Beeple-crap - it's amazing simply how much this guy has produced. It gets better over time.

Very important! A scone is not a biscuit.

Very interesting article on the Vatican, Ratzinger and Francis.

Empathic communication and strategy for Effective Altruism, Part 1. It's an interesting article - describing the use of dark …

Computing and Mathematics

I've gotten into Count Min Sketch lately. It's a neat probabilistic algorithm for counting, and it has the nice property that you can compute inner products with it. More papers on the topic.

How can I use nonconstructive proofs in data analysis?

Distribution Testing: Do It With …

The Algebra and Calculus of Algebraic Data Types.

Too Much Finance or Statistical Illusion?. Very important econometric note: quadratic regression with any variable that rises with per capita income (e.g., doctors, finance, telephones) will cause a negative quadratic term - i.e., past a certain point, that quantity will be …

Dependent types are a way of proving facts about your program at compile time. One interesting use case of dependent types, which I've discovered recently, is ensuring consistency in a sharded database system. Sharding is a database practice where different pieces of data are stored in different physical databases, depending …

On the hazards of significance testing. Part 2: the false discovery rate, or how not to make a fool of yourself with P values

Hands-Free Kafka Replication: A Lesson in Operational Simplicity. Self-recommending.

This is a great essay by Michael Anissimov discussing why people who know an unpopular secret about …

In category theory, a Free Object is an algebraic object M[_] possessing a natural transformation - a way of lifting a function f: A => N into a function from M[A] => N which preserves the algebraic structure. In this article I'm going to discuss how this applies to the Free …

There are a variety of methods of using Apache Thrift from Scala. Scrooge from Twitter is a popular option, but it's only for Scala 2.9. That's a problem with most Thrift for Scala libraries - nothing is current for Scala 2.11. I've found the best way to get Thrift …

Archinowhere, by Federico Babina.

Sorry for not posting anything lately. I've got a big backlog of posts, but I've also started a new job which is taking up a lot of time. We are doing exciting work in statistics - if anyone (particularly people in Delhi or Bangalore) wants to learn …

The Tail at Scale. Great article about strategies to reduce latency and increase reliability in distributed systems.

Lambda Architecture. I may have posted this before, but I keep coming back to it.

Using Edgeworth series to approximate random inequalities. Super cool.

Good critique of append-only databases

Bigger Data; same laptop …

I've had several discussions with friends lately about investing, mostly in the wake of robinhood.io's early release. Quite a few people have the plan to put some cash into robinhood.io accounts and engage in some sort of investment strategy. Strategy ideas range from daytrading (I do NOT recommend …