A worst case for Functional Programming

How Unique is your Web Browser

Tribal vs Extent reality

Double checked locking is broken

For small businesses, small matters

Inequality and the Masters of Money

"Bro, I'd love to get a brewski, but you know I’m busy writing a Haskell program to …

If statistical mechanics models work, why don't people use them to get rich?

When I studied physics in grad school, I was told something along these lines:

"Statistical mechanics models are useful because they pass the Atomic Critique (the belief that because the universe is made out of atoms, all …

Another cool feature offered by Spire is the cfor macro. cfor is basically just a C-style for loop:

cfor(0)(i => i < maxSize, i => i + 1)( i => {
  result = result + i*i
})

The purpose of cfor is not to do anything you can't do with ordinary Scala iterator primitives. The sole …

Bokeh is out.

Prediction: the Lasso vs. just using the top 10 predictors. But the Lasso is so fancy and mathematical! How would I ever get published if I just used the top 10 predictors?

Scott Winship shows the true cause of reduced income mobility.

Json-lenses

Paul Graham on What …

For various projects I've been using the spray routing library to provide the web frontend of the recommendation engine. One rather annoying error I've run into several times is the following. Given some type Foo, for which a JsonSerializer exists, I have cote which looks like the following:

respondWithMediaType(`application …

Gordon Ramsay scrambled eggs - this video changed my life.

Disco Fried Eggs. When I was in India I never saw this - anyone know where to find it? The Pav suggests Mumbai. I tried to make this myself, came out real good.

Crazy Russian Hacker shows us that You've been cooking …

Sample size and power for rare events

ArsTechnica posts a flowchart illustrating a thought process used by many modern feminists which shows they are not rational Bayesians (except under the most charitable possible interpretation). So I'll take the opportunity to link to Eliezer Yudkowsky's excellent post Conservation of Expected Evidence …

I've been working through some of Spire, which is a math library for Scala. I originally discovered Spire when I was looking for a VectorSpace typeclass for Scala, so it's probably worthwhile to discuss that here. We all learned abot vector spaces in Linear Algebra, and probably thought they were …

For a long time I've been a fan of the Scalaz library for Scala. Scalaz puts a Haskell into your Scala so you can Haskell while you Scala. More precisely, it provides a lot of useful features for expressing pure computations such as Applicative functors, Monads, Monoids, NonEmptyLists and the …

Don't use actors for concurrency. Instead, use actors for state and use futures for concurrency.

A common practice I've seen in scala code is to use actors for concurrency. This is encouraged by Akka and a lot of writing about Scala, the documentation of which is highly actor-centric. I assert …