When I took CS101, my professor shared a well-known truth: “For every hour you spend coding, expect to spend three hours debugging.” While I never officially timed it, I can confidently say that the ratio often feels closer to five… However, debugging doesn’t have to be an endless struggle. With a clear mind and a more organized approach, it can be surprisingly efficient. Today I faced a frustrating issue when checking my blog: the changes I pushed earlier never updated. I usually use my local server for demos before pushing updates to the cloud, so I rarely check the live site. Therefore, when I finally did check, I discovered the changes hadn’t been updated since January 30th. ...

A new paper is out: Contextual Budget Bandit for Food Rescue. The picture shows volunteers and donation regions in real food rescue database. Region color indicates the richness of volun teer resource. Connected lines indicates how volunteers and real-time donation tasks are matched by food-rescue platforms. ...

Really? The best way to make everyone read a book is to BAN IT… (Hermione, Harry Potter) DeepSeek AI ban: What’s going on and why it matters (Techcircle): Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek that has rocked the global AI landscape by recently launching R1 LLM model, is facing crackdowns from several governments, including India, the US, Australia, Taiwan, and South Korea, due to concerns over its security and data practices, particularly on government devices. ...

Told you so— Sabrina Carpenter won Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Pop Solo Performance of 67th Annual GRAMMY Awards. she didn’t prepare her acceptance speech obviously (here). Advice: always prepare for every possible public speeches you might anticipate. also, here’s the link to Grammy’s official page if you want to check out more winners. ...

Accepted to The Web Conference 2025, Sydney Australia💖💖💖 Ophir Friedler, Hu Fu, Anna Karlin, Ariana Tang abstract Platforms design the form of presentation by which sellers are shown to the buyers. This design not only shapes the buyers’ experience but also leads to different market equilibria or dynamics. One component in this design is through the platform’s mediation of the search frictions experienced by the buyers for different sellers. We take a model of monopolistic competition and show that, on one hand, when all sellers have the same inspection costs, the market sees no stable price since the sellers always have incentives to undercut each other, and, on the other hand, the platform may stabilize the price by giving prominence to one seller chosen by a carefully designed mechanism. This calls to mind Amazon’s Buy Box. We study natural mechanisms for choosing the prominent seller, characterize the range of equilibrium prices implementable by them, and find that in certain scenarios the buyers’ surplus improves as the search friction increases. ...

Wait what? China launches an antitrust probe into Google. Here’s what it means https://apnews.com/article/google-china-antitrust-investigation-tariffs-ab02b906733666cb0d348d2b416b7fa5 AP News. China’s State Administration for Market Regulation said Tuesday it was investigating Google on suspicion of violating antitrust laws. While regulators did not provide further details, the announcement came minutes after the new U.S. tariffs came into effect.

From Medium, by Maria Cassano “I’m a Professional Editor and These Phrases Tell Me You Used ChatGPT”: These phrases make it extremely obvious that you used ChatGPT “Treasure trove”, “Intricate tapestry”, “It’s important to note that”, “It’s essential to consider”, “While navigating the complexities of”, “A testament to”, “Furthermore”, “Consequently”, “In the world of”, “Let’s delve into”, “Look no further than”, “Whether you’re… or…”, “A plethora of”, and, “**In conclusion **”. ...

Karajan. Karajan. Karajan, KarajanKarajanKarajan, Karajan, Karajan! Kaããããããããããããããããããããrajan! The following comic opera piece Der Karajanuskopf (what is in Karajan’s head), use the melody from the famous aria of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville: “Largo al factotum della città” (make way for the factotum of the city): Listen to the audio here: YouTube full version ...

I spent two days going nuts over a Python script not recognizing directories properly when passing them from a bash script. I was doing something like: (passing in a list of directories from command line to python) python main.py --result_dir "folder/dir_1, folder/dir_2" And in the python script main.py, parse the list of strings and on… result_dir_list = [f for f in result_dir.split(',')] # some operations following For now the code doesn’t work. It turns out that the extra space after the comma (“folder/dir_1, folder/dir_2”) meant Python saw " folder/dir_2" with a leading space, which didn’t match the real folder name. Removing that extra space fixed everything: ...

When I have to show a series of experiment results plottings, I used to use Meitu (a phone photoshop app) to first airdrop all images to my iphone, concatenate all the images, and them airdrop back to my mac. Not anymore now I got my hands on Imagemagick (https://imagemagick.org/). ImageMagick® is a free, open-source software suite, used for editing and manipulating digital images. It can be used to create, edit, compose, or convert bitmap images, and supports a wide range of file formats, including JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, and Ultra HDR. ...