Accuracy vs Precision

I had a hard time remembering this1, almost as bad as Type 1 vs Type 2 (which are still the worst terminology I’ve ever seen).

  1. 4 years until 10 minutes ago, when I finally thought about it 

Handy command line benchmarking tool

Lots of languages have packages for benchmarking. But writing code to do that is a pain when you just care about getting a sense of how fast it is as a whole.

Stan Rogers

I found out about this guy yesterday. He was a famous Canadian folk singer1 who died in the accident that led to planes having a special section for people who’re supposed to help out in emergencies (with extra legroom as a nice perkquisite).

  1. Tom Lehrer’s preamble to Irish Folk Song has made it a lot 

Ultimate Hot Couch Guy

https://www.outsideonline.com/2395803/snakebite-antivenom-tim-friede

Quote on Java Generics

From some guy on Hacker News:

The Programmer Tendency

And, behold, I will deliver you up to the programmer tendency to build overelaborate sandcastles of abstractions.

Figure out undocumented JSON with gron

Found a new tool: gron. It flattens JSON and makes it easier to figure out what structure some JSON document has. Once you know that structure, further processing is much easier.

Mental Model of Dental Hygiene

Story time

Book Review: Swastika Night

I read this book a while back and thought it was alright. But then I read that it was written before World War 2. It predicts that both the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese conquer the world.

Is there a name for this construction?

Construction

Fun with negation and idioms

This is trivial but kind of fun.

How to change tabs to spaces

find [options here] -exec bash -c 'expand --initial --tabs=4 {} | sponge {}' +

Another Way to Write Conditional Probability

The \(p(\cdot | B)\) notation is convenient sometimes, but other times it obscures what’s going on, like in the definition of conditional independence and the law of total probability (when you fix the conditioning event).

Notes for May 9, 2019

  • Spotify’s “Medieval ambient” in your house is a great way to feel like you’re in Skyrim, especially when Streets Of Whiterun is playing.
  • Seabreeze Cafe has good fried catfish
  • I’m writing this because my post on math notation proved a lot longer than expected, so I’m copping out.

A tool to look at random images

It’s useful to look at image data before you do any ML with it. Usually I want to look at random samples. So I wrote a tool to do it. Actually, I wrote the same tool 3 times (today afternoon), improving something else each time.

Safeway

Apparently if you ask for a sample of any food or drink1 at Safeway, company policy is that they have to give you it. Even for fancy stuff like smoked salmon. Though they’ll throw away any open packets, so that’s on your conscience.

  1. Except alcohol.