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mark_l_watson
21,400karma·8,624submissions·August 19, 2009
about
I am an author of 20 books and a practitioner specializing in artificial intelligence, deep learning, natural language processing, and the semantic web. I have 55 US patents. I code in Common Lisp, Clojure, Swift, Python, Haskell, Java, and Scheme. My web site is https://markwatson.com
My recent books can be read for free online on my web site or optionally you can pay for them at https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson
Twitter: mark_l_watson and Mastodon: @mark_watson@mastodon.social
recent activity (8,624 total)
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I did not really intend to be too critical: I would never discourage someone from doing a major open source project because just the learning experience is rewarding enough for the developer. I will k…
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Wave is a nice platform to program for. I have never written any gadgets but I have played around quite a bit with writing robots (and I wrote a DevX article on robots a while ago). I still think that…
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It looks interesting enough, and the sort-of SQL language looks OK, but I have to ask: why would anyone use a young project (with only one developer?) rather than something really well supported like …
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The author makes a good point, similar to those made in the excellent book "The Millionaires Next Door." My wife and I have make it a habit of saving for new big ticket items like cars to avoid debt p…
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The author makes a really good point. Personally, about 90% of the time I buy something online I just go straight to Amazon.
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Great paper, and a tough problem (for one thing, sparse positive samples in training data).
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Hello Tom, first I should say that Ruby is my favorite language and fortunately there is a lot of demand for Ruby development. I don't really pitch customers on language since almost everyone I work f…
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I am not sure about Wave. I was a beta user, then got accounts for family and friends, but the uptake seems really slow. My enthusiasm level is good, but: As a practical matter, the only money I have …
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Nice article! I really enjoy hearing about other people's experiences. I have nothing per se against Microsoft's hosting except for the expense. I believe that it is much more expensive than AppEngine…
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I used to use Prolog a lot on R&D projects at SAIC but since becoming a consultant, few customers have wanted work done in Prolog (it has been about 5 years since anyone has paid me to do Prolog).…
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I use Ruby a lot, and I always deploy Ruby web apps to Heroku. This is all about loading request times. Right now, I think that the best bet for AppEngin is coding in Python. Since I don't much use Py…
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Amazon sells technology that they developed for their own use. I wonder what data they store in RRS? Tracking information? User calculated preferences on products?
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That is great. I'll alternate backups between S3 and GS.
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Clojure is nice (I have been using it more often for customer work). For me, Clojure still lacks the totally immersive feeling of using (as examples) Gambit-C with Marc Feeley's Emacs support (unbelie…
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A useful service, but I wonder when they will also support PostgreSQL/PostGIS? Amazon has a good story for replication, now with RDS across availability zones, and Elastic Load Balancing, etc. I am he…
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I wonder if his new company will do everything in Scala. If I were starting a company and writing the corporate stack from scratch, Scala would be a good possible choice. He has written a fair amount …
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Cool writeup. I am enthusiastic about node.js and I have Heroku node.js beta access - now all I need is more free time. Javascript and node.js have a nice development story and I am trying to spin up …
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I save GMail via POP3, Google Docs with a Python script, and I keep originals of Flickr and Picasa photos. Fairly easy to do.
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Hiking: I have explored over 100 remote Indian ruin sites in the mountains of Central Arizona. Cooking: definitely a favorite way to decouple from my work day. Music: I gave up on the guitar after 40 …
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I agree - same reason Rubinius will probably be the future of Ruby. Smalltalk has been around forever and one of Smalltalk's strengths is that most of the implementation is in Smalltalk itself. When…
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Very cool! I use Ruby 1.9.1 and JRuby 1.5 for production, but Rubinius may become dominant in the future because of using LLVM and because the code base must be much easier to work with.
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Great article. I like Neo4J but I have never used it for a customer project - just for personal experiments. In general, NoSQL vs. relational is an interesting tradeoff between the ability to horizont…
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Sure upgrading to Ruby 1.9.x is a hassle (character encodings, changes to array class, etc. does break some old code). That said, 1.9 gives a good performance boost that Ruby needs, so man up and just…
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I like Yehuda's advice to use --rebase. I'll have to try that. I used to really like svn, but after using git for about a year I am now feeling some cognitive dissonance using svn on a customer projec…
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AppEngine is being used, but I would bet not nearly to the degree that AWS is. One thing that Google could do right away is to offer a (hopefully reasonable) monthly fee to keep instances active - loa…
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That is really slick. Too bad that old documents can't be automatically converted (wait for that feature, sure it is coming).
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Interesting idea, but why not just use some disk space on a remote server that you pay for anyway? I use a VPS for this and use cron jobs for rolling S3 backups. (And, I need the VPS anyway.) If someo…
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I am using Clojure a lot right now on a customer's project, a cool language for sure. That said, I have doubts about Clojure + AppEngine because of the loading request times. I can get a Java + AppEng…
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I think that they use the social graph linking you with your friend's accounts, and the information they get when your friends give FB access to their GMail account. Makes sense, right?
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Exactly right. Pay, and you don't get loading request delays.