I’m representing StyleFeeder at this year’s KDD conference, held in Las Vegas, Nevada. It might seem odd mixing seductive showgirls and stodgy statisticians, but I think it’s an excellent location choice. Gambling concepts such as probability, expected value and exploration vs. exploitation are core to many concepts in Machine Learning, Data Mining and [...]
This isn’t technology related, but every startup on the planet should do what we did for our signage. It’s cost effective and looks great. Check out the photos.
Getting data feeds from hundreds of vendors, it’s always surprising how big or small some of them can be. Sometimes there is a rational explanation, like when they include a separate product entry for every size or color. Sometimes it’s just astounding how much variety there is in certain product categories that I wouldn’t give [...]
I have a little piece on the wonderful Xconomy site about Amazon’s new EBS service that you should check out.
If there’s one thing that we have here at StyleFeeder, it’s… well, a lot of data. If there’s another thing, I’d have to say that we all have a healthy sense of humor. Because we basically sit in front of teh intrawebs all day long, we are exposed to many humorous diversions, which [...]
As part of our effort around product data feeds, we get a lot of delimited text files of varying size and content delivered on a daily basis. Previously, we primarily used OpenOffice.org Calc to view these files, since it has a fairly flexible text import facility and can deal with CSV files pretty well. For [...]
Boston was a key city in the War for Independence, and to celebrate that there is a big fireworks display over the Charles River every year. This year the Erics of StyleFeeder (Savage and Kilby) were looking for a place to watch the show. Down by the river was a mass of humanity, even compared [...]
top - 12:59:09 up 6 days, 15:51, 4 users, load average: 1050.04, 753.62, 356.
Tasks: 150 total, 24 running, 126 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 12.2%us, 87.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2059260k total, 2049260k used, [...]
A few weeks ago we got a pointer to the LinkShare developer contest, open to any of their publishers who are using their web services in interesting ways. I wrote up an entry, mailed it in, and didn’t think too much about it for a while. Then a couple of weeks ago we [...]
We just did a little refresh of our Facebook profile box, and I learned a couple things along the way that would have been nice to know ahead of time:
I knew that Facebook caches all referenced images, but I didn’t know that they will resize any referenced image larger than 400px down to 400px.
If an [...]