It’s legal to buy an AR-15 assault rifle. It’s illegal for a gay man to donate blood to victims of the massacre. The world makes no sense.

— John Barcus (@johnrtworld) June 12, 2016

In the wake of an Islamic radical shooting up a bunch of gays, Americans have …

Bloom filters are probabilistic data structure for determining whether an element is in a set. Such a data structure offers only two methods - add and mightContain. Google's guava library offers a nice implementation, but unfortunately this implementation (like every implementation I've found) is not concurrent. Concurrent reads are no problem …

Star Wars - Episode V "The Empire Strikes Back" Homage (Title Sequence) from KROFL on Vimeo.

Computer science and math

Bots won't replace apps - better apps will. Argues that the main reason for the rise of WeChat and the like is that mobile OS makers aren't really meeting user needs.

Write …

I've recently discovered a 4 step process for lying without statistics. Here it is:

1. Write down the conclusion.
2. Run a statistical analysis.
3. If the statistical analysis agrees with your conclusion, publish it.
4. If the statistical analysis disagrees with your conclusion, write some anecdotes and allude to the fact that you …

I live a strange life - due to a funny life situation, I travel regularly between India and the US. One of the starkest differences is observing how many jobs machines have taken in the wealthy US, leaving the US with a dire surplus of labor.

A day in the life …

Computer science and math

Principal Component Projection Without Principal Component Analysis - yep, this is as awesome as it sounds.

String Interning done Right - from Scott Locklin. From what I can tell, it's a bit specific to column oriented databases where the main string field contain highly repeated small values like …

In the Star Trek episode Let That Be Your Last Battlefield the Enterprise encounters two human-looking aliens (as is the Star Trek custom) from the planet Cheron. These aliens are full of intense ethnic hatred towards each other based on historical issues on their planet. This episode was broadcast in …

When running a large site, it's important to monitor site behavior. For an ecommerce or similar site, the key thing to measure is conversion rate - if your conversion rate goes down, something is wrong. A common - but wrong - way to measure conversion rate is to simply use a rolling window …

NEJM suggests it's rude to use an author's own data to prove them wrong. Um, that's not how science works.

The Real Tragedy in Flint.

An anonymous response to dangerous FOSS Codes of Conduct

A quantitative analysis of free speech.

An unconditional increase in teacher salary has no beneficial effect …

I wrote about Free Boolean Algebra and other free objects on the Wingify engineering blog. Go check it out.