HN: the good parts
HN comments are terrible. On any topic I’m informed about, the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong. Most of the time, there are zero...
Read moreCategory: General
Deconvolution and Checkerboard Artifacts
When we look very closely at images generated by neural networks, we often see a strange checkerboard pattern of artifacts.
Read moreProgramming book recommendations and anti-recommendations
There are a lot of “12 CS books every programmer must read” lists floating around out there. That’s nonsense. The field is too broad for almost...
Read moreHow to Use t-SNE Effectively
Although extremely useful for visualizing high-dimensional data, t-SNE plots can sometimes be mysterious or misleading.
Read moreHiring and the market for lemons
Joel Spolsky has a classic blog post on “Finding Great Developers” where he popularized the meme that great developers are impossible to find, a corollary of...
Read moreI could do that in a weekend!
I can’t think of a single large software company that doesn’t regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could...
Read moreIs dev compensation bimodal?
Developer compensation has skyrocketed since the demise of the Google et al. wage-suppressing no-hire agreement, to the point where compensation rivals and maybe even exceeds compensation...
Read moreHow I learned to program
Tavish Armstrong has a great document where he describes how and when he learned the programming skills he has. I like this idea because I’ve found...
Read moreAttention and Augmented Recurrent Neural Networks
A visual overview of neural attention, and the powerful extensions of neural networks being built on top of it.
Read moreA Survival Guide to a PhD
This guide is patterned after my “Doing well in your courses”, a post I wrote a long time ago on some of the tips/tricks I’ve developed...
Read moreNotes on concurrency bugs
Do concurrency bugs matter? From the literature, we know that most reported bugs in distributed systems have really simple causes and can be caught by trivial...
Read moreDeep Reinforcement Learning: Pong from Pixels
<!– –> This is a long overdue blog post on Reinforcement Learning (RL). RL is hot! You may have noticed that computers can now automatically learn...
Read more