Viewing profile — jwp

It also resonates especially when you're reading from hard experience. A year ago I would have quickly read & enjoyed this, then moved on. Now too many items give me pause as I rec…

This is exactly the same handshake deal the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor did with each other.

What he said! I'd like to add that a key to squeezing more out of NathanRice's post is the phrase "conjugate prior." Another totally natural thing would be to use a Gaussian prior …

Hey, AOLserver is open source. At the time it was the only web server with a built-in glue language (Tcl) and pooled database connections. It got me excited about web programming. …

Kevin Garnett plays exactly the same way that you describe Jack Lambert. He goes only one speed: full blast. Whenever I need motiviation, I find myself asking myself, wwkgd?

Creating the list of URLs and prioritizing them is the hardest thing about building a crawler! That is, a good, web-scale one. A replacement for wget might be sort of fun, but the …

Sure, there's plenty of fluff in the article, but it isn't because the author ( http://www.math.wisc.edu/~ellenber/ ) is clueless about science. The article is probably at the righ…

Suffix array.

I remember seeing this video in a very sobering HBO documentary: http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/hackingdemocracy/

Nespresso is great. At $0.50 per pod, it's pricey, but for such painless cleanup and consistently good shots, worth the price. Hands down the best teas I've had come from Upton Tea…

My intuition says it's not possible to get 1 without destroying the ability to get 2, or vice versa. But I'm no expert. The solution that leaps to my mind is to use a locality-sens…

That's not true. You can submit your results and then refuse to release your algorithm, disqualifying you from the competition. "Upon qualifying, as described above, the Participan…

What's your score on the Netflix Prize quiz?

We prefer to call it a family.

The non-friend vs anti-friend distinction didn't even occur to me, but it's clearly an important part of the experiment. I like all the discussion of data. Fun problem. I did not r…

Yeah, yeah, so the engineering part wasn't that great. But were the results good? Which algorithms did you use? What were your features? Seems like an interesting experiment, espec…

Good cites. I second them. Mackay and Jaynes are excellent but can get out of hand quickly. Duda, Hart and Stork is another good hardcore option. When I need the book "for dummies,…

A very important question... Celestial Seasonings Fast Lane tea.

The MSFT guy is right. Full open speech recognition is very hard and a long way away. For some simpler tasks, it's fine. On a related note, I was surprised to discover that "say" w…

When you file yourself (pro se), the PTO is gentler and kinder than they are if a lawyer files for you. If you have the time and energy, file now to get the early filing date and c…

This begs the question, how do you define a bot? From my understanding of the talk, they replay one person's session and don't use composites. But, point taken.

It depends on what your definition of "bot" is. Are you talking about when the ESP game records a person's session, then plays those moves back to other players (and other recorded…

From what I can tell a lot of this CF stuff starts with a machine learning algorithm and data about likes/dislikes, making filtering a classification or search task. Is there somet…