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Overview
Software developer and mathematician specializing in algorithms, machine learning, and interactive visualizations. Explore my blog, open-source projects, and technical tutorials on mathematics and programming.
News
The Last Five Percent: The Coupon Collector and the Panini Effect
Completing 95% of a collection is where the spending explodes. The coupon-collector problem shows why the final stickers cost more than the entire rest of the album, and why Panini, Pokemon, FUT and gacha all live on the same curve.
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Contextual Logging, Part 1: The Singleton Trap
A field story about building, publishing and then being audited on a contextual logger for Node (the library now called spawntrail). Part 1: the Mapped Diagnostic Context idea, a naive singleton context, and the concurrency bug that mislabels production l
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The Tyranny of 87%: The Illusion of Progress
A progress bar that says 87% can finish a task that a blank page never would, even when the number is arbitrary. The goal-gradient effect and endowed progress turn a single rendered rectangle into a commitment device.
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The Economics of Almost: The Near-Miss Effect
Two losses can be mathematically identical and psychologically opposite. The near-miss, cherries-cherries-blank, lights up the brain like a win and is deliberately engineered into reels and drop tables. Here is how almost-winning is manufactured.
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The Slot Machine in Your Pocket: Variable Reinforcement
Why does a reward given at random produce far more persistence than the same reward given every time? From Skinner's pigeons to pull-to-refresh, the variable-ratio schedule is the most powerful behavioral hook ever discovered, and it is pure probability.
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