Seen on JWZ: a link to this reddit discussion exhorting people to summarize their sex life with a Star Wars quote. My favorites:
‘I thought they smelled bad on the outside!’
"That’s okay, I’d like to keep it on manual control for awhile."
Seen via Planet Debian, a video mocking "social media gurus". Genius.
It’s our social media strategy: it’s fucked. We have computers coming out our asses and a great product, but we’re so dumb we don’t realize that using social media is as easy as pissing on a rock, and free too. Please save us from our worthless selves.
I know, I know. But I really like a lot of the things pixelstyle posts.. here’s another.
Via Suzanne: a fascinating look at how the LOTR can be interpreted as the story of a Ph. D. student.
After Frodo has completed his first project, Gandalf (along with head of department Elrond) proposes that the work should be extended. He assembles a large research group, including visiting students Gimli and Legolas, the foreign postdoc Boromir and several of Frodo’s own friends from his undergraduate days.
Yes, yes, a bit late. But: Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Dive Into Python has been adapted to Python 3, and is now available under CC-A-SA license (seen on LWN).
Case Study: Porting chardet to Python 3 documents my (ultimately successful) effort to port a non-trivial library from Python 2 to Python 3. It may help you; it may not. There’s a fairly steep learning curve, since you need to kind of understand the library first, so you can understand why it broke and how I fixed it. A lot of the breakage centers around strings.
No idea where I came across this, but it’s an interesting read: building an automatic tagger in 200 lines with BOSS.
Here’s another way to use it:
tagger viksi$ python classify.py apple microsoft bill gates steve ballmer windows vista xp microsoft tagger viksi$ python classify.py apple microsoft steve jobs ipod iphone macbook appleclassify combines the above steps into an application that, given two tags and some text, will return which tag more likely describes the text. Or, in command line form, ‘python classify.py [tag1] [tag2] [some free text]‘ => ‘tag1′ or ‘tag2′
Machine learning has only caught on a little bit in the personal computing space, and only in web-based services like Google Search and Amazon/Netflix-style "you might also like" features. Is that about to change? I’m skeptical..
