Mustafa Atik - Personal Blog

Facebook’s data science team published a post in which they claim it is possible to predict a football team’s performance mining emotions of its fans. The post tells us before a kick-off, fans seem positive. But the volume of positive emotion is higher in the fans who support the better team. After the match, the winner’s fans feel very high positive emotion, on the other hand other team’s fans feel negative. Actually we do not need any study to predict this correlation between teams and their fans. It is obvious when a team wins, its fans get happy and so they post positive status messages. Yet I think this study is not trivial. Every study does not necessarily bring about a breakthrough.

At last, I’ve made a strong decision to migrate from PHP to Python. Leaving a tool, leaving your bread basket would not be an easy decision if you used it almost for eight years. Otherwise, I believe that sometimes with a little bit courage to leave your conform zone and a lot of curiosity you can get a better bread basket, maybe a jar of jam too. if you want to be a sea, you must give up being a drop. Why am I leaving PHP? Actually I am not leaving PHP totally, but switching my primary language to Python because my works have been changing. Most of work required from me is related to natural language processing(NLP), machine learning(ML) techniques. And I, and many other developers, find Python much more capable to deal with this kind of works. It has already many libraries, tools, frameworks for NLP and ML. Another reason is that I think web programming will not grow as much as an intelligent system. Maybe I am wrong, but there is no doubt the future is about intelligent syste...

In my programming circle, I’ve encountered many programmers who give most of their attention to debugging software bugs. And this is not bad, but not enough to be efficient. Efficiency includes both preventing possible bugs and removing existent one. Let me explain what programming and debugging are with a doctor-patient analogy, which I’ve just made out. As we all know, to be healthy the first thing we must do is not eating too much and junk food, doing enough exercise, not smoking, and not drinking too much drink. The list may vary for each individual. Even though we do all these, it is always possible to be ill. In view of possibility of being ill, we always require doctor to be around in case of anything. For example, not to be a diabetic you need control your eating. But does the controlling make medical improvement against diabetes unnecessary? Not at all. We need enough efficient cure to diabetes, so medical and science works on this. We need doctors. Analogously, in software ...

Long time ago, when the first courses about natural language procession and machine learning had released, I was planning to get them. I announced around and let people know what they could have, what they couldn’t. In short, I was excited. But years were passing and I couldn’t have attend because of short of time and being very busy. A few weeks ago I was contemplating about tf-idf. I looked for it and read some pages and continued to search, eventually run across the nlp course. I watched the related videos, since then I’ve been continuing. Learning something for need is much better than learning to fill spare time.