Ryan's personal blog an applied data science and various related topics https://eightportions.com Flattening wood slabs the easy way - As an avid woodworker, I flatten a lot of wood slabs on my CNC machine. Flattening a slab is a tedious, repetive task. You basically run a router (or CNC spindle) forwards, sideways, backwards, sideways, forwards, etc. on the same plane repeatedly. Then drop the bit lower (so as not... Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0800 https://eightportions.com/2025-12-03-cnc-flattening-gcode-generator/ https://eightportions.com/2025-12-03-cnc-flattening-gcode-generator/ Training my dog to stay out of the kitchen with a Raspberry Pi and a flyswatter - My dog, Honey, has a long history of stealing food from our kitchen when we aren’t looking. She is particularly drawn to our skillet, often taking it upon herself to liberate the skillet of any meats or grease it may contain. This is both annoying and a safety concern if... Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0700 https://eightportions.com/2025-10-06-dog-training-robot/ https://eightportions.com/2025-10-06-dog-training-robot/ Who Will Thrive in the Age of AI - In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Deep Thought spends 7.5 million years calculating the answer to life, the universe, and everything: 42. The problem wasn’t that Deep Thought was wrong but rather that nobody knew what question it was actually answering. Asking the right question, it turns out, is... Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0700 https://eightportions.com/2025-08-03-ai-will-benefit-good-question-askers/ https://eightportions.com/2025-08-03-ai-will-benefit-good-question-askers/ A counterintuitive approach to maximizing your impact in knowledge work - Everyone talks about finding “high-leverage” work. Build tools that automate tasks. Write code that gets reused. Create processes that scale. These are all great things that can help you land more impact with your finite time. But if we think more deeply about what leverage actually means, I would argue... Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0700 https://eightportions.com/2025-07-14-low-leverage-work/ https://eightportions.com/2025-07-14-low-leverage-work/ A gentle reminder that screenshots are so easy to spoof that they mean absolutely nothing - Billions of dollars have been made and lost in recent months based on screenshots of Roaring Kitty’s account balances1. These screenshots were widely circulated and discussed, yet they could have easily been doctored. Creating a fake screenshot is incredibly simple. With a standard web browser, anyone can alter numbers and... Sun, 07 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0700 https://eightportions.com/2024-07-07-screenshots-are-not-proof/ https://eightportions.com/2024-07-07-screenshots-are-not-proof/ A multivariate analysis of used car prices - Many factors affect a vehicle’s market value but two of the most important factors are vehicle age and mileage. The average American vehicle travels about 14,000 miles per year, per the 2019 FHA data. Most publicly available depreciation estimates are a formulated as a function of vehicle age age and... Sun, 18 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0800 https://eightportions.com/2022-12-18-depreciation-cost-per-mile/ https://eightportions.com/2022-12-18-depreciation-cost-per-mile/ 4-20mA sensor, Arduino nano, MQTT messaging, and monitoring dashboard - We recently moved into a rural home running on well water. The well pumps groundwater into a storage tank, which holds about 5,000 gallons of water. However, due in large part to the historic drought in California our well runs dry sometimes and we need to get water delivered when... Fri, 01 Jul 2022 00:00:00 -0700 https://eightportions.com/2022-07-01-diy-water-level-monitor/ https://eightportions.com/2022-07-01-diy-water-level-monitor/ Automating chicken ownership - My wife and I got three backyard chickens a few months ago. There was a lot of setup work initially, but we eventually settled into a routine that didn’t require much daily work. One pain point was waking up early enough to let the chickens out of their coop at... Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 -0700 https://eightportions.com/2020-05-31-automatic-chicken-door/ https://eightportions.com/2020-05-31-automatic-chicken-door/ Improving pandas dataframe row access performance through better index management - Millions of people use the Python library Pandas to wrangle and analyze data. I, being one of those users, noticed a few months ago something peculiar: accessing rows by an index reference through .loc can be significantly slower when using double bracket notation [[]] than single bracket notation [], even... Sat, 15 Dec 2018 00:00:00 -0800 https://eightportions.com/2018-12-15-pandas-index-performance/ https://eightportions.com/2018-12-15-pandas-index-performance/ Simple API serving for a pre-trained Keras DenseNet model with ServeIt - ServeIt is an open source library that lets you easily serve model predictions and supplementary information from a RESTful API on any domain using your favorite Python ML library. This post illustrates the process of deploying a pre-trained ImageNet classifier with ServeIt to a new API. The classifier accepts an... Tue, 13 Mar 2018 00:00:00 -0700 https://eightportions.com/2018-03-13-serveit-keras-imagenet/ https://eightportions.com/2018-03-13-serveit-keras-imagenet/ Finding hidden APIs through client-side XHR monitoring - Web scraping is frequently used when no suitable public data can be found in a structured format. Unstructured or semi-structured data served on static websites or web applications can be scraped programmatically and structured for analysis. But before reaching for your favorite web scraper you should first check for hidden,... Sun, 11 Feb 2018 00:00:00 -0800 https://eightportions.com/2018-02-11-Look-before-you-scrape/ https://eightportions.com/2018-02-11-Look-before-you-scrape/ Do larger competition rewards increase participation? - Kaggle is a popular online platform for data science competitions. Competition hosts can post their data online, and data scientist from around the world compete to build the best algorithm for the host’s needs. Competition hosts benefit when they receive a large volume of high-quality submissions and walk away from... Sun, 14 Jan 2018 00:00:00 -0800 https://eightportions.com/2018-01-14-Kaggle-competition-rewards/ https://eightportions.com/2018-01-14-Kaggle-competition-rewards/ Reverse engineering machine learning models for advice - Machine learning models are frequently used to make predictions about a target variable, such as the sales price of a home. However, we can use a fitted model to do much more than to predict – by carefully inspecting a model we can glean useful insights that can be used... Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 -0700 https://eightportions.com/2017-10-21-Adversarial-advising/ https://eightportions.com/2017-10-21-Adversarial-advising/ Learning high dimensional company representations - In this post I introduce the Company Vector, a distributed representation of a company’s core business activities. Company vectors are learned from business descriptions found in public SEC 10-K filings using an unsupervised learning algorithm called the Paragraph Vector. The learned vectors can be used to compare companies to each... Sun, 12 Feb 2017 00:00:00 -0800 https://eightportions.com/2017-02-12-Company-vectors/ https://eightportions.com/2017-02-12-Company-vectors/ Static website hosting migration - Last week I decided to migrate this blog, Eight Portions, from GitHub Pages to GitLab Pages for hosting service. My experience to-date has been net positive: GitLab Pages offers more flexibility and control over your site than does GitHub Pages, though at the expense of performance and ease-of-use. This post... Sun, 21 Aug 2016 00:00:00 -0700 https://eightportions.com/2016-08-21-Migrate-blog-to-GitLab-pages/ https://eightportions.com/2016-08-21-Migrate-blog-to-GitLab-pages/ Neighborhood by neighborhood - In this post I explore NYC yellow cab data neighborhood-by-neighborhood. I examine NYC taxi rides from a neighborhood-centric perspective through a set of superlatives that highlight the diverse nature of NYC neighborhoods, as defined by Zillow1. This post focuses on Manhattan neighborhoods, as neighborhoods in other boroughs have relatively low... Thu, 14 Jul 2016 00:00:00 -0700 https://eightportions.com/2016-07-14-NYC-yellow-cabs-neighborhoods/ https://eightportions.com/2016-07-14-NYC-yellow-cabs-neighborhoods/ How distorted is the Dow Jones Industrial Average? - This post examines the Dow Jones Industrial Average (“DJIA”) along one of its key criticisms: price-weighting. It quantifies the extent to which price-weighting distorts the DJIA by creating a distortion index that measures aggregate over/under influence across all index components relative to a capitalization-weighted index composed of the same stocks.... Wed, 15 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0700 https://eightportions.com/2016-06-15-Dow-Jones-Distortion-Index/ https://eightportions.com/2016-06-15-Dow-Jones-Distortion-Index/