The idea of PassCard was born from the frustration with password management solutions. Technology should make our lives easier and better, and pervasive online services help us greatly, but we do not feel free anymore. Each time we read an email on parents’ notebooks or pay in the store with another card, we need to check our phones or write down passwords on a piece of paper. Internet services and local network administrators require long passwords with letters, numbers, and special symbols. Moreover, you must regularly change the password due to password hash leaks and automatic security policies. You cannot...

Sooner or later printfn style of logging becomes too cumbersome and you start to search for a logging library. For F# developers the most obvious choice is Logary, but very soon you find out that your Logary logging code is even less readable. In this article you will find F# tricks, which helped me to create a neat abstraction for logging in Semagle Framework. Logary is perfect for libraries because it does not require you to reference Logary library. You only need to add Facade.fs dependency to your paket dependencies file: github logary/logary src/Logary.Facade/Facade.fs and add a replacement target to...

During last 10-15 years, machine learning gradually moved from academia to industry. There are many open source frameworks like Scikit Learn, Spark MLlib and hundreds of lines of R code available for applied developers. Yet experimenting and development of machine learning algorithms remain difficult problems. Functional programming languages like Haskell, OCaml and F# have appealing semi-mathematical notation that greatly simplifies machine learning algorithms implementation, but could meet required performance restrictions. Semagle F# Framework is a successful experiment that demonstrates how to create and refine the functional code for clarity and performance, and now its code is available on GitHub. At...

The post “SVM Classification in F#” shows how fast is to implement SVM classification and Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) method in F#, but it doesn’t show how fast is the F# implementation. Unfortunately, the performance of that code is too small for practical applications. Apparently, there are intrinsic limitations of the .Net execution model and Mono virtual machine, which prevent to achieve a native code performance, and this overhead needs to be estimated. However, the main factor is the computational complexity of the implementation, and this problem can be solved. Setup LIBSVM provides the collection of datasets a1a, …, a9a...

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) is a very popular machine learning method for classification, regression, distribution estimation, etc. Exceptional feature of this method is an ability to handle objects of a diverse nature as soon as there is a suitable kernel function. Nonetheless, popular software libraries like LIBSVM 1 and SVMlight 2 are designed for vector data and it is hard to adopt them for other object types. The F# implementation seems to be promising in terms of readability and extensibility. Readability and extensibility quite often are the opposite measures of the software design. Increasing one of them leads to decreasing...