Category: Programming
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All Machine Learning Platforms are Terrible (but some less so)
I recently took a medium sized feature set with labels at work and ran it through some of the most popular machine learning platforms. The goal was to get a feel for each of them via the standard battery of regressions and evaluate each for use in further experimentation. This is a review of my…
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In Retrospect: QCon NYC 2013 (and a conversation with Rich Hickey on languages)
QCon NYC was the most refreshing conference I’ve been to in a very long time. Perhaps it’s partially because I’ve lingered too long in Microsoft circles, or maybe it’s just been too long since I went to a large conference. In any case, the speaker lineup was just chock full of brilliant minds from all over…
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On Type Safety, Representable States and Erlang
Close your eyes and imagine your program as a function that takes a set of inputs and produces a set of outputs. I know this may seem overly simple, but a set of actions in a GUI can be thought of as a set of inputs, and a set of resulting side effects to a…
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Bad Data is the Real Problem
Big data is the buzzword de jour, and why not? Companies like Google with huge server farms are doing amazing things leveraging huge amounts of data and processing power. It’s all very sexy but these researchers get to pick and choose the data they work with. They can maximize their research gains by pushing the cutting edge…
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Levenshtein Distance and the Triangle Inequality
Levenshtein distance is one of my favorite algorithms. On the surface it seems so very simple, but when you spend some time thinking hard on it deep insights are waiting to be had. The first and most important thing about Levenshtein distance is it’s actually a metric distance. That is, it obeys the triangle inequality. For…
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The Ted Neward F# Folding Challenge
My friend, and fellow Professional F# 2.0 author, Ted Neward recently challenged me to a bit of a Code Kata. Take a list of numbers and compress it in a particular simple way but without any mutable state. What makes this problem interesting is that a tech interviewer mentioned that that he hadn’t seen a functional solution to this problem.…
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Code Bubbles and the Keyboard
I was catching up on reading one of my favorite blogs today, Lambda the Ultimate, and was not disappointed in the least. At the top of the list sat Code Bubbles, a whole new take on the IDE. Code Bubbles shocked me because it’s visually manifest much of what I had in mind when I wrote almost two years…