Linear Digressions

If you’re like most software engineers and, especially, data scientists, you find it really hard to make accurate estimates of how long a project will take to complete. Don’t feel bad: statistics is m...

5 Maj 201919min

53.5 million light-years away, there’s a gigantic galaxy called M87 with something interesting going on inside it. Between Einstein’s theory of relativity and the motion of a group of stars in the gal...

29 Apr 201920min

As artificial intelligence algorithms get applied to more and more domains, a question that often arises is whether to somehow build structure into the algorithm itself to mimic the structure of the p...

21 Apr 201919min

It’s not news that data scientists are expected to be capable in many different areas (writing software, designing experiments, analyzing data, talking to non-technical stakeholders). One thing that h...

15 Apr 201914min

If you work in data science, you’re well aware of the sheer volume of high-risk, high-reward projects that are hypothetically possible. The fact that they’re high-reward means they’re exciting to thin...

8 Apr 201919min

When you are running an AB test, one of the most important questions is how much data to collect. Collect too little, and you can end up drawing the wrong conclusion from your experiment. But in a wor...

1 Apr 201922min

OpenAI recently created a cutting-edge new natural language processing model, but unlike all their other projects so far, they have not released it to the public. Why? It seems to be a little too good...

25 Mars 201921min

Imagine you have two choices of how to build something: top-down and controlled, with a few people playing a master designer role, or bottom-up and free-for-all, with nobody playing an explicit archit...

17 Mars 201932min