Enlarge We’ve spent the past few weeks burning copious amounts of AWS compute time trying to invent an algorithm to parse Ars’ front-page story headlines to predict which ones will win an A/B test—and we learned a lot. One of the lessons is that we—and by “we, ” I mainly mean “me, ” since this […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) We may have bitten off more than we could chew, folks. An Amazon engineer told me that when he heard what I was trying to do with Ars headlines, the first thing he thought was that we had chosen a deceptively hard problem. He warned that I needed […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) We’re in phase three of our machine-learning project now—that is, we’ve gotten past denial and anger, and we’re now sliding into bargaining and depression. I’ve been tasked with using Ars Technica’s trove of data from five years of headline tests, which pair two ideas against each other in […]
Enlarge / Turning the lens on ourselves, as it were. There’s a moment in any foray into new technological territory that you realize you may have embarked on a Sisyphean task. Staring at the multitude of options available to take on the project, you research your options, read the documentation, and start to work—only to […]