back
user profile
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)
comment
Long term, our government can either default on its debt (I doubt this will happen) or use massive inflation to reduce the effects of debt (this is what I think will happen). I think that it is imposs…
comment
Good questions. I would think that if they are making money with AWS then they will keep buying more servers. I usually trust S3 for backups and restores but periodically back my own data off of AWS t…
comment
Nice presentation! Sorry that this is little off topic, but: MongoDB is released under the AGPL. As a MongoDB user, I have been fine with this because I always use mongodb as-is as a service, and will…
comment
Common sense and obvious. In the 1980s I worked on a large DARPA project where a huge hit was taken because our admins never tried to restore from backups. It is the kind of lesson that is (hopefully)…
comment
You might want to experiment for an hour or so with DrScheme/MzScheme: lots of good libraries for web app development -- same comment applies to Chicken Scheme. My favorite Scheme is Gambit-C which ha…
comment
That is a good list! Good idea "using SimpleDB for dumping a lot of important metrics data" and reminded me to install webrat, which I just did (people at a Merb Camp were raving about webrat) and fro…
comment
Nice article. I especially like the attitude of the author: "One barrier I have encountered is that there is a bias against BI efforts that require 'programming.'"
comment
Good article. I get a lot of interesting information from following a small number of technical blogs of people I know (usually just through years of email contact) and trust. That is how I get valuab…
comment
The popup dialog box was fine. It would have been better though to have more of the defaults tuned to more privacy enhancing options. Facebook is cool, though, and I check my home page a couple of tim…
comment
Thanks to whoever added the 2001 date to my submission - I'll remember to do that next time. The history of Javascript is a history of accidents :-) Javascript is one language that I wish I new better…
comment
That said, I am likely to be using Lisp a lot next year: I have a partially written book on Franz AllegroGraph that the people at Franz suggested that I put on hold until their new version 4 is releas…
comment
I must admit that I usually think that whatever projects that I happen to be working on are: most fun, most interesting, etc. Same comment applies to programming languages, tools, and frameworks. This…
comment
Not to mention nice add-ons like PostGIS. MySQL is simpler to set up in master-slave configurations, but except for that, PostgreSQL is almost always my choice.
comment
I find that some good books take a very long time for me to read because I need to stop and mull over what I am reading. Case in point: I just finished a short Joseph Campbell book ("Pathways to Bliss…
comment
You are right about writing: it shows you what you don't yet thoroughly understand and need to think about some more.
comment
I used to worry more about good runtime performance. Now I prefer to use a language that is easier and faster to use in development. re: pluses and minuses: Lisp: + better interactive development styl…
comment
I wrote 2 Springer-Verlag Lisp books in ancient times, and have about 25 years of Lisp experience. That said, Ruby has mostly replaced Lisp in my toolbox. When I do use a Lisp family language, it is m…
comment
I have a beta account but I have not yet used it very much because I have CouchDB running on two of my own servers, and usually on my laptop. Except for not really being able to do ad-hoc queries (you…
comment
Good article and quantified my own take, making me feel justified for setting up RAID0. Lately, I have spent 5 to 10 hours a week doing setup/experiments on EC2 + EBS (about half on customer projects,…
comment
Chris: never use automatic memory management? The only time I have, after the fact, thought it worthwhile using C/C++ was some Nintendo game development. Well worth the effort to lower memory footprin…
comment
I know where this guy is coming from: I get a few proposals a year from potential customers to do projects for them that I consider to have a very low chance of business success. I clearly state my re…
comment
I bet that he wishes he could roll-back that comment! I think that most non-tech people would be very surprised if they realized how much personal data our corporate overlords have collected.
comment
I have had 3 customers have me use github, and that works fine. For my own stuff, I prefer using one of my own servers.
comment
I hear you. I am still a "google fan," specifically I have a business idea I want to implement on top of Wave, and I plan on continuing using GMail. That said, I switched my default Firefox search to …
comment
It seems to me that many (most?) people I know just can not cope with the truth about our economy, but there is some real nervousness. I have had friends who have lost over 50% of their retirement fun…
comment
A few are, but in general I like two types of blogs: 1. how-to articles that solve specific development problems I have run into 2. thought-articles that expose me to a different point of view, even i…
comment
Really nice article. Knowledge as an industry must mostly play a supportive role to the physical world of oil, food production, building and maintaining infrastructure, etc. Most people probably don't…
comment
I understand where you are coming from re: privacy issues, but aren't you also missing some real value? I check Facebook 2 or 3 times a week to see what family and friends have been doing. With Twitte…