About a month ago, I vaguely recall a discussion on Twitter – if memory serves me, @rickasaurus was involved – around sharing articles. This inspired me to try something. Every morning, I start my day with an espresso first, followed by reading blog posts for half an hour or so. While I get a lot from these quick reading sessions, I rarely go back to the material afterwards, and thought it would be interesting to keep track of a few, and revisit them at the end of the month. I also decided I would primaril[...]

In our previous post, we looked at James McCaffrey’s code, “Gradient Descent Training Using C#” from MSDN magazine, and took a stab at rewriting the first part in F#, to clarify a bit the way the dataset was created. Today, we’ll dive in the second block, which implements the logistic regression using gradient descent. Again, we won’t discuss why the algorithm works – the article does a pretty good job at that – and focus instead purely on the F# / C# conversion part. Let’s begin by taking a look at the c[...]

I will admit it, I got a bit upset by James McCaffrey’s column in MSDN magazine this month, “Gradient Descent Training Using C#”. While the algorithm explanations are quite good, I was disappointed by the C# sample code, and kept thinking to myself “why oh why isn’t this written in F#”. This is by no means intended as a criticism of C#; it’s a great language, but some problems are just better suited for different languages, and in this case, I couldn’t fathom why F# wasn’t used. Long story short, I just co[...]

A few weeks ago, I came across DiffSharp, an automatic differentiation library in F#. As someone whose calculus skills have always been rather mediocre (thanks Wolfram Alpha!), but who needs to deal with gradients and the like on a regular basis because they are quite useful in machine learning and numerical methods, the project looked pretty interesting: who wouldn’t want exact and efficient calculations of derivatives? So I figured I would take a couple of hours to experiment with the library. This post [...]

I had the great pleasure to speak at CodeMash this week, and, on my way back, ended up spending a couple of hours at the Atlanta airport waiting for my connecting flight back to the warmer climate of San Francisco – a perfect opportunity for some light-hearted coding fun. A couple of days earlier, I came across this really nice tweet, rendering the results of an L-system: {start:'FFPF',rules:{F:'PF++F[FF-F+PF+FPP][F]FFPF',P:''},'α':60} pic.twitter.com/JZGDV4ghFy— LSystemBot (@LSystemBot) January 10, 2015 [...]