Posts

The stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

An analysis of which stories are removed from the front page of Hacker News due to moderator intervention.

How many people will actually die this week because of Daylight Savings Time?

A data analysis of how many deaths the DST transition causes due to tired driving.

Reverse Engineering the Hacker News Ranking Algorithm

A data-driven exploration of how the Hacker News ranking algorithm works.

A Greedy Image Unshredder

A brief response to Nayuki’s post about the use of simulated annealing to solve an image unshredding problem. An interactive demo is used to show that a simple greedy algorithm outperforms the SA, both in terms of results and computation time.

Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype

An overview of my work on optimizing phone keyboard layouts for Swype and T9. There’s some interesting history here as well as a novel simulation-based approach to keyboard optimization.