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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! A well thought out reference. One thing: I wish that people would add RDF data stores to NoSQL discussions.
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I spent several hours Thursday night re-reading Cassandra docs and doing another test install. I am trying to decide between MongoDB (which I have a fair amount of experience with) and Cassandra for a…
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The author should have watched the entire interview if he was going to blog about it. Annie Leonard sounded reasonable, not knocking all material things, but rather saying that we should get good use …
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You might be right that Heroku always keeps all of your dynos "spinning." If they do spin them down for the two less expensive shared cluster options, that seems OK, at least for my understanding of t…
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I agree. Also, I suspect that if a deployed app is rarely accessed, then there is some spin up time to load a slug. Both customers noticed this effect that the first page load usually seemed slow to t…
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Good application of Hadoop (processing 100 GB of log data a day, separate web interface for looking at results). As a research project, I have been using Hadoop for NLP. I'm also following with some i…
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Heroku is great, no doubt about that. My only issue is the 'guilt factor': almost all of my use of Heroku has been for free (my cookingspace.com web site that I use to monitor my diet because I take b…
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That is pretty neat: the author wrote a Clojure wrapper for part of the OpenNlp library in his last blog post, and in this post he uses the wrapper in a search application.
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Actually, this is good general advice! After my wife and I moved from living at the beach (exp$ensive) to the mountains (equally nice, and much cheaper), Carol was able to stop working except for a fe…
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Nice article. Older people (I speak from experience since I am in my 50s) have some real advantages in starting businesses: likely to already have some degree of economic independence, have many busin…
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Good article but the author concentrated just on great output quality. There is another huge advantage: it is easier and less time consuming to write using Latex. I have used Latex, OpenOffice.org, an…
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That is a good idea. I set up a customer's portal to use FBC last year and as impressed by how simple this was. It would be easy to implement your secondary login idea, so I'll probably do this in the…
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I use a lot of my (sometimes ancient) Java code with both Clojure and Scala. So far I have always written wrappers that copy Java data into Clojure or Scala 'native' data types. If you do this then th…
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If your app is written with Java + JDO, then with some effort it should be portable. I've seen JDO backends of relational databases, Hadoop Hbase, ODF, JSON,etc. I don't have a lot of experience with …
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Last night I watched most of Ryan Dahl's 1 hour video on Node, built it, and played with a few examples. I must admit that I like it much more than I thought that I would. The video is good (but too l…
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Since the author quoted me a few times in this article, how can I not like it :-) For certain types of problems (e.g., graph theory, circuit design, general layout problems, planning) Prolog's built i…
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Unfortunately, changing the bottom bar properties to place it to the left or right makes the text indicating running apps show up as ...
On the Mac, I make the bottom task bar very small and place it …
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I bought a Sinclair ZX80 30 years ago - I thought about writing a commercial game app for it but I got busy on other things. Compared to the Apple II (I had serial number 71 of the original Apple II …
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That was great - well worth 30 minutes. He seems to take so much more of a 'scientific' approach to his work and general thinking than I do - I am now sitting here thinking about my own thought proces…
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Everyone knows that GDP is an awful measure of economic health and resiliency. No real news here. Huricane Katrina? GDP goes up.
War? GDP goes up.
Banks need bailed out a tax payer expense. GDP goes u…
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I can't agree with the negative comments here. I think that his comparison to chaotic systems is right-on.
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"Regan's or any other era's budget deficits pale in comparison the the unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security." Actually, the biggest unfunded liability is the interest on the money that…
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For a large business, this looks like a great product. Way too expensive for an individual or very small company. Jungle Disk is a lot cheaper, and I am going to set my wife's MacBook up to use it sin…
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Charles Nutter has a writup on using nailgin with JRuby: http://blog.headius.com/2009/05/jruby-nailgun-support-in-130... I've tried this and it works fine.…
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Nice writeup. Sinatra with builder is just about perfect for implementing web services, dynamically generated RSS feeds, simple web apps, etc. Nicely complements using Rails for rich web apps.
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This look really useful: only use the potentially high latency consistent read operations when you really need them. BTW, I have noticed something that one of my customers concurs with: using SimpleDB…
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I use AppEngine, Heroku, and Amazon AWS often - for me, the very rare outages are just noise. Seriously, sometimes (not often but it happens) my bank's web portal, my health insurance's web portal, et…
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So stupid since open source licenses are all about intellectual property rights: you create something and thus it is your right to determine the license that allows other people to legally use it. Tha…
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That was so cool. Simplicity is more difficult than clutter. My wife and I moved from a large, "partially cluttered" house on the beach to a small and very tidy house in the mountains. It was not easy…
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I had lunch with John Koza many years ago and bent his ear a bit with an idea for speeding up the creation of pre-trained recurrent neural networks (ended up being the last example in my 2nd C++ book…