
Probabilistic Programming and Bayesian Methods for Hackers (2015) - dacm
https://camdavidsonpilon.github.io/Probabilistic-Programming-and-Bayesian-Methods-for-Hackers/
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nextos
I also really like a related book and its companion resource:

* [https://probmods.org/](https://probmods.org/)

* [http://forestdb.org/](http://forestdb.org/)

~~~
wodenokoto
I'm having a _really_ hard time comprehending what should be simple code in
church, the LISP like programming language used in probmods.

Mostly I'm having a hard time figuring out if what-ever I'm working with is a
function that requires input or is a result from a function. I'm mostly
familiar with ML/NLP stuff in python.

Is there some "trick" to more easily figure out what is going on? My
understanding of the prerequisites was that lambda-calculus was not a
requirement.

~~~
nextos
Church is a Scheme dialect. Scheme is a Lisp-1, meaning there's a single
namespace for everything, including functions. That is, a variable can be
bound to a function object, an integer, a list, etc. This is IMHO a very good
thing.

Functions or macros can return other functions. It's not easy to say what is
going on, unless you look a bit at the context to spot e.g. function
applications.

~~~
wodenokoto
> That is, a variable can be bound to a function object, an integer, a list,
> etc. This is IMHO a very good thing.

The same with Python, which I spend most of my time using. However, I cannot
remember the last time I had trouble figuring out if I was dealing with a
variable that contained a value or a function in python, whereas in probmod I
am having difficulties with a simple countess application.

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nurettin
Few hackers I know don't have a python environment installed. Let alone numpy
scipy pymc and jupyter.

~~~
achompas
Oh this is interesting. Do you know people who use PyMC extensively,
especially in industry? I'm working on some empirical Bayes estimation
nowadays, and it's not unrealistic to think I'll encounter an ugly posterior
soon enough.

~~~
nurettin
Not a data scientist by any means, but I heard [Bayesian Data
Analysis]([http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/book/](http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/book/))
mentioned more than once, and it seems to use Stan (there is also PyStan)

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v_ignatyev
It's awesome! It is what I'm looking for!

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Schiphol
This is not the place, but I've been frustrated in the last few days by
jupyter not being able to run these notebooks with an up to date python
scientific stack. The kernel dies whenever a cell is run that attempts to
generate an in-line chart.

Alright, I'll go and open an issue now :)

