SPARK-1019: pyspark RDD take() throws an NPE

Author: Patrick Wendell <pwendell@gmail.com>

Closes #112 from pwendell/pyspark-take and squashes the following commits:

daae80e [Patrick Wendell] SPARK-1019: pyspark RDD take() throws an NPE
[SPARK-1237, 1238] Improve the computation of YtY for implicit ALS

Computing YtY can be implemented using BLAS's DSPR operations instead of generating y_i y_i^T and then combining them. The latter generates many k-by-k matrices. On the movielens data, this change improves the performance by 10-20%. The algorithm remains the same, verified by computing RMSE on the movielens data.

To compare the results, I also added an option to set a random seed in ALS.

JIRA:
1. https://spark-project.atlassian.net/browse/SPARK-1237
2. https://spark-project.atlassian.net/browse/SPARK-1238

Author: Xiangrui Meng <meng@databricks.com>

Closes #131 from mengxr/als and squashes the following commits:

ed00432 [Xiangrui Meng] minor changes
d984623 [Xiangrui Meng] minor changes
2fc1641 [Xiangrui Meng] remove commented code
4c7cde2 [Xiangrui Meng] allow specifying a random seed in ALS
200bef0 [Xiangrui Meng] optimize computeYtY and updateBlock