O'Reilly News & Commentary

Top Stories: October 31-November 4, 2011 - An author turns to automation, a look at privacy in the age of big data, and a simple rule for data ethics.

By Mac Slocum
November 4, 2011

This week on O'Reilly: Former author Robbie Allen explained his shift to software-generated writing, Terence Craig said transparency is the best way to handle digital privacy, and we learned how a simple question can keep data companies honest.

How I automated my writing career - A former author uses data and software to take the tedium out of some kinds of writing.

By Robbie Allen
November 3, 2011

You scale content businesses by increasing the number of people who create the content ... or so conventional wisdom says. Learn how a former author is using software to simulate and expand human-quality writing.

Four short links: 3 November 2011 - Getting Feedback, Colour Design, Discovering Musicians, Weather Prediction App

By Nat Torkington
November 3, 2011

Feedback Without Frustration (YouTube) -- Scott Berkun at the HIVE conference talks about how feedback fails, and how to get it successfully. He is so good. Americhrome -- history of the official palette of the United States of America. Discovering Talented Musicians with Musical Analysis (Google Research blgo) -- very clever, they do acoustical analysis and then train up...

Top Stories: October 24-28, 2011 - 10/30/11 is Dennis Ritchie Day, post-PC and the new tech revolution, publishing's fundamental shift.

By Mac Slocum
October 28, 2011

This week on O'Reilly: Tim O'Reilly called for a Dennis Ritchie Day to honor the computing pioneer, Mark Sigal examined the players and products in the post-PC revolution, and Hugh McGuire discussed the seismic shifts that are reshaping the publishing industry.

"Revolution in the Valley," revisited - Andy Hertzfeld on the Macintosh's early days and its long-term legacy.

By Mac Slocum
October 26, 2011

With "Revolution in the Valley" making its paperback debut and the work of Steve Jobs fresh in people's minds, we checked in with Andy Hertzfeld to discuss the legacy of the first Macintosh.

Four short links: 12 September 2011 - History Repeats, Fuller Feeds, Open Source Dev, and The Long Sunset of Business Models

By Nat Torkington
September 12, 2011

HP Emulates Next (BoingBoing) -- In mid-1993, a few months after CEO Steve Jobs had shuttered the NeXT factory, and was in the process of switching to an all-software company—a path that led to its later acquisition by Apple—the lights were turned back on in its Fremont, Calif., factory. NeXTWorld's rumor columnist, Lt. Sullivan, reported that the U.S. military...

Four short links: 12 August 2011 - Learning Adventure, Python Data Analysis, Lanyrd Technology, and New Sensor

By Nat Torkington
August 12, 2011

Hippocampus Text Adventure -- written as an exercise in learning Python, you explore the hippocampus. It's simple, but I like the idea of educational text adventures. (Well, educational in that you learn about more than the axe-throwing behaviour of the cave-dwelling dwarf) Pandas -- BSD-licensed Python data analysis library. Building Lanyrd -- Simon Willison's talk (with slides) about the...

Four short links: 18 July 2011 - Organisational Warfare, RTFM, Timezone Shapefile, Microsoft Adventure

By Nat Torkington
July 18, 2011

Organisational Warfare (Simon Wardley) -- notes on the commoditisation of software, with interesting analyses of the positions of some large players. On closer inspection, Salesforce seems to be doing more than just commoditisation with an ILC pattern, as can be clearly seen from Radian's 6 acquisition. They also seem to be operating a tower and moat strategy, i.e. creating...

Four short links: 13 July 2011 - Freebase in Node, Form Styling, Implicit Friendships, and Dyslexic Font

By Nat Torkington
July 13, 2011

Freebase in Node.js (github) -- handy library for interacting with Freebase from node code. (via Rob McKinnon) Formalize -- CSS library to provide a standard style for form elements. (via Emma Jane Hogbin) Suggesting More Friends Using the Implicit Social Graph (PDF) -- Google paper on the algorithm behind Friend Suggest. Related: Katango. (via Big Data) Dyslexia -- a...

Four short links: 12 July 2011 - Rare Visualization, Google+ Tech, Scala+Erlang, and In-Database Analytics

By Nat Torkington
July 12, 2011

Slopegraphs -- a nifty Tufte visualization which conveys rank, value, and delta over time. Includes pointers to how to make them, and guidelines for when and how they work. (via Avi Bryant) Ask Me Anything: A Technical Lead on the Google+ Team -- lots of juicy details about technology and dev process. A couple nifty tricks we do: we...

Four short links: 7 July 2011 - C64 Presales, Coding Lessons Learned, Feedback Loops, and Continuous Integration

By Nat Torkington
July 7, 2011

Commodore 64 PC -- gorgeous retro look with fairly zippy modern internals. (via Rob Passarella) Designing Github for Mac -- a retrospective from the author of the excellent Mac client for github. He talks about what he learned and its origins, design, and development. Remember web development in 2004? When you had to create pixel-perfect comps because every element...

Four short links: 28 June 2011 - Mediasaurus Dix, Mobile Numbers, Machine Learning, and Software Patents

By Nat Torkington
June 28, 2011

Networks Blocking Google TV -- the networks are carrying over their old distribution models: someone aggregates eyeballs and pays them for access. In their world view, Google TV is just another cable company. They're doubling down on this wholesale model, pulling out of Hulu and generally avoiding dealing with the people who ultimately watch their shows except through ad-filled...

Four short links: 6 June 2011 - Paper App, Retro Net Simulation, Games Creator, Beginning Large-Scale Machine Learning

By Nat Torkington
June 6, 2011

Turning Receipts into Paper Apps (BERG London) -- I love the idea of the modern web app sensibility bleeding back into the world, the same way classic offline design has informed online. Telehack -- an amazing interactive reconstruction of the early net, part nostalgia part game part simulation. Check out the README for more details. (via Andy Baio) Stencyl...

Four short links: 3 June 2011 - Distributed Drug Money, Science Game, Beautiful Machine Learning, and Stream Event Processing

By Nat Torkington
June 3, 2011

Silk Road (Gawker) -- Tor-delivered "web" site that is like an eBay for drugs, currency is Bitcoins. Jeff Garzik, a member of the Bitcoin core development team, says in an email that bitcoin is not as anonymous as the denizens of Silk Road would like to believe. He explains that because all Bitcoin transactions are recorded in a public...

The search for a minimum viable record - Open Library's George Oates on the pursuit of concise categorization.

By Audrey Watters
May 24, 2011

George Oates, the lead from the Open Library, discusses the complexities of biographic data and the possibility for a minimum viable record.

Four short links: 25 April 2011 - Healthcare Data, C64 Emulator, Python Machine Learning, and Startup Success Stats

By Nat Torkington
April 25, 2011

E-Referral Evaluation Interim Findings -- in general good, but note this: The outstanding system issues are an ongoing source of frustration and concern, including [...] automated data uptake from the GP [General Practitioner=family doctor] PMS [Patient Management System], that sometimes has clearly inaccurate or contradictory information. When you connect systems, you realize the limitations of the data in them....

Four short links: 22 April 2011 - Markov Logic Networks, Social News, Content Liberation, Rate Limiting Traffic

By Nat Torkington
April 22, 2011

Tuffy -- a GPL v3 licensed Markov Logic Network inference engine in Java and PostgreSQL that claims to be more scalable than previous tools. (via Hacker News) Behind news.me -- if you are curious to see what they are reading, if you want to see the world through their eyes, News.me is for you. Many people curate their Twitter...

Four short links: 18 April 2011 - Community, Metrics, Sensors, and Unicode

By Nat Torkington
April 18, 2011

Your Community is Your Best Feature -- Gina Trapani's CodeConf talk: useful, true, and moving. There's not much in this world that has all three of those attributes. Metrics Everywhere -- another CodeConf talk, this time explaining Yammer's use of metrics to quantify the actual state of their operations. Nice philosophical guide to the different ways you want to...

The quiet rise of machine learning - Alasdair Allan on how machine learning is taking over the mainstream.

By Jenn Webb
April 11, 2011

From Goodreads to Google to Orbitz, machine learning is slowly becoming part of everyday life. Alasdair Allan discusses current uses and how machine learning factors into his own robotic telescope network.

Four short links: 4 April 2011 - Library Game, Mac Security, Natural Programming, Selecting Metrics

By Nat Torkington
April 4, 2011

Find The Future -- New York Public Library big game, by Jane McGonigal. (via Imran Ali) Enable Certificate Checking on Mac OS X -- how to get your browser to catch attempts to trick you with revoked certificates (more of a worry since security problems at certificate authorities came to light). (via Peter Biddle) Clever Algorithms -- Nature-Inspired Programming...

Four short links: 9 March 2011 - R IDE, Audience Participation, Machine Learning, Surviving Success

By Nat Torkington
March 9, 2011

R Studio -- AGPLv3-licensed IDE for R. It brings your R console, source code, plots, help, history, and workspace browser into one cohesive package. We've added some neat productivity features like a searchable endless command history, function/symbol completion, data import dialog with preview, one-click Sweave compile, and more. Source on github. Built as a web-app on Google AppEngine, from...

Watson and the future of machine learning - Watson opens the door to conversations, not just answers.

By Mike Loukides
February 28, 2011

Now that we can build machines that can answer tough and ambiguous questions, the next step is to realize that the answer to a question isn't the end of the process.

Four short links: 4 February 2011 - Intellectual Property, Javascript Charting, Open Source Advice, and Java-based Machine Learning

By Nat Torkington
February 4, 2011

Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property (MIT Press) -- with essays by knowledgeable folks such as Yochai Benkler, Larry Lessig, and Jo Walsh. Available as open access (free) ebook as well as paper. I love it that we can download these proper intellectuals' intellectual property. (via BoingBoing) AwesomeChartJS -- Apache-licensed Javascript library for charting. (via Hacker...

Need faster machine learning? Take a set-oriented approach - How a days-long data process was completed in minutes.

By Roger Magoulas
January 28, 2011

We recently faced the type of big data challenge we expect to become increasingly common: scaling up the performance of a machine learning classifier for a large set of unstructured data. In this post, we explain how a set-oriented approach led to huge performance gains.

Four short links: 26 January 2011 - Identifying Communities, Web Principles, Wiring Library, and Instapaper Interview

By Nat Torkington
January 26, 2011

Find Communities -- algorithm for uncovering communities in networks of millions of nodes, for producing identifiable subgroups as in LinkedIn InMaps. (via Matt Biddulph's Delicious links) Seven Ways to Think Like The Web (Jon Udell) -- seven principles that will head off a lot of mistakes. They should be seared into the minds of anyone working in the web....

Four short links: 5 January 2011 - Cloud Checklist, Feedback Loops, Coverage Testing, and Un-national Services

By Nat Torkington
January 5, 2011

Multi-tenant SaaS Checklist -- if you're used to building single-site web apps, this is a simple overview of the differences when building multi-tenanted web apps. Nominally about Java, ending with a plug for its author's product, but ignore all that and it's still useful. (via Abhishek Tiwari on Twitter) Angel Investing: My First Three Years (Paul Buchheit) -- interesting...

Four short links: 6 December 2010 - .bas Scripts, Net Neutrality, Open Harrassment, and iOS Blog

By Nat Torkington
December 6, 2010

Apple I Basic as Mac OS X Scripting Language -- great hack. The “apple1basic” executable is a statically recompiled version of the original binary. All code is running natively. It plugs right into UNIX stdin and stdout. You can pass it the filename of a BASIC program to run. You can run BASIC programs like shell scripts. (via Hacker...

Four short links: 12 November 2010 - Experimental Design, Distributed Microsatire, Annotations, and Machine Learning

By Nat Torkington
November 12, 2010

Evaluating Extraordinary Claims -- science isn't easy, and the most difficult part of science is experimental design. Peter Norvig takes us through a handful of studies that claim to have found prayers to be effective, and critiques their experimental design. Lest you think scientists only criticize prayer experiments, read the Atlantic's profile of John Ioannidis. Thimbl -- decentralized microblogging...

Crowdsourcing specific microtasks

By Ben Lorica
October 25, 2010

Since the first-ever Mechanical Turk meetup a year ago, there has been an explosion in crowdsourcing services and a well-attended conference in San Francisco. I remain enthusiastic about crowdsourcing, but the number of companies has me worried about quality of work. Fortunately specialization is already occurring, so for particular tasks there are companies out there ready to provide high-quality service....

Four short links: 6 October 2010 - Poetry Translation, Smartphone Sales, Freedom for Machines to Read Information, and Free jQuery Book

By Nat Torkington
October 6, 2010

“Poetic” Statistical Machine Translation: Rhyme and Meter (PDF) -- Google Research paper on how to machine translate text into poetry. This is the best paper I've read in a long time: clever premise, straightforward implementation, and magnificent results. There's a very workable translation of Oscar Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" into a different meter, which you'll know isn't easy...

Four short links: 29 September 2010 - Social Mining, Machine Learning, Traffic Patterns, and OpenOffice Autophoenixes

By Nat Torkington
September 29, 2010

Digital Mirror Demo (video) -- demo of the Digital Mirror tool that analyses relationships. Some very cute visualizations of social proximity and presentation of the things you can learn from email, calendar, etc. (via kgreene on Twitter) Free Machine Learning Books -- list of free online books from MetaOptimize readers. (via newsycombinator on Twitter) Chewie Stats -- sweet chart...

Four short links: 17 September 2010 - BBC Machine Learning, Wikipedia for History, Nuggets from Websites, and Lawbreaking Robots

By Nat Torkington
September 17, 2010

BBC Jobs -- looking for someone to devise advanced machine intelligence techniques to infer high level classification metadata of audio and video content from low-level features extracted from it. (via mattb on Delicious) A History of the Iraq War Through Wikipedia Changelogs -- printed and bound volumes of the Wikipedia changelogs during the Iraq war. This is historiography. This...

Four short links: 9 September 2010 - Thumb Drives and the Cloud, FCC APIs, Mining on GFS, Check Your Prose with Scribe

By Nat Torkington
September 9, 2010

CloudUSB -- a USB key containing your operating environment and your data + a protected folder so nobody can access you data, even if you lost the key + a backup program which keeps a copy of your data on an online disk, with double password protection. (via ferrouswheel on Twitter) FCC APIs -- for spectrum licenses, consumer broadband...

Four short links: 5 August 2010 - Delicious Graphs, Charities and Data, Climate Psychology, Data Structure Portability

By Nat Torkington
August 5, 2010

Delicious Links Clustered and Stacked (Matt Biddulph) -- six years of his delicious links, k-means clustered by tag and graphed. The clusters are interesting, but I wonder whether Matt can identify significant life/work events by the spikes in the graph. Open Data and the Voluntary Sector (OKFN) -- Open data will give charities new ways to find and share...

Xcode 4 Preview 2 Now Available

By Andrew Trice
July 23, 2010

For those of you fellow iPad and iPhone developers out there, a preview version of Xcode 4 has been released. I'm personally looking forward to the integrated single window in the IDE, as opposed to multiple separate applications, the enhanced debugger, and enhanced code editing and navigation tools. Not to mention, the faster LLVM 2.0 compiler.

Four short links: 12 July 2010 - Machine Learning Toolkit, Map Politics, Borg Newspaper, and Ambient Displays

By Nat Torkington
July 12, 2010

Shogun: A Large Scale Machine Learning Toolbox -- open source (GPL v3), C++ with interfaces to MatLab, R, Octave, and Python. Emphasis for this toolkit is on SVM and "large scale kernel methods". The Agnostic Cartographer (Washington Monthly) -- land and sea are easy to measure compared to the trouble you get into when you put names on them....

Four short links: 23 June 2010 - Being Wrong, Science Malfunding, Touch-screen Libraries, Mining Flickr Photos

By Nat Torkington
June 23, 2010

Ira Glass on Being Wrong (Slate) -- fascinating interview with Ira Glass on the fundamental act of learning: being wrong. I had this experience a couple of years ago where I got to sit in on the editorial meeting at the Onion. Every Monday they have to come up with like 17 or 18 headlines, and to do that,...

Four short links: 17 June 2010 - Statistical Jeopardy Wins, Mobile Taxonomy, Geodata Mystery, and Machine Learning Blog

By Nat Torkington
June 17, 2010

What is IBM's Watson? (NY Times) -- IBM joining the big data machine learning race, and hatching a Blue Gene system that can answer Jeopardy questions. Does good, not great, and is getting better. Google Lays Out its Mobile Strategy (InformationWeek) -- notable to me for Rechis said that Google breaks down mobile users into three behavior groups: A....

1 to 38 of 38