taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited or ETAOIN SRHLDCU

Amazing how consistent the n-gram counts are between Peter Norvig’s analysis (here) against the 20120701 Google Books corpus, and Mark Mayzner’s 20,000-word corpus from the early 1960s

(tags: english statistics n-grams words etaoin-shrdlu peter-norvig mark-mayzner)

Solving monitoring state storage problems using Redis

a nice basic Redis-in-practice post

(tags: redis storage)

HTTPretty

‘a HTTP client mock library for Python, 100% inspired on ruby’s FakeWeb [ https://github.com/chrisk/fakeweb ].’ ‘HTTPretty monkey patches Python’s socket core module, reimplementing the HTTP protocol by mocking requests and responses.’

(tags: mocking testing http python ruby unit-tests tests monkey-patching)

Why did infinite scroll fail at Etsy?

‘A/B testing must be done in a modularized fashion. The “fail” case he gave was when Etsy spent months developing and testing infinite scroll to their search listings, only to find that it had a negative impact on engagement.’ [...] ‘instead of having the goal of “test infinite scroll,” Etsy realized it needed to test each assumption separately, and this going forward is their game plan.’

(tags: usability testing design etsy ab-testing test modularization via:hn)

airlift/airline · GitHub

Annotations-based git-like CLI helper for Java

(tags: git cli java)

“Matters Computational – Ideas, Algorithms, Source Code”

A hefty tome (in PDF format) containing lots of interesting algorithms and computational tricks; code is GPLv3 licensed

(tags: algorithms computation via:cliffc pdf books coding)