Apr 28, 2020 20:37:32 GMT c said:

Also a story he does not know, but after a few posts years ago on PW I started to study calc after he suggested it was useful to know.

This shocks me for two reasons. First, I can't imagine ever suggesting that calculus is useful to know. Not that I don't believe it, but I'm so far removed from calculus now that it seems impossible. Must have been during my undergrad. The second reason is that c not knowing calculus, and studying it based on a post I made, is very flattering. The guy that's posting about advanced political theory and economics and psychology in one thread, then hopping over to school everyone on databases and programming in another thread, took a recommendation from me to learn something. Crazy.

To conclude this posting spree, I'll answer the question of the thread. What am I going to accomplish in isolation?

1. Start exercising more, in particular doing yoga every day. I kept this up for seven days then I got sick (normal sick, not corona-sick), and haven't been able to regain the momentum since then.
2. Get better at chess
3. Finish up my chess project in Python. Something I started before I got employed to boost my hireability. I got pretty far but dropped it once I got hired. Haven't touched it since then.
4. Keep working on my Spanish. Write a short story.

Dr. Emperor is all of the following:
1. A bad ass username (you should change it!)
2. What I'll call you from now on (a la Baker-man)
3. An epic villain name for a DBZ character (or really ANY of our beloved cartoons)
4. Probably pretty close to whatever name Don Trump calls Ben Carson

Apr 28, 2020 21:47:28 GMT Emperor said:

Interesting developments in this thread. Lots to cover.

Let's start with c 's relational database example. The wide table is something you would not store as a static table, at least in the data warehousing models I am familiar with. You'd store the other three tables, and if you want a report of all the products all customers have bought, you'd save a script down which joins the other three tables together, most likely with some filters. Might need to do some pivoting in SQL or some mucking about in SSRS/Excel to get the data to look presentable.

Don't really follow c 's non-relational description from that post (I'll read the article later), but it seems like a radical solution to this problem. Of course I know his example is very simplified, and I'm sure there are many good reasons to use non-relational because relational is not perfect. But it is very very good, and has been the database standard for a very long time, and I believe still is. The various SQL database systems, as well as Oracle, are all widely used and all relational.

Often instead of going wide I noticed SQL goes long.  Less redundant information but still a lot of redundancy.  Not sure if it is the proper term or not but the way I understand it is NoSQL uses objects and lists, and SQL forces everything into matrix form.  This is why NoSQL is much better for unstructured data as you do not have to force it into a structure.


Where NoSQL shines is in organizing unstructured data.  I got into NoSQL with market basket analysis.  Here the receipts are stored in JSON in the stuff I used and look like this:

{"customerOrder":{
"orderNumber":"T100",
"lineItems":{
"lineItem":[{
"orderLineNumber":"1",
"productNo":"1",
"productName":"18th century schooner",
"quantityOrdered":"49",
"priceEach":"34.47",
"lineTotal":"1689.03"},
{"orderLineNumber":"2",
"productNo":"2",
"productName":"1900s Vintage Bi-Plane",
"quantityOrdered":"20",
"priceEach":"33.00",
"lineTotal":"660"},
{"orderLineNumber":"3",
"productNo":"5",
"productName":"1903 Ford Model A",
"quantityOrdered":"33",
"priceEach":"36.45",
"lineTotal":"1202.85" ]}}}

Now any of these orders can have any number of items, so a structured system is not really the best way to go about this.  With NoSQL you can easily turn these into tuples based on productName then use a count function on the orderNumber key to get the counts of subsets of items in each order.

Where NoSQL shines though is when organizing documents IMO.  Documents cannot really work well in a SQL format.  You end up using SQL to store their location.  With NoSQL you can store the entire document in the database.  Things like wikipedia can be stored in NoSQL databases.  I am not an architecture guy so no clue how it actually works beyond the lack of a need for structure and relationships.

Apr 28, 2020 22:21:14 GMT Emperor said:

Apr 28, 2020 20:37:32 GMT c said:

Also a story he does not know, but after a few posts years ago on PW I started to study calc after he suggested it was useful to know.

This shocks me for two reasons. First, I can't imagine ever suggesting that calculus is useful to know. Not that I don't believe it, but I'm so far removed from calculus now that it seems impossible. Must have been during my undergrad. The second reason is that c not knowing calculus, and studying it based on a post I made, is very flattering. The guy that's posting about advanced political theory and economics and psychology in one thread, then hopping over to school everyone on databases and programming in another thread, took a recommendation from me to learn something. Crazy.

I spent most of the last 20 years unable to work and a lot of the time unable to sleep.  So I had a lot of free time.  Read about a book a day and will spend hours looking up random information.  Have a lot of surface knowledge about a crapload of subjects.  But not a lot of depth beyond the basics.  Very good though at taking information from one field and applying it to a different field.  Using market based analysis in studying how people solve problems, or finding subsets of strategies that predict learning using adaptive boosting on regression trees (something that blew the minds of my committee).  Sadly did not get to do that for the thesis as they preferred to split this project at the baseline analysis using all subset regression that I was using this method to improve.  Given no one used all subset regression at all, they said establishing even the framework for that would be a thesis worthy topic, and would become chapters 1- 4 of my dissertation and complete 70 percent of it in the thesis version.  

And holy shit Emperor you studied graph theory? Ok NoSQL can organize things in graphic databases. Surprised you did not encounter it there. I freaking love graph theory though. Suck at it, but am really into trying to learn network modeling, so to understand how that even works you need to know graph theory. Was planning to use graph theory to show how the brain organizing information and how it adapts to new information with Piaget's basic schema. Also wanted to use it to show how beliefs spread through society based on the schemata of the people being exposed to them. In both cases a belief propagation would ironically work. Or I am circling around Judea Pearl's work, which I am cool with as if I can translate it to lay people that still would be a major accomplishment in itself.

May still work on this on my own to bounce theories off of people and see what sticks. Ultimately want to try to update the information processing model brain as a computer metaphor to account for post 1970's computing.

PW is a microcosm of insane genius and hilarious idiocy.

I fucking love it.

All I've accomplished so far is reading this thread and realizing I am not very smart or talented

Still working, and working more hours (like @ness) so learning extra languages or practical skills or even making my place look less like a dilapidated hellhole is not in my future. Riding my human-powered bike to work more and more, though, so hopefully won't be too much of a fatass when society starts up again.

Both classical intelligence and natural talent are overrated. Anyone can become a specialist in just about any area just by devoting time to it.

Not sure I fully explained the story on PW but I used to be a totally different person. Until I was 18 I was being groomed to study art (mixed media design) at Parson's School of Design, was deeply religious as a Wiccan and wrote poetry for fun. I gave no shits about school and considered education absolutely useless. I stopped attending school basically and dropped my classes from honors to general level so I could ace the tests without trying by using stuff i was taught in middle school or simply by being average. Then I got into a nasty fight standing up for a friend's sister who was bullied. Took 18 kicks to the forehead denting my skull and I strongly suspect damaging my frontal lobe. I lost all motivation for art or spirituality, and no longer felt the connection to the areas I once had. Could no longer feel my connection to the universe or my deities, connect emotions with artistic vision or even feel things that could be expressed poetically. My emotional processing got all fucked up giving me flat affect and I have very little actual natural motivation and obviously my body deregulates what should be automatic processes since then, like digesting food or sleeping. Also my memory of high school itself is scattered, around a 3 year period of the assault I have a lot of damage to my memory. Around the time I joined PW I made a decision to lean into science and math and embrace my logical side since it was clear that I was not getting my artistic side back. For 20 years I been pushing this as far as I could continuing to see where I can take me. I have no natural talent for the shit I do and IQ testing while manic showed on my best days I am no genius. Fuck some days I do not even have control of my full mental resources with it getting cloudier by the year as my sleep apnea kills more and more of my brain off and we cannot seem to find a way to treat it due to parasomnia issues that also followed the attack. So not really anything special I do, just that since I cannot work, I have the time to do things that others don't. Since my health does not allow me to get out much for year on end that is a lot of time I end up devoting to learning weird shit. And that is all people really need to do, devote a few hours a week to something for a few years and you start to get pretty good at it.

I know it may be super remedial, entry-level stuff... but I'm having a blast so far learning HTML! :lol:

HTML is great to know as you can use it to make local changes to website to do things like download media from them despite guards to prevent you doing just that. I downloaded my high school yearbook from a yearbook site that disabled right click Social Network style by taking the image files from the HTML directly and copying them. Since they followed a structured naming system, was extremely easy to open one the browser then just change one or two numbers.

Apr 29, 2020 1:23:09 GMT c said:

And holy shit Emperor you studied graph theory? Ok NoSQL can organize things in graphic databases. Surprised you did not encounter it there. I freaking love graph theory though. Suck at it, but am really into trying to learn network modeling, so to understand how that even works you need to know graph theory. Was planning to use graph theory to show how the brain organizing information and how it adapts to new information with Piaget's basic schema. Also wanted to use it to show how beliefs spread through society based on the schemata of the people being exposed to them. In both cases a belief propagation would ironically work. Or I am circling around Judea Pearl's work, which I am cool with as if I can translate it to lay people that still would be a major accomplishment in itself.

May still work on this on my own to bounce theories off of people and see what sticks. Ultimately want to try to update the information processing model brain as a computer metaphor to account for post 1970's computing.

I came across the concept of graph databases, and found the idea really interesting, but never had any time to read into it. It was too distant from my actual research. Now I really don't want to read scientific papers any more :lol:

I say graph theory, but I only scraped the surface of the mathematical graph theory. My work was all about graph rewriting, which is structured transformation of graphs. Basically I developed a programming language based on this concept.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_rewriting

Apr 29, 2020 2:38:39 GMT 🤯 said:

PW is a microcosm of insane genius and hilarious idiocy.

I fucking love it.

I’d put this in my signature but I haven’t used PW in desktop mode in forever

Sounds like 🤯 has a career as a front-end developer ahead of him. I can't stand HTML/CSS. So bloody tedious.

Apr 29, 2020 7:40:53 GMT c said:

Both classical intelligence and natural talent are overrated.

Agreed, but having a natural talent for something sure speeds up the learning process, and if you have a talent for it, it likely means you enjoy it too.

Apr 29, 2020 20:20:23 GMT Emperor said:

Sounds like 🤯 has a career as a front-end developer ahead of him. I can't stand HTML/CSS. So bloody tedious.

Apr 29, 2020 7:40:53 GMT c said:

Both classical intelligence and natural talent are overrated.

Agreed, but having a natural talent for something sure speeds up the learning process, and if you have a talent for it, it likely means you enjoy it too.

Isn't the front-end stuff what is being largely outsourced to like India and China these days via freelance sites like Fiverr or whatever? Perhaps largely for the tedium you've touched on and that I can sense even in these early practice lessons.

I mean, I'm still enjoying it and want to establish competency at HTLM, etc. (even if only for nefarious reasons like c touched on)... but I can also see myself enjoying the back-end stuff. For work, I deal with lots of our company's financial data through SAP and then export for manipulation in Excel. Our custom enterprise application for housing and manipulating the SAP data fucking sucks... so I wanted to explore Access or PowerBI or even just stay within Excel and learn Visual Basic or improve my macros game to see if those applications/skills could unlock super powers to make my work even easier.

Relational tables or databases seem like something if I can master how to manipulate, etc. I might be looking at a powerhouse promotion in my dumb old company. Or at least maybe a transfer into a better department.

Everything techy is outsourced to India :lol:

I don't know what SAP is, but I imagine you can do a lot better than Excel. Forget about Microsoft Access. Visual Basic macros can be quite powerful, far from the nicest way to do things, and it's a nightmare trying to do anything remotely complex with it. PowerBI is a good tool. Not used it much myself, but from what I've heard it's excellent at producing reports, aggregating data, displaying it all nicely. Doesn't have anything to do with storing data though.

Apr 29, 2020 20:35:17 GMT Emperor said:

Everything techy is outsourced to India :lol:

I don't know what SAP is, but I imagine you can do a lot better than Excel. Forget about Microsoft Access. Visual Basic macros can be quite powerful, far from the nicest way to do things, and it's a nightmare trying to do anything remotely complex with it. PowerBI is a good tool. Not used it much myself, but from what I've heard it's excellent at producing reports, aggregating data, displaying it all nicely. Doesn't have anything to do with storing data though.

Emperor:
SAP

Oracle is it's main competitor it seems... so, whatever Oracle does (and probably does better)?

For me/my company, "SAP" refers to whatever program we likely paid them millions of dollars for to host/access/manipulate company data on finances, material, timesheet entries, expense reports, etc. Honestly, I should probably be better versed in the terminology for describing the whats and hows of my work... but I'm technotarded. But starting this week, working to become less so!

Speaking of which, just finished my client-side validation module! Still digging HTML, and in parallel to these modules from Codecademy, I'm now popping open the "view page source" tab in Chrome for some of the simpler websites I visit. I'm already learning enough to discern what appears to be shit HTML coding!

Sounds like you are at my level. I have pretty basic knowledge of HTML but that is all it took when I called out the PW owner for fucking up the way he was hosting the board that was causing the crashes and google blocks.

OTHER QUARANTINE GOALS:

- Chomp gummies
- Put on a Paolo Nutini playlist
- Rebook WWF w/ Strobe

Then, later:
- Binge cartoons w/ Baker-man

Then:
- Decompress mentally/emotionally with my shrink, Big Pete

Lastly:
- Thwart Dr. Emperor's plot to take over the world.

Well, HTML down... now onto CSS. Figuring that's the next logical step. Then JavaScript? Or should I learn Java BEFORE JavaScript? What's the difference?

Java and JavaScript are completely unrelated. The only similarity is the name. No idea why they called it JavaScript. CSS and HTML go hand in hand. Then JavaScript. PHP is another web language, but I'm not sure how that fits in to the rest of the picture.

You've mastered HTML already? After what, two days?

Apr 30, 2020 18:56:46 GMT Emperor said:

Java and JavaScript are completely unrelated. The only similarity is the name. No idea why they called it JavaScript. CSS and HTML go hand in hand. Then JavaScript. PHP is another web language, but I'm not sure how that fits in to the rest of the picture.

You've mastered HTML already? After what, two days?

LOL, nooo... not mastered. Just finished the course Codecademy offers for free. I assume I'll forget a bunch and won't really ingrain much until I start practicing. Looking at their catalog, I'm thinking with HTML + CSS + JavaScript I'll have the foundation for their "Building a Website" course... which I'll take, and then afterward repurpose www.wrestlesystem.com as a testing ground for projects to practice and apply what I've learned, discover what I've already forgotten, etc.

Order is HTML -> CSS -> Javascript -> PHP

Get a good text editor either notepad++ or sublimetext (this is most people's favorite) for when you move to javascript. Both support syntax highlighting, autocomplete and stuff for all four languages.

Sublime is suggested for the awesome interface and stuff like multiple select to select all of a term at once (control + d to select next occurrence) to edit all terms at once, define function (f12, tells you what a function does).  Also allows tabbed browsing of files and a structural overview of a folder in the sidebar for fast navigation.  It is free but is nagware asking you to support them and pay for it.  However they want $80 bucks for it so most of us deal with it.  

Some stuff to get you started if you use it.  The text functions area is what really matters.


www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/06/shortcuts-and-tips-for-improving-your-productivity-with-sublime-text/

Never used Sublime. Looks interesting. Notepad++ is my text editor of choice, but I don't use it to program.

Back when I used to do back-end stuff I would use Linux + Vim. Now I'm using APIs, Visual Studio and the like. I used to avoid them because they are bloated, but having been forced to use them at work, I appreciate some of their benefits.

I don't know what any of this means yet. Can I not use MS Word?

-_-

Sublime and notepad++ are like word but has a lot of features aimed to make programming easier. Like highlight terms, autocompleting things you are typing, editing multiple things at once, ect.

I used to use notepad++ but the advanced features of sublime made it my go to. VIM is too intensive for me, and Visual Studio I had not really had a NEED to use over sublime yet, but have installed in case I do need to use it. For my main language, R, I use R-studio as it does all I need it to do when using R. Visual Studio supports R now but is still trailing behind R-studio.

Apr 30, 2020 22:42:16 GMT 🤯 said:

I don't know what any of this means yet. Can I not use MS Word?

-_-

You can if you enjoy suffering.

Yeah word will quickly have limitations. When you need to change stuff on multiple lines it is painful in word, super easy in a text editor. Also you will likely want something you can use to view what you are working on while you make it. Same with things like adding quotes to a list of words (a common javascript task). Also word sometimes embeds stuff into hidden text, that gets put into a document when you convert to txt.


Quick site on text editors and why you should have one and what to look for.

learntocodewith.me/programming/basics/text-editors/


For their recommendations I used Sublime, GEDIT and Notepad++.   Like sublime the best but before that was used, used notepad++ for windows and GEDIT on linux.

I view GEDIT as the Notepad (not ++) of Linux. Perhaps I'm not giving it enough credit, but GEDIT always kinda sucked to me.

I actually used GVIM over VIM. GVIM is sort of like VIM but allows you to select text with the mouse, it isn't pure keyboard commands. If you master VIM you can code super efficiently and look like a deity doing so, but I could never be bothered training myself to memorise all these fancy keystroke combinations. It's hardly necessary. In retrospect, VIM is very much a showoff text editor, whereas something like Sublime or Notepad++ is far more practical.

GEDIT still had syntax highlight and some other features if you hacked at it a bit. Needed to use the plugins.

And god using the mouse with VIM? What kind of monster are you?