That’s very unlikely

The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data by David Spiegelhalter

This book was a brilliant refresher on statistics, aimed at people without a mathematical background. It considers a number of questions, often based on a clickbait newspaper headlines, and shows how the question should really be analysed using statistical methods. It’s a really good read.

Rather strangely, I was reading this paper on a probabilistic programming language and the author contributed to one of the cited papers, though the book does talk about using simulation as a technique for using distributions so I can see how they are related.

I’ve also been doing some reading on Haskell. For quite some time I’ve been trying to understand how you can extend the standard Hindley-Milner type inference to handle some of the more interesting features like Phantom types and GADTs. At long last I came across this paper which describes how to do it. This also helps to explain some of the type checker messages that I see from time to time. While doing some reading, I also came across this article on how the IO Monad is implemented, and why you don’t get the same kind of guarantees from the unsafe functions for performing IO.

Last, two great videos on .NET. Performance improvements in .NET 5 by Stephen Toub which talks about recent optimisations – I hadn’t come across some of them before, such as being able to turn off the zero initialization of local variables, What’s so hard about pinning? by Maoni Stephens which goes into some implementation details about the .NET garbage collector.

I’ve also been reading some posts on how Linux debuggers work – these two talk about getting access to registers and this paper talks about how to stop the breakpoints stopping the target process for long. While we are talking about Linux, this post goes into detail about the durability guarantees behind various Linux file system operations.

I’ve also been doing more reading on Category Theory, and have again wondered about the proof that polymorphic functions in Haskell correspond to the natural transformations in the relevant category.