WRITING
(RSS)
A/B testing articles
  • NEW Adding Error Bars to Evals: A Statistical Approach to Language Model Evaluations (arXiv)
  • Likelihood-ratio inference on differences in quantiles (arXiv)
  • Formulas for Bootstrapping Sample Medians
  • You Can’t Spell CUPED Without Frisch-Waugh-Lovell
  • Simple Sequential A/B Testing
  • Formulas for Bayesian A/B Testing
  • The Low Base Rate Problem
  • A/B Testing Duration Data
  • Lazy Assignment and A/B Testing
  • Announcing Evan’s Awesome A/B Tools
  • Linear Regression For Fun And Profit
  • How Not To Run An A/B Test Popular article!
Artificial intelligence
  • Attention Is Off By One
Programming notes
  • The Floppy Disk of Floating Point
  • Why I’m Learning Perl 6
  • Type Punning Functions in C
  • Elixir RAM and the Template of Doom
  • Why I Develop For The Mac
    • Follow-up: Hackers and <canvas>
  • Please Offer An Excel Export Option
  • Statistical Shortcomings in Standard Math Libraries
  • Functional Tests As A Tree Of Continuations
Applied math
  • SlowerLogLog
  • The Amex EveryDay Bonus: A Stochastic Valuation Model
  • Adventure Games and Eigenvalues
  • Splatoon’s Ranking System Is Still Broken
  • Evaluating Splatoon’s Ranking System
  • Inferring Tweet Quality From Retweets
  • Statistical Formulas for Programmers
  • How To Read an Unlabeled Sales Chart
  • Holt-Winters Forecasting Applied to Poisson Processes in Real-Time (pdf)
Non-technical essays
  • You Can’t Dig Upwards
  • The Mathematical Hacker
  • Don’t Kill Math
  • The Other Money Problem
  • Start-ups and Emotional Debt
Programming language reviews
  • Things That Bother Me About Swift
  • A Review of Perl 6 (Raku)
  • A Taste of Rust
  • Four Days of Go
  • Swift Impressions
  • Why I’m Betting On Julia
  • Why I Program In Erlang
Mathematics of user ratings
  • Ranking News Items With Upvotes
  • Deriving the Reddit Formula
  • Ranking Items With Star Ratings
  • Bayesian Average Ratings
  • How Not To Sort By Average Rating Popular article, 250,000 page views!
  • Rank Hotness With Newton’s Law of Cooling
Business notes
  • Big Tablets Are Coming
  • Escaping The Two-Star Rating Pit
  • The Software Scientist
  • Apple’s RAM Problem
  • Marketing Your Startup Hub
  • The Feature Matrix
Unsolicited book prefaces
  • Preface to A Lost Lady
  • Preface to Brave New World
  • Preface to Frankenstein
  • Preface to The Time Machine
Big data notes
  • Predictive Analytics: What Is It Good For?
  • Big Data and the Price-Precision Curve
  • In Praise of Small Data
Programming stories
  • Fixing a Hole in the F-Distribution
  • Winkel Tripel Warping Trouble
  • Notes on Rendering 2D Graphics on a Mac
  • Premature Optimization and the Rise of Nginx Module Development
Erlang references (old)
  • Chicago Boss: A Rough Introduction (pdf)
  • The Joy of Erlang
  • Write a Template Compiler for Erlang
Nginx references (even older)
  • Guide to Nginx Module Development
  • Advanced Topics In Nginx Module Development
SOFTWARE
(RSS)
Desktop Mac applications:


Magic Maps 2
Mapping and analysis

Wizard 2
Got data? Get Wizard


Evan’s Awesome A/B Tools (home)

  • Sample Size Calculator – How many subjects do you need for your experiment?

  • A/B Buddy – A sample size calculator for iPhone and iPad
  • Chi-Squared Test – Are the conversion rates statistically distinguishable?

  • Two-Sample T-Test – Is the difference in means significant?

  • Survival Curves Test – Does the hazard rate differ between two groups?


Evan’s Ultimate Credit Card Calculators

  • Amex Blue Cash Cashback Calculator – Is the $95 annual fee worth it?

  • Amex EveryDay Bonus Calculator – Spending as a random Poisson process


Open-source projects I maintain:

  • Hecate – The Hex Editor From Hell!
  • libxls – Excel (.xls) reader for C/C++
  • librdata – R data reader/writer for C/C++
  • ReadStat – SAS/SPSS/Stata reader/writer
  • ProjCL – Secret map-projection sauce
  • TimeFormatStrings – Excel, Unicode, Stata
  • DSShortNumberFormatter – An abbreviator

Stuff that still works:

  • Erlang:
    • Chicago Boss – Web framework
    • BossDB – An evented ORM for Erlang
    • ErlyDTL – Django template language
    • Aleppo – Erlang Pre-Processor
    • Jerome – Rich-text processing library
  • Nginx:
    • mod_zip – Streaming ZIP archiver
    • mod_circle_gif – Lots of round corners
    • mod_rrd_graph – Pretty pictures

Project graveyard:

  • nginx_upstream_hash (2007–2014)
    A hashing load balancer for Nginx. RIP
  • Google Maps Extension (2005–2012)
    Embed and edit Google Maps in your wiki. RIP

ABOUT ME

Hello, and welcome to Evan Miller’s corner of the Internet. I earned my bachelor’s degree in physics from Williams College, worked briefly for A9.com and IMVU, and spent a few years in an economics Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago.

You’ll find my ranking algorithms in use at some of the largest destinations on the Internet, and my statistics software cited in top medical journals. I recently worked as a Statistics Engineer at Eppo, and am currently a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic.

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© 2008–2024 Evan Miller