soodoku

GitHub - soodoku/wait: Waiting Times at CA DMV Waiting Times at CA DMV. Contribute to soodoku/wait development by creating an account on GitHub.

see also: github.com/soodoku/wait

technically no one should have to wait. they should allow people to book slots based on forecasted volume/staff or provide a call back functionality

GitHub - finite-sample/optimal_classification_cutoffs: Script for calculating the optimal cut-off for max. F1-score or accuracy Script for calculating the optimal cut-off for max. F1-score or accuracy - finite-sample/optimal_classification_cutoffs

after extensive de-vibing!

github.com/finite-sampl...

Congenial Invention and the Economy of Everyday (Political) Conversation - By Gaurav in Social Science — 31 Dec 2015 Congenial Invention and the Economy of Everyday (Political) Conversation Communication comes from the Latin word communicare , which means `to make common.’ We communica…

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The increase in life expectancy is not solely a function of reduced child mortality. Life expectancy at age 15 has also increased dramatically in the past 100-200 years.

Too Much Churn: Estimating Customer Churn - By Gaurav in Economics — 18 Nov 2020 Too Much Churn: Estimating Customer Churn A new paper uses financial transaction data to estimate customer churn in consumer-facing companies. The paper defines churn as follows: There are three concerns w…

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Traveling Salesman - By Gaurav in Commentary — 17 Nov 2023 Traveling Salesman White-collar elites venerate travel, especially to exotic and far-away places. There is some justification for the fervor—traveling is pleasant. But veneration creates an umbra that hides some truths: Local t…

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The Story of Science: Storytelling Bias in Science - By Gaurav in Science — 07 Jun 2021 The Story of Science: Storytelling Bias in Science Photo by Etienne Girardet / Unsplash Often enough, scientists are left with the unenviable task of conducting an orchestra with out-of-tune instrum…

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Streaming Calibration - By Gaurav in ML/Statistics — 19 Jul 2025 Streaming Calibration Photo by Cam Adams / Unsplash Modern applications—from ad platforms calibrating click-through predictions to polling systems incorporating responses to ML algorithms adapting fairness thresholds—shar…

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Measuring Tree Stability - By Gaurav in ML/Statistics — 04 Jul 2025 Measuring Tree Stability Photo by billow926 / Unsplash Consider training a decision tree to predict customer churn. You split your data in half and build a model on one half. The tree identifies tenure, monthly charges…

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headline: Trump Tells Generals the Military Will Be Used to Fight ‘Enemy Within’ President says some U.S. cities he considers dangerous should become training grounds for American troops

I've long skimmed the comment section of pieces at WSJ to find out where political fault lines are -- readers there actually debate each other

Don't think I've ever seen one like this. There is hardly any debate. Comments are overwhelmingly negative. Hardly anyone is trying to rationalize it

The never heard of numbers are amazing ...

2025-09-29 Apologies for the interruption in coverage; I have a good excuse, henceforth known as The Agent (of both the ‘defying the Principal’ variety and the fast-learning natural/artificial variety).

apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
new linklog - ecological inference, adversarial estimation, bargaining games with The Agent

Cell Mates: Extracting Useful Information From Tables for LLMs - By Gaurav in ML/Statistics — 06 May 2025 Cell Mates: Extracting Useful Information From Tables for LLMs We seem to have cracked the art of distilling information in words and images using large machine learning models. Ho…

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Looks like my favorite paper on the age trajectory of happiness is finally out!!! So happy for the authors. Go check it out, it’s great.

Office buildings and the municipal governments who depend on them for tax revenue are still not back

www.slowboring.com/p/municipali...

GitHub - finite-sample/optimal_classification_cutoffs: Script for calculating the optimal cut-off for max. F1-score or accuracy Script for calculating the optimal cut-off for max. F1-score or accuracy - finite-sample/optimal_classification_cutoffs

github.com/finite-sampl...

Maximize F1, precision, recall, accuracy, or custom cost-sensitive utilities with algorithms designed for piecewise‑constant classification metrics.

the going rate is < $1 for 1000: 2captcha.com (i have used this for some indian gov. websites)

How to Use Your Free Reads with a Personal Account On this page: How to start reading for free Where to find your articles Can I remove articles I've read? How to start reading for free With a free personal JSTOR account, you can read up to 100 ...

p.s. The 100 free articles launched at least a year ago: support.jstor.org/hc/en-us/art...

Not so Prompt: Prompt Optimization as Model Selection Prompt optimization is a budgeted black‑box problem. The objective (task performance under latency/cost/safety constraints) is non‑differentiable with respect to the prompt. Each evaluation consumes t...

www.gojiberries.io/not-so-promp...

Political Psychology: What Political Scientists Get Wrong About LaPiere's 1934 Study Attitudes Vs. Individual Behavior Richard LaPiere's 1934 study revealed a striking gap between stated attitudes and actual behavior. LaPiere, a white sociologist, traveled across the United States fo...

When I watch YT content of some of the intrepid travel vloggers, I sometimes think about that.

Even if cross-group everyday interaction is good, can it generate bad politics (and policies)?

www.gojiberries.io/political-ps...

Stereotypical Understanding - By Gaurav in Gender — 11 Jul 2016 Stereotypical Understanding The paucity of women in Computer Science, Math, and Engineering in the US is justly widely lamented. Sometimes, the imbalance is attributed to gender stereotypes. But only a small fraction of me…

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Pay-as-Bid GPU Pricing Most GPU providers post standard rental rates by hour and adjust them infrequently. Some expose dynamic prices that evolve based on supply and demand. But these approaches, while simple and predictabl...

www.gojiberries.io/pay-as-bid-g...

Reducing Friction in Selling Data Products: Protecting IP and Data - By Gaurav in Computer Science — 15 Sep 2022 Reducing Friction in Selling Data Products: Protecting IP and Data Traditionally, software has been distributed as a binary. The customer “grants” the binary a broad set of…

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Some major countries in Europe are almost as old as Japan

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

GitHub - gojiplus/bloomjoin: bloomjoin: An R package implementing Bloom filter-based joins for improved performance with large datasets. bloomjoin: An R package implementing Bloom filter-based joins for improved performance with large datasets. - gojiplus/bloomjoin

bloomjoin: An R package implementing Bloom filter-based joins for improved performance with large datasets.

github.com/gojiplus/blo...

Let's get them to invest their money in the tremendous arbitrage opportunity...insurance for properties in low lying areas next to water?

Incredible pairing of text and chart

Why Microsoft Has Lower Borrowing Costs Than the U.S. There are several theories for why anyone would pay more for a bond from Microsoft or Johnson & Johnson than for a Treasury.

An explanation not considered here is that Stephen Miran's tariff paper proposes "a user fee on foreign reserve holders’ USTs" which would take a unilateral cut of "remittances of interest or principal"

www.wsj.com/finance/inve...

Social media is God’s way of telling you you have too much time.