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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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Nice. I bought a MEAP of Fogus' Clojure book: I assume that all of his mini-articles will be in the book.
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A sensationalist article title, for sure. My answers to the three "dangers" listed in the article: No separation between home and work: in the late afternoon I shut down my computer and have a glass o…
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I think this is an old link. That said, one of the best things about AWS is their great online documentation. A few years ago a customer wanted a web service quickly deployed to AWS, and even having n…
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I don't agree with the article: odd business premise since we use S3 because it is replicated across availability zones, is very robust, and probably safe enough to base a business on. Why "de-duplica…
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I would guess that his "secret" is that he loves the game of chess. I like both chess and Go but realized my limitations (I did poorly in the US Chess Open in 1976, and I never broke the Shodan level …
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Right on. Surprised to hear the criticisms in these comments since this seems like such basic advice: don't have debt, work in a context of trust, and the desire to have everyone do good work. Not hav…
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I wish them luck and agree with Paul Miller's comment on needing more work on trust, provenance, and licensing rather than syntax. N3 is very easy to work with, but issues of trust/provenance are hard…
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Thanks. BTW, my telephone number is on my web site - I'm available to talk, preferably in the morning (Arizona time)
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I like these small devices, but as a practical setup, a good choice is just a very small Ubuntu laptop with a large external monitor for when you happen to be working at your desk. Inexpensive, not a …
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I nice example of doing sockets in Clojure but the list of sockets to check and agents blows memory if you test for a reasonable range of port numbers.
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I agree Eric. Not covering gen-class? That is the way to go if you want to package up a library written in Clojure.
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I know someone who is non-technical and does startup Internet businesses. His lack of knowledge concerning software development is a real problem, but he guts through it. The biggest problem is one of…
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An old, but excellent article. I had the good fortune, in ancient history, to get some hacking time in on the first type of Connection Machine (the SIMD one). And the best part was, wait for it ..., w…
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Just ask yourself: what would be best for the super rich? What would be best for the banks? And then you can make an accurate guess what Bernanke will do.
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I should have mentioned: Pharo uses the Squeak VM, but has its own (derived) sources and image files. When I give kudos to Pharo, those complements apply also to the original Squeak project.
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Good call. BTW, after having fun with Squeak and VisualWorks for a long time, I have switched to the Squeak fork project Pharo ( http://www.pharo-project.org/home ).…
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Great article - this is why I read HN. I think that Bradford Cross is right on: as more data becomes available, the challenge is not building 'cookie cutter' applications, but rather using some combin…
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I do a lot of simple things. Servers: use cron, zip, and s3cmd tools to backup to S3; on EC2, use snapshots. Development laptops: use git repos hosted on a rented VPS and I have a cron script to ZIP t…
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Interesting and I liked the CherryPy results. I used CherryPy a lot 5 to 6 years ago back in my Python using days -- simple and does the job. That said, database access, network latency, caching, etc.…
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Good summary list. For most developers, there is a nice abstraction barrier for graph theory because tools like neo4j, efficient RDF stores, search libraries, etc. make it fairly easy to build apps wi…
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weego: excellent point! The countries with the worse problems (at least that will also badly effect the rest the world) are the UK and the USA. In making predictions we should be informed by chaos the…
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Interesting - I am not sure if I buy into this, but an interesting article. In the USA, we stopped publishing our M3 figures 7 or 8 years ago -- a stunning lack of transparency, but as the article say…
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Good stuff. In my small town one of the two super markets hires people with disabilities and that is one reason I do my shopping there. A good friend has been deaf since she was about 4. She has accom…
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Freebase is interesting. I have played with it since the beginning, and I spent a lot of time with it recently because I just wrote a chapter for my new book on Freebase. Freebase compares a little wi…
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Looks like a fun project but without RDFS inferencing, may not be too useful. Without at least RDFS inferencing (and OWL would be nice) I don't know how you can merge data from different sources using…
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Not a great article. Might be more productive to play around with DBpedia ( http://wiki.dbpedia.org/OnlineAccess ) a bit. Semantic web tech is good for mixing data from multiple sources but be prepare…
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I haven't tried this yet but the docs look awesome. The Clojure community is attracting a lot of creative developers and projects.
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For years, I have "compiled stuff by hand" of OS X - not a bad approach, but it takes time. If I was just a software developer I would probably run OS X most of the time because I would have my tools …
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I hear you: TextMate is a great editor, especially when you want to browse through a lot of code. That said, "e" on Windows is fairly TextMate compatible (at least it runs the TextMate plugins). For U…
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As you say, MongoDB has support for replica pairs that are partition tolerant, but part of this functionality is in client libs. For Ruby, you register both dual masters in a replica pair with the cli…