Daniel Lemire's Blog
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How many users are needed for an efficient collaborative filtering system?
via Daniel Lemire's blog by Daniel Lemire on February 05, 2008
You can build an effective recommender system with as little as two people.As you have more users, you tend to have more training data. Hence, you may have more accurate recommendations.More accurate recommendations may not be important to your users. The exact count of your users may not matter as much as the diversity of your users. A good rule of thumb is that you should have many more users...
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Patience, persistence, perseverance
via Daniel Lemire's blog by Daniel Lemire on May 19, 2008
In gardening—as in research—there are 3 fundamental values one must cultivate.Patience. Quick results are possible without much effort. However, it takes a minimum of 3 years for a new garden to reach its maturity. The first year you set the ground, the second year you build-up, and the last year you reap your best results.Persistence. You have to continually work at your goals. You do not...
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Database indexes are less useful than you think
via Daniel Lemire's blog by Daniel Lemire on January 18, 2008
An index helps you find an item without scanning all of the data. David DeWitt and and Michael Stonebraker have made comments opposing index-light systems such as
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Who should be buying expensive commercial database systems?
via Daniel Lemire's blog by Daniel Lemire on January 21, 2008
According to Curt Monash, few people should be buying high-end Database management systems:There are relatively few applications that wouldn’t run perfectly well on PostgreSQL or EnterpriseDB
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Who should be buying expensive commercial database systems?
via Daniel Lemire's blog by Daniel Lemire on January 21, 2008
According to Curt Monash, few people should be buying high-end Database management systems:There are relatively few applications that wouldn???t run perfectly well on PostgreSQL or EnterpriseDB
Shared by: Roger,
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No shortage of Information Technology Workers
via Daniel Lemire's blog by Daniel Lemire on February 07, 2008
At my school, the dean of the Science Faculty claims that we should see a surge of enrollment in Computer Science given the current shortages in Information Technology workers. I have my idea on who is feeding him this information, but I believe it is nonsense.First, I do not believe there is a shortage right now in Information Technology at large. I have seen numbers quoted left and right, but...
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What you can ask of a researcher in an email
via Daniel Lemire's blog by Daniel Lemire on March 09, 2008
I routinely get emails from unknown graduate students who ask me to help them. Most of these emails are interesting. Unfortunately, some are unacceptably rude. What is ok:Can I get an electronic copy of your paper? Do you have the source code or the data for this paper?This new paper claims to do better than your algorithm, what do you think about their work?In Algorithm 1, isn’t there a...
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Pictures from paradise
via Daniel Lemire's blog by Daniel Lemire on May 28, 2008
Kamel is back from Madeira (Portugual) where he presented our paper Collaborative OLAP with Tag Clouds: Web 2.0 OLAP Formalism and Experimental Evaluation. Madeira is too far from Montreal when you are old and decrepit like me. But he took some great pictures of the place.I was there last year and it was great:
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The ten-minute rule for presentations
via Daniel Lemire's blog by Daniel Lemire on June 02, 2008
Mike gives us 3 rules to improve our presentations. Two of the rules I knew: you have to practice and you should present pictures, not text, on your slides. The other rule is the 10-minute rule: you have to insert a break in your presentation every 10 minutes to refresh the audience.I must admit that I am really bad at attending presentations. I usually fall asleep within 5 minutes. But, at...
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Blogs make meetings feel dull
via Daniel Lemire's blog by Daniel Lemire on June 16, 2008
I have always hated meetings. I prefer to work alone at my desk, with the occasional email. I realized recently that blogging makes meetings feel even worse. There are many types of information you will not get through traditional channels. Peter Turney’s latest post is one such example. He basically says that simplicity is just one type of bias: the simpler solution is not necessary better....
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