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adpreese

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CSV Challenge 11 years ago

I think it's usually better to do this with a reproducible script instead of manual editing in a text editor. There are too many times where the requirements change after the fact for "simple one-off" transformations.

I've used this to great effect to help handle partially obfuscated phone numbers and validate whether they could be valid or not. There are far too many edge cases to try to handle on your own if it's not core to the problem you're trying to solve.

It's like asking "Why doesn't everyone know calculus in this day and age? It was discovered hundreds of years ago." Sometimes people are ignorant, lazy, under a time crunch, etc. When information became widely available(That SQL injection is bad and easy to fix) has little to do with how 5 random dudes working on a team write their code.

Sure, but that's hardly the only problem. The simple fact is most people don't have systems in their home that they want/need to interface with through an app or something. Here's a close to comprehensive list of the electronic things in my home: Several computers, Microwave, George Foreman Grill, Rice Cooker, Fridge, Thermostat, Toothbrush, Lights, Dish washer, Washer/Dryer

Mechanical engineering doesn't seem to be blocking point for any of those except maybe the washer/dryer and food related stuff. I could definitely see the opportunity to have a device that could portion out N grams of rice per person and then have it ready to eat when I get home, but for the rest, I don't see it as the stumbling block.

Every time I see a thing about the internet of things, I get a little excited, but then they don't really show exciting examples of what you should do with it. Outside of Lockitron and Nest, I am unimpressed with what's come out so far. But it's tough. The field seems so expansive that most people get overwhelmed with possibilities, but few bare any fruit. For my part, I've only had one decent idea in the space. I'd love to see a robot that cooks food for me while I'm commuting home. Possibly like a Zojirushi rice cooker that I can program to make stuff at a certain time, but with more flexibility and a web API.

Agreed. Starting with a framework first unless you truly and deeply understand the space is going to either make something that kind of solves a problem but has its own problems, period, or kind of solves a problems but has its own problems for a really long time while you slowly refine it. And the odds of dedicating yourself to solving a problem that you don't have a need to solve are low.

Sure, there's value in rare words, but I don't think anything that occurs across the corpus fewer than 3 times is going to tell you anything useful. You need a certain amount just to have it be a real signal. What was the least frequent useful word in the data set, msalahi?

I did try it out. It does a good job of pulling out different bits and categorizing them. I went ahead and ran the example you had and put it up to continue the conversation(https://gist.github.com/adpreese/6722561). If you want me to take it down, I will certainly respect that but I thought it'd be convenient for anyone else paying attention.

The noun phrases part of the response gave a concise list of things, including the word thing(hijacked, NLP thread, stuff, My NLP, thing, Drakaal, cooler, heuristics, Just). That's maybe good at picking out the nouns, but it's not really actionable yet. It might be great as the bag of words to use for trying to classify something, but by itself the best it's giving me is NLP/heuristics if I had the concepts grouped together, somehow. I think that's a reasonable takeaway from your example, but I'd be curious what your thoughts are on it.

PS. I tried the TLDR API on a copy and paste of the original article with commas, periods, and single and double quotes removed but it returned a 500 error. I'm probably doing something wrong, but I'd love to see what it spits out if you can help me out.

I tried to test your example with your API, but it requires a credit card even for the freemium plan. Is there any way you can make a rate limited API that never charges to avoid that? I'm not familiar with mashape so it may not be possible.

How do you deal with keeping your super rare words list sensible? For many forms of technical writing I could see things getting out of hand where you have lots of tiny dense clusters not really close to anything else if you didn't manage the list well.