Month: June 2021

The most under-rated programming books

Ask any programmer what their favourite programming book is, and their answer will be one of the usual suspects: Code Complete, The Pragmatic Programmer, or Design Patterns. And rightly so; these are outstanding and highly-regarded works that belong to every programmer’s bookshelf. (If you’re just starting out building up your bookshelf, Jeff Atwood has some […]

Feature standardization considered harmful

Many statistical learning algorithms perform better when the covariates are on similar scales. For example, it is common practice to standardize the features used by an artificial neural network so that the gradient of its objective function doesn’t depend on the physical units in which the features are described. The same advice is frequently given […]

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