteppa

There is part of me that thinks matrix algebra should replace linear algebra as a subject

danielunderwood

@enumaris have a talk with its well-named sister, multilinear algebra

Semiclassical

That too

bolbteppa

Once you put polynomials in the entries of those matrices things can get insane quick

dmckee

Every car comes in some packages and some schemes, but you can't have every scheme in every color.

enumaris

9:16 PM

It's so linear it's multilinear

Semiclassical

I mean, you sorta already have multilinearity in linear algebra proper

insofar as determinants are multilinear functions of their columns

bolbteppa

The smith normal form follows pretty quickly and things like the JNF are sub-cases instead of the convolutions one normally goes through

dmckee

Perhaps on the model X you can have the premium package in red, black or white, but the deluxe package in red navy or hunter green.

Semiclassical

of course, in physics we usually get spoiled by working with Hermitian matrices

bolbteppa

Also inner products are actually part of "multilinear algebra" and not even linear algebra if one wants to be pedantic which LA claims to be :p

dmckee

9:17 PM

Where on the model S you can have the premium in every color scheme, but the deluxe only comes in red.

Emilio Pisanty

@dmckee which is better, the premium or the deluxe?

enumaris

@EmilioPisanty obviously the premium deluxe

dmckee

I can pretty well deal with a system like pick your model then your package then your color, but how do I best indicate the whole matrix to the user?

@EmilioPisanty Sport. Of course.

Semiclassical

The main exception to the rule of 'everything in physics is Hermitian' would be stuff like linear systems of ODEs, e.g. circuits when time is involved

enumaris

Just like the super unlimited plan is the best data plan and better than the normal unlimited plan

Emilio Pisanty

9:19 PM

@dmckee I'd say show everything but grayout the unavailable bits

enumaris

@dmckee from a UX perspective, why do you want to indicate the whole matrix to the user?

Emilio Pisanty

so long as the entire matrix actually makes sense

danielunderwood

@dmckee I think a lot of car and clothes sites show all the options and gray/cross out the unavailable options

Semiclassical

another good example is the absurdity of video game special editions these ddays

(looking at you, ubisoft)

enumaris

Showing users what they can't access is an easy way to get a ton of recommendations on what they should be able to access lol

dmckee

9:20 PM

Right. I've seen the "some options grayed out" scheme, too.

enumaris

"why doesn't premium have red??"

dmckee

But what do I call it?

danielunderwood

I think the UX attitude may be to go to a few car sites and see which you like best

enumaris

"why doesn't deluxe have grey??"

and so on and so forth ad infinitum

dmckee

And how do I ask a user interface person what my choices are?

ACuriousMind

9:20 PM

@dmckee How many options are there? Do they comfortably fit on a single screen as three lists of radio button where you disable the ones that don't fit to the options currently selected in the other two columns?

Emilio Pisanty

@dmckee ah. that's a much harder question.

dmckee

@ACuriousMind I don't really know the answer to that yet. But there are going to be a lot of models and a lot of color schemes. There may be a relatively small number of packages.

Emilio Pisanty

@ACuriousMind @dmckee and also, how graphically representable are the options? if it's colours it's easy, but if it's some abstract mathematical framework choice...

Semiclassical

I mean, for the next Assassin's Creed game you've got: Standard edition, Deluxe edition, Gold edition, Gold Digital edition, Ultimate Digital edition, Spartan edition, and Pantheon edition.

danielunderwood

@Semiclassical that's absolutely ridiculous

dmckee

9:22 PM

@EmilioPisanty Alas they are more abstract then my "let me not tell you what I'm really working on" example.

Semiclassical

@danielunderwood it's been pretty widely ridiculed

Emilio Pisanty

@dmckee then by? then my? than my?

ACuriousMind

@dmckee Is there a natural order to the choices, or do you need to allow them to be made in any order?

dmckee

@EmilioPisanty yeah.

Semiclassical

but then that was also the case with the previous Assassin's Creed game (see gamespot.com/articles/…) and people evidently still bought the damn thing

ACuriousMind

9:23 PM

I.e. will all users decide on the car model first, or do you have weirdos who settle on the color first?

In that case, a tree structure may be appropriate

dmckee

@ACuriousMind One of them has a natural default, but users will want to alter it if they get part way in and find themselves blocked. So I have to anticipate changes coming in any order.

enumaris

gonna be hard to represent a 3-D matrix in a UI...

danielunderwood

@Semiclassical gaming communities seem to be in a perpetual cycle of "that's ridiculous" -> "we're going to boycott it" -> "bought it anyway"

enumaris

I suppose you can represent it as a bunch of different 2-D matrices...but then things get cluttered real quick

dmckee

@ACuriousMind The model will generally be first, but users will want to play around with package and color.

Emilio Pisanty

9:25 PM

@enumaris flatten it out. columns whose entries are columns.

enumaris

@EmilioPisanty yeah, theoretically you can do it

but from a UX perspective...is that really what you want...

Semiclassical

@danielunderwood as long as the market is there, they'll keep marketing it

Emilio Pisanty

@enumaris depends on the number of choices, I guess

ACuriousMind

@danielunderwood The "gaming community" is far smaller than the number of people who play games.

Emilio Pisanty

otherwise, one big matrix with package and colour, with a tab selector for model on top

danielunderwood

9:27 PM

Yeah that's true too. I feel the "gaming community" are the ones that like to complain about games

ACuriousMind

Even if every gamer on the internet complains about something, that's still a tiny fraction of those who play (and buy!) the games

enumaris

EA - it's in the game

bolbteppa

E.A. Sports - 'ts in the game :\

:p

ACuriousMind

@dmckee So let the users choose the model in a first step, then display all possible color/package combinations in a matrix in a second step? With a simple back button to go back to change the model

Semiclassical

You do have to wonder about how sustainable that marketing model is, tho (for video games, not cars)

enumaris

9:29 PM

I'm a proponent of the Ford model

You can have any color you want as long as it's black

So just show your users 1 option

and then wipe your hands of the work cus you're done

Anonymous

I'd try to avoid necessitating the use of back-buttons while implementing that kind of a "model - color - package ". Back-buttons can be annoying. I normally prefer to see everything in form of a tree with nodes having on-click-drop-lists on the same page

Semiclassical

but time will tell on that

ACuriousMind

@Blue But a tree implies a hierarchical model. If none of the options is naturally "prior" to another, that doesn't make sense

danielunderwood

Could also let people pick whatever, but show a dialog to change something when an incompatible change is selected. That may be a bit annoying though

enumaris

how about a tSNE of all the different options into a 2-D space?

Emilio Pisanty

9:31 PM

@ACuriousMind you don't need a back button. put the model on a tab selector on top

danielunderwood

Or fix it on the other end and tell the manufacturer that you need the deluxe edition in all colors!

dmckee

@Blue I've been using drop-down lists in most places. But those pieces of the problems have a natural pick-this-then-that-then-the-other sequence to them.

Semiclassical

well, you can impose a decision hierarchy on the user. it's just whether the users will go along with it

ACuriousMind

@danielunderwood Probably fine if one in a hundred combinations is not available, terrible if it's one in three :P

enumaris

then you can boast that your UX uses machine learning

marketing is important

danielunderwood

9:32 PM

Or give it until the customer is ready to pay and go "oops that option isn't available"

Bonus points if you don't tell them which part of the combination isn't available

ACuriousMind

Then again, it's likely no one should listen to my UX ideas. SAP is...not known for its brilliant UX, and basically my entire tteam tries to keep as far away from the UI layer as possible :P

enumaris

somebody post the mojojojo + him meme

plz

I can't access memes

Emilio Pisanty

dmckee

If we think of the whole choice space as 3D, most parts are likely either dense or empty with just a scattering of things that don't obviously belong to a cluster.

enumaris

@dmckee tSNE that bad boy into a 2-D space

Emilio Pisanty

9:34 PM

or permute the variables as needed

Anonymous

@dmckee Firstly, are you doing the implementation for a particular purpose or is it a general one which can have an arbitrary number of parameters? To avoid the problem you mentioned you could provide a type-of-sort tab on the top showing around 3 combinations: Model-Color-Package, Color-Package-Model, etc

dmckee

@EmilioPisanty That is something I hadn't really considered yet. I'll have to think on it. It could work is the number of "models" is small enough.

enumaris

goo.gl/images/HZUE2g

Anonymous

@dmckee Yeah, it does depend on the number of "models"

Anonymous

But it looks really reasonable to me

Emilio Pisanty

9:35 PM

@dmckee it depends on the standing of the different options. You can permute as required.

dmckee

@Blue This is a tool for just the one domain, so I can optimize for the situation I have rather than trying to be arbitrarily general.

Anonymous

Also, all permutations are not natural

Anonymous

So maybe only show the natural permutations

dmckee

@EmilioPisanty Sure. I donb't have a fixed mapping of my really parameters to the example parameters. I'll put the one with the small number of options into "model".

Anonymous

Like only 0.001% of the population would chose package, color and then model :P

Emilio Pisanty

9:37 PM

@dmckee be sure to call it ThingTryer ;-).

dmckee

@EmilioPisanty I'm afraid it already has an acronym. People in this business like things to have acronyms.

enumaris

nobody likes my idea to tSNE it?

ACuriousMind

@enumaris I don't even know what an ISNE is :P

Emilio Pisanty

@dmckee ah, figures.

are you able to divulge the business?

in other news, though

dmckee

@enumaris My problem space is discrete, so I'm not sure that would look like and I am positive that a significant fraction of end-users would experience auditory canal brain-matter leakage from trying to use such a thing.

enumaris

9:39 PM

@ACuriousMind tSNE*

Emilio Pisanty

@coniferous_smellerULPBG-W8ZgjR is there some specific reason why you've broken the users page?

enumaris

t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding

Anonymous

@dmckee LOL

dmckee

@EmilioPisanty The contracting firm I work for does most of its business with the US government.

enumaris

You can use maybe just modify it to use some discrete distribution rather than continuous ones

Emilio Pisanty

9:40 PM

@dmckee yeah, they like their acronyms, for sure.

ACuriousMind

@EmilioPisanty I think someone didn't properly sanitize the location string :P

Emilio Pisanty

@ACuriousMind yeah, looks like

and also, it might be a good idea to add a string-length clipping to that display

danielunderwood

@enumaris do people usually say it as t-snee? I've only ever heard one person say it in person and didn't know if that was typical

ACuriousMind

Sounds like a case for a mother meta bug report

Emilio Pisanty

@ACuriousMind sure, yeah, let's do it

ACuriousMind

9:42 PM

@enumaris Thanks, that clarified everything :P

enumaris

@danielunderwood yeah, I mostly hear it as t-snee

Andrew Ng called it as such

@ACuriousMind you're welcome :D

(In seriousness, it's a machine-learning based embedding algorithm that takes points in high dimensional spaces and embeds them into a lower dimensional space where the nearer the points are in the high dimensional space makes it more likely the points will be embedded into nearer points in the lower dimensional space according to the t-distribution)

danielunderwood

Ahh good. Then people won't look at me like I'm strange when mentioning it in casual conversation

ACuriousMind

Acronyms are wonderful. There are some things in our kernel called RUDI (which is also a short form of Rudolph) whose name's origin no one remembers. So now they're RUntime DInger - "runtime things".

enumaris

Hence, t-distributed (using the t-distribution in the embedded space), stochastic (probabilistic embeddings rather than deterministic embeddings) Neighbor (closer in high-D means should be closer in low-D with higher probability) Embedding

Emilio Pisanty

@ACuriousMind my field likes animal acronyms, for some reason I still cannot puzzle out

enumaris

9:47 PM

@danielunderwood you could always just call it "t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding"

or just use PCA instead lol

Anonymous

@enumaris I don't see how it would be particularly relevant here? Like you'd cluster together cars of the same color?

ACuriousMind

@EmilioPisanty Why would you need to denote animals by acronyms? :P

enumaris

@Blue you have a 3-Dimensional representation of options, and then you can embed them into 2-Dimensions so you can show it all on one page

It's just your 2-D representation won't be a grid

it'll be clusters

dots that say "this package - this color - this trim"

but they'd all be in 2-D

the only difficulty left is that the 3-D space is not a continuous space, but a discrete space

but I'll leave the implementation as an exercise to the reader

dmckee

The difficulty is how does a user find the one she wants. The stochastic nature makes searching hard.

enumaris

but you can say your UX uses machine learning

Anonymous

9:49 PM

That doesn't seem like an intuitive UI to me, especially when there are too many items. The average internet user gets confused even when they're having to pick a color coordinate from the RGB palette XD

enumaris

that gives you a lot of brownie points

dmckee

I mean, you can probably find the right cluster pretty quickly just by sampling, but then the hunt begins.

Emilio Pisanty

@ACuriousMind FROG CRAB, SPIDER, RABBIT, Rainbow RABBIT, ARIES

just off the top of my head

ACuriousMind

Looks like much potential for chimeras. Twenty years from now you'll be measuring radioactive spider-rabbits

enumaris

But then who gets to determine if it's a Spider-rabbit or a rabbit-spider?

Emilio Pisanty

9:52 PM

though I think the cake for most tortured acronym in my field goes to a non-animal one, MAch-ZEhnder-Less Threefold Optical Virginia spiderwort

ACuriousMind

@enumaris If you're close enough to tell, you're too close to escape :P

@EmilioPisanty ...ouch

enumaris

Mazeltov!

Emilio Pisanty

@ACuriousMind 'cause, I mean, everybody knows what a Virginia spiderwort is, right?

dmckee

@EmilioPisanty That may be a winner across a large group of fields.

Emilio Pisanty

@dmckee that's good to know.

dmckee

9:56 PM

John Beacom used to go to conferences pushing his proposals under the acronyms EGADS! and GADZOOKS!.

But when he got approval for EGADS! it was under a less enthusiastic name.

(These were the technology demonstrator and full scale application of gadolinium doping to turn Super-K into a improved supernova spotter.)

enumaris

welp...finished reading all the materials for today...now I gotta figure out what I wanna do for the next hour lol

Emilio Pisanty

@ACuriousMind huh.

ACuriousMind

@dmckee Googling suggests that there's indeed an EGADS project at Kamioka

Emilio Pisanty

> We can probably assume reasonably safely that people aren't going to be using MathJax in their location fields...

reads my draft

::goes to check in SEDE just in case::

::well, shit::

ACuriousMind

Another entry for "falsehoods programmers believe" :P

Emilio Pisanty

10:03 PM

@ACuriousMind indeed

so.... we leave that out of the bug report and we strongly suggest to @coniferous_smellerULPBG-W8ZgjR that s/he escapes the dollar signs in his/her location field?

i.e. M\$m7 instead of M$m7. If the dollar signs were intentional, they're not showing up.

0

Q: On dollar signs in the user Location field, and character limits on overlong Locations displayed in the Users page

Here's one of the weirder bugs I've seen in some time: I have no idea why the user in question chose to enter... whatever that string is, as their location. I don't really care - I think it's weird, but it's their profile page and they can do whatever they want with it. I imagine it's some...