Gross Receipts Taxes as Payroll Taxes
A common critique of gross receipts taxes (where the government charges a small fixed percent of a business's total revenue) is that they have a disproportionate impact on low margin businesses. (For...
View ArticleWhy I've Liked Chess So Much
I've liked chess off and on for twenty years. I don't remember learning to play but I do remember an after school class and losing repeatedly to my dad and cousin when I was little. When I taught...
View ArticleMap Transformation
Note: I was describing my map transformation project to Sasha Trubetskoy recently, who is even more into maps than I am. This is a project I completed in March 2011 with Shir Yehoshua for a CS class,...
View ArticleStyle for Python Multiline If-Statements
PEP 8 gives a number of acceptable ways of handling multiple line if-statements in Python. But to be honest, most of the styles I've seen--even those that conform with the PEP--seem ugly and hard to...
View ArticleHypothesis Tests for Machine Learning
Statisticians have spent a lot of time attempting to do complicated inference for various machine learning models. In fact, there's an enormously simple and naive way to do this in complete generality:...
View ArticleThe Communication Loss Function
My first ever task writing software professionally was to make some small change to the Kaggle server. I spent a day or so following painstakingly moving down the call stack from the API endpoint to...
View ArticleLogistic Regression Isn't Interpretable
Suppose two events A and B are independent, with the odds of A occurring being 4, and the odds of B being 5. What are the odds of both A and B occurring? I'll give you a hint: it's not 20.
View ArticleNontrivial: Exception Handling in Python
Most code can fail in multiple places and for multiple reasons. Handling these failures seems pretty trivial, something you'd cover in the basic tutorial to your programming language. Actually, I think...
View ArticleImplementing "nonlocal" in Tauthon: Part I
Tauthon is a fork of Python 2.7 with syntax, builtins, and libraries backported from Python 3. It aspires to be able to run all valid Python 2 and 3 code. In this article, I begin discussing how I was...
View ArticleDay-to-Day Operations of Palo Alto
Palo Alto runs a pretty open city government, with a number of interesting documents available for download on their website. Of particular interest are their annual budgets and annual financial...
View ArticleContinuous Time Lending
Assume a borrower takes out an installment loan of size $1$ and makes continuous-time payments on it. The installment loan starts at time $0$, ends at time $T$, and has an interest rate of $r$,...
View ArticleAn Easy Chess Puzzle
I was looking through Markovian, my old chess engine, recently, and came across the first game it won against another chess engine. Stepping through the game, it seems that both engines actually played...
View ArticleWhy I'm Making Tauthon
For the past two months I've been spending half my time on Tauthon. Tauthon is a backwards-compatible Python interpreter that runs Python 2 code and C-extensions exactly as-is, while also allowing...
View ArticleDesperation Motivated Creativity
I am not the strongest climber. Some of the people I've climbed with are so strong that they can do a one-arm pull-up, and then--while locking off with one arm--sing the "Head, Shoulders, Knees and...
View ArticleOHMS Lessons Learned
Note: I found the following post as an almost complete draft as I was reading some of my unpublished posts. I wrote it around October 1st, 2013, at the beginning of what would end up being my last year...
View ArticleMachine Learning over JSON
Supervised machine learning is the problem of approximating functions X -> Y from many example (x, y) pairs. Now, the vast majority of supervised learning algorithms assume that X is p-dimensional...
View ArticleVisualizing DBSCAN Clustering
A previous post covered clustering with the k-means algorithm. In this post, we consider a fundamentally different, density-based approach called DBSCAN. In contrast to k-means, which modeled clusters...
View ArticleYou Can't Predict Small Counts
A small restaurant is interested in predicting how many customers will come in on a given night. This is valuable information to know ahead of time, for example, so that the restaurant can figure out...
View ArticleHalf the Decimal Trick
If something happened 1,234 out of 10,000 times, we'd estimate that the true probability of occurence is about 0.1234. Of course, we wouldn't expect the true probability to be exactly 0.1234, and to...
View ArticleHow to Forge an Email
Most people don't realize how easy it is to forge an email. Say my brother John Doe uses the email address john.doe@example.com. If I get an email from that address, it's natural to assume that John...
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