Nontrivial: 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 ArticleGross 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...
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