I just listened to an ACM sponsored talk  Making Big Data Processing Simple With Spark  by Matei Zaharias. You may need to be an ACM member to watch the webinar. I first joined ACM in the mid 1970s - recommended. For handling huge datasets Spark is evolutionary or revolutionary depending on your point of view. A bit of personal history before I talk specifically about Spark: In the late 1980s I was an architect and developer on a multinational project to use seismic data from 38 data collection stations to detect atomic bomb tests. All of our data handling software was custom; if we had Spark, or even Hadoop, we would have saved a ton of effort. Similarly, in the 1990s I was tech lead on a fraud detection system that used massive real time telephone records data sets. Modern infrastructure would have saved a lot of time and money. My first serious use of map reduce was processing large Twitter data sets at Compass Labs. We used Hadoop on Amazon ElasticMapreduce. Later wh...

I have been using Lisp languages professionally since the early 1980s. While I now use Java, Ruby, and Clojure for much of my work, I have been slowly been getting up to speed using Haskell over the last 5 years. My difficulties using Haskell are caused almost 100% when I need write impure Haskell code. This occasional discomfort is made up for by the fun and productivity of writing pure Haskell code. Using haskell-mode in Emacs I get the same happy feeling writing pure Haskell code that I used to get using Common Lisp, Scheme, and Clojure - and with the advantages of a strongly typed language! I like to mock up test data and write the pure code first and then write impure code that needs to access the web, RDF data stores, relational databases, file IO, etc. For me, as a student of Haskell, this is the easiest way to write Haskell programs. About 15 years ago, in one of my Java artificial intelligence books I wrote an example program that provides a natural language processing (NL...

I believe that Hillary Clinton is in the pocket of Wall Street, a lacky by any definition. I also believe that she is, as Ralph Nader says, a poster child for the military industrial complex. I also don't like her close ties to agribusiness giant Monsanto and her advocacy for the industry's genetically modified crops. I believe that our two party system is broken, almost never giving us a choice that matches the preferences of the electorate. Corporate news corporations favor Clinton over Bernie Sanders in subtle and unfair ways, basing so much of their slanted (as directed to the financial interests of the network owners) discussion in terms assuming Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic candidate and pushing the false narrative that Bernie Sanders has no chance of winning the general election. Some of my friends who are Democrats believe that it is a mistake to not vote for whatever Democratic toadie the establishment runs. What if a Republican wins? Oh NOoos! The sky w...