Every time you navigate to a new URL, your browser checks to see if it is in a list of millions of malicious sites. Normally, searching through such a list would take minutes. Anything more than a few milliseconds would make it unusable. So how do they pull it off? Bloom filters! A bloom filter…
Matplotlib has become the standard plotting library in Python. This is thanks to its simple API and NumPy/SciPy integration, making it easy to add interactive plots to any code. In this post, I will walk through how to make animated 3D plots in Matplotlib, and how to export them as high quality GIFs. RGB Color…
Society has unlocked vast amounts of value by harnessing the power of the graphs. First, we used graphs as infrastructure for running water, electricity, and the internet. Then, we used graphs as platforms for further applications. The refrigerator and washing machine are second-layer graph technologies, as are Google and Facebook. The networks people are looking…
What is context-free grammar? A grammar is a set of production rules for a language. Context-free grammar is any grammar that is of the form , where is a finite set of nonterminal characters, is a finite set of terminal characters, is the relation from to , and is the start symbol. This is what…
For competitive, low-margin businesses, a store’s layout can be the difference between surviving and getting wiped out. To drive more sales, businesses are using recommendation systems in online stores, and data-driven nudging at brick-and-mortar locations. How can purchasing data be turned into sales? We can use an unaltered version of the word2vec algorithm used in…
What is word segmentation? Word segmentation (also called tokenization) is the process of splitting text into a list of words. Humans can do this pretty easily, but computers need help sometimes. At a higher level, you can think of segmentation as a way of boosting character-level models that also makes them more human-interpretable. Setup First,…
Introduction Fast food is one of many industries that emerged from the construction of the American highway in the 20th-century. Greater mobility led to completely new ways to shop. Smaller menus meant higher efficiency and cheaper, faster food. Today, menus have been getting larger in response to increasing competition, fallout from the health backlash in…