A few weeks ago, I came across DiffSharp, an automatic differentiation library in F#. As someone whose calculus skills have always been rather mediocre (thanks Wolfram Alpha!), but who needs to deal with gradients and the like on a regular basis because they are quite useful in machine learning and numerical methods, the project looked pretty interesting: who wouldn’t want exact and efficient calculations of derivatives? So I figured I would take a couple of hours to experiment with the library. This post [...]

One thing I never really thought about a great deal before was the term ‘on-line’ friends and what it might or might not mean. I mean what does that really mean? Are they just actual friends or just “on-line” friends?

After enjoying owning a 150mm refractor telescope for a year, I decided I wanted to upgrade.