Are your recommendations any good? – Does the output of your machine learning pass the ‘So what?’ test? We’re in the enviable position of being able to predict a lot of things we couldn’t before, but we need to be careful that the predictions actually matter.
Meet Marvin Heiferman – “1.2 billion photographs are made per day. Half-a-trillion per year.” I sometimes feel like I’m taking crazy pills trying to explain how mind-blowingly world-changing humanities photo-taking habit is, so it was great to run across Marvin’s deep thinking on the subject.
Parsing C++ is literally undecidable – I spent over a decade working in C++ almost exclusively, and the arcana involved in the language design still amazes me. I’ve lost more neurons than I’d like to remembering Koenig’s lookup rules, this example just reminds me how much more insanity can emerge from a language defined so complexly.
Evidence-based data analysis – If we were able to define best practices for the data analysis pipeline, then we’d be able to compare and trust the results of data science a lot more. We’d no longer be able to pick and choose our techniques to get artificially good results.
Transmitting live from the ocean below the Antarctic ice – Bring a little bit of the worlds strange vastness to your desk.
Pete Warden's blog 