natasha's corner

A lot has been written about the recent announcement by Netflix that they will be increasing their plan prices by as much as 60%. Clearly, this backlash was not unanticipated by Netflix – according to David Pogue: Netflix knew that there would be a nasty backlash, and has already taken the subscriber defection into account [...]

I’ve been pretty excited about the possibilities presented by OpenAmplify – I wrote a bit about it in my previous post. So I got thinking… Twitter is a good obvious place to start with text analysis, but wouldn’t it be cool to see the top topics and sentiment for any website you’re looking at? For [...]

This post has been moved to my new blog, Uncharted. Please continue the discussion there. I recently learned about OpenAmplify, a web service that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to extract meaning from text. I’m very familiar with NLP because I’ve worked on the Text Analysis team at SAP (previously with Inxight Software), so I [...]

The new Wolfram|Alpha “computational knowledge engine” is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long while. My first impression was that this was just a big fancy calculator to help people solve NP-complete problems and complex differential equations and whatnot. Not that this wouldn’t be impressive in its own right, but it’s not exactly something [...]

They spelled out "ten" and "seventeen," but I guess they just couldn’t squeeze in 3 more letters for the proper spelling of "through."

I’ve always had a problem saying “he” or “she” when I really want to say “they.” For example, “The user can read the help information before they decide on the best option” just sounds so much better than “The user can read the help information before she decides on the best option.” The user, in [...]

The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves as well. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen accidents, meetings and material assistance that no one could have dreamed would come their [...]

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods [...]

Take the time and money and effort you’d put into an expensive logo and put them into creating a product and experience and story that people remember instead. – Seth Godin

In 1060, an imperial decree barred “every woman, every child, eunuch, smooth faced person, and female animal” from Athos, which suggests that there had been incidents of inventive nonchastity over the years. – Frommer’s guide for Greece