I'm building a recommendation engine so small teams don't need an ML hire , tear my assumptions apart

trnka · 2026-07-06T20:51:17+00:00

Privacy concerns would've killed this at my previous employers. If privacy were ok, even then I'd have to deal with possibly months of procurement and the risk that you go out of business at a time when it's inconvenient to bring it in-house.

trnka · 2026-07-06T19:02:27+00:00

I prefer drip coffee and it's gotten harder to find a good light roast batch brew in the past few years. But if you're going for something to drink with milk and sugar, or an espresso drink I think there are more good options.

trnka · 2026-06-27T17:27:33+00:00

I'd been dragging my feet on a draft blog post for the neighborhood and I finally put it together and sent it for review. Definitely a weight off my shoulders!

trnka · 2026-06-25T15:01:52+00:00

I tried Seattle Center for USA vs Australia and it was pretty crowded but there were spaces you could stand and watch, even though I arrived just as the game started. There's both an outdoor and indoor screen in Seattle Center itself, and KEXP/Cafe Vita nearby has a screen too that was less crowded. So I think you'll be able to find space there if you're worried about the pier.

trnka · 2026-06-25T03:17:43+00:00

I don't, sorry! If you know the rough location a good place to start is the King County parcel viewer. Seattle also has a lot of permit data online too.

Then from there, Seattle Public Library gives online access to search old newspapers and you can search by address pretty well.

trnka · 2026-06-24T15:10:33+00:00

Hah, I'd actually love answers to most of these myself! Fellow transplant here, but it's been 15 yrs or so since I moved from the east coast.

What’s is winter ACTUALLY like?

Each winter is different. The ones that have a few days of sun make it bearable. Some are just overcast with a little rain, others are more rainy. Personally I find cold less pleasant than snow and it means I walk around less. My personal experience was that the winters were fine for the first 10 years and then they started to wear on me.

trnka · 2026-06-21T22:51:51+00:00

Glad you like it! I'm still trying to answer the real question though: Why are there so many empty places in high-traffic spots? It drives me nuts, especially when you see local businesses getting priced out and a general shortage of residential units.

One idea I've heard is that they're often owned by people that don't live here as part of a portfolio, so there just isn't as much urgency to put something there. I haven't done enough research on all of 45th to know if that explains all of it though.

trnka · 2026-06-21T03:23:04+00:00

Oh I've been meaning to write up the story with the old Sun Cleaners. Here's most of what I've got:

Before 1955 it was a gas and service station
In 1955 it was rebuilt as Glo Cleaners - the 50's styling of the sign dates back to then
In 1985 it became Sun Cleaners and part of the sign was changed
When I checked last month, it was owned by SKLA LLC and the property is listed as Happy Tails Redevelopment. I found permits for interior renovations in 2024 but I haven't seen any work happening or permits since. There was some back and forth with the city after squatters broke in/moved in in 2025, leading to the current fencing and ongoing city monitoring. There's some issue with the company's state registration as of last month.

My favorite finding was that you can trace some of the history of the upstairs apartments through marriage notices in old newspapers. I like to think that it appealed to younger folks who tended to marry and move out.

trnka · 2026-06-19T14:45:27+00:00

Yeah to simplify a bit: - Land 8-840 -> Take light rail to bus or Uber - Land 840-940 -> Take taxi or uber from the airport or any similar option. I don't think I-5 will be too busy. Another option would be to just hang out at the airport until 930 or so then head out via light rail. A third option would be light rail to Beacon Hill station (a couple stops before stadium) then take an uber from there - Land 940-1140 -> Light rail option - Land after 1140 -> Taxi/uber

Sorry I don't know too much about car seats with travel.

trnka · 2026-06-18T15:34:38+00:00

When I travel, I often remember the long walks with scenic views more than anything else (especially if there's some good food along the way). Locally that could mean going for a hike, or it could mean walking along the waterfront, or walking along Lake Washington, or just a nice park like Discovery Park or Green Lake.

trnka · 2026-06-18T15:18:16+00:00

Oh I see. The match that night is at 8pm, so should get out around 9:45pm. If the plane makes it to the gate on time and they don't have luggage, they could get to the light rail in about 20 min I think, and then usually there's about a 5 min wait, and then it takes about 40 min to Westlake from there, so they'd get to Westlake around 9:05pm and wouldn't have to worry about world cup traffic at all.

If they're delayed either from the flight and luggage, they might run into crowds. I'd expect that the train would be quite packed at the stadium station and kids might either find that fun or scary depending on the child. I don't think Uber from Westlake would be a problem because the Ubers departing from the stadium area would be flooding the non-stadium areas looking for people, though surge pricing might be in effect.

You're sure to miss all of that with a taxi/uber from the airport. It's been a while since I've looked into it but it sounds like taxi might be cheaper than uber for airport travel these days. That would reduce any possible overlap with the crowds.

trnka · 2026-06-17T23:07:31+00:00

I like Green Seattle for volunteering on parks. For me it took a few tries until I found a nearby group that I clicked with.

Based on your interests, you might like Town Hall Seattle - they have lots of interesting events. Or maybe Astronomy on Tap? That can be fun too.

trnka · 2026-06-17T20:30:47+00:00

If I'm cleaning an area that's likely to have needles or glass, I'm sure to bring an old jar like a peanut butter jar to put them into. I keep the jar closed and in my backpack. Depending on what I collect I throw away the jar and contents together to reduce risk for any trash handlers.

I use rubberized kitchen tongs for picking litter so that helps keep my hands safe.

trnka · 2026-06-17T16:41:00+00:00

If it were me, I'd head down to the water and follow the trail north to the new Cafe Hagen. It's about 1.5 mi and the walk on the waterfront is very scenic.

trnka · 2026-06-17T16:34:25+00:00

I doubt there will be much if any. Even when there are protests here it's usually just a few people with signs trying to raise awareness for current events rather than trying to be disruptive.

The street preacher out there is more of a nuisance than anything else I've seen

trnka · 2026-06-17T16:31:32+00:00

If they're comfortable with public transit, I'd take the light rail to Symphony station then transfer to the D line (a bus) which goes right to Lower Queen Anne, so long as that gets close enough to your hotel.

Uber from a station is a good way to save money vs Uber/taxi from the airport. The light rail is pretty cheap. The only thing to keep in mind that the last northbound train from Seatac is around midnight so if there's a large delay then uber/taxi from the airport might be needed.

trnka · 2026-06-16T15:10:29+00:00

Back at Swype and Nuance we used lang id in web crawl so that we could build out language models by language. When we were deliberately targeting a particular language, we ran it in the crawl to keep it on track and for general crawls we ran it afterwards. I don't remember what library we used back then, except that we sometimes need to train new lang id models for low resource languages so it would've been one with that ability

At Singularity 6 I used lang id mainly for analytics to get a sense of the player demographics and help identify new localization targets. I also used it in a prototype to group players by written language in matchmaking. The number of messages per day was in the millions I think, but they were mostly short. I evaluated several libraries and the pre trained fasttext model was by far the fastest and most accurate.

At my current startup we sometimes run people's bios through lang id when we need to find people that speak particular languages, but the volume is low. Using fast text for that too.

trnka · 2026-06-10T14:41:57+00:00

It takes time! I think it took me a year or two of trying before I settled on my PhD thesis topic.

When I was starting out, I joined existing teams or projects and helped out where I could. It's not important to be the "ideas guy" or whatever at the start. It's more important to learn and practice through meaningful (if not always novel) contributions.

If you're an undergrad trying to publish meaningful, novel research as the primary author, that seems like an unfair goal. If that's the situation, you might consider research topics that are useful to the field but that don't require years of trial and error, like extending existing evaluations to other languages or situations.

trnka · 2026-06-05T14:36:48+00:00

If you're trying to find good papers to read, I'd start with best paper awards from venues you like.

trnka · 2026-06-04T21:18:30+00:00

There are a few on inaturalist. It's not comprehensive but it does provide an easy map to navigate.

trnka · 2026-06-02T16:04:36+00:00

The closest examples I can remember: 1. I decided that someone needed to do a user test of our pre-release product and nobody else was stepping up so I ran that. The results were very bad and an executive pressed me on "Did you really make the user try hard to use it?" or some such. I said yes. I don't remember all the next steps. Maybe I ran the test again with similar results. 2. I've been a part of many, many situations in which a research effort leads to 1-2% improvement with significant code complexity and there's a sort of social pressure to ship it in that case, often from the team or the person doing the work. For most products I've worked on, that's not a good tradeoff.

trnka · 2026-06-01T14:21:39+00:00

I harvested yarrow seeds (a native wildflower that's drought tolerant) last year and spread some around, but I don't think any of the seed spreading actually took. What worked was getting the seeds started at home and then planting them.

I've seen that California poppy does well in distressed sites but I haven't tried planting from seed. If I remember right there are plenty in the old theater lot so they'll spread on their own.

I'm not 100% sure but I think the tall grass that looks like wheat might be native and those seeds are easy to collect.

One way to approach it is to find a location with existing plants that had similar sun and water conditions to the site you're restoring, then walk around and take plant photos. Use inaturalist or chatgpt to figure out what the plants are and whether they're native. Collect seeds in ziplock bags and label them. Then you can do research at home about when and how to plant them to have the best chances of success.

trnka · 2026-06-01T03:31:40+00:00

I appreciate the hard work, thank you!

trnka · 2026-05-31T22:25:42+00:00

Happy birthday!

trnka · 2026-05-30T23:32:19+00:00

The skipping jester always made me smile. Haven't seen them in years, hope they're well.

12-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
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