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jlewis_st | 11 years ago | on: Scientific Data Has Become So Complex, We Have to Invent New Math

Definitely — our R&D team works on developing new mathematical approaches (for example, how to best leverage TDA for classification problems) and also applying existing approaches to new problem domains. The team also does plenty of prototyping (coding) and then works with engineering to move new algorithms to production. Drop me a line and I can put you in touch with someone who can talk in depth about what we're up to on the research side.

jlewis_st | 11 years ago | on: Scientific Data Has Become So Complex, We Have to Invent New Math

I'm the lead frontend developer at Ayasdi, and I figure I should take this opportunity to let the HN community know that we're actively hiring in engineering :)

If you're a frontend engineer with an interest in machine learning and data visualization, Ayasdi is a great place to build those skills. We use Backbone and D3 as our core stack on the client side, and we're pushing at the edge of what's possible when building rich data analysis applications for the web. (Incidentally, we're talking about our approach at the next Bay Area D3 User Group meeting http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-d3-User-Group/events/19268574...)

Feel free to contact me directly (contact info in profile) if you're interested in learning more about Ayasdi!

jlewis_st | 13 years ago | on: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

I did simple analysis of overall letter frequency and how that would map to a 98 tile set (not counting the blanks) and this is what I got:

A: 7 B: 2 C: 4 D: 3 E: 11 F: 1 G: 3 H: 2 I: 8 J: 1 K: 1 L: 5 M: 3 N: 6 O: 6 P: 3 Q: 1 R: 7 S: 9 T: 6 U: 3 V: 1 W: 1 X: 1 Y: 2 Z: 1

It makes a lot of sense to reduce the number of Ss for the sake of gameplay, and it seems like Butts redistributed those extra tiles amongst the vowels.

jlewis_st | 13 years ago | on: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

Yes, my distaste for C is probably because I'm not a good enough player, haha. I received an email mentioning the CLARINETS heuristic for choosing tiles to leave in one's rack, and in that context the drop in C's value makes sense, as you say.

jlewis_st | 13 years ago | on: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

I was thinking that you could sum up the transition probabilities from the actual transitions available on the board as the main measure. Then you could use frequency by length to weight legal Boggle plays (3/4 letters and up, so 2-letter words wouldn't even count).

You're right that with a Boggle board you could just count up the available Boggle points by finding all the possible words, but that might miss some aspects of how hard the words are for a human to find.

jlewis_st | 13 years ago | on: What we built with Twitter that now won't fly

Yeah, we'll do what we can to comply. If you're signed up and have your Twitter account connected you do get the reply/retweet functionality on hover. We like the calm of having no avatars, but we could add them (and see if we get busted if we let users toggle them).

The part that is tough for us is third party actions. It's specifically those actions we're excited to enable. So while we don't anticipate having to totally remove Twitter data, we do expect it to become less useful and integrated.

It's unclear how draconian Twitter wants to be. We'll do our best to work with them while refining and adding other services as a hedge against getting cut out.

jlewis_st | 14 years ago | on: Show HN: Divvy - fast and intuitive unsupervised machine learning.

Looks like there was an Xcode 3/4 confusion that crept in. I imagine you were compiling in Xcode 3--I've fixed the issue now and pushed the change to the repository, though you may need to do a clean after pulling. If you're still having issues you can try removing the files in Divvy's application support directory. Thanks again for bringing this to my attention.
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