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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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My bad: Neo4J did have their prices listed.
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Neo4J is a great tool - I have used it with the Ruby wrappers. A little off topic but: I think that the AGPL (which is used for Neo4J) is a good license but I wish that dual licensed projects would be…
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I had to install it from source on Ubuntu 9.10 after: sudo apt-get install python2.5-gtksourceview2 sudo apt-get install python2.6-gtksourceview2
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That is really neat - I just installed it. I don't usually use Python (strongly preferring Ruby) but I want to experiment with Python + AppEngine (I am tired of the hassles with JRuby + AppEngine, and…
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Ur/web looks very cool - I just skimmed through some of the documentation. I have often thought about creating my own web framework and writing a DSL using Gambit-C (probably by building on Blackhole,…
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Well, I disagree with most of this 3+ year old article. Sure, the SW has got off to a slow start - partially I think because people would look at an XML serialization of RDF data and say WTF :-) There…
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That was pretty cool, but I kept skipping forward 30 seconds, to see all of the effects without taking 10 minutes. I really enjoy spending time at the shooting range (yeah, it is an Arizona thing :-),…
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Ouch, that sounds painful. I still use my 2+ year old MacBook a lot because Ubuntu seems to work perfectly on it. I have a new 4 core Toshiba that has been a nightmare re: Ubuntu. I decided to wait fo…
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Great point about lack of realtime coverage. Usually my wife and I postpone normal life an enjoy the Olympics 24x7 (almost :-) In the past, the non-realtime coverage would have been awful. However, si…
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I would not do this. Several years ago, an investor was putting together a team and offered me 30% salary and some equity - with a 1 year commitment to see if the business would fly. Because the busin…
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Thanks, that sounds right. That said, I have 3+ years invested in Rails, so it is difficult to make a commitment to another stack. I am doing a small (non web app) project with Clojure right now, whic…
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Great set of slides - I wish I could have heard the talk live. I did add his company's blog to my RSS/Atom feed. I would like to spend more time with both Clojure and AppEngine and the slides were som…
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A good read, good points criticizing the spec. At first, I was dead set against HTML5 because I had been waiting for wide XHTML+RDFa adoption. That isn't going to happen now. Still, if HTML5 implemen…
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If you read the Blogspot profile of the author of this article, it looks like he lives in the USA. That said, he makes good points. I agree that the UK and USA are face the worse economic problems, bu…
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Another myth: the world is a dangerous place. Seriously, for most people on earth, the world has steadily become a safer place over the last 50 years. Far more danger during the "cold war." Media hype…
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Amazon designed and implemented AWS for their own use, and it is not always a good fit for outside developers. But sometimes it is. AWS is very good for offloading non-time critical calculations, back…
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Great article. I also have felt some "TED attendance envy" while really enjoying the online videos. For some people, the value of personal networking far out weighs the travel costs and conference fee…
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I am put off by the article's title, but otherwise Alan makes some good points: I would prefer that Buzz not show the number of new items. I have been using Buzz like I use Twitter: about 10 minutes a…
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Interesting points on library design to do the heavy lifting (especially the HTML document regular expression example). Still, the main point of the article is not right: Scala is much more concise th…
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Hello hga, yes, ultimately the USA and U.K. are too big (in my opinion) to get bailed out. Also: of course the Eurozone news is big, but here in the USA I feel like that story is used to gloss over ou…
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I find all of the news coverage on Greece to be a "red herring." The real story is that England and the USA have no chance of avoiding economic collapse (most likely large devaluation of currency) - s…
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Sorry if this is off topic, but: the speed that Google changed Buzz is the reason why I love the web as a deployment platform. Except for local software development tools, Latex, and video editing sof…
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Very cool idea of using a low cost camera sensor to provide feedback on how well the robot is moving. I would guess (not having seen the code) that Matt is using the metric of how far the robot can mo…
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That is a good point about EC2 being a black box. When something really slows down (SimpleDB queries, network access, etc.) it takes effort to track down the problem(s). I think that AWS is a good res…
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Silly article, IMHO. Main reason: if you are really caught up in the privacy issue, don't use Google (signed in), Facebook, etc. Also, strongly control what cookies you want to allow. To me it is a va…
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I would diversify my investments internationally, pack my laptop and reading material and book a long cruise. Seriously: no matter how long the trip, my wife and I never get bored on a cruise ship. Al…
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I see the logic in taking a small job just to keep busy. I did the same thing right after the dot com bust 8 years ago: I took a task from an Indian company to do a Sharepoint clone in Java at a fairl…
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You are right about the next older generation getting even a better deal, but I am not complaining on my own account: when I graduated from college in the 1970s, it was really easy to buy a home, and …
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Good article, as usual for mises.org (I credit their material a few years ago for motivating me to get out of the stock market). I am in my 50s, and one of my common little rants is how selfish my gen…
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BTW, I wrote an article for DevX last year on Gambit-C (pardon the self-plug): http://www.devx.com/opensource/Article/42778/1763/ …