Posts

I had a very interesting chat with a few data science students yesterday. Part of the chat involved the idea of statistical modeling. Throughout the chat, it occured to me that the students didn’t have a very good grasp of what modeling is. To their credit, they were proficient in the techniques of linear regression, and deep learning, but I got the sense that they were very much pushing buttons and watching things happen rather than understanding what they were actually doing. [Read More]

Happy New Year! 2020 was definitely a weird year. The majority of the year was dominated by news of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were mass lockdowns across different countries. International travel halted to a trickle. Jobs were lost. Lives were lost. I am very thankful to not have been impacted as much by the pandemic. I didn’t get the virus, nor did any of my close friends or family - we are all safe. [Read More]

Recently at work I optimized key-lookup for Ristretto, a caching library for Go, effectively doubling the lookup speed with one trick. This post walks you through what I did. The benchmarks and code can be found here. Overview Ristretto is a fast concurrent cache library in Go. In the upcoming version, the cache is B-tree based. In this, the keys and values are stored in one flat slice of []uint64. Call this node. [Read More]

This post was [originally published in GopherAcademy](https://blog.gopheracademy.com/advent-2019/pkgapi/) for their Advent 2019 series. It's been republished here for posterity. As programmers we use libraries a lot. But library design is hard. In this article, I will walk through some considerations in designing a library. We will start by bifurcating the acts of programming. We start by casting the act of programming as conversations. Then we examine the main activities that constitute what people call “programming”. [Read More]

A friend of mine is doing an MBA. Her course this semester follows the Startup School model - each week they have lectures regarding issues a startup face while creating a startup at the same time. They have to create a product for the startup that they create. They first have to find customers and solve their customers problems, and create a product and startup around the problem. The problem her team discovered was this: Graduating MBA students from her school cannot find jobs in Management Consulting, citing the lack of project experience as the reason. [Read More]

These days I am slow in my blogging. I am trying to write my thoughts out more clearly. I don't think I am very good at it. Consider this snippet of conversation: Chewxy: Star Wars is typical Campbellism. and here I use the word "typical" in the typical fashion which is to say, not the usual connotation of "usual" what I meant is "a representative of a type" where " [Read More]

I had a data visualization problem at work. I’ve been thinking about set coverage issues, and wanted to test some ideas for visualizations. I had wanted to visualize the space of aggregate measures (i.e. things like means, etc). It later transpired that I didn’t need it, because my thinking around the issue had been wrong to begin with. I had written some code, and was eager to check it out. By the end of it, it had morphed into something entirely different, but it was a good entertaining night last night nonetheless. [Read More]

I have had the most vivid and unusual dream that I feel compelled to note it down for posterity. Or for future self-introspection. It’s too long to write in my notebook and I feel more comfortable typing it out anyways. In the dream I was at a birthday party of a friend of mine. It had gone particularly wrong - I was the organizer and I had arranged for logistics to cater for two children. [Read More]

I recently used the words “deceptively simple” to describe lambda calculus. One person reading my paper sent a comment back: “do you mean ‘deceptively complicated’?”. What I had meant to say was on the surface, lambda calculus looks simple. But when you consider all the meta conditions of alpha-renaming and substitutions - you know, practical things about programming - then it isn’t. It turns out the phrase “deceptively simple” requires disambiguation - it means one of two diametrically opposite meanings: [Read More]

I was extending Gorgonia for a project of mine when I rapidly ran into a dot-import gotcha in Go. Specifically I was trying to implement a fused version of the Conv2d function that exists. The current Conv2d function works well, if you want to do image convolution related work. It could be quite a bit faster (if anyone from Intel is reading, I’d love some help in the same way Intel boosted the speeds of Caffe), but that’s not really the concern - different convolution algorithms have different performance characteristics, and should be used accordingly. [Read More]