It's a widely cited fact that Uber has continually lost money since it started. Uber opponents widely cite this fact hoping that once the VCs stop investing, Uber will collapse and we can return to the era of yellow cabs. Another stylized fact about Uber is that it's profitable in …

I recently gave a talk at PyDelhi 2017. The talk was an introduction to Bayesian statistics for the average Python programmer who knows no statistics. The slides are available here.. Examples included my gamble with @lisamahapatra as to whether Richard Spencer ever hurt anyone, how to predict disease given diagnostic …

Consider a data set, a sequence of point \(@ (x_1, y_1), (x_2, y_2), \ldots, (x_k, y_k)\)@. We are interested in discovering the relationship between x and y. Linear regression, at it's simplest, assumes a relationship between x and y of the form \(@ y = \alpha x + \beta + e\)@. Here, the variable $@ e …

art from Socks Studio.

Math, Stats, Computer Science

Problematic Presentation of Probabilities. About how difficult it is to explain probabilistic predictions to lay audiences.

...any bayesian algorithm is also an algorithm that can be implemented for streaming...

Inherent Trade-Offs in the Fair Determination of Risk Scores - explains how all algorithms …

Sometimes in statistics, one knows certain facts with absolute certainty about a distribution. For example, let $@ t $@ represent the time delay between an event occurring and the same event being detected. I don't know very much about the distribution of times, but one thing I can say with certainty is …

Cinta Vidal is really interesting.

Math, Stats, Computer Science

“Why Should I Trust You?” Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier

Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone - a great paper on category theory, explaining connections between computation, mathematics and quantum physics.

A Simple Explanation for the Replication Crisis. Great …

Very often one builds a statistical model in pieces. For example, imagine one has a binary event which may or may not occur - to work with my thematic example, a visitor arrives on a webpage and he may or may not convert. A reasonable question to ask is "if I …

I've recently discovered that Nick Gaetano, who painted the covers of recent prints of various Ayn Rand novels, is actually a fairly prolific artist. I like a great deal of his work.

Computer science and stats

Urbit has been released. See also The DAO as a lesson on decentralized governance …

I've got a sensor network - a collection of hipster detectors planted at various locations in Brooklyn. Due to power limitations, the sensors are not connected to any network on a regular basis. Rather than immediately transmitting information to the central data collector, the sensors instead wake up at random times …

While writing a previous post, I learned a pretty shocking fact: 19% of gay men have HIV. That's a lot! A while back I had broken-condom sex with a lady from sub-Saharan Africa who I later learned was a pimpstress - for months afterwards I was really scared that I got …