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Gaurav

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Stemming Link Rot

The Internet gives many things. But none that are permanent. That is about to change. Librarians got together and recently launched https://perma.cc/ which provides a permanent link to stuff. Why is link rot important? Here’s an excerpt from a paper by Gertler and Bullock: “more than one-fourth

countpy: Incentivizing more and better software

Developers of Python packages sometimes envy R developers for the simple perks they enjoy. For example, a reliable web service that gives a reasonable indication of the total number of times an R package has been downloaded (albeit only from one of the mirrors). To achieve the same, Python developers

Searching for Great Conversations

“When was the last time you had a great conversation? A conversation that wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, but when you overheard yourself saying things you never knew you knew, that you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that found places within you that you thought you had lost,

Siamese Networks for Record Linkage

For the uninitiated: A siamese neural network consists of twin networks which accept distinct inputs but are joined by an energy function at the top. This function computes some metric between the highest level feature representation on each side. The parameters between the twin networks are tied. Weight tying guarantees

The Risk of Misunderstanding Risk

Women who participate in breast cancer screening from 50 to 69 live on average 12 more days. This is the best case scenario. Gerd has more such compelling numbers in his book, Calculated Risks. Gerd shares such numbers to launch a frontal assault on the misunderstanding of risk. His key

What's Best? Comparing Model Outputs

Let’s assume that you have a large portfolio of messages: n messages of k types. And say that there are n models, built by different teams, that estimate how relevant each message is to the user on a particular surface at a particular time. How would you rank order

Expertise as a Service

The best thing you can say about Prediction Machines, a new book by a trio of economists, is that it is not barren. Most of the green patches you see are about the obvious: the big gain from ML is our ability to predict better, and better predictions will change

5 is smaller than 1.9!

“In the late 1990s, the leading methods caught about 80 percent of fraudulent transactions. These rates improved to 90–95 percent in 2000 and to 98–99.9 percent today. That last jump is a result of machine learning; the change from 98 percent to 99.9 percent has been

Disgusting

Vegetarians turn at the thought of eating the meat of a cow that has died from a heart attack. The disgust that vegetarians experience is not principled. Nor is the greater opposition to homosexuality that people espouse when they are exposed to a foul smell. Haidt uses similar such provocative

The Best We Can Do is Responsibly Answer the Questions that Life Asks of Us

Faced with mass murder, it is hard to escape the conclusion that life has no meaning. For how could it be that life has meaning when lives matter so little? As a German Jew in a concentration camp, Viktor had to confront that question. In Man’s Search for Meaning,