Re:Ask HN: What do you think is the next Technology worth ma...
by nerme on Thursday December 31, 2009 @12:43PM
(#1024596)
Learn some linear algebra. Literally every how'd-they-do-that-technique from OCR to PageRank is based on putting data in to a matrix and extracting some eigenvectors.
I took LA in college, but my professor was no where near as good and on topic in relation to computer algorithms as this guy: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-06Spring-2005/Cours...
Oh, check out R. There are a lot of free papers and example code showing say, how principal component analysis on a dataset of migratory geese can be used to explain so and so, along with generating some pretty pictures.
It's a really nice bit of OSS!
Re:Ask HN: What do you think is the next Technology worth ma...
by vlod on Thursday December 31, 2009 @11:39AM
(#1024490)
"Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications" is worth checking out in Borders to get a sense if it's gobbledegook amazon link: http://bit.ly/5JlRz7
[I figured since you just got into it ... ]