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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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Well, I liked the article - I have worked through the real world haskell book just enough to sort-of understand this article :-) That said, I gave up on Haskell. I spend a lot of time semi-learning la…
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S3 is fairly much awesome. Has anyone here ever lost data in S3 (not counting human/admin errors)? I've twice had issues with EBS volumes, but never with S3. Also, at least for my applications, S3 is …
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I haven't yet used Rackspace cloud services, but from reading the documentation, I do like that they integrate a persistent file system with compute units (whatever they call them). Compare with EC2 a…
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Thanks rbanffy - that is my read of the AGPL also. I suppose that if there were a problem, then MongoDB would not be as popular :-)
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blank - clean screen, clean mind :-)
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Nice writeup. I also spent a few hours kicking the tires of RDS the first day it was released. I use Amazon AWS a lot for both customer work and my own projects. The two things I most want to see are …
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Also, here in the USA, our government (for very good reasons) underestimates inflation. In the last decade, stuff like the cost of food, medical expenses, and housing have been removed or diminished i…
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This is more complicated than you may think. For example, if you live in the USA, how do you estimate the dollar's fall in value over the next 10 to 20 years?
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There are a few technical bloggers I follow that I might watch a few 'at work' screencasts. However, I think I prefer the polished type of screencast where, for example, someone shows good use of Emac…
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No. However, I am more optimistic than I was a year ago. I think that here in the USA our economy will (hopefully, slowly) settle downwards over the next decade - I don't think it will fall off a clif…
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Fairly good search results, except for one thing: it seemed to me that the highest ranked results tended to be "aggregation sites" that contain links to the original material. I prefer to be pointed t…
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That was a good writeup. I use screen so often, that I don't think much about it, so this article was a good refresher. A little off topic, but: I should spend about 5% of the time I devote to explori…
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If most app time is spent in database calls, or network, etc., then Ruby and JRuby are definitely fast enough. For some work, the order of magnitude faster performance of natively compiled Lisp, or Ja…
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Amazon gave me the equivalent of 10,000 free hours on a small EC2 instance when I was working on my last book. I used a few hours of this to prepare a custom AMI with all of the examples in my book se…
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I've had a difficult time getting into either Clojure or Scala - bought a book on each, and had fun playing, but neither language felt great to me. I am stuck on (J)Ruby, Common Lisp, and Java when I …
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That is a strong statement, and not true for everyone, so I would vote for it not being necessary to know Java. Until about 3 years ago, I used Common Lisp and Java each roughly 40% in my work (I stil…
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I don't think that I have ever seen their web site down, but in the last 3 months (or so), a few times my robots stopped getting event notifications for brief periods of time. But, hey, the system is …
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If I have to use a word processor, then I use Pages for OS X. The full screen mode is nice, and it seems more responsive that OO or Office. IMO, best is LaTex, but some collaborators, publishers, and …
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This looks good, but I have not tried installing and running it. Something similar I have spend some time playing with (no real projects with it yet, though): gem install cassandra cassandra_helper ca…
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My older brother taught me to play when I was 8 years old (a long time ago!) - now I can give him a 9 stone handicap :-) Once, in the late 70s, I got to play the womens world champion when she was in …
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Well, I think this white paper goes a little overboard, but I might point some customers and potential customers to this PDF anyway. I love Ruby as a language (I have gone from roughly 50% Common Lisp…
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I don't really agree with you unless you work for a very large company that has an economy of scale. Think you can compete with AppEngine for cost per computation/bandwidth/storage? Developing for App…
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I spent 2 ours this morning playing with RDS - not really a waste of time since I deploy most of my customer's projects to EC2, etc. Sort-of kicking the tires. Anyway, it is easy to use, and not havin…
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I have to admit that I find more value in just using RDF and RDFS, along with simple to install and admin RDF data stores like Sesame, and perhaps Redland (nice, but does not fully support RDFS infere…
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Hello dwiel, I did something sort-of like this about 12 years ago. My wife and I sold our house in San Diego and moved to the mountains in Central Arizona. Definitely lower cost of living. We bought a…
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You may be over generalizing. I think that it depends a lot on the client. For clients who often try to get more work for their money, I agree. Good clients will offer a little more money for small ch…
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Thanks!
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I just had an Apress book published, and the contract gives APress the distribution rights - fine with me since they effectively paid me to write the book: their advances allowed me to have a really g…
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Very cool explanation :-) I have several little writing projects that I distribute, but I chose the Creative Commons 'no commercial use, no derivatives' license because that was what I felt good with.…