[The following post is my submission to the Knight-Mozilla “Beyond Comment Threads” challenge.]
The following are the core problems with current discussion systems:
Trolls, acrimonious people, and low quality commentary can drown out thoughtful discussion and destroy a good community.
Bias towards seniority: Deep insight is penalized if it comes from a new, unknown, or anonymous voice. For example, on …
Would you like to get Fat Free CRM up-and-running, but spend only five minutes on deployment?
I am not a Rails hacker, so getting Fat Free CRM installed and running is non-trivial for me.
fatfreecrm-ec2 will automatically deploy Fat Free CRM on a fresh Amazon EC2 micro instance. I have also tested it on a fresh Ubuntu Linode slice.
Caveat: The five minutes will …
Summary
In the spirit of shared tasks and NLP “bake offs”, I hereby announce the first MetaOptimize Challenge. It’s an open problem, and I am interested in involving practitioners who want to demo their style, as well as people who want to learn some large-scale IR/NLP. Hopefully, we’ll all learn something about various real-world approaches.
Join the announcement list …
I introduce “information organization”, an approach which I have been exploring for several years. As a case study, music recommendations should be organized, but existing applications currently organize music recommendations poorly. I discuss issues with current applications, and discuss features that address these issues.
Summary
Email me your pitch and how you need help monetizing data.
If I like your pitch, I’ll give you a free consultation on data strategy (NLP, ML, business intelligence, etc.)
Afterwards, if we both think that I can add value to your business, we can talk about a longer-term relationship.
You should forward this blog post to any friend who could use …
Summary
We release code written by Ali Afshar, which turns the KEA keyphrase extractor into an XML-RPC service. This allows you to use KEA as a service, calling it from a variety of different programming languages. The code is released under the New BSD License.
Background
Keyphrase extraction (AKA terminology mining, term extraction, term recognition, or glossary extraction) is the …
Until there is better documentation for Lucene 3.0, I recommend you use Lucene 2.4 or 2.9. Nonetheless, I provide a basic indexing and retrieval code using the PyLucene 3.0 API, perhaps the first such example code on the web.
Summary
I speculate that job hopping, if it becomes a widespread phenomenon, might actually lead to improved business efficiency. In this way, the “Gen Y” job hopping phenomenon could ultimately prove beneficial.
Background
Mark Suster begins the debate by writing: “[Job Hoppers] Make Terrible Employees”.
Paul Dix responds that job hopping is not correlated with employee quality and there are …
Summary
According to common wisdom, the best code is developed in-house. I am beginning to believe this is only true when the code must be tightly coupled, or there are realistic security concerns. These scenarios are less common than managers like to believe.
For run-of-the-mill development projects, outsourcing might have advantages above-and-beyond cost savings. If your code effort …
Okay, I’m ready.
After reading a handful of articles making tenuous connections between entrepreneurship and music, including :
The Notorious CEO: Ten Startup Commandments from Biggie Smalls
Being like The Sex Pistols can help your startup?
I’ve decided to come out and share my favorite startup music.
Dirt, by The Stooges, is a proto-punk cut that sprawls for seven-minutes, brooding and smoldering. It …