michael-mccracken.net (optimization)

Links for June 27, 2014

Michael McCracken — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 19:24:00 GMT

OpenTuner by jansel "OpenTuner is a new framework for building domain-specific multi-objective program autotuners. OpenTuner supports fully customizable configuration representations, an extensible technique representation to allow for domain-specific techniques, and an easy to use interface for communicating with the tuned program. A key capability inside OpenTuner is the use of ensembles of disparate search techniques simultaneously, techniques which perform well will receive larger testing budgets and techniques which perform poorly will be disabled." -- This looks really useful. I started on something like this long ago at LLNL, but since I was so young I focused mostly on fancy plots and designing a language for describing experiments.
Paper to Plants on Vimeo A really cute video about a game that seems pretty charming. I'm still not sold on little kids using iPads so much, I'm told it's bad for their eye development.
Ergonomic Workspace Planner Tool | ComputingComfort.org Use this to figure out the optimal height of your standing desk
pollen Write web based books in racket
Finding the perfect house using open data — dealloc.me A guy builds a map of available houses in Portland that match his desires. Seems like a good real estate agent should do this for you - but how do you know you've got a good one? I guess you have to write some code.
Drawing Presentable Trees "When I needed to draw some trees for a project I was doing, I assumed that there would be a classic, easy algorithm for drawing neat trees. What I found instead was much more interesting: not only is tree layout an NP-complete problem1, but there is a long and interesting history behind tree-drawing algorithms. I will use the history of tree drawing algorithms to introduce central concepts one at a time, using each of them to build up to a complete O(n) algorithm for drawing attractive diagrams of trees." -- I've always wondered what a good way to do this would be. Knew it had to be a solved problem.
Grain-Free Oatmeal Raisin Cookies | Against All Grain - Delectable paleo recipes to eat & feel great If you want oatmeal-raisin but you're trying to avoid oats and sugar, these are really quite good. The coconut makes a great texture.
Lev Grossman on his daughter, Lily: How being a father ruined my life and made me a better writer. A really heartfelt story about becoming a dad and getting your act together. Now that I have kids I'm a total sucker for this kind of article.
HAL :: [inria-00555588, version 1] A comprehensive study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types Formal exploration of sync-able data types. Abstract: "Eventual consistency aims to ensure that replicas of some mutable shared object converge without foreground synchronisation. Previous approaches to eventual consistency are ad-hoc and error-prone. We study a principled approach: to base the design of shared data types on some simple formal conditions that are sufficient to guarantee eventual consistency. We call these types Convergent or Commutative Replicated Data Types (CRDTs). This paper formalises asynchronous object replication, either state based or operation based, and provides a sufficient condition appropriate for each case. It describes several useful CRDTs, including container data types supporting both \add and \remove operations with clean semantics, and more complex types such as graphs, montonic DAGs, and sequences. It discusses some properties needed to implement non-trivial CRDTs."
What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell 2.1 ( Stephen Diehl ) Nice quick article with practical tips for beginners.
Not So Much 'New York Poor' as 'Pittsburgh Rich' - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society You can get a lot for your money in Pittsburgh, and lots of other places throughout the US. I'm from Pgh, and have fond memories. I'd consider moving back there if they could fix the weather.
Call me maybe: Elasticsearch Part of a series of irreverent but thorough explorations of various popular distributed systems.
What Do We Save When We Save the Internet So as you proceed with your protests, I wonder if you might also ask, quietly, to yourself even, what new growth might erupt if we let the Internet as we know it burn. Shouldn't we at least ponder the question? Perhaps we’d be better off tolerating the venial regret of having lost something than suffering the mortal regret of enduring it."
Music Animation Machine — "Music Worth Watching" Old stuff, but great. Couldn't believe I hadn't bookmarked it long ago.
Moving from Octopress to Nikola | serialized.net This post and a few tweaks got me into nikola without much hassle.

Links for January 12th through January 18th

Michael McCracken — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:44:00 GMT

My shared links for January 12th through January 18th:

Steven Frank: Notes: Home -
CVXPY documentation -- CVXPY v0.0.1 documentation - Optimization, uses Disciplined Convex Programming
Progression: Supporting Optimisation in Haskell « Communicating Haskell Processes - Tools for benchmarking haskell performance
1.-Environment setup -
The GNU Prolog web site - Free GNU Prolog - supports ISO
The Ciao System - "Ciao is a general-purpose programming language which supports logic, constraint, functional, higher-order, and object-oriented programming styles. Its main design objectives are high expressive power, extensibility, safety, reliability, and efficient execution"
Marmalade: Spreadable Elisp - A repository for elisp packages. Uses ELPA. Didn't work when I tried it, but maybe a firewall issue?
Haddock Documentation Generator for Haskell - Really nice documentation generator for Haskell code.

I particularly like the synopsis tab.

Archives of the Caml mailing list > Message from Xavier Leroy [2002] - From 2002: "In summary: there is no SMP support in OCaml, and it is very very unlikely that there will ever be. If you're into parallelism, better investigate message-passing interfaces."
Archives of the Caml mailing list > Message from Benjamin C. Pierce - Lots of links about CPS and continuations in Ocaml and others.

Links for November 19th through November 25th

Michael McCracken — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 20:08:00 GMT

My shared links for November 19th through November 25th:

Norway: an Eden with wifi - FT.com - "Visiting Norway during the global crisis felt like prosperity tourism, or "wealth porn"."
The Axis of Eval: The extensible way of thinking - An interesting way of looking at requiring types: it hampers extensibility…
U1DB in Launchpad - Potential replacement for desktopcouch
How John Got 15x Improvement Without Really Trying (Compile My Code) -

Links for October 25th through November 4th

Michael McCracken — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 07:51:00 GMT

My shared links for October 25th through November 4th:

Coaching a Surgeon: What Makes Top Performers Better? : The New Yorker - atul gawande talks about coaching in professional fields. Should you have a coach?
Incredible Control Panel Of IBM System/360 On Slant With A Few Illuminated Lights (Large image) -- Ookaboo! -
SIGHPC - New ACM SIG for HPC.
Michael Nielsen on Networked Science - WSJ.com -
2011 Par Lab Boot Camp - Short Course on Parallel Programming | Par Lab - Slides for bootcamp talks
Dropbox tech blog » Blog Archive » A Python Optimization Anecdote -

Links for July 19th through July 22nd

Michael McCracken — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 20:34:00 GMT

My shared links for July 19th through July 22nd:

Artificial Intelligence Applications | Securities Trading | Nerds on Wall Street | Computational Finance -
Making Desktop Webapps in Lion - Andy Ihnatko's Celestial Waste of Bandwidth (BETA) - Site-specific browsing gets OS support. Just in time for the inspiration for my webmail.app (GMail) to get permanently tagged with a social network's notification wart.
Objectivist-C - Tagged pointers and fast-pathed CFNumber integers in Lion - Neat little trick to reduce the impact of boxing/unboxing. I haven't written cocoa code in a long time, so I'm not really clear on how often this would apply. I thought there were a lot of places where the API just uses raw ints already?
Put This On • We Got It for Free: Randolph Engineering I've... - I need new sunglasses, and I'm too old for plastic surfer shades. Wear those to a business lunch and you look like a chump. But aviators can make you look like some kind of fratbro, so what to do? I turn to Put This On.
If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault - Anil Dash - A great post about applying what we've learned over human history to make communities work, to the web.

After all, the web is just people.

Buxton collection - a gallery of technology design

Links for July 5th through July 6th

Michael McCracken — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 17:08:00 GMT

My shared links for July 5th through July 6th:

Overlay Scrollbars - Update « Canonical Design - They have a video of the new scrollbar design for Ubuntu. I'm not sure I like it but it's hard to say without using it first.

One nit - I don't think it's obvious what happens to the red position bar (what to call that?) when you just press the arrows on the thumb instead of moving it around.

pulp-or - puLP: An LP modeler in Python - Google Project Hosting Linear Programming solvers!
CouchDB: The Definitive Guide - The couchdb oreilly book. (free full text and drafts)