The Logic of Stupid Poor People

tressiemc

We hates us some poor people. First, they insist on being poor when it is so easy to not be poor. They do things like buy expensive designer belts and $2500 luxury handbags.

To be fair, this isn’t about Eroll Louis. His is a belief held by many people, including lots of black people, poor people, formerly poor people, etc. It is, I suspect, an honest expression of incredulity. If you are poor, why do you spend money on useless status symbols like handbags and belts and clothes and shoes and televisions and cars?

One thing I’ve learned is that one person’s illogical belief is another person’s survival skill. And nothing is more logical than trying to survive.

My family is a classic black American migration family. We have rural Southern roots, moved north and almost all have returned. I grew up watching my great-grandmother, and later my…

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FightMe Raises $500K To Bring Its Social Video Competitions To The US

Why are Internet startups raising so much, so fast?

Machine Learning Guidance For Beginners

Machine Learning

With a deluge of machine learning resources both online and offline, a newbie in this field would simply get awestruck and might get stranded due to indecisiveness. There are people who are good at spotting what to read/follow and what not . Particularly, this post is for ML enthusiasts who are not able to find a good way to understand and use ML but this is what they had always wanted to wet their hands into.

[Hilary mason’s video on ML ] for Hackers gives a great introductory feel of the ML area in 30 minutes

People who think a rigorous background of stochastic, optimization and linear algebra is utmost necessary to start with might not always be correct. Most important thing is to get started and the other mathematical fundamentals can be learnt on the fly. But, yes some prior knowledge might be helpful. A person cannot learn…

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11 of the funniest TED Talk spoofs, and what speakers can learn from them

Online learning promotes passivity

mathbabe

Up til I took Andrew Ng’s online machine learning class last semester, I had two worries about the concept of online learning. First, I worried that the inability to ask questions would be a major problem. Second, I worried about the possibility of building up material. I could imagine learning a given thing online but the ability to sustain and build material over an entire semester seemed kind of unrealistic.

On the second point, I think I’m convinced. Andrew definitely taught us a real semester’s worth of stuff, and he built up a body of knowledge very well. I now communicate with my colleagues at work using the language he taught us, which is very cool.

On the first point about asking questions, however, I am even more convinced there’s a crucial problem.

I want to differentiate between two different kinds of questions to make my point. First, there’s the…

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Our Python 3 migration status

Seek Nuance

IP Street’s application runs on Python 2.7. Earlier this week, I evaluated all our Python packages for Python 3 support, as the first step in deciding when to migrate our codebase.

Although this was the time I’ve checked our packages for Python 3 support, I expected Django to be the only one that didn’t officially support it. (Production support is slated for version 1.6, which is now in release-candidate.) But Django is the only project whose development roadmap I closely follow! D’oh! Talk about a blind spot!!

This is why it’s good to sit down and formally check each package. Make a list of every package and check each one…

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9 memorable, manic moments of jealousy in literature

Bond is a smart wristband designed to save your long-distance relationship

Python Complements R’s Shortcomings