Mark Nagelberg’s Blog

Notes on Developing Transformative Tools for Thought January 3, 2020
Occasionally, special tools come along that amplify our minds, enabling new kinds of thought not otherwise possible. Computers, writing, speaking, and the printing press are all examples of these “Tools for Thought” that surge human potential. This essay from Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen explores whether we can accelerate the development of these kind of […]
Mark Nagelberg
The Hidden Power of Compounding (and 4 Ideas for Harnessing it) November 9, 2019
Ways to take advantage of this powerful and often-overlooked force for improvement Ever wonder how successful people reach such heights? Think of a wildly successful person you admire. How did they get there? The typical answers are hard work, innate gifts (personality, natural ability) and luck. These factors play a role, but the most important […]
Mark Nagelberg
Spaced Repetition for Efficient Learning by Gwern Branwen October 27, 2019
If you’re interested in spaced repetition and haven’t read it yet, Gwern Branwen’s essay is a fantastic review, including research into the benefits of testing, what spaces repetition is used for, software, and other observations. There are lots of resources here for people that want to know the research behind why spaced repetition works, including […]
Mark Nagelberg
How to Make Decisions: A Mental Framework and 5 Common Failures September 28, 2019
Whether you like it or not, you are faced with a barrage of decisions every day. Human beings are essentially decision machines, and the quality of your life hinges on these choices you make. The better you are at it, the better your life will be. Some decisions are low stakes. Sometimes, the stakes are […]
Mark Nagelberg
Take your Python Skills to the Next Level With Fluent Python September 10, 2019
You’ve been programming in Python for a while, and although you know your way around dicts, lists, tuples, sets, functions, and classes, you have a feeling your Python knowledge is not where it should be. You have heard about “pythonic” code and yours falls short. You’re an intermediate Python programmer. You want to move to […]
Mark Nagelberg
Syncing your Jupyter Notebook Charts to Microsoft Word Reports December 2, 2018
Here’s the situation: You’re doing a big data analysis in your Jupyter Notebook. You’ve got tons of charts and you want to report on them. Ideally, you’d create your final report in the Jupyter notebook itself, with all its fancy markdown features and the ability to keep your code and reporting all in the same place. […]
Mark Nagelberg
Building a Rare Event Reporting System in Python (Part 1 – Crunching Historical Data to Determine What is Unusual) November 21, 2018
Here’s the situation: you have a dataset where each row represents some type of event and the time it occurred. You want to build a system to let you know if there were unusual events occurring in some time period (a common application). You also want your users to be able to explore the events […]
Mark Nagelberg
Getting Started with Airflow Using Docker November 1, 2018
Lately I’ve been reading intensively on data engineering after being inspired by this great article by Robert Chang providing an introduction to the field. The underlying message of the article really resonated with me: when most people think of data science they immediately think about the stuff being done by very mature tech companies like […]
Mark Nagelberg
Deploying and Maintaining a Web App Part 3: Adding Tests with Pytest October 14, 2018
Testing is an important part of development, including developing web applications. Among other benefits, they increase your confidence that your web application is doing what you expect, and a provide a basis for preventing bugs in an automated way when you make changes to your code. Since testing is such an integral part of web […]
Mark Nagelberg
Digging into Data Science Tools: Docker October 1, 2018
Docker is a tool for creating and managing “containers” which are like little virtual machines where you can run your code. A Docker container is like a little Linux OS, preinstalled with everything you need to run your web app, machine learning model, script, or any other code you write. Docker containers are like a […]
Mark Nagelberg

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Posted on September 16, 2019Full size 16 × 16

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