In the past couple of weeks, the excellent article A Fervent Defense of Frequentist Statistics has been making the rounds. The article makes some strong arguments in favor of using frequentist tools, since many of them are more computationally efficient than Bayesian methods.

However, the author makes a fundamental mistake …

A lot of people believe that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are a speculative bubble. Scott Sumner is a notable person who disagrees, and believes that Bitcoin may be rationally priced based on the low probability of high expected rewards.

Most of the arguments claiming BTC is a bubble are nonsensical …

Actors are overly nondeterministic. Argues also that futures have the same property - somewhat of a counterpoint to a post of mine on the same topic. Overall an excellent article, and it makes me want to take a much closer look at scalaz-stream. The author has two other posts on the …

11 A/B Split Testing Mistakes I See Businesses Make All The Time

Interesting, and unpleasant: Narratives of Racism in Delhi University. I've never been to Delhi, but I got the impression that Pune is not so bad. There certainly is some racism, but from what I saw the shared …

If you are in need of mainframe computers in Aurangabad, you can go to this store only.

Here is the Chetty Paper. It's a big correlational study done across time in the US, looking at income mobility - comparing children's income at age 30 to that of their parents.

It's been floating around the blogosphere, and the results are surprising:

1. Income mobility has remained flat, in spite of …

Just a quick fix to a problem I ran into, putting it out there just in case it helps someone. Ignore this post if you haven't run into this exception.

While configuring logback in order to filter out a bunch of redis.actors.RedisClientActor messages (tangential note: rediscala WTF?) I …

How to conquer tensorphobia

A Scala Corrections Library

On retiring the idea of falsifiability in science. Also see this article on the same topic.

Nassim Taleb writes an idiotic article advocating that we should stop using standard deviations. Pointless to read. But John Mount's takedown is useful.

For Hire! Bangalore …

Handling failure is probably the most important part of building reliable systems. Monads are a common method of encapsulating failure - for instance, Option[T] returns either Some(t) or None, and None represents the failure. But Monads do not actually have any mechanism for handling failure - in principle, a monad …

About 3 years ago, I posted a blog post arguing that the poor don't work due to economic rationality. This was just me playing around with the data and trying to see what I could come up with.

My conclusion back then: by graphing consumption vs income, it turns out …