In 2007, Michelin published its first-ever restaurant guide to Tokyo and awarded the city more stars than even Paris. Jean-Luc Naret, Michelin’s editorial director at the time, was emphatic: Tokyo, he said, was “by far the world’s capital of gastronomy,” a comment that seemed as much an indictment of Paris, and of France, as it was a nod to Tokyo. [...] With its 2013 guide, Michelin has again affirmed that the “muse” has relocated to Tokyo: The French food bible awarded three stars, its highest rating, to 14 restaurants (compared with only 10 in Paris) and dished out a total of 323 stars -- more than to any other city in the Michelin firmament -- to 281 establishments overall.

Last week, while working on new features for our product, I had to find a quick and efficient way to extract the main topics/objects from a sentence. Since I’m using Python, I initially thought that it’s going to be a very easy task to achieve with NLTK. However, when I tried its default tools (POS tagger, Parser…), I indeed got quite accurate results, but performance was pretty bad. So I had to find a better way. Like I did in my previous post, I’ll start with the bottom line – Here you can find my code for extracting the main topics/noun phrases from a given sentence. It works fine with real sentences (from a blog/news article). It’s a bit less accurate compared to the default NLTK tools, but it works much faster!

The current legal system around sampling is outdated and broken. It was created in 1991 by a judge throwing Bible quotes around who (more importantly) failed to consider the doctrine of fair use. Treating all samples the same unfairly burdens producers who use samples to create unique and original work. They system has been maintained by the economics of how it benefits players in the industry with the most time, money, and lawyers. The claims of producers like Girl Talk - that sampling constitutes fair use and is in line with copyright law - should see its day in court. Until it does, the music industry will continue to be hampered by ambiguity that stifles creativity. Clearing samples can be impossible for all but the biggest stars, which leaves the music industry’s dreamers facing a hard choice between restricting their creativity or making music with the nagging fear of a lawsuit. A law that makes it impossible to play by the rules is not a good one.

The TTY subsystem is central to the design of Linux, and UNIX in general. Unfortunately, its importance is often overlooked, and it is difficult to find good introductory articles about it. I believe that a basic understanding of TTYs in Linux is essential for the developer and the advanced user. Beware, though: What you are about to see is not particularly elegant. In fact, the TTY subsystem — while quite functional from a user's point of view — is a twisty little mess of special cases. To understand how this came to be, we have to go back in time.

The Perl provided by your OS is ancient (yes, it is) and probably broken. We can fix that. Most of your programming problems are probably solved by a Perl module from CPAN, but if you don't know what that is, or how to install modules from it, you'll never use it. We can fix that as well. You've got production code that needs to keep running, but you still want to forge on with modern tools and approaches. We can help with that as well. This talk provides a rapid introduction to perlbrew, cpanminus, and local::lib.

Down in the depths of your organisation, you have a treasure-trove of valuable data. But how hard is it for your users to retrieve it? Salvage your data with a natural language interface - ask your app English questions, get clear answers and reports back.

We prefer Pyramid to Django, Flask, and Bottle due to its flexibility, scalability and speed. It gives us more control than Django and is easy to create a small app that can scale later without being rewritten. These are many of the same reasons for Why We Choose Python in general. Recently we provided some training on how Pyramid works that was recorded. It provides a great overview of why Pyramid is ideal and how to setup a basic app with scaffolds, routes, and persistence. We also built a ToDo App for a web shootout we organized in Indianapolis through IndyPy. Putting these together turned out to be a great introduction to Pyramid, so I wrote this post.

There’s no comfort in the statistics for missions to Mars. To date over 60% of the missions have failed. The scientists and engineers of these undertakings use phrases like “Six Minutes of Terror,” and “The Great Galactic Ghoul” to illustrate their experiences, evidence of the anxiety that’s evoked by sending a robotic spacecraft to Mars — even among those who have devoted their careers to the task. But mention sending a human mission to land on the Red Planet, with payloads several factors larger than an unmanned spacecraft and the trepidation among that same group grows even larger. Why? Nobody knows how to do it.

My North Korean name is Shin In-kun (South Korean name: Shin Dong-hyuk). I was born on 19 November 1982. I was a political prisoner at birth in North Korea.

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library. The library, largely written in Julia itself, also integrates mature, best-of-breed C and Fortran libraries for linear algebra, random number generation, signal processing, and string processing. In addition, the Julia developer community is contributing a number of external packages through Julia’s built-in package manager at a rapid pace. Julia programs are organized around multiple dispatch; by defining functions and overloading them for different combinations of argument types, which can also be user-defined. For a more in-depth discussion of the rationale and advantages of Julia over other systems, see the following highlights or read the introduction in the online manual.