It looks like this summer will be my strangest vacation in a while – I’ll be taking a F# road trip of sorts in August, talking about F# at user groups all over the United States. How this crazy plan took shape exactly I am not quite sure in retrospect, but I am really looking forward to meeting all the local communities – this will be fun! As of July 13th, here is the plan: July 31, Sacramento: “Coding Dojo: a gentle introduction to Machine Learning with F#” August 8, Houston: “An Introduction to F# for th[...]

Besides having one of the coolest names around, Random Forest is an interesting machine learning algorithm, for a few reasons. It is applicable to a large range of classification problems, isn’t prone to over-fitting, can produce good quality metrics as a side-effect of the training process itself, and is very suitable for parallelization. For all these reasons, I thought it would be interesting to try it out in F#. The current implementation I will be discussing below works, but isn’t production ready (y[...]

Introduction This article will introduce Last-Fi – an F# powered internet radio player that uses a Raspberry Pi and Last.Fm services.  The motivation behind this work was to both build something fun and useful for the Raspberry Pi that interfaces with various pieces of hardware, but can also show off some features that F# is great at within a hardware context. The result is Last-Fi – a highly asynchronous and stable music player.  It is based around Last.Fm, but because it uses MPD to play music it only re[...]

I just completed the Coursera Machine Learning class this week, and enjoyed the experience very much. Let’s get the obvious out of the way: getting a high-quality class, for free, wherever you are, at your own pace, is pretty amazing, and I can put up with a sometimes flaky video player for that. Every quarter in college, I would agonize over what limited number of classes I should take, thinking that I might not be able to take that class ever again once I graduated, and Coursera is awesome for that – now[...]

Yesterday’s New York Times has a good article on Google’s analysis of what works and what does not work when interviewing candidates for technical jobs. This paragraph closely matches my experience: Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a [...]