apoorva lal
@apoorvalal.com
causal inference, econometrics, ML, arsenal, loud music, unix, FOSS for scientific computing.
apoorvalal.github.io
(passively) maintains @paperposterbot.bsky.social
apoorvalal.github.io
(passively) maintains @paperposterbot.bsky.social
Caterpillar of Daughter
December 24, 2025 at 9:24 PM
Caterpillar of Daughter
You can't engineer around truly radioactive founder effects: evidence from the rise and fall of bsky
(Tolerable semi-public social media, for all its faults, was nice while it lasted. Made parasocial and IRL friends, learned a lot. Now everyone's back on whatsapp and discord boards)
(Tolerable semi-public social media, for all its faults, was nice while it lasted. Made parasocial and IRL friends, learned a lot. Now everyone's back on whatsapp and discord boards)
Deleted a post that was going viral and bringing an undesirable amount of attention from anonymous accounts. But, I'm going to be honest, the toxic folks here have won. So much of the usage of the site is about avoiding their attention. I'll just use this site to get book recs going forward
December 22, 2025 at 1:08 AM
You can't engineer around truly radioactive founder effects: evidence from the rise and fall of bsky
(Tolerable semi-public social media, for all its faults, was nice while it lasted. Made parasocial and IRL friends, learned a lot. Now everyone's back on whatsapp and discord boards)
(Tolerable semi-public social media, for all its faults, was nice while it lasted. Made parasocial and IRL friends, learned a lot. Now everyone's back on whatsapp and discord boards)
incredible idea
dosaygo-studio.github.io/hn-front-pag...
dosaygo-studio.github.io/hn-front-pag...
December 19, 2025 at 9:43 PM
incredible idea
dosaygo-studio.github.io/hn-front-pag...
dosaygo-studio.github.io/hn-front-pag...
economics of tech this week is firms repeatedly rediscovering that the optimal price is the inverse hazard rate of the customer valuation distribution plus markup, and that their prior over this is wrong (llms, snap, github pricing runners)
read/tinker: pricingexperiments.streamlit.app
read/tinker: pricingexperiments.streamlit.app
December 17, 2025 at 9:31 PM
economics of tech this week is firms repeatedly rediscovering that the optimal price is the inverse hazard rate of the customer valuation distribution plus markup, and that their prior over this is wrong (llms, snap, github pricing runners)
read/tinker: pricingexperiments.streamlit.app
read/tinker: pricingexperiments.streamlit.app
Reposted by apoorva lal
MIT's famous 'Missing Semester' course (for the Independent Activities Period in January is back.
missing.csail.mit.edu/2026/
missing.csail.mit.edu/2026/
December 15, 2025 at 6:42 PM
MIT's famous 'Missing Semester' course (for the Independent Activities Period in January is back.
missing.csail.mit.edu/2026/
missing.csail.mit.edu/2026/
it would be a genuine novelty if a billboard on the 101 in the bay area tried to sell me a burger / soda / ambulance-chasing legal advice
December 14, 2025 at 5:00 AM
it would be a genuine novelty if a billboard on the 101 in the bay area tried to sell me a burger / soda / ambulance-chasing legal advice
absolutely terrible attempted punny title aside, this is a very funny fig 1
December 12, 2025 at 5:01 PM
absolutely terrible attempted punny title aside, this is a very funny fig 1
based on the amount of navel-gazing "what truly is a science" going on on my feed, i'm assuming it is finals period?
December 10, 2025 at 10:56 PM
based on the amount of navel-gazing "what truly is a science" going on on my feed, i'm assuming it is finals period?
relatedly: tabular foundation models are getting very good.
lalten.org/pages/fmXgbB...
lalten.org/pages/fmXgbB...
December 6, 2025 at 4:34 PM
relatedly: tabular foundation models are getting very good.
lalten.org/pages/fmXgbB...
lalten.org/pages/fmXgbB...
Reposted by apoorva lal
Want to be an intern at Microsoft Research in the Computational Social Science group in NYC (Jake Hofman, David Rothschild, Dan Goldstein)
Follow this link and do your thing! Deadline approaching soonish!
apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job/...
Follow this link and do your thing! Deadline approaching soonish!
apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job/...
Research Intern - Computational Social Science | Microsoft Careers
Research Interns put inquiry and theory into practice. Alongside fellow doctoral candidates and some of the world's best researchers, Research Interns learn, collaborate, and network for life. Researc...
apply.careers.microsoft.com
December 5, 2025 at 11:35 PM
Want to be an intern at Microsoft Research in the Computational Social Science group in NYC (Jake Hofman, David Rothschild, Dan Goldstein)
Follow this link and do your thing! Deadline approaching soonish!
apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job/...
Follow this link and do your thing! Deadline approaching soonish!
apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job/...
if you do even moderately computationally demanding tasks, get a GPU - even an older one.
testing scripts and benchmarks on a 5070 series here, 2060 from @detectiveenters.bsky.social in replies, and 1070 here apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
testing scripts and benchmarks on a 5070 series here, 2060 from @detectiveenters.bsky.social in replies, and 1070 here apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
December 5, 2025 at 2:18 AM
if you do even moderately computationally demanding tasks, get a GPU - even an older one.
testing scripts and benchmarks on a 5070 series here, 2060 from @detectiveenters.bsky.social in replies, and 1070 here apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
testing scripts and benchmarks on a 5070 series here, 2060 from @detectiveenters.bsky.social in replies, and 1070 here apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
New linklog - tiebreaker designs, permutation testing, compressed DML estimation, new bandit library, and a bunch of interesting papers.
apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
2025-12-01
self-promotion Lal and Woodward is a work-in-progress poster on a decision-theoretic motivation for tiebreaker designs, which are a hybrid of RCTs and RDDs.
apoorvalal.github.io
November 30, 2025 at 7:21 PM
New linklog - tiebreaker designs, permutation testing, compressed DML estimation, new bandit library, and a bunch of interesting papers.
apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
Who would've thought a ban on aimless position papers in one arxiv field would simply redirect it to another
link 📈🤖
Integrating RCTs, RWD, AI/ML and Statistics: Next-Generation Evidence Synthesis (Yang, Gamalo, Fu) Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have been the cornerstone of clinical evidence; however, their cost, duration, and restrictive eligibility criteria limit power and external validity. Stu
Integrating RCTs, RWD, AI/ML and Statistics: Next-Generation Evidence Synthesis (Yang, Gamalo, Fu) Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have been the cornerstone of clinical evidence; however, their cost, duration, and restrictive eligibility criteria limit power and external validity. Stu
November 26, 2025 at 4:24 PM
Who would've thought a ban on aimless position papers in one arxiv field would simply redirect it to another
handy little data hoarder tool i built and deployed for myself but others might find useful lalten.org/linkpull/
1) academic or govt site with a bunch of hyperlinks
2) write a regex to grab all links matching a pattern in said url, copy and paste into file
3) download with wget or curl
1) academic or govt site with a bunch of hyperlinks
2) write a regex to grab all links matching a pattern in said url, copy and paste into file
3) download with wget or curl
November 26, 2025 at 6:19 AM
handy little data hoarder tool i built and deployed for myself but others might find useful lalten.org/linkpull/
1) academic or govt site with a bunch of hyperlinks
2) write a regex to grab all links matching a pattern in said url, copy and paste into file
3) download with wget or curl
1) academic or govt site with a bunch of hyperlinks
2) write a regex to grab all links matching a pattern in said url, copy and paste into file
3) download with wget or curl
an attempt to formalize the "squiggly pre-trends that match well are more credible than smooth pre-trends" intuition.
apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
ideation -> simulation -> algorithm sketch -> writeup heavily aided by LLMs
apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
ideation -> simulation -> algorithm sketch -> writeup heavily aided by LLMs
November 24, 2025 at 12:57 AM
an attempt to formalize the "squiggly pre-trends that match well are more credible than smooth pre-trends" intuition.
apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
ideation -> simulation -> algorithm sketch -> writeup heavily aided by LLMs
apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
ideation -> simulation -> algorithm sketch -> writeup heavily aided by LLMs
typical theorist career
November 21, 2025 at 4:11 PM
typical theorist career
What is it about building flash-attn (vanilla uv pip install, v 2.8.3) wheels that oscillates wildly between consuming ~no RAM and consuming 25-26 gb? Don't know enough about the cuda compiler to debug.
This is single threaded (MAX_JOBS=1), anything more OOMs my machine.
This is single threaded (MAX_JOBS=1), anything more OOMs my machine.
November 19, 2025 at 8:24 PM
What is it about building flash-attn (vanilla uv pip install, v 2.8.3) wheels that oscillates wildly between consuming ~no RAM and consuming 25-26 gb? Don't know enough about the cuda compiler to debug.
This is single threaded (MAX_JOBS=1), anything more OOMs my machine.
This is single threaded (MAX_JOBS=1), anything more OOMs my machine.
Crossposting because the QT is there but the audience for this is here
November 15, 2025 at 10:39 PM
Crossposting because the QT is there but the audience for this is here
First wintery week calls for GPU warmth
Large scale OCR (and hopefully downstream embedding, search, and model) project running on a brand new GPU - should be adaptable to many other tasks
github.com/apoorvalal/n...
Large scale OCR (and hopefully downstream embedding, search, and model) project running on a brand new GPU - should be adaptable to many other tasks
github.com/apoorvalal/n...
November 15, 2025 at 7:10 PM
First wintery week calls for GPU warmth
Large scale OCR (and hopefully downstream embedding, search, and model) project running on a brand new GPU - should be adaptable to many other tasks
github.com/apoorvalal/n...
Large scale OCR (and hopefully downstream embedding, search, and model) project running on a brand new GPU - should be adaptable to many other tasks
github.com/apoorvalal/n...
Baiting bsky with nanobanana artist cover portraits of The Agent in commemoration of 2 months of life and a full week of sleeping through the night
November 14, 2025 at 8:41 PM
Baiting bsky with nanobanana artist cover portraits of The Agent in commemoration of 2 months of life and a full week of sleeping through the night
Is this enshittification?
November 14, 2025 at 4:39 PM
Is this enshittification?
upgraded my eGPU setup over the weekend [RIP ADT rube goldberg machine] and decided to document it for posterity (with some promo for my torch econometrics package included)
apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
GPU-Accelerated Econometrics on Consumer Hardware
tl;dr: A $200 used GPU plugged into an EGPU can make your research code order-of-magnitude faster.
apoorvalal.github.io
November 9, 2025 at 10:06 PM
upgraded my eGPU setup over the weekend [RIP ADT rube goldberg machine] and decided to document it for posterity (with some promo for my torch econometrics package included)
apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/...
My twitter feed is doing a 4th round of memeing a shitty inconsequential interview and my bsky feed is 4 people competing to be the goodest boy by circular firing squad. Back to whatsapp and discord then.
November 8, 2025 at 4:45 PM
My twitter feed is doing a 4th round of memeing a shitty inconsequential interview and my bsky feed is 4 people competing to be the goodest boy by circular firing squad. Back to whatsapp and discord then.
The agent's first vibecoding experience
November 7, 2025 at 7:52 PM
The agent's first vibecoding experience