Saturday, January 5, 2013
Videos of open-source project activity
Neat for an artist's impression of how activity on a project is structured.
Norvig
So Peter Norvig has a blog, and uses it very interestingly indeed. Here he is opining on Chomsky (not that he's wrong, but I cannot believe the words coming out of my mouth, I agree with Chomsky [not due to Chomsky's politics, which I largely agree with, but because of his linguistics, which I don't]).
Where I think Chomsky is right is that right now, statistical techniques dominate the field. It's misguided; we're describing the how and not the why of human language. Great in terms of engineering, no doubt, but ... empty. Devoid of semantics. Norvig reacts with no little acerbity, which I find misplaced. But it had to sting.
That said, the post is a good one, and well worth reading.
And then he tops it off today with a re-do of Mark Mayzner's work from the 60's - in response from a letter from Mayzner, no less! Mayzner did some frequency counting using Hollerith cards and an IBM sorter, working with a randomly selected 20,000 word corpus, and wondered if a larger corpus, such as, oh, Google Books, might show different results.
Interestingly, it does! Norvig's corpus, 37,000,000 times the size of Mayzner's, has slightly different letter frequencies, which I find pretty fascinating. If punched on Hollerith cards, it would fill up NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building to the 2/3 point, and a single pass through an IBM card sorter of the model Mayzner used would take only 700 years.
It would be interesting to build a lorem-ipsum generator that used a tuned Markov chain to return a sample text that exactly matched Norvig's statistics. That would be neat.
Where I think Chomsky is right is that right now, statistical techniques dominate the field. It's misguided; we're describing the how and not the why of human language. Great in terms of engineering, no doubt, but ... empty. Devoid of semantics. Norvig reacts with no little acerbity, which I find misplaced. But it had to sting.
That said, the post is a good one, and well worth reading.
And then he tops it off today with a re-do of Mark Mayzner's work from the 60's - in response from a letter from Mayzner, no less! Mayzner did some frequency counting using Hollerith cards and an IBM sorter, working with a randomly selected 20,000 word corpus, and wondered if a larger corpus, such as, oh, Google Books, might show different results.
Interestingly, it does! Norvig's corpus, 37,000,000 times the size of Mayzner's, has slightly different letter frequencies, which I find pretty fascinating. If punched on Hollerith cards, it would fill up NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building to the 2/3 point, and a single pass through an IBM card sorter of the model Mayzner used would take only 700 years.
It would be interesting to build a lorem-ipsum generator that used a tuned Markov chain to return a sample text that exactly matched Norvig's statistics. That would be neat.
Friday, January 4, 2013
HaXe
Remember HaXe? (Also here, because clearly I didn't remember it well.) Apparently this AS3 programmer likes it. I like the concept!
A "short" list of front-end development skills
Here's a nice list of domain skills for front-end work.
Wireframe.cc
Free wireframing tool Wireframe.cc. Seems kind of ... low-powered to me. But still interesting,
Regexper.com
Neat! Regexper.com lets you enter a regexp and it shows you a really nice graphical rendering of the language it matches. I like everything about it!
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
CrowdFlower
I remember CrowdFlower from the HNN discussion of the Mechanical Turk last... uh, year before last. They appear to be packaging certain workflows and task breakdowns as API services (see the link - RTFM is Real Time Foto Moderator, kind of cutesy) and also doing various custom services along the same lines.
Where I think I might differ (maybe) is that I'm talking primarily about automation of arbitrary workflow that might have Turk-sized tasks or bigger ones, or none at all.
Where I think I might differ (maybe) is that I'm talking primarily about automation of arbitrary workflow that might have Turk-sized tasks or bigger ones, or none at all.
Z: a tiny language inspired by Markdown
Here is Z, a simple language based on indentation and string manipulation.
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