noahmarc's comments

On: What is money? (1913)

[noahmarc]

It's been a few years since I last read it but Menger's take was the first I've ever read that just makes sense: https://mises.org/sites/default/files/On%20the%20Origins%20o... (1892)

[jacobolus → noahmarc]

It may “make sense”, but it’s also an ahistorical just-so story.

If you want a more accurate description, I recommend the first half of David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5000 Years, also mentioned by another top-level comment.

[hitekker → jacobolus]

For me, mises.org has the same credibility in economics as the DailyCaller or PoliticaUsa have in politics.

[amatic → hitekker]

Same here. I used to read articles from mises.org, but they seem to have some fishy characters as contributors and authors.

Note, however, that Menger is not a columnist or blogger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Menger http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/374958/Carl-Menger

[skylan_q → noahmarc]

It's a great read that actually gets you to understand how money came to be, in a theoretical sense. The book the other poster suggests is more about the history of money and monetary phenomena.

On: Book design inspired by Edward Tufte

[noahmarc]

Not a dumb question at all. I left my Tufte books at the office, so I can't check, but I thought he cited sources throughout.

Either way, between Cleveland, Robins, Few, and Ware there're tons of studies and references:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/departments/sia/wsc/index.html

http://www.researchgate.net/researcher/2028337238_Naomi_B_Ro...

http://www.perceptualedge.com/library.php

http://www.amazon.ca/Visual-Thinking-Design-Colin-Ware/dp/01...

Better is subjective though and related to what you're trying to do. A lot of past research was about efficiency of information transfer. There's more recent research looking at memorability. In one report, different graphics could have both goals.

There's a "Useful Junk" paper delving into that topic. There's a link to it in Few's reply: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intel...

There's plenty more. Stanford Vis group is a fun place to check from time to time: http://vis.stanford.edu/ Heer specifically has a range of papers and some online slides for a vis course he taught http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~jheer/ (uses Tufte for the course text)

I'm drawing a blank on a few others I find informative...

Unfortunately, I don't have any about fonts but I'm sure there are plenty out there.

On: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour

[noahmarc]

For someone with a programming background, this is one of the best introductions I've seen: http://medianetwork.oracle.com/video/player/2623621262001

On: Choosing Scala

[noahmarc]

Thanks for joining the discussion. Just want to say I'm working through the the videos for your coursera course (https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun) and, in addition to being a great introduction to Scala, it's changing how I approach other functional languages like JavaScript and R

[mercurial → noahmarc]

At most JavaScript is an imperative language with functional flavour

[klibertp → mercurial]

Try LiveScript: http://livescript.net/

JS semantics are those of a functional-oop language. It lacks a few standard functions (LiveScript has prelude-ls) and a ton of syntactic support for things. Once these are in place, you can write the code which looks and feels like Ocaml.

For example, moment.js function is `moment(dateString, formatString)`. In LiveScript I used it as:

     parseDate = (flip moment) "DD/MM/YYYY"

Now tell me that this doesn't look like functional code :)

(The only really lacking feature in JS is of course TCO, but then Clojure, so yeah, let's just trampoline everything.)

On: Bold pricing strategy (free with rev. royalty)

[noahmarc]

Seems like they would alienate enterprise clients but free certainly sounds appealing for small shops.

On: FastR: An implementation of the R language in Java...

[noahmarc]

The Relite mention at the end looks very worthwhile. We were just about to begin a large rewrite of analysis code from R to CUDA; Relite has the potential to save the effort of rewriting our existing code.

[tiarkrompf → noahmarc]

Relite author here. I'd love to learn more about your use cases, feel free to get in touch!

[noahmarc → tiarkrompf]

Definitely, thank you for the offer. I'm running through the install now but will send you an email once I've run a couple tests. I see your contact info is listed on your home page.

On: Launching our Data Science and Big Data Track

[noahmarc]

This seems like a great bundle of courses. The big data topics caught my attention but I'm actually looking forward to exploratory data analysis. Especially with the Tukey mention: https://www.udacity.com/course/ud651

On: Don't found a company unless you love Excel

[noahmarc]

Sounds like a market opportunity. Aside from simple accounting (tracking revenue and expenses), what's the range of startup needs that are covered by Excel?

If these needs aren't met by current accounting / finance packages, it definitely opens the door for a new competitor.

On: Snap – A JavaScript SVG Library

[noahmarc]

I wouldn't mind taking a closer look at that. They do have a data API to store individual key value pairs http://snapsvg.io/docs/#Element.data

Definitely different than what I'm used to in D3js, but worst case scenario you would have to loop through each key value pair. Worth testing out.

[startithub → noahmarc]

You're right, noahmarc, it's the same for me, I'm now too used to working with D3j, that I definitely need to find my way in Snapsvg library, as it really looks promising; maybe it'd be better to arrange a high level specialized class library to handle not only worst case scenario, but even common chart functions, as the Api itself looks quite low level code...