Naive Bayes and Text Classification I – Introduction and Theory
Naive Bayes classifiers, a family of classifiers that are based on the popular Bayes’ probability theorem, are known for creating simple yet well performing…
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,981 posts.
Naive Bayes classifiers, a family of classifiers that are based on the popular Bayes’ probability theorem, are known for creating simple yet well performing…
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
Last week I wrote about Apple’s new default encryption policy for iOS 8. Since that piece was intended for general audiences I mostly avoided technical detail. But since some folks (and appar…
I believe the notion that Haskell uses “monads” to enforce purity is rather misleading. It has certainly caused quite a bit of confusion! It’s very much like saying we use “rings to do arithmetic”. We don’t! We use numbers, which just happen to form a ring with arithmetic operations. The important idea is the number …
What am I running inside my bash?
For some months, Amtrak was my home. It began simply somewhat unintentionally. A friend was getting married in Spokane, Washington, I was in New York, and the 45 day Amtrak pass was cheaper than rent.
Many of us believe it wasn't the FBI who discovered the hidden Silk Road server, but the NSA (or other intelligence organization). We believ...
INTRO Last Friday evening, I received a tip via telephone, “You should go to the Houtem tower tomorrow morning. Jump may work on the network.” Unfortunately I couldn’t make it back to Houtem. But i…
October 2014 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.) One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give advice, you can ask yourself "what would I tell…
In my previous post , I explored how programming with promises can be made close to programming with values. After some more work on it, and some learning from bluebird , I came to conclude that my brain doesn’t think well with promises. So I wrote a macro for Javascript that expands “tasks” into async state machines…
The patch that implements a prefix-based way to mitigate vulnerabilities in bash function exports has been out since last week and has been...
I have three big announcements to make today. The first is the official announcement of our next project. We’ve been quietly talking about it over the past few months, but today we want to tell you a bit more about it and finally reveal its name:
Two years ago today I released Sidekiq Pro, my commercial extension to Sidekiq, as an experiment to see if I could make OSS development financially viable for individual developers. I had no idea if anyone would trust me and buy it. Can you think of anyone else selling a Rubygem?
An updated report on my experience with Rust and where I think it might be going.
I’m very excited to share that I’m investing in reddit (personally, not via Y Combinator). I have been a daily reddit user for 9 years—longer than pretty much any other service I still use...
In episode 47 of the Debug podcast, former Apple managers Lisa Melton and Nitin Ganatra talk about their work schedules at Apple and the questionable practice of being expected to work on weekends and vacations.
Mark Twain? Jonathan Swift? Thomas Francklin? Fisher Ames? Thomas Jefferson? John Randolph? Charles Haddon Spurgeon? Winston Churchill? Terry Pratchett? Anonymous?
That we’ll learn school-ish things on the internet seems inevitable, but most people seem not to learn very much or very quickly online; Sebastian Thrun admitted as much in a Fast Company interview a few months ago. To figure out how computers actually could help people learn, I spent the summer teaching students and…
Zookeeper is an Apache project for providing coordination services to distributed systems. ZooKeeper aims to provide a simple kernel (a fil...
This article is now available in Japanese: 紙と鉛筆でビットコインをマイニング:1日に0.67ハッシュ and Russian: Майним Bitcoin с помощью бумаги и ручки . I decided...
This is a defense of the most prolific and dedicated public servant that has graced the world in my lifetime. One man has added hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars of value to the global economy. This man has worked tirelessly for the benefit of everyone around him. It is impossible…
OS X Yosemite introduced JavaScript for Automation. This makes it possible to build native OS X apps using good ol’ JS. This article covers the basics and walks through building an example app.