Monday, December 31, 2012

YouTube

Am I the only one that has trouble with YouTube?

I have a decent FIOS connection. I get 2.5MB/s download speeds from speedtest.net. And I have trouble watching videos sometimes in 360p. In Chrome. On my quad-core desktop with 8G of memory.

What. The. Hell.

I don't watch videos online because YouTube sucks so bad. Funny cat videos, programming discussions, none of it I watch.

And WHY doesn't it download an entire video? I get to watch things in HD in about twenty second chunks because that's all that YouTube will download. It takes me fifteen minutes to watch a three minute video. And that's if I stop and start it manually. If I don't do that I'll get a one-second chunk of video about every three seconds.

In 2001 I could pause a download and wait for it to queue enough to play through to the end. It makes me angry that we have apparently lost this technology.

YouTube, I hate thee.

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Kaggle FTW

After over a month of playing with random forests, I ditched them and built a decision tree for the titanic problem. My first attempt scored higher than the tutorial score, which was my initial goal for my exploration into data science. It wasn't much higher, but it was a few more correct results, and I'm calling that a win.