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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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That is a really good point. BTW, food stays fresh in the refrigerator for many days, so often there is no need to freeze it. I like to add a small amount of fresh finely chopped vegetables to leftove…
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All about marketing: this is big business, so a lot of money is spent pushing the convenience life style. I have a difficult time relating to this however since cooking is a favorite activity of min…
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I would extend Tim's comments to include voice and speech as modes for interacting with computers. My wife and I got new Android phones recently and we both adapted instantly to speaking commands as o…
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An old article, but a great read. Tying together writing and programming Lisp is insightful and if I could extend his ideas a little: writing using a light weight but very powerful tool like Latex see…
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I was just today tweaking memcached use on one of my Rails apps and also a customer's app. In addition to using the out of the box support, I used a few simple tricks with ActiveRecord also (I wrote t…
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I am trying it out right now, and first impressions are good. That said, for me, Rails for complex apps and Sinatra for web services and simple apps is probably sufficient. I continue to be pleased wi…
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Sorry to see Werner Vogels doing an April Fools column. Not to pick on him, but tech April Fools articles are lame.
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No. I look at this site occasionally, and nothing seems to get done. Also (pardon me if I take your good joke seriously :-) I don't see why we need planet scale RDF data stores. Instead, we need a ver…
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A few years ago, I bought a print book on Lulu. Paul Graham had released the book into the public domain (?) and some kind person had spent an hour or so uploading it to Lulu.com and the book was very…
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The Church probalistic extentions to Scheme ( http://projects.csail.mit.edu/church/wiki/Church ) look interesting enough. I am not sure how practical things like the fuzzy list equality (using Levensh…
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The gossip mills in computer science :-) I used to work with Ben Goertzel (a lot of fun, BTW) but I don't know David Hart. Sounds like personal issues. BTW, OpenCog is an interesting system. I have sp…
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I agree with you. I mostly use MongoDB with Ruby and mongo_record. I find this combination so easy to use that I don't have to think about it (like driving a car). I always keep MongoDB running as a s…
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Here is an article on mixing Datamapper + MongoDB + MySQL: http://lunarlogicpolska.com/blog/2010/02/15/mysql-and-mongod... …
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I can't believe some of what is said by people on both sides of the NoSQL arguments. Discounting use of RDF data stores, almost all of my recent work involves PostgreSQL and MongoDB. I think that it i…
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I have a friend who is a retired Scotland Yard detective and he has an interesting take on the US war on drugs: we effectively put hundreds of billions of dolars a year into the hands of organized cri…
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I dislike it when business agreements are changed unilaterally. (Think of Darth Vader speaking with Lando Calrissian.) Terms of service at a web site with authenticated login is a business agreement. …
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I've never read anything by Joe Stump before but I just bookmarked this article so I can peruse more of his stuff later. I liked the way he personalized his argument to his own deployment situation ra…
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Strange name change, but a good programming environment (although I more frequently use Emacs+Gambit-C Scheme because I like being able to effortlessly build small compiled applications - harder to do…
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I was running 10.4 alpha 3 and then the beta in order to get better support for the hardware on a new laptop. I agree with the author of this article that 10.4 just feels well put together visually. B…
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I wrote about how easy it is to do some form of index and search: http://markwatson.com/blog/2009/11/mongodb-has-good-support-... …
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Sweet, I am installing it right now on my MacBook (I always have it running) and if everything looks good I'll also install it on my 2 MongoDB servers. I really like MongoDB for its ease of use with R…
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The port of mini-Kanren to Clojure is a great contribution - thanks!
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A nice writeup, but I wonder why not just use Scala? It is true that Scala has a steep learning curve compared to Java but you get all of the efficiency with a concise notation. (Substitute Clojure fo…
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This is even better than his last writeup. Interesting about the financial tradeoffs of running his own server instead of something like EC2, but he still relies on S3 for terabytes of storage. He men…
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Jim's point is that you only need so much money, so waiting for (as an example) $20m instead of taking $10m now does not make sense. I think that his argument can be turned around: founders of a succe…
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Here is an article that I feel paints a fairly accurate picture of the risks that the USA is facing: http://www.moneyandmarkets.com/bernanke-running-amuck-6-3842... There are a few things I don't ag…
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Interesting reading the comments: is denial a river in Egypt? :-) I aree that the USA has great assets (although many have been sold to foreign investors) but there is a disturbing trend of losing ou…
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Great news! I usually use Rails for medium and medium-large projects but I like to use Sinatra for small web apps and web services. Sinatra seems like a better fit also if you want to use JRuby on App…