Miklós Koren
@koren.mk
2.2K followers 1.1K following 280 posts
Professor at ceu.edu. Data Editor at Restud.com.
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koren.mk
How to make sure you ran reproduce all steps of your research months later? We demoed our CLI tool bead.zip that saves code and data together at RSECon at Warwick. Slides bead.zip/rsecon25
koren.mk
This. Today my coauthors complained that Github does not properly render the math from my @obsidian.md notes. By the time we finished the meeting, Claude Sonnet 4 has built a nifty CLI tool “ghmd” that converts Obsidian markdown to github flavor. Complete with unit tests and pipx installable.
koren.mk
When you start your commit message with bigfux: instead of bugfix: you can be sure it was a major bug.
koren.mk
The way AI helps human-to-human communications is underrated.

I used to be picky about collaborating on technical projects. Like, "don't send me an email, send me a pull request."

Now I do some of my best work just talking to coauthors. AI transcribes, AI summarizes using the project context.
koren.mk
How to make sure you ran reproduce all steps of your research months later? We demoed our CLI tool bead.zip that saves code and data together at RSECon at Warwick. Slides bead.zip/rsecon25
koren.mk
I have been working with coding AI agents several hours a day in the past couple of months. You get to know their style.

Grok is like Elon Musk. Moving fast and breaking things at 10x speed. Not apologizing either.
koren.mk
For the narrow subset of #econsky people clinging to their Stata and crunching big datasets with @duckdb.org, I have vibe coded a DuckDB extension that reads .dta files.

koren.dev/software/

Give it a spin and report issues! (Thanks, @anthropic.com Claude Code and the Python Pandas implementation.)
-- Load a Stata file as a table
SELECT * FROM read_stata_dta('path/to/your/file.dta');

-- Count observations
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM read_stata_dta('data/survey.dta');

-- Filter and aggregate
SELECT 
    region, 
    AVG(income) as avg_income,
    COUNT(*) as obs_count
FROM read_stata_dta('data/households.dta')
WHERE age >= 18
GROUP BY region;
koren.mk
Always excited to hear Elhanan Helpman. If you're in Vienna, come by.

events.ceu.edu/2025-05-07/p...
Public Lecture: Elhanan Helpman
events.ceu.edu
koren.mk
Why I love OneDrive, part 78.

My local folder is called

/Users/koren/OneDrive\ -\ Central\ European\ University\ \(CEU\ GmbH\ Hungarian\ Branch\ Office\)/

Luckily, I can symlink.
koren.mk
Good point, this never occurred to me.
koren.mk
Austrian Airlines is pitching Budapest for me.

I mean, I love the city. But as long as this is how well AI understands us, I feel safe.
koren.mk
I see a lot of scripts where the file name encodes some structure. Like analysis_this.do, analysis_that.do and plot_this.do, plot_that.do

If you have such a clear structure, you are best served by folders. It just as easy to write "src/analysis/whatever.do" as "src/analysis_whatever.do".
koren.mk
Ceci n’est pas une espresso machine.
koren.mk
Sorry, by internet I mean www. Was profoundly useless before proper search.
koren.mk
Not knowing what to ask is one of the best use cases of LLMs.

The technology is much better at deciphering what I want than SEO-infested web pages.
koren.mk
To me this seems similar to the early days of the internet. A promising technology with no product. Once the initial bubble bursts, we may yet see fantastic products leveraging the tech.
edzitron.com
Newsletter: Generative AI is a marketing con perpetuated by Sam Altman and Dario Amodei through a mixture of lies and half-truths carried by a tech media that fails to ask the right questions. Outside of ChatGPT, generative AI companies barely get any traffic at all.

www.wheresyoured.at/longcon/
The Generative AI Con
It's been just over two years and two months since ChatGPT launched, and in that time we've seen Large Language Models (LLMs) blossom from a novel concept into one of the most craven cons of the 21st ...
www.wheresyoured.at
koren.mk
New level unlocked: typing an email, three letters into a word in the second sentence, get distracted, then go back and try to figure out what words begin with those three letters.

#adhdlife
koren.mk
Searching for Sugarman was such an awesome movie.
koren.mk
Image to text. English to German. Vague text to clean Python code. Legalese to human arguments.

Automating this translation seems both useful and profoundly risky for many white-collar jobs.
koren.mk
Compelling arguments. I have seen the value of LLMs in “translation”, not “creation”.

It is striking how much of a professional’s job, whether lawyer, teacher, software developer, is about translating things from one format to another.
koren.mk
The fact that i’ve been listening to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Donovan and John Lennon these past days doesn’t mean I won’t defend capitalism in a degrowth debate. koren.dev/events/2025-...

I like to keep my music out of my science.
Album cover of Bob Dylan at Budokan Album cover of best of Joan Baez Album cover of Donovan’s Gift from a flower to a garden