Ben Kuhn - Tech↗

I recently decided I should get over my learned helplessness at web design.

While updating my DNS for the redesign, I had to decide whether my canonical URL should be benkuhn.net or www.benkuhn.net .

A couple people have asked me why I’m taking a course on operating systems this term. Presumably they ask because I’m officially studying math and systems programming is very un-theoretical.

While TAing a linear algebra class last semester, I discovered that there aren’t many resources for good problems in linear algebra.

Someone pointed out that my “fun linear algebra problems” post would be more useful with solutions. Here’s a solution to problems 1 and 2.

Today I realized that Facebook’s newsfeed isn’t useful.

As of today, benkuhn.net is open source! You can find the source code here .

Lincoln recently analyzed the St. Petersburg Paradox . Let’s consider the following gamble: I pay you a fixed amount up-front. Then, I flip a fair coin repeatedly until it comes up heads.

An interesting article up at Fast Company, Hugh Whalan’s “Hip Gadgets For The Developing World Won’t Solve Global Poverty: Stop Making Them” : Every time I see a gimmicky product hailed as the “next...

At my work I’ve been writing a lot of machine learning code.

In a previous post I explaind how hard it is to prevent, or find and fix, bugs in machine learning code via conventional strategies. In this installment, I’ll go over some strategies that do work.

Some people have been asking me how my job search went—how I found out about and decided on the current company that I’m working for.

I recently started looking into dependency tracking in Python—determining which pieces of code and data are required to compute a particular function.

Introduction When I took machine learning, one of the first learning algorithms we were taught was the ID3 algorithm for learning a decision tree from a dataset.

Survival analysis is an interesting problem in machine learning, but it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as the usual classification and regression tasks, so there aren’t as many tools for it.

A friend of mine who’s taking an introductory machine learning course recently emailed me with a bunch of questions about my experience doing machine learning.

Someone recently asked me what resources I used to learn statistics.

Almost a year ago, I started working full-time in machine learning after graduating from studying pure math in college.

Suppose you’re writing a script to spin up servers for your web application. def deploy ( ip ): copy ( 'code/' , ip + ':~/code' , recursive = True ) write_template ( 'conf/config.

Scott Kupor of Andreessen Horowitz recently suggested an alternative structure for employee stock options: But, a way to truly compete for the very best and long-term oriented employees would be to...

In Python and a lot of other dynamic languages, there’s no distinction between loading a module and executing a script. When you write a file named main.

Originally written for some coworkers at Wave who were thinking about early exercise. Most employees at startups get some of their pay in stock options.

Conceptual background: stock option , strike price , post-money valuation . Suppose you get a job offer for a senior engineering position at Square in November 2014.

Here are some facts about venture capital that might surprise you if you’ve learned some economics: VC firms’ returns tend to persist over time ( Kaplan and Schoar 2004 ).

Somehow I never worried about this particular failure mode (in either component): Edit: while publishing this post, my git push was rejected because I hadn’t agreed to GitLab’s updated Terms of...

Most code editors color different pieces of your program in different ways. For instance, they’ll make keywords like if bold and bright so that you notice when you’ve misspelled them.

As of the last couple years, every popular dynamic language has optional static types .

A friend of mine was looking at some job offers from startups recently and asked me for advice on how to think about the equity awards he was offered.

(Attention conservation notice: only useful if you have a static site that you’d like to remove the Javascript from.

Every so often I read an essay that I end up thinking about, and citing in conversation, over and over again.

People have big arguments over whether “10x engineers” exist or not. Pro : The differences are not minor—it is rather like Salieri and Mozart.