Over the past year, having learned about Bayesian inference methods, I finally see how estimation, group comparison, and model checking build upon each other into this really elegant framework for data analysis. Parameter Estimation The foundation of this is “estimating a parameter”. In a typical situation, we are most... Read more

Mario Kart was a staple of my childhood — my friends and I would spend hours after school as Mario, Luigi, and other characters from the Nintendo universe racing around cartoonish tracks and lobbing pixelated bananas at each other. One thing that always vexed our little group of would-be speedsters was... Read more

Software programmers need random number generators. For this purpose, they often use functions with outputs that appear random. Gerstmann has a nice post about Better C++ Pseudo Random Number Generator. He investigates the following generator: uint32_t xorshift(uint64_t *m_seed) { uint64_t result = *m_seed * 0xd989bcacc137dcd5ull; *m_seed ^= *m_seed >> 11;... Read more

A dot (or scalar) product is a fairly simple operation that simply sums the many products: float sum = 0; for (size_t i = 0; i < len; i++) { sum += x1 * x2; } return sum; It is nevertheless tremendously important. You know these fancy machine learning... Read more

If you had to design a new database system optimized for the hardware we have today, how would you do it? And what is the new hardware you should care about? This was the topic of a seminar I attended last week in Germany at Dagstuhl. Here are some thoughts:... Read more