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vedant

224 karma · joined October 3, 2011

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vedant··on Why Has Andreessen Horowitz Raised $2.7B in 3 Years?
Alas, the only winning move with "begging the question" is to not play. Insist on its proper use as a logical fallacy and you're a pedant; misuse it and draw the ire of grammarians and Aristotelians. Solution: "this raises the question."
vedant··on Good bye, Google Maps… thanks for all the fish
Douglas Adams is rolling over at this title. It should be "So Long, Google Maps..."
vedant··on Markov chain paper title generator
Since Paul Erdos is one of the most prolific mathematicians ever, the problem is more likely that the default chain length (4) is too long for even a relatively large corpus. A chain length of 2 does much better.
vedant··on Before Recruiting in Ivy League, Applying Some Math
The academic index equation---probably the most crucial part of the article---could have been more clearly explained with, well, an equation (or two). Instead, it is a 626x752px image of words and arrows and nested fractions, and there's a colored box with ordinal numbers spelled out, and it's oriented vertically. Not to mention that the whole thing is a jpeg, so it's full of compression artifacts. Avoiding equations is not only unclear, it may even discourage scientific literacy.
vedant··on Secret app on millions of phones logs key taps
Nobody had computed the percentage:

Using 2e12 SMS messages/year, 160 characters/message, and 1 byte/character:

(2e12 * 160) / (365 * (2^30)) = 816.501983 GiB/day

So 10GiB/day is about 1.2% of daily SMS traffic.

EDIT: Too slow.

vedant··on Making Text Mining Accessible to Any Developer & Non-Expert
Machine learning is concerned with developing algorithms that enable programs to use data to evolve new behavior. Calling it a meme seems to put it in the same category as advice animals and Old Spice ads. Still, I see what you're saying--- it is really "in" right now, which is probably because:

(1) There's a lot more data now for people to use it with (2) Infrastructure for doing it is cheap and scalable (3) Automation is a key driver of progress, and ML algos are now getting good enough to automate a lot of stuff that humans used to have to do.

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