Locality Sensitive Hashing is a method for placing similar items together. This can be seen as a clustering effort, where similar items, when hashed, will produce a value that is close to each other, and therefore fall into the same bucket. When we talk about hashing, most of the time we want to form a […]
Before MapReduce Before MapReduce, a typical way of parallel and distrubuted way was to split the data into equal chunks, and place them on different machines. Each machine will then do their computation, before sending their results back to a central server to do the collation, and final calculation. For example, to find the maximum […]
What is Kafka Before going into Kafka, lets do a brief overview of what it is, and what it’s most commonly used for. Kafka is a messaging system, where it takes it large amount of data from various sources (Producers), and allows various services to read the data off it (Consumers). Central to the architecture […]
I’ve briefly written about ways to combat overfitting in the post here when I wrote about regularization. In that post, I talked a bit on L1 and L2 regularization, and the brief difference between them. In this post, I’m going to do a deep dive into the differences. This article is an excellent resource in […]
We all wish we can make the perfect decisions, and many times, we’re given too much options to the paths we want to take in our lives. In choosing a career, choosing a car to buy, choosing a person to marry, choosing what to eat. There are various psychological deteriments related to decision making, such […]
A really great book about highlighting some of the unconscious biasness we have in our views of life. Overall, it paints an optimistic view about the world, and points to several concrete evidences that the world is indeed getting better, and progressing towards a positive direction. If anything, I would blame the media for sensationalizing […]
Ever wonder what happens when you send an email, and what the various systems and components are that facilitates the whole process? In our digital age, we all communicate over email, and even more nefariously, the bad guys do too: from sending credential harvesting links to a malware download, the email the most viable way […]
The age old question: What is the Meaning of life? The book on flow attempts to answer this by breaking down the different interpretations of meaning, and using each of them to ascribe some actions that we can take. The three different interpretations of meaning are: Finality, Intentionality, and Associativity. Meaning as Finality To ask […]
This was a short and simple book packed with succient life lessons, and exposes common fallacies we tend to view the world. Specifically, it deals with the notion of success, and what makes a person successful. The book tells of 6 things we think successful people do that makes them successful, and that if we […]
After reading the book “Overcoming Pefectionism”, I don’t think I have servere perfectionism, but I have some symptoms of it. A bit of background on why I picked this book up in the first place. I found myself being very critical towards myself when I didn’t meet my expectations. Be it in work, or in […]
