Ben Frederickson on Flipboard

What's the most important thing in statistics that's not in the textbooks? - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

As I wrote a couple years ago:

Statistics does not require randomness. The three essential elements of statistics are measurement, comparison, and …

How AI crushed all human records in 2048 | Randal S. Olson

By now, we’ve all heard of the addictive tile-mashing game called 2048. Last week, I picked up 2048 for the first time and — true to my nature — I …

Letter of Recommendation: Nardwuar the Human Serviette

My favorite journalist is a shrieking British Columbian who dresses like an exploded 1970s Soviet golf catalog. He was born John Ruskin, but changed his name to Nardwuar the Human Serviette. (“Serviette” is Canadian for napkin.) He hosts a weekly radio show on CiTR Vancouver, 101.9 FM, but his best …

Musketeer - Part I : What's the best data processing system?

For between 40-80% of the jobs submitted to MapReduce systems, you’d be better off just running them on a single machine…

It was Eurosys 2015 last …

The emperor's new clothes: distributed machine learning

We can think of two reasons for using distributed machine learning: because you have to, and because you want to (hoping it will be faster). Only the …

"People Who Like This Also Like ... "

Distance Metrics for Fun and Profit
"People Who Like This Also Like ... "

A while ago a friend of mine asked me how I would go about building a …

jQuery is dead

There’s way more code here than the jQuery example. Why is it better? Perhaps this will help…

We just added a feature to our lightbox directive …

The Sensor-Rich, Data-Scooping Future

The technology world is looking at ways to make everything more efficient.

The question is, will this be good for the many, or the mighty few?

Earlier this month, General Electric announced it was selling GE Capital, its financial arm. With less fanfare, G.E. also unveiled plans for …

The King of Bullsh*t News

How a small British news agency and its founder fill your Facebook feed with stories that are wonderful, wacky – and often wrong.

Last November, within a few hours of each other, some of the planet’s biggest news websites published an irresistible story. An attractive Argentinian teacher called …

The Fed's Cold War Bunker Had $4 Billion Cash For After The Apocalypse

New York and DC are piles of ash, but at least your checks are clearing. That was the idea behind the Culpeper Switch, a sprawling bunker built by …

Building a new trends experience

We recently launched a new trends experience on mobile and web. Certain users will now see additional context with their trends: a short description …

Rust Once, Run Everywhere

Rust's quest for world domination was never destined to happen overnight, so Rust needs to be able to interoperate with the existing world just as …

Terry Glavin: Canada's unhappy affair with China's millionaires

If the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual top 10 world cities rankings are what you’ve been relying on, you probably weren’t surprised last month …

Visualizing a single null-byte heap overflow exploitation

22 Apr 2015 -- wapiflapi

When Phantasmal Phantasmagoria wrote The Malloc Malleficarum back in 2005 he exposed several ways of gaining control of an …

World Happiness Report ranks Canada 5th

Canadians are a relatively happy bunch — the fifth happiest in the world, according to new data from the 2015 World Happiness Report released …

bytecode hacking for great justice

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! NO PYTHONS WERE HURT IN THE CREATION OF THIS BLOG POST!

Check out the code at code at github.com/mynameisfiber/pytailcall

As …

Four Days of Go

April 21, 2015

Part of my work involves the mild reverse-engineering of binary file formats. I say “mild” because usually other people do all of the …

Four things startups can learn from Target Canada’s mistakes

When Target Canada recently decided to shut the doors of its 133 stores around the country, leaving nearly 18,000 people out of work, “what went wrong?” was the question people were asking themselves.

As a serial entrepreneur and former Target Canada Team Leader, the writing was on the wall from the …

Canada's music copyright extension will cost Canadians millions

Michael Geist writes, "Randy Bachman found himself embroiled in a public fight with Prime Minister Stephen Harper last year when Harper used his song 'Takin' Care of Business' as a theme song for a major speech. Bachman said he probably would not have granted permission to use the song, since 'I …

Loren on the Art of MATLAB » The Netflix Prize and Production Machine Learning Systems: An Insider Look

Do you watch movies on Netflix? Binge-watch TV series? Do you use their movie recommendations? Today's guest blogger, Toshi Takeuchi, shares an …

Call me maybe: MongoDB stale reads

In May of 2013, we showed that MongoDB 2.4.3 would lose acknowledged writes at all consistency levels. Every write concern less than MAJORITY loses …

Lessons Learned while Working on Large-Scale Server Software

Do not forget it. The CAP Theorem is a good model to keep in mind. It's not exaustively listing everything that can go bad, but it forces you into …

How C-51 will undermine Canada’s business climate: An open letter from 60 Canadian business leaders

The challenge of being Canadian today is to uphold our values of openness, tolerance, and trust of others, while maintaining a very real …

Canada Loves the Poop Emoji

A new report on worldwide emoji usage finds a new kind of national character. (Americans, by the way, adore the eggplant.)

The French love the heart emoji.

Canadians prefer pizza—and the pile of poo.

And Americans? The land that gave the world the iPhone, the Declaration of Independence, and the …

How Benford's Law Reveals Suspicious Activity on Twitter

The counterintuitive distribution of digits in certain data sets turns out to be a powerful tool for detecting strange behavior on social networks. …

The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples

For the past couple of years, a young woman known only as “Bionerd23” has been making strange, dangerous videos in and around one of the most …

Robot with $100 bitcoin buys drugs, gets arrested

This is the curious story of how a robot armed with a weekly budget of $100 in bitcoin managed to buy Ecstasy and get arrested.

Why GEMM is at the heart of deep learning

I spend most of my time worrying about how to make deep learning with neural networks faster and more power efficient. In practice that means …

Elixir - The next big language for the web

In this article I will explain why I think the Elixir language will make a big impact in the world of web development.

From obscurity to the default …

Canada entangled by its own anti-corruption laws

Federal officials dismiss as “hypothetical” the notion that selecting an SNC-Lavalin Group Inc.-led consortium to rebuild and operate Montreal’s Champlain Bridge might endanger the massive project.

In February, the RCMP charged Canada’s leading engineering firm with fraud and corruption for alleged …