I built a simple Python-based Taboo game server using asyncio to provide a customizable multiplayer experience via Telnet.

Continue reading

My review of the AI landscape in late 2024, and what the road ahead looks like for those of us not building foundational models.

Continue reading

Recently, I delivered a techtalk on A/B testing to an audience of non-technical Product Managers and experienced Data Scientists.

Continue reading

A review and introspect on the second 100 articles written on Bytepawn.

Continue reading

A few days ago OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published an article titled The Intelligence Age. I used OpenAI's new o1-mini model to critique Sam Altman's writing of its own future.

Continue reading

I detail my structured approach to managing one-on-one meetings within a 40-person data team, emphasizing people management principles like radical transparency, tailored meeting cadences, and strategies to navigate common managerial challenges to foster a supportive and productive work environment.

Continue reading

The article explains the Bell inequality using Monte Carlo simulations in Python, and shows how non-local action-at-a-distance can be used to break it with entangled qubits.

Continue reading

This blog post explores foundational quantum mechanics concepts such as superposition, entanglement, and the challenges posed by locality and determinism, while highlighting the historical efforts of Einstein and Bohm to reconcile these phenomena with hidden variable theories.

Continue reading

In February 2016, I made a life-changing decision to leave Hungary and seek opportunities abroad, starting in London and later moving to Dubai. This essay explores the multitude of reasons behind my choice and why I have no immediate plans to return to Hungary.

Continue reading

I discuss Polya's How to Solve it approach to mathematical problem solving and the 2010 paper Teaching general problem-solving skills is not a substitute for teaching math.

Continue reading

Screening CVs is a critical step in the hiring process, used to determine which candidates progress further in the hiring funnel. While the approach to CV screening can vary by company and industry, the primary goal remains the same: to identify candidates with the potential to succeed in subsequent interview stages.

Continue reading

In this final post on the toy Javascript async message queue server implementation, I make it compatible with the Python version. I use the library of unit tests developed previously to ensure identical behaviour between the two codebases.

Continue reading

I write a small library of unit tests for the message queue servers.

Continue reading

I apply NIST's suite of statistical tests to my randomness extractor implementations from the previous posts.

Continue reading

I discuss various models of biased bit sequences, and how to extract uniform random (or close to it) output bit sequences from them, illustrated with Python code.

Continue reading

In this final post on the toy Python async message queue server implementation, I make further feature and code improvements.

Continue reading

I write a somewhat more complicated, but still relatively simple async message queue server in Javascript.

Continue reading

I write a simple, bi-directional async message queue server in Javascript.

Continue reading

Why are Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs, known as A/B testing in much of the industry) testing is widely regarded as the golden standard of causal inference? What else can a Data Scientist do if A/B testing is not possible, and why are those alternatives inferior to A/B testing?

This papers shows, using 15 experiments (for ads on Facebook) where a RCT was conducted, that common observational methods (run on the Facebook data, by ignoring the control group) severely mis-estimate the true treatment life (as measured by the RCT), often by a factor of 3x or more. This is true, even though Facebook has (i) very large sample sizes, and, (ii) very high quality data (per-user feature vector) about its users which are used in the observational methods. This should be a major red flag for Data Scientists working on common marketing measurements (such as marketing campaigns) using observational methods.

Continue reading

Last year, in 2023, Dennis Austin, one of the original developers of Powerpoint passed away. The news made it to the front page on Hacker News, and prompted a lively discussion of the merits of Powerpoint itself. I posted a top-level comment, which itself sparked a lively thread of responses. In this post I will expand and extend my points about Powerpoint in a business settings, after pointing to hard-learned lessons from Edward Tufte and Jeff Bezos.

Continue reading