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Matt Blodgett: But Where Do People Work in This Office?

Sublime: Nice Features & Plugins: A brief talk introducing my favorite editor.

Time: Programmers all hate time, timezones, etc.

Last year, I published nine interviews with Internet friends about how an academically-minded, 22-year-old college senior should work on a Ph.D.

Sketching as a Tool for Numerical Linear Algebra: A neat paper on sketching algorithms for linear algebra.

How do I draw a pair of buttocks?

brushfire: Avi Bryant has been building a ‘Brushfire is a framework for distributed supervised learning of decision tree ensemble models in Scala.’

There’s no magic: virtualenv edition: I didn’t really get virtualenvs until long after I started programming Python, though they’re now an essential part of my toolkit.

Amazon Picking Challenge: Kiva Systems (where I interned in 2011) is setting up a robotics challenging for picking items off warehouse shelves. contexttimer 0.3.1: A handy Python context manger and decorator for timing things.

Public Data Sets : Amazon Web Services: Amazon hosts a number of publicly datasets on AWS (including the common crawl corpus and the “Marvel Universe Social Graph”).

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

The pyspark documentation doesn’t include an example for the aggregateByKey RDD method.

Hammock: A lightweight wrapper around the Python requests module to convert REST APIs into “dead simple programmatic APIs”.

Philosophy of Statistics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): I suspect that a lot of the Bayesian vs Frequentist debates ignore the important epistemological underpinnings of statistics.

Open Sourcing a Python Project the Right Way: Great stuff that should be taught in school: “Most Python developers have written at least one tool, script, library or framework that others would find useful.

Recently, I’ve spent a lot of time going back and forth between Python dicts and JSON.

TIL how to checkout the last branch you were on in Git (before the current): git checkout - — Tim Hopper (@tdhopper) September 10, 2014

textract: textract is a Python module and a command line tool for text extraction from many file formats.

As I have noted before, body weight is a noisy thing.

Ggplot2 To Ggvis: I’m a huge fan of ggplot2 for data visualization in R.

How do I generate a uniform random integer partition?

I spend a lot of time in IPython Notebooks for work.

How can I pretty-print JSON at the command line?

Arrow: better dates and times for Python: Arrow is a slick Python library “that offers a sensible, human-friendly approach to creating, manipulating, formatting and converting dates, times, and timestamps”.

Back in July, I posted some analysis of my attempt at weight loss.

I recently discovered the Twitter account @primes.

I have largely moved from Textmate to Sublime Text 2 for text editing.

Ralph Keyes, The Height of Your Life: I’ve heard this sort of thing repeatedly from tall men.

I put on some weight during my time in grad school, and this spring, I decided to do something about it.

I have started to realize that Monte Carlo methods of various kinds keep coming up in my work.

I had the honor of being a technical reviewer for John Myles White’s outstanding book, “Bandit Algorithms for Website Optimization: Developing, Deploying, and Debugging.”

I gave a talk at a recent Research Triangle Analysts meetup on scikit-learn, the excellent machine learning library for Python.

I presented at INFORMS 2012 on Bringing Operations Research into the 21st Century with Online Video.

I gave a talk at PyCarolinas 2012 about using Pickle and Redis to persist data with Python.

For part of my sophomore year of college, I was a computer science major.

Here are my notes on the derivation of the Least Squares Policy Iteration (LSPI) algorithm.

I offered my calculus students bonus points to write a limerick or haiku on their final exam.

I am teaching the dreaded calculus II this semester.

Last month, Stephen Wolfram did a blog post on the Personal Analytics of his life.

Yesterday, someone on MathOverflow asked Consider $n$ points generated randomly and uniformly on a unit square.

Over the past 18 months, I’ve been slowly learning some machine learning.

Stephen Wolfram, of Wolfram Research and Mathematica fame, did a Q&A (i.e.

Although I was a computer science minor, I’d never heard of statistical machine learning until after college.

As an undergraduate, our math department used Wolfram Research’s Mathematica heavily for instruction in a number of classes.

I assume most people who are nerdy enough to read this blog are nerdy enough to know about the $\mathcal{P}$ vs $\mathcal{NP}$ problem1.

In economics, some have asserted the efficient market hypothesis.

In 1953, the eminent mathematician John Von Neumann (as they say, “Most mathematicians prove what they can, von Neumann proves what he wants”) wrote a letter to T.

My friend John Cook asked me an interesting question recently: If you had a room full of people with a graduate degree in [operations research], what things would nearly everyone in the room know?

A former grad school classmate of mine lived largely off of oatmeal and carrots.

Notes from ISE 789, the healthcare-optimization seminar I am taking this term at NC State.