“Python is about having the simplest, dumbest compiler imaginable.” —Guido van Rossum, Masterminds of Programming People write source code, machines run machine code. A compiler turns one into the other—how? Somehow stones, taught to read our commands, obey, and the compiler acts at the heart of this magic: it’s the spell that interprets...

Storage is an essential part of every computer architecture, from the hypothetical paper tape in a Turing machine to the registers and memory unit of the von Neumann architecture. Non-volatile storage media and volatile memory devices have both gone through several technological evolutions over the last century, including some delightfully strange mechanisms....

Why am I doing this? When I was in high school my studies were heavily skewed towards foreign languages and literature in general. This means that between ages 14 and 18 I wrote a whole lot of literary analysis essays. The idea behind this exercise is that if you analyze and describe the techniques that make a piece of literature effective, you’re...

Random forests are an excellent “out of the box” tool for machine learning with many of the same advantages that have made neural nets so popular. They are able to capture non-linear and non-monotonic functions, are invariant to the scale of input data, are robust to missing values, and do “automatic” feature extraction. Additionally, they have other...

Immutable data structures – also known as persistent or purely functional data structures – are a key part of modern functional programming. Once created, immutable data structures cannot be modified. Instead, they support operations which efficiently produce a new copy of the structure with the desired changes applied. As I’ve gotten more experience...

Different types of graphs may, at first glance, appear completely distinct. But in fact, graphs share many common elements, such as coordinate systems and using geometric shapes to represent data. By making different visual choices (Cartesian or polar coordinates, points or lines or bars to represent data), you can use graphs to highlight different...