HN user
Ben McRedmond. Co-founder at Equals
Hi, author here. I love reading academic papers and I love Math. But it's an unfortunate fact that academic papers make up the majority of the literature on ML — and that their notation, and writing style exclude a large population who would otherwise find them useful. That's all I'm trying to get at here.
Hey, author here.
Aside from the fact the techniques he mentioned are some of the simplest in machine learning (and are hardly those that would immediately come to mind when I think "machine learning")
The primary point of this article was the contrast between something as simple as K-Means, and the literature that describes it. It wasn't meant as a full intro to ML, but rather something along the lines of "give it a try, you might be surprised by what you can achieve".
Even for "simple" algorithms such as K-Means, implementing them is often only the tip of the iceberg.
Yup. But getting more people to explore the tip of the iceberg is, in my opinion, a good thing. We don't discourage people from programming because they don't instantly understand the runtime complexity of hash tables and binary trees. We encourage them to use what's already built knowing that smart people will eventually explore the rest of the iceberg.
Sure, author here.
The point of the graphs are as an example more than anything — in any real world solution it's not trivial to plot your documents (as representing documents with thousands of words in 1d, 2d or 3d is not trivial).
But if _you could_ represent your documents in 2d, you could plot them like I do here. And, the X-axis would represent 1 feature of your documents, and the Y-axis another.
Tl;dr don't focus on the axes — focus on the idea of being able to compare the relative distances between documents.
Yup. We're working on making this clearer right now.
"Your users" is _your_ users. You add a Javascript snippet to your app which sends us up-to-date information about your users (as they move around your app) — we record that data and allow you (or a colleague) to download a CSV of the data at any time.
Does that make sense?
Eek! Fixed.
Thanks for the feedback — we'll see if we can make that clearer.
Yup, my bad. Terms of use I don't think we need right now. Privacy policy is: we'll never share your data with anyone.
I'm often asked to generate CSVs of our user base for various non-technical colleagues. They might use these CSVs to do analyses in Excel or import users into a service (like Mailchimp).
This is an attempt at taking me out of that process, and automating it.
Congrats guys!
I think there's a big difference between how [my generation and] I (19 y.o.) use Facebook, and how older generations do.
For me, it is 80% keeping up with my current friends and 20% older friends. I think these ratios are perhaps flipped after a certain point, perhaps the people for whom their FB graph wasn't created organically from the age of 14/15 but rather, had to go and create it posthumously.
Yes, there are people I'm friends with who I'm not friends with anymore. But, if you use Groups + Lists (which all my non-techy friends use too), this isn't really an issue.
Anyway, I just see a lot of commentary on things FB is doing wrong by people > 25/30 y.o. But, for people below that age bracket (who tend not to be commenting in the media) it has (from my observations) replaced texting/phone/skype/letters/etc.
I like the TV analogy, it's perhaps more apt. Surely the point of any TV network is to show ads based on their viewers interests? Just FB is able to be much more targeted (at the same time they also have to compete with the huge over-supply of online display-ads, are my eyeballs worth more on facebook.com vs. joes-blog.com? I don't think so, which is the major issue with their current monetization strategy (EDIT: and they haven't shown that their targeting is significantly better than Google Adwords as of yet)).
I am confident though that they will find a way to make FB a seriously viable business. The list of things I use FB for is just so long, I don't see how they couldn't find at least one v. profitable workflow to tap into (organising a night out, checking-in on the night out, posting photos the next day, etc.).
I don't know. Obviously this matters in determining how much FB is worth. It probably isn't much right now but, I see the potential for huge future earnings, they haven't found their adwords yet, I'm confident they will.
RE: The stock being down ~10% in after-hours.
I think there's a real divide between the people who use Facebook, for whom it is (often) a serious part of their social life and, those who comment on FB in the media and invest in FB on the public market.
Being 19 Facebook is a critical part of finding out what's going on, organising events and, keeping in touch with everyone (whether I see them every day or once a year). I'm not unique in this, it's true for all my friends and pretty much anyone I meet, of my age, around the (western?) world.
Obviously, the market thinks FB is over-valued; I'm not commenting on whether it is or isn't. I'm just interested at what the market might value FB at if the people buying its stock used it as much and in the same way as younger generations. (As far as I see it, it's like a single private company owning the whole "phone system" for young people. What would that be valued at?)
This is really a problem with Github's news feed, rather than the watch button. Facebook had this problem a few years ago but put a lot of work into aggregating similar stories, etc.
I just did the Leaving Cert in Dublin in June and I'm currently interning at Hunch. You'll hear a lot of people going on about just how expensive New York is, but, honestly compared to Dublin, it's cheaper or the same price for pretty much everything. New York is exceptionally expensive in comparison to the rest of the US, but, in comparison to Dublin, it really isn't at all.
As for camaraderie, the tech scene here feels very friendly and there're plenty of people helping each other out (I don't really have anything to compare it to though). Get in touch if you have any questions.
How is advertising a net-negative to society? Advertising funds many things which are too expensive to produce by themselves: newspapers, tv, movies, etc. You may not _like_ it but it makes possible many things which would otherwise be infeasible.
Just as an example from my own experiences: I was able to predict the winner of the XFactor within 1% of the final vote, two hours prior to the final [1]. I've also written an algorithm that can with 80% accuracy detect a news story will come out of a group of tweets. There is a lot that can be done with this data.
[1] http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0115/122426...
Twitter's data set is incredibly valuable; Twitter won't make money from ads, they will make money from analyses of their data [1]. Developing infrastructure and software that can analyse the sheer quantity of data Twitter generates takes time — and money. But, when they finally crack it they will be extremely profitable. It's much easier for Twitter to do this opposed to Facebook (who I would say is also interested in doing this) because of Twitter's public by default culture (/policies).
[1] If evidence is needed: they just bought BackType; They're starting to lock down and sell their APIs rather than give it away for free as they realise the data's immense value.
"...but youngsters with no special talent, like Ms. Cinkle..."
Not so sure that's fair: I see this a lot with young 'stars' being 'talentless', in this case, being smart enough (both to use it for a good cause and to be able to use it in this way) to capitalize on her 'fame' "to generate money and attention for earthquake relief for Japan" or raise money "for Cystic Fibrosis Walk" is pretty impressive, and remember, she is 14 years old; I don't think most in her situation wouldn't be capable of doing that.
EDIT: I just felt like adding this because I see this sort of thing a lot, sure, she may not have demonstrated talent in the video but what she's done afterwards has definitely demonstrated that she's a smart kid, and, 'sly bashing' like that is so unnecessary (and prevalent).
For anyone who's interested, I've been working on a static site generator called Bolt (http://usebolt.com/), which is more like a Sinatra clone which outputs static HTML (rather than being aimed at bloggers) giving you a lot of flexibility!
There are a lot of interesting ideas in this video about customer support, management and pricing. Definitely worth a watch, really inspiring!
The BusinessInsider article [1] refers to them as a "pre-revenue company", so, not much?
I don't see what this offers over HN that would cause the people here, who provide excellent content + discussion, to jump ship; especially considering they're the likely target audience for this website. Also... the design is quite, link-farm-ish...
Surprised no one's mentioned GigaOm (gigaom.com) yet, personally, I think they do the best job out of all the 'professional' blogs.
It's not as big a problem for the big companies like Google and IBM since they can afford to pay people off, they can also afford to have a more extensive hiring process in the first place.
Dublin is definitely not so expensive that it outweighs the benefit of a 12.5% corporation tax, which is more than twice less than most other EU countries.
I live in Ireland and am an Irish citizen (US citizen too, hoping to move to the US). There are several reasons I would think the US is better for entrepreneurs and startups than Ireland.
* The truly brilliant people tend to leave after high school, since there're no world class universities here (particularly for sciences).
* People seem, in my opinion, to get quite tunneled vision in terms of what they can achieve: they see Ireland as the boundary of their successes. People here tend to be unambitious.
* Labour laws in Ireland are very strict: once you hire someone, it's practically impossible to fire them.
* We are currently in a terrible economic situation, the country is bankrupt. 20 year old Irish companies have trouble getting credit, let alone startups.
* It's probably worth noting that Enterprise Ireland is generally considered quite incompetent in terms of deciding who to invest in and in general operation of their programs. Getting this grant would require, most likely, an absurd amount of hoop jumping.
* Dublin is also still a very expensive place to live.
That said, there're a lot of great things about Ireland (more specifically Dublin):
* It's a very small (and very social!) place, building a network is not hard, everyone knows everyone.
* Dublin is a great place to live.
* Very low corporation tax (12.5%)
EDIT: Formatting
I think this is potentially a mistake, it furthers (in my opinion) the image that Jobs is irreplaceable (being on a medical leave of absence he must still come back to launch products, etc.).
I'm not sure about that, I don't know what pricing is like in the US but here (Ireland) Android phones are significantly cheaper. Most people I know who buy an Android phone, do so because it was a cheap phone, not because it's a 'smartphone' (excluding the more technically inclined friends of mine) — while the iPhone and Android are certainly competitors, I don't think people buy Android for the same reason. If I'm making sense...
BTW Person I replied to, changed their comment after I replied and I can no longer edit mine. Also, I was wrong about the exceptions: sorry bout that.
This cannot be turned off with a click of the mouse (see my warning below) :-) — although, one who spent 5 minutes reading the source, could turn it off! But still, not click of the mouse.
And yes, a second time wasting computer would be ideal but ye I don't have one :)
ha, it looked wrong at the time, thank you :)