To avoid keeping you in suspense, I’ll get this out of the way right up front: ML Hipster is me!
I started the ML Hipster account on a whim and found it fun to mash up clichés about hipsters and their attitude with jargon from machine learning and statistics.
Is this Bayesian? You know I’m a strict Bayesian, right?
— ML Hipster (@ML_Hipster) July 13, 2012
I guess I was partially inspired by the rash of other technical novelty accounts out there such as PLT Borat and Hipster Hacker.
There was also the added enjoyment of obliquely poking fun at what some “old school” machine learning people might think of the recent, “big data”-driven incursion onto our (ahem) their turf.
Everyone is all big data this and online that. My methods are small batch: they only handle a few instances but really look at them, y’know?
— ML Hipster (@ML_Hipster) August 16, 2012
Ultimately though, it was really just an excuse to make bad puns that only a select few would understand, let alone find amusing.
“Oh sure, going in that direction will totally minimize the objective function” —Sarcastic Gradient Descent.
— ML Hipster (@ML_Hipster) July 20, 2012
To be honest, I had no idea the account would get so popular. So much so that shortly after starting it I promised myself that if it ever got more followers than my main twitter account I’d spill the beans.
Well, 103 days, 61 tweets, and 1,651 followers later, here I am presiding over scattered legumes.
I have no intention of abandoning ML Hipster and will likely post there whenever I have yet another terrible, technical pun to inflict which I don’t want friends and family to hear.
I prefer Chervonenkis’ solo work.
— ML Hipster (@ML_Hipster) July 14, 2012
I’m also not going to reveal who ML Hipster is via that account. I figure there are people following ML Hipster (but not this blog or my other account) who couldn’t care less about who it actually is and I don’t want to spoil their fun.
Or mine.
Mark Reid October 24, 2012 Canberra, Australia