Disqus - Latest Comments for turian

Re: The Best Portable Bluetooth Speaker

Joseph Turian — Sun, 16 Sep 2018 11:30:06 -0000

What about the Anker Soundcore *2* ?

Re: My Autobody Shop Has a Sense of Humor

Joseph Turian — Sat, 22 Jun 2013 18:32:07 -0000

At one point, this was my email sig:

1. Reader (henceforth "you") reads above screed ("this communication")

at his or her own risk.

2. As pertains to information included heretofore in this

communication, any express or implied warranties, including, but not

limited to, warranties of being:

a) correct, helpful, germane, timely, informative, studied, reasoned,

considered, pointed, forceful, lucid, comprehensible, simple,

conclusive, and/or life-affirming;

and of NOT being:

b) specious, spurious, facile, annoying, trifling, irrelevant,

injurious, deleterious, tortious, defamatory, libelous, wilfully

intransigent, cruel, turgid, curt, dense, discursive, grandiloquent,

flowery, pompous, shrill, bombastic, quaint, short-sighted, biased,

and/or emasculating;

are hereby disclaimed in perpetuity.

3. There is no third term.

4. If you do not agree with these terms, kindly go fuck yourself.

Re: New version of Get-Another-Label available | A Computer Scientist in a Business School

Joseph Turian — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 21:32:00 -0000

What would be interesting is a common repository that pools worker assessments.

If everyone is evaluating workers, it only makes sense to share the worker assessments.

The main difficulty is that the more open the data is, the easier it is to attack and make untrustworthy workers seem trustworthy. So perhaps it's a blackbox service that you upload assessments to, and can receive assessments back from.

Re: Why oDesk has no spammers | A Computer Scientist in a Business School

Joseph Turian — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 14:24:09 -0000

I agree that there are very few spammers on Odesk.

Recently, I had one applicant who sent me an RAR that appeared to be a trojan. What is the appropriate channel to report that? I didn't see a "Flag this user" on the contract.

The main issue I have with Odesk is that five-star workers aren't really five-stars. (I'm not saying that other platforms have solved this issue either.) I believe this is a problem in general for most reputation and recommendation systems; there is a loss of resolution at the upper-end.

I've been thinking about this issue a lot, and my current formulation is the notion of an "economy", in the sense that perhaps there should be forced scarcity. For example, in the Michelin Restaurant Guide, even getting one star is a big deal. I believe that changing the semantics from "Is this good or bad?" to "Would I spend one star recommending this person?" could be quite beneficial.

Re: Building with Twitter Bootstrap

Joseph Turian — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 19:06:40 -0000

Do you mind sharing the skeleton code for your new layout?

Re: The Shades of TIME project

Joseph Turian — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:01:26 -0000

Have you considered turking the images? It doesn't seem like there are very many, and it would give you a good sense of your machine vision algorithm's accuracy.

Re: Choosing an API framework for Django

Joseph Turian — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:53:36 -0000

There's a difference between a project being "dead/inactive" and "unpolished". It's unfair to say that a project is "dead", if you really mean "unpolished". I think your readers would appreciate if you say specifically what you mean in the main text.

Re: http://www.gwern.net/Zeo

Joseph Turian — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:05:35 -0000

As a scientist, I always read the introduction and conclusion first, and then determine which parts of the work merit further study. This is useful because one doesn't have the time to grok everything.

Re: http://www.gwern.net/Zeo

Joseph Turian — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:42:39 -0000

Since you present this so scientifically, it would be useful to have a Conclusions section where you summarize your findings.

Re: Finally A Whiskey For Horrible People

Joseph Turian — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:03:52 -0000

For such an acutely written article, I'm surprised that you miss one key point:

"The last thing a true died-in-the-wool-cap hipster would ever embrace is a product specifically designed for them, as that would fly in the face of their carefully cultivated sense of irony."

Much like this recent Miracle Whip ad (http://www.youtube.com/watc..., this sort of marketing doesn't appeal to hipsters. It appeals to people who consume hipsters.

Re: Legal Key Names - MongoDB - 10gen Confluence

Joseph Turian — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:59:20 -0000

I believe this documentation needs to be updated, and I cannot find any more recent authoritative documentation on this topic.

It appears that there might be other restrictions on key names, like 'no null character' or '_' cannot be the first caracter (http://www.yoyobrain.com/fl....

Also, more confusingly, these key name restrictions apply when doing a save or insert, but not an update. (http://stackoverflow.com/qu.... I have no idea why this inconsistency exists, but it was a real head-scratcher for me.

Re: brain of mat kelcey

Joseph Turian — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:10:31 -0000

Is the code for this pipeline available?

Re: Business development: the Goldilocks principle

Joseph Turian — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 22:51:06 -0000

That's a good suggestion. I was planning on amping up my blogging about technical how-tos and general trends and news, but the business side of things is a good topic too.

Re: Business development: the Goldilocks principle

Joseph Turian — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 22:25:37 -0000

This. NLP+ML are hot right now, because they are valuable if applied correctly, but this hotness makes it difficult to rent technology. I've experienced this consulting through MetaOptimize on NLP and ML, and it's the biggest barrier to acquiring clients. I posted a more detailed commentary on my experiences on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com...

Congratulations on the acquisition, by the way!

Re: Using Haml in Django Projects - Stephen Jackson

Joseph Turian — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 04:35:32 -0000

I tried HAML, but I was unable to HAMLize the following code:
<a href="{{ prereq.detail_url }}">Task #{{ prereq.pk }}</a>

Any ideas?

Re: Discussion 2.0: Personalization

Joseph Turian — Mon, 30 May 2011 14:02:11 -0000

To quote my response to Mike Altarriba:

"I believe this is the most common misconception about my
proposal. I'm going to address this in an upcoming post. But the short
response is: Personalization of discussion doesn't filter to give you a
warm fuzzy feeling in your tummy that everything is right in the world.
Personalization of discussion gives you stimulating discussion, which
often-times means opposing viewpoints. It should also tie in discussions
on adjacent topics, to give a broader perspective on the context,
assuming you are the sort of person who doesn't like to have blinders
on.

Re: Discussion 2.0: Personalization

Joseph Turian — Mon, 30 May 2011 13:45:25 -0000

To respond to your objections:

"audience matters" Agreed. Ideally, personalization would automatically find the right community for you, and filter out the trolls.

"text communication makes misunderstanding and anti-social behavior easy" People will learn quickly how to modulate their tone if the system buries their comments or if angry writing leads to stupid responses.

"if individuals have their input filtered based on their own
subject matter / viewpoint preferences, this will drive their world view
such that their positions and beliefs will become even more polarized" Okay, so I believe this is the most common misconception about my proposal. I'm going to address this in an upcoming post. But the short response is: Personalization of discussion doesn't filter to give you a warm fuzzy feeling in your tummy that everything is right in the world. Personalization of discussion gives you stimulating discussion, which often-times means opposing viewpoints. It should also tie in discussions on adjacent topics, to give a broader perspective on the context, assuming you are the sort of person who doesn't like to have blinders on.

"the fact that my choices mean that I don't see a particular poster or
post doesn't change the fact that said poster / posts are still there,
and still affecting the character of the online community." This is an interesting argument about ambient discussion. I'd like to explore it more. Can you give some examples? It seems to me that if something is indirectly stimulating discussion that is relevant to me, I should get shown it.

Re: Congrats William and Kate! Here's My Wedding Gift! - Stu Green

Joseph Turian — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:05:49 -0000

Why don't you upload it now and then push again when you've tidied it?

Re: My 2011 Content Strategy as an Entrepreneur and Startup Founder

Joseph Turian — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 04:13:59 -0000

Did you ever get around to writing this blog post? I want to learn more about mailing list tech.

Re: List of resources: Article text extraction from HTML documents

Joseph Turian — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 19:34:34 -0000

Thank you for this post, it is the most comprehensive summary I've seen to date. I have added a link to your post on the MetaOptimize thread that discusses this problem:

http://metaoptimize.com/qa/...

Re: Spencer Fry — Hiring for a Boostrapped Company

Joseph Turian — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 15:33:38 -0000

How do you interview contractors?

Re: On GitHub and how I came to write the fastest Python JSON module in town

Joseph Turian — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 18:27:37 -0000

You should consider the ijson bindings for conveniently streaming in Python objects using yajl. ijson.items() makes things really simple.

Re: Ubuntu and Debian packages - MongoDB

Joseph Turian — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 16:17:47 -0000

Agreed, is there any way this could be changed?

Re: NLP Challenge: Find semantically related terms over a large vocabulary (>1M)?

Joseph Turian — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:53:57 -0000

The data isn't clean.

Welcome to the real world.

I'd love to throw out the numbers (at least the low ones) and the extra characters like dashes.

You can do that if you like.

Leaving the goal of "semantically defined" vague doesn't really give us much to shoot at.

Part of this task is to see how people define the problem. Part of the exercise is learning through evaluation and looking at people's outputs. Yeah, it's less well-defined and less academic that way. I find that more interesting.

I think it will also be interesting to see if there is a mismatch between people's interpretations of what "semantically related" means and what methods produce a certain interpretation.

*Is the goal really to find semantic relationships based on YOUR data, or just to find semantic relationships based on web-mined data?*

The goal is to find semantic relationships over a particular vocabulary. You can use the data set that generated that vocabulary. And/or you can use auxiliary data.

But I apologize to the extent that you don't like the setup. This is my first time doing a challenge and I'm trying to learn for next time.

Re: NLP Challenge: Find semantically related terms over a large vocabulary (>1M)?

Joseph Turian — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 20:10:58 -0000

I would be very excited if you tried an LLR approach. Ted Dunning was suggesting that style of approach to me too.