benofsky

Hi, author here. I love reading academic papers and I love Math. But it's an unfortunate fact that academic papers make up the majority of the literature on ML — and that their notation, and writing style exclude a large population who would otherwise find them useful. That's all I'm trying to get at here.

Hey, author here.

> Aside from the fact the techniques he mentioned are some of the simplest in machine learning (and are hardly those that would immediately come to mind when I think "machine learning")

The primary point of this article was the contrast between something as simple as K-Means, and the literature that describes it. It wasn't meant as a full intro to ML, but rather something along the lines of "give it a try, you might be surprised by what you can achieve".

> Even for "simple" algorithms such as K-Means, implementing them is often only the tip of the iceberg.

Yup. But getting more people to explore the tip of the iceberg is, in my opinion, a good thing. We don't discourage people from programming because they don't instantly understand the runtime complexity of hash tables and binary trees. We encourage them to use what's already built knowing that smart people will eventually explore the rest of the iceberg.

Sure, author here.

The point of the graphs are as an example more than anything — in any real world solution it's not trivial to plot your documents (as representing documents with thousands of words in 1d, 2d or 3d is not trivial).

But if _you could_ represent your documents in 2d, you could plot them like I do here. And, the X-axis would represent 1 feature of your documents, and the Y-axis another.

Tl;dr don't focus on the axes — focus on the idea of being able to compare the relative distances between documents.

Yup. We're working on making this clearer right now.

"Your users" is _your_ users. You add a Javascript snippet to your app which sends us up-to-date information about your users (as they move around your app) — we record that data and allow you (or a colleague) to download a CSV of the data at any time.

Does that make sense?

Eek! Fixed.

Thanks for the feedback — we'll see if we can make that clearer.

Yup, my bad. Terms of use I don't think we need right now. Privacy policy is: we'll never share your data with anyone.

I'm often asked to generate CSVs of our user base for various non-technical colleagues. They might use these CSVs to do analyses in Excel or import users into a service (like Mailchimp).

This is an attempt at taking me out of that process, and automating it.

Congrats guys!

I think there's a big difference between how [my generation and] I (19 y.o.) use Facebook, and how older generations do.

For me, it is 80% keeping up with my current friends and 20% older friends. I think these ratios are perhaps flipped after a certain point, perhaps the people for whom their FB graph wasn't created organically from the age of 14/15 but rather, had to go and create it posthumously.

Yes, there are people I'm friends with who I'm not friends with anymore. But, if you use Groups + Lists (which all my non-techy friends use too), this isn't really an issue.

Anyway, I just see a lot of commentary on things FB is doing wrong by people > 25/30 y.o. But, for people below that age bracket (who tend not to be commenting in the media) it has (from my observations) replaced texting/phone/skype/letters/etc.

I like the TV analogy, it's perhaps more apt. Surely the point of any TV network is to show ads based on their viewers interests? Just FB is able to be much more targeted (at the same time they also have to compete with the huge over-supply of online display-ads, are my eyeballs worth more on facebook.com vs. joes-blog.com? I don't think so, which is the major issue with their current monetization strategy (EDIT: and they haven't shown that their targeting is significantly better than Google Adwords as of yet)).

I am confident though that they will find a way to make FB a seriously viable business. The list of things I use FB for is just so long, I don't see how they couldn't find at least one v. profitable workflow to tap into (organising a night out, checking-in on the night out, posting photos the next day, etc.).

I don't know. Obviously this matters in determining how much FB is worth. It probably isn't much right now but, I see the potential for huge future earnings, they haven't found their adwords yet, I'm confident they will.

RE: The stock being down ~10% in after-hours.

I think there's a real divide between the people who use Facebook, for whom it is (often) a serious part of their social life and, those who comment on FB in the media and invest in FB on the public market.

Being 19 Facebook is a critical part of finding out what's going on, organising events and, keeping in touch with everyone (whether I see them every day or once a year). I'm not unique in this, it's true for all my friends and pretty much anyone I meet, of my age, around the (western?) world.

Obviously, the market thinks FB is over-valued; I'm not commenting on whether it is or isn't. I'm just interested at what the market might value FB at if the people buying its stock used it as much and in the same way as younger generations. (As far as I see it, it's like a single private company owning the whole "phone system" for young people. What would that be valued at?)