Blogs I follow - part 1

I'm still one of those rare weirdos who use RSS feeds (with Feedly) and over the years I have started following many people and reading many blogs. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, many of them have stopped posting, but there are still some people who regularly post really in­ter­est­ing stuff. I am impressed by how some of them can sustain posting daily, even if only a short snippet, others post 2-3 times a week some in­ter­est­ing ob­ser­va­tions in a wide range of fields, and others keep posting coding op­ti­miza­tions even though they are tenured professors, but they are not afraid to get their hands dirty.

I hope I will soon be able to post more often and to post stuff that is more in­ter­est­ing and have a wider audience again. In the mean time, I'll start sharing with you some of the blogs I'm following, with a short de­scrip­tion:

John D. Cook: This guy is a sta­tis­ti­cian by training, who does consulting work and he posts on all kinds of stuff, from numerical com­pu­ta­tion to solving real business needs. One of my favorite posts from him is Random is as random does, which I find is a useful reminder whenever you read an article about something that is modeled prob­a­bilis­ti­cal­ly, that just because that model fits, it doesn't mean that the model is the underlying reality. I stumbled upon John on Stum­ble­Upon (wow, I feel old now).

FastML: This a machine learning blog ran by several people under one pseudonym. They have a funny writing style, like to criticize many novelty papers, but most im­por­tant­ly, they give lots of useful code that can be directly used, such as tricks on how to encode capital/lower letters for RNNs. Really cool stuff.

Classic Programmer Paintings: Not really a blog (well, it's a Tumblr blog), but I include it for the  mandatory laughs. Classical paintings have never been so much fun. Some favorites here.