It also resonates especially when you're reading from hard experience. A year ago I would have quickly read & enjoyed this, then moved on. Now too many items give me pause as I recall some mistake I've made. It is very good.
Can you tell apart founders who sponge up advice vs those who are doomed to learn on their own? I suspect the answer is conversational resourcefulness (http://www.paulgraham.com/word.html) but wonder if you have more to say.
What he said! I'd like to add that a key to squeezing more out of NathanRice's post is the phrase "conjugate prior." Another totally natural thing would be to use a Gaussian prior & likelihood, then update the posterior as ratings arrive. This would take advantage of the ordinality of ratings as NR suggests. Bishop's Machine Learning book goes into this sort of stuff in more depth.
Hey, AOLserver is open source. At the time it was the only web server with a built-in glue language (Tcl) and pooled database connections. It got me excited about web programming. Plus, the sheer amount of code already written was fantastic.
I never understood why people were put off by his favoritism to those tools. ACS was all about page flow and user experience, and in that department, got it right more often than not.
Kevin Garnett plays exactly the same way that you describe Jack Lambert. He goes only one speed: full blast. Whenever I need motiviation, I find myself asking myself, wwkgd?
Creating the list of URLs and prioritizing them is the hardest thing about building a crawler! That is, a good, web-scale one. A replacement for wget might be sort of fun, but the real way to make a fast crawler is to be choosy about which pages get updated frequently, which are likely to contain good content (by computing a pagerank-like stat on the fly), etc.
It is far from my area of expertise, but the Wikipedia page about this looks very useful. It cites a bunch of wicked smart people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler
If you just want to suck down a bunch of pages, then there's nothing wrong with wget.
Sure, there's plenty of fluff in the article, but it isn't because the author (http://www.math.wisc.edu/~ellenber/) is clueless about science. The article is probably at the right level of technical depth. Seems ambitious to even touch SVD in Wired.
A couple of years back, googling for "suffix array" got you advertisements for jobs@google. I'm not sure whether Google HR ended the program, or just migrated to more obscure search terms :)
Nespresso is great. At $0.50 per pod, it's pricey, but for such painless cleanup and consistently good shots, worth the price. Hands down the best teas I've had come from Upton Tea (uptontea.com).
Can you tell apart founders who sponge up advice vs those who are doomed to learn on their own? I suspect the answer is conversational resourcefulness (http://www.paulgraham.com/word.html) but wonder if you have more to say.