I got interested in the following question lately: given a data set of examples with some continuous-valued features and discrete classes, what’s a good way to reduce the continuous features into a set of discrete values? What makes this question interesting? One very specific reason is that some machine learning algorithms, like Decision Trees, require discrete features. As a result, potentially informative data has to be discarded. For example, consider the Titanic dataset: we know the age of passengers [...]

Last week, we had our first Coding Dojo at SFSharp.org, the San Francisco F# group – and it was great! A few people in the group had mentioned that at that point they were already convinced F# was a great language, and that what they wanted was help getting started writing actual code, so I figured this would be a good format to try out. What I wanted was something fun, something cool people could realistically achieve under 2 hours. I settled for one of the Kaggle introduction problems, a classic of Machi[...]

As part of the app I developed for AngelHack I wanted to display some data in a classic grid style. Android offers a GridView as part of the basic SDK, however if you look at all the samples they only show how to use it as a grid of images, essentially they only demonstrate usages where all columns show the same thing, usually columns of photographs. It’s not too tricky to use the GridView as classic “data grid” but it did require a wee bit of thinking, so I thought I put together a quick example to show h[...]

As I’ve already mentioned last weekend I took part in AngelHack and took the opportunity to learn how to develop for an Android device (in this case a Kindle Fire) using C# and Xamarin Studio. The experience was a bit mixed, overall I think the folks at Xamarin have done a good job in smoothing the experience when targeting mobile devices, but there’s still a few rough edges. Here’s a run though of what I thought: The installer for Xamarin Studio works well and does a good job of downloading and installin[...]

Hi, just a quick note to say that recordings of my talk with Community for F# is now available. In this session, I shared some of our experiences of building a successful MMORPG for a social audience and insights into some of the technical challenges that my team has had to overcome along the way. [...]