blauwbilgorgel

It is hard in the beginning, but it gets much easier after sticking with it for a few weeks. Your body and hunger adapts.

> ... how exactly none of those are the ones with the necessary PhDs in statistics and algorithms to get anything of any value done.

I see it almost the other way around: Companies strictly demand PhD's for Big Data jobs and can't find this unicorn. Yet we live in a time where we don't need a PhD program to receive education from the likes of Ng, LeCun and Langford. We live in a time where curiosity and dedication can net you valuable results. Where CUDA-hackers can beat university teams. The entire field of big data visualization requires innate aptitude and creativity, not so much an expensive PhD program. I suspect Paul Graham, when solving his spam problem with ML, benefited more from his philosophy education than his computer science education.

Of course, having a PhD. still shows dedication and talent. But it is no guarantee for practical ML skills, it can even hamper research and results, when too much power is given to theory and reputation is at stake.

In my experience Machine Learning was locked up in academics, and even in academics it was subdivided. The idea that "you need to be an ML expert, before you can run an algo" is detrimental to the field, not helping so much in adopting a wider industry use of ML. Those ML experts set the academic benchmarks that amateurs were able to beat by trying out Random Forests and Gradient Boosting.

I predict that ML will become part of the IT-stack, as much as databases have. Nowadays, you do not need to be a certified DBA to set up a database. It is helpful and in some cases heavily advisable, but databases now see a much wider adoption by laypeople. This is starting to happen in ML. I think more hobbyists are right now toying with convolutional neural networks, than there are serious researchers in this area. These hobbyists can surely find and contribute valuable practical insights.

Tuning parameters is basically a gridsearch. You can bruteforce this. In goes some ranges of parameters, out come the best params found. Fairly easy to explain to a programmer.

Adapting existing algorithms is ML researcher territory. That is a few miles above the business people extracting valuable/actionable insight from (big or small or tedious) data. Also there is a wide range of big data engineers making it physically possible to have the "necessary" PhD's extract value from Big Data.

This will be the first of this scale. On both those sites the most channels I could find was 64. This program is planning 10.000 channels for unprecedented resolution and scale.

Since 16 channels is enough to predict if a subject is looking at a face or not, it is exciting to research what this large-scale system is going to be capable of. Next to neuroscience, it could help with healthcare (research into dementia, epilepsy and schizophrenia).

Did Google notify you of a link-based penalty? You should set up Google Webmaster Tools, if you haven't already. Then you can read notifications about suspicious links pointing to your site and disavow the ones that are spammy.

I am not so sure that you are under a link-based penalty. I know you did not ask for this, but I had a look at your website's link profile, source and index health.

1. SEO: The online web form market is hugely saturated. You probably can not compete with Wufoo on terms like "web form builder". Honestly ask yourself if you currently deserve a top 10 spot for this term. Are you a top 10 player in this field? Explore more specific and longtail keywords. Create better targeted pages and page titles. "Documentation - NicSoft Software" is a missed chance. Create more content on the blog (inbound marketing).

2. Links. You do not have enough natural links to beat competitors. They get linked from webdeveloper forums by real users of the software. You also should check out Google's stance on "Powered by"-links. If this turns in the majority of your backlinking profile, you get links from a lot of bad neighborhoods. These links may thus do more harm than good. It is not an editorial link, but probably in exchange for a free version of the product. Much safer to nofollow links created for profit or SEO/online marketing purposes.

3. Site HTML is not well-structured for information retrieval. For every page on your site, the first heading is "Home". Browse your site with styles disabled. Reorder repeating boilerplate code below the relevant page content. Specify a canonical or make sure only one version is served to visitors with redirects (both www- and non-www versions of the site return duplicate content).

4. Index health is poor. Robots.txt file is indexed. There are a few inactive subdomains, an unattended Wordpress and Drupal install in a subdirectory. Includes are indexed as separate pages "/inc/footer.php". Documentation (the content "meat" if the site) is off limits for bots. Over 90% of pages on the site are in the secondary index, which is not a good sign.

About 10 hits a day from Google is far too low for any commercial site to survive on. You could get more than 10 hits on a random wordlist.

Do not solely think about in-links. Are you even linking to reputable sources yourself? End-node sites are far less interesting for visitors than hub sites.