Merry Christmas!! After a family filled day, I decided to sneak in a couple of interesting articles I’ve read in the past week or so.

How the Grinch stole array.length access – It hits a very sensitive nerve. Caching array.length is one of those micro-optimizations that gets spread around like an urban legend; in that it sounds reasonable enough but very few actually go out to prove whether they actually work. Good thing to note is that the research done is purely on a V8 engine.

Big Data, Machine Learning, and the Social Sciences: Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency – A while back I watched Hanna Wallach’s talk on some text analysis and she intrigued me in the applications of ML techniques in the real world. This article goes in great (and better) detail in explaining what I was trying to convey a while back.