Atlhack

Tuesday night!

Participants: Mark, Alex, Vinny

Topics discussed:
– languages and the future thereof
– North Sentinel Island
– business plans
– starting a bar called The Trading Floor, where prices on beer floats based on market forces. For extra credit, make it so that bar patrons can also sell beer, and you have to run around all furious, wearing a suit and shouting into a phone about how buying and selling should happen. There need to be futures on beer, and it needs to be possible to go short on it. Maybe somebody will ring a bell loudly.
– copyright and the future thereof (or lack of a future thereof)
– places and traveling to them
– funding for research
– getting stuff fabricated for hardware prototypes
– Atlanta startup situations
– souls and their relationships with mathematics
– Paraguay and its history
– Graham Keith Coleman
– the ATLHack IRC channel on freenode and how people on it don’t seem to be on the facebook community? is there a facebook community? I thought we had a googlegroup or something… but not a circle. Maybe there’s a circle? Maan, I don’t know. But I love all of you and I wish I got to see you more often and I kind of want to move back to Atlanta but atlhackers are worldwide now anyway <3

What’s the longest palindrome you can produce entirely out of words in
/usr/share/dict/words ? (or some other finite word list?)

– Spaces don’t count; the string, minus spaces and punctuation, has to
be a palindrome.
– Don’t use the same word more than once.
– Bonus points for constructing something syntactically valid-ish, but
that seems hard.

Something of a classic; I guess I was thinking about Peter Norvig.

Alex R:
– finishing up writeup for a project on Deniable Encryption
— crypto is really fun.
— http://code.google.com/p/narorumo/source/browse/trunk/deniable/
Lindsey K:
– helping her advisor write a grant proposal, for mad type-theory cash
— (they’re going to prove that certain classes of parallel languages run deterministically, with certain kinds of write-once datastructures)

Look to the Frozen North for cool side-project hacks as soon as we’re done with classes for good…

alexr:
– Made contact with the BloomingLabs folks, probably going to go hang out with them tomorrow and see what’s up.
– developing a lab assignment for his students: n-gram autopoetry… been having a good conversation with Edde Addad, mysterious Internet Electronic Poetry Person, about this.

Greetings from the frozen north!

Alex:
– fixing Ubuntu install on the netbook (video drivers for Poulsbo chipset keep getting screwed up)
– thinking about what to do for the Spring — brainstorming research projects for machine translation with limited resources, mailing professors asking them to be on my committee, wibbling about classes
– should be hacking on the verbs project, because it got accepted to MTML workshop!
– over the weekend: hacking on the Snippets project

Lindsey:
– furiously reading for quals: going to be a qualified phd candidate in just over a week!

Rebecca:
– reading a paper about Blame (correct attribution of type errors in dynamic languages): “blame assignment for dependent contracts”. Ask her or Lindsey or sstrickl what that means?
– thinking about contributing to NLTK

Hacking in Bloomington!

I’ve been helping Eric H a bit on a paper about training classifiers for webspam detection (sort of a “how to do machine learning for your security problem” paper), and I was supposed to write about Naive Bayes classifiers. It occurred to me that I’d never implemented one.

So I did! It’s straightforward, because naive classifier is naive.

Also, I did a bit of hacking on Snippets, which is like weekly atlhack notes for people’s non-side projects. It’s up and running, and some people at Indiana are even using it! As of last night, it sends weekly reminders to people, so they’ll remember to update (these are opt-in).

*hugs from the frozen north*
— alexr