Waffles - Machine Learning command line tools | Hacker News Reader

Waffles - Machine Learning command line tools

waffles.sourceforge.net

70 pointshamilton13 comments

I do a lot of machine learning, and I'm not sure how useful this is. Machine learning technology is not currently automatic enough that it can be effective at the command-line level. By moving one level down the stack, to the API and library bindings level, it becomes a lot more effective.

What I'm saying is that to use command-line machine learning, I would have to couch it in a bunch of scripting. At that point in time, I might as well use library bindings. So command-line is not a selling point for me.

Compared to WEKA (http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/), waffles look inferior. Weka has a much wider variety of classifiers and filters to play with.

Yeah, but WEKA is a piece of Java bloatware. Waffles looks awesome, especially if they keep it lean and mean and truly try to adhere to the unix philosophy like they say. I'm excited.

Alas, the Java hate. MALLET, Mahout and Lingpipe are written in Java too and don't suffer from it.

Java hate? I never said all Java programs were bloatware, only that WEKA was and that was a distinct difference between Waffles, which is what the OP asked.

I found the phrase 'Java bloatware' to be indicative of a certain sentiment towards the language (or JVM environment) in general (as compared to just 'bloatware'). And, given common use cases for machine learning toolkits, the overhead incurred by the JVM doesn't warrant (IMHO) ruling out Java-based options. I must have misread your comment, thanks for clarifying!

I'll have a look at the underlying C++ classes API (http://waffles.sourceforge.net/apidoc/html/index.html).

I think you are being too harsh on WEKA.

One of the cool things they've taken the trouble to do is to make sure that almost all functionality is accessible from the command line.

As such WEKA is easily scriptable. This is great for integration into bigger projects. It can easily be chained like standard unix tools; I've used this functionality in projects with good success.

I'm discouraged by the fact that this may well be the worst logo in the history of technology.

I actually kind of like it - true "ugliness" can just as elusive as beauty or elegance. See this interesting book - http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/books/review/Finnerty-t.ht...

Waffles? DON'T YOU MEAN CARROTS? AHAHAHAHAHA

No. This isn't Reddit.

Not even in Reddit would that comment be welcomed.

Upvoted. Ignore the moronic haters. (throwaway because i know i'll be downvoted into oblivion for disagreeing with the majority of HN users)

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