Personal website and blog https://www.davidjwiner.com/ Fri, 29 May 2026 05:33:10 GMT Next.js In 2020, I read more books than I have in one year since I was in college. Perhaps the one silver lining of Covid-19 lockdowns. For posterity's sake, I decided to make a list of my books from the year along with some ratings and notes. Fri, 18 Dec 2020 17:44:57 GMT https://www.davidjwiner.com/blog/2020/12/18/2020-book-list https://www.davidjwiner.com/blog/2020/12/18/2020-book-list The last five years has seen a huge proliferation of internet-connected devices, many of which are produced by tiny but fast-growing startups. In general, startups are at a disadvantage compared to incumbent competitors: they do not have as much cash to invest in development, they have a harder time attracting talent, they are not as well known, and they do not have the same sales relationships that established companies do. But they do have one advantage: being fast growing can help you juice your metrics. In this post I'll show that if an IOT startup is growing fast enough, its products will appear to have much better availability than they actually do. Consider a company selling a server that is availabile 99% of the time. In other words, in a given year of 365 days it is only down for $$0.01 \times 365 = 3.65$$ days. (Note that this is actually terrible performance in the enterprise computing world---imagine your whole company having to go without access to its Outlook server for nearly 4 days a year!). Sat, 25 Nov 2017 17:44:57 GMT https://www.davidjwiner.com/blog/2017/11/25/availability https://www.davidjwiner.com/blog/2017/11/25/availability Growing up, The Simpsons was my favorite television show. Friends was a close second and the radically age-inappropriate Maury reruns my sister and I watched when we got home from school comprised a distant third. There is a delightful compact book out there called The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family, which provides more detail than anyone would want on every episode from seasons 1-8. (NB: Ask any Simpsons true believer and s/he will confirm that these episodes were by far the finest of the series.) I somehow persuaded my parents to buy this book for me when I was 10 and subsequently read it from cover to cover, in spite of the fact that all of the information contained in it could be gleaned from owning every DVD and watching every episode multiple times---which I of course did, too. Fast forward 15 years: I discovered this spring that a kind soul uploaded a massive data dump of 600 Simpsons episodes (episode names, characters, and every damn line from all 600 scripts) to Kaggle. Needless to say, I got pretty excited. Wed, 17 May 2017 17:44:57 GMT https://www.davidjwiner.com/blog/2017/05/17/fun-with-the-simpsons https://www.davidjwiner.com/blog/2017/05/17/fun-with-the-simpsons I've recently been doing some work related to political affiliation and voter prediction for a friend who is starting a political advocacy organization. As a result, one thing that I have been thinking about a lot lately is predicting party affiliation for voter targeting. For example, can we use Twitter to figure out if folks are Democrats and target them for get-out-the-vote messaging accordingly? Sat, 31 Dec 2016 17:44:57 GMT https://www.davidjwiner.com/blog/2016/12/31/predicting-political-affiliation https://www.davidjwiner.com/blog/2016/12/31/predicting-political-affiliation I recently ate out with an omnivore friend of mine who asked me before we ordered if I was okay with him having steak for dinner. Sat, 17 Dec 2016 17:44:57 GMT https://www.davidjwiner.com/blog/2016/12/17/thought-for-food https://www.davidjwiner.com/blog/2016/12/17/thought-for-food A few weeks ago, I was doing my ML homework and started to wonder how significance testing is applied to ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. I started to do a little bit of poking around and realized that there wasn't really a good resource that explained, from first principles, how we get from the classic OLS problem to test statistics, p-values, etc. Fri, 02 Dec 2016 07:00:00 GMT https://www.davidjwiner.com/blog/2016/12/01/meditations-on-p https://www.davidjwiner.com/blog/2016/12/01/meditations-on-p I live in Berkeley, California, which is known for at least three things: - Bike theft - Vegetarian food - Liberalism I'll tackle the first of these topics today; the other two deserve (several) longer posts. Mon, 31 Oct 2016 17:44:57 GMT https://www.davidjwiner.com/blog/2016/10/31/bike-theft https://www.davidjwiner.com/blog/2016/10/31/bike-theft Up and running! Check back for more later... Sat, 17 Sep 2016 17:44:57 GMT https://www.davidjwiner.com/blog/2016/09/17/obligatory-first-post https://www.davidjwiner.com/blog/2016/09/17/obligatory-first-post