I was reading yet another blog post titled “Why our team moved from <language X> to <language Y>” (I forgot which one) and I started wondering if you can generalize it a bit. Is it possible to generate a N * N contingency table of moving from language X to language Y?
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I just realized last Thursday that I have spent two full years at Better, incidentally on the same day as we announced a $15M round led by Kleiner Perkins. So it was a good point to reflect a bit and think back – what the F led me to abandon my role managing the machine learning team at Spotify?
From: Erik Bernhardsson
This is a pretty dumb post, in which I argue that functional programming has a lot of the bad parts of libertarianism and a lot of the good parts: Both ideologies strive to eliminate [the] state.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
As a project evolves, does the new code just add on top of the old code? Or does it replace the old code slowly over time? In order to understand this, I built a little thing to analyze Git projects, with help from the formidable GitPython project.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
This blog post Data sets are the new server rooms makes the point that a bunch of companies raise a ton of money to go get really proprietary awesome data as a competitive moat. Because once you have the data, you can build a better product, and no one can copy it (at least not very cheaply).
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Pareto efficiency is a useful concept I like to think about. It often comes up when you compare items on multiple dimensions. Say you want to buy a new TV. To simplify it let's assume you only care about two factors: price and quality.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I joined Spotify in 2008 to focus on machine learning and music recommendations. It's easy to forget, but Spotify's key differentiator back then was the low-latency playback. People would say that it felt like they had the music on their own hard drive.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Why does it suck to wait for things? In a previous post I analyzed a NYC subway dataset and found that at some point, quite early, it's worth just giving up. This isn't a proof that the subway doesn't run on time – in fact it might actually proves that the subway runs really well.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
As you may know, one of my (very geeky) interests is Approximate nearest neigbor methods, and I'm the author of a Python package called Annoy. I've also built a benchmark suite called ann-benchmarks to compare different packages.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I've been trying to learn Clojure. I keep telling people I meet that I really want to learn Clojure, but still every night I can't get myself to spend time with it. It's unclear if I really want to learn Clojure or just want to have learned Clojure?
From: Erik Bernhardsson
(I accidentally published an unfinished draft of this post a few days ago – sorry about that). There's a lot of sources preaching the benefits of dollar cost averaging, or the practice of investing a fixed amount of money regularly.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
One of my favorite business hobbies is to reduce some nasty decision down to its absolute core objective, decide the most basic strategy, and then add more and more modifications as you have to confront the complexity of reality (yes I have very lame hobbies thanks I know).
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Apparently MTA (the company running the NYC subway) has a real-time API. My fascination for the subway takes autistic proportions and so obviously I had to analyze some of the data. The documentation is somewhat terrible, but here's some relevant code for how to use the API:
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I do a lot of recruiting and have given maybe 50 offers in my career. Although many companies do, I never put a deadline on any of them. Unfortunately, I've often ended up competing with other companies who do, and I feel really bad that this usually tricks younger developers into signing offers.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
(This is not a very relevant/useful post for regular readers – feel free to skip. I thought I would share it so people can find it on Google.) My blog blew up twice in a week earlier this year when I landed on Hacker News.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Here's a conclusion I've made building consumer products for many years: the speed at which a company innovates is limited by its iteration speed. I don't even mean throughput here. I just mean the cycle time.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I've been spending several hundred bucks renting GPU instances on AWS over the last year. The speedup from a GPU is awesome and hard to deny. GPUs have taken over the field. Maybe following the footsteps of Bitcoin mining there's some research on using FPGA (I know very little about this).
From: Erik Bernhardsson
My blog post about fonts generated lots of traffic – it landed on Hacker News, took down my site while I was sleeping, and then obviously vanished from HN before I woke up. But it also got retweeted by a ton of people.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
For some reason I decided one night I wanted to get a bunch of fonts. A lot of them. An hour later I had a bunch of scrapy scripts pulling down fonts and a few days later I had more than 50k fonts on my computer.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
The easiest way to be a 10x engineer is to make 10 other engineers 2x more efficient. Someone can be a 10x engineer if they do nothing for 364 days then convinces the team to change programming language to a 2x more productive language.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Early last year when I left Spotify I decided to do more reading. I was planning to read at least one book per week and in particular I wanted to brush up on management, economics, and technology.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I've been obsessed with how to iterate quickly based on small scale feedback lately. One awesome website I encountered is Usability Hub which lets you run 5 second tests. Users see your site for 5 seconds and you can ask them free-form questions afterwards.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
(Warning: super speculative, feel free to ignore) As Yogi Berra said, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future”. Unfortunately predicting is hard, and unsurprisingly people look for the Magic Trick™ that can resolve all the uncertainty.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
