#TATAELXSI Weekly chart indicates we're near top as continuous profit booking . https://t.co/p5b5cYVtRP

This post is pretty bizarre, but it manages to hit on so many false beliefs that I've seen hurt junior data scientists that it deserves some explicit

(1) The notion that R is well-suited to "building web applications" seems totally out of left field. I don't feel like most R loyalists think this is a good idea, but it's worth calling out that no normal company will be glad you wrote your entire web app in R.

(2) It is true that Python had some issues historically with the 2-to-3 transition, but it's not such a big deal these days. On the flip side, I have found interesting R code that doesn't run in modern R interpreters because of changes in core operations (e.g. assignment syntax).

(3) "Most of the time we only need a latest, working interpreter with the latest packages to run the code" -- this is where things get real and reveal some things that hurt data scientists. If this sentence is true, it's likely because you don't share code with coworkers.

(3) Really is a broader issue in data science: people only think of what they need to do their work if no one else existed and code was never maintained. Junior data scientists almost always operate on projects they start from scratch and don't have to maintain for long.

#Thread Two divine forms of Khatu Shyam ji...

On the day of Amavasya, devotees get the darshan of Shyam Baba in Shyam varan (black color). In ordinary days, the form of Baba is saffron. The reason for this is a custom. The real head of Shyam Baba which had appeared from Shyam Kund is of Shyam varan.

Every day Shyam Baba's grand Shringar is done by Pujaris. The main part of Shyam Baba's shringar is Tilak. This Shringar is done by the members of Nij Mandir sevaks. The sevaks of the Nij Mandir do sandalwood tilak to Baba everyday in the auspicious time.

This Divine Tilak is applied from the forehead to the nose. When Baba is given a bath by sevaks, this tilak comes off. Then in the auspicious time, the sevaks again apply tilak to Baba.

There is no auspicious time on the Amavasya. Because of this, tilak is not done on that day. That's why devotees have darshan of Shyam Baba on the Amavasya only in the actual real form (Shyam Swaroop). Baba's tilak is done on Amavasya only on the day of Deepawali.

I got a Toshiba T1200, which has a bad screen, and a dead CMOS battery, and I thought the hard drive was broken too...

but I rebooted it and heard a KTHUNK and a really loud spin-up noise and holy shit, the hard drive works!

and it still has files on it. the newest date is January 1994.

It's a 21mb hard drive, with ~37k of bad sectors.

This fucker is never going to spin up again, so I better go find some serial cables and copy shit off now.

The backlight is fucked so I'm shining a flashlight on it.
without it, it looks like this.

1/ Something strange is happening with people’s sex lives. 20-somethings are having sex later and less frequently than previous generations. I spent several months digging into this for @theatlantic. https://t.co/5ehzmWY9wi

2/ This phenomenon—I’m calling it a Sex Recession—really surprised me. It seemed improbable in the age of Tinder, digital porn, and attitudes that are generally permissive and sex-positive.

3/ What’s happening isn’t exclusively American: Similar trends are being observed in other countries, including Japan, Australia, the U.K., Finland, and the Netherlands.

4/ One cause is obvious: Adults under 35 are less likely to be living with a partner than in recent decades, and more likely to be living with their parents—which, it’s safe to say, isn’t great for one’s sex life.

5/ But I also found other explanations, each with profound implications. The first, unsurprisingly, has to do with internet enticements. Netflix and other online entertainment may be substituting for sex.

Important paper from Google on large batch optimization. They do impressively careful experiments measuring # iterations needed to achieve target validation error at various batch sizes. The main "surprise" is the lack of surprises. [thread]

https://t.co/7QIx5CFdfJ

The paper is a good example of lots of elements of good experimental design. They validate their metric by showing lots of variants give consistent results. They tune hyperparamters separately for each condition, check that optimum isn't at the endpoints, and measure sensitivity.

They have separate experiments where the hold fixed # iterations and # epochs, which (as they explain) measure very different things. They avoid confounds, such as batch norm's artificial dependence between batch size and regularization strength.

When the experiments are done carefully enough, the results are remarkably consistent between different datasets and architectures. Qualitatively, MNIST behaves just like ImageNet.

Importantly, they don't find any evidence for a "sharp/flat optima" effect whereby better optimization leads to worse final results. They have a good discussion of experimental artifacts/confounds in past papers where such effects were reported.