I was playing around with D3 last night and built a silly visualization of antipodes and how our intuitive understanding of the world sometimes doesn't make sense.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Every once in a while when talking to smart people the topic of automation comes up. Technology has made lots of occupations redundant, so what's next? Switchboard operator, a long time ago What about software engineers?
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Here's a problem that I used to give to candidates. I stopped using it seriously a long time ago since I don't believe in puzzles, but I think it's kind of fun. Let's say you have a function that simulates a random coin flip.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Annoy is a library written by me that supports fast approximate nearest neighbor queries. Say you have a high (1-1000) dimensional space with points in it, and you want to find the nearest neighbors to some point.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
The workflow engine battle has intensified with some more interesting entries lately! Here are a couple I encountered in the last few days. I love that at least two of them are direct references to Luigi!
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I have spent some time lately with D3. It's a lot of fun to build interactive graphs. See for instance this demo (will provide a longer writeup soon). D3 doesn't have support for 3D but you can do projections into 2D pretty easily.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Note: this post is full of pseudo-psychology and highly speculative content. Like most fun stuff! I became a manager back in 2009. Being a developer is fun. You have this very tangible way to measure yourself.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Saw this link on Hacker News the other day: The Highway Lane Next to Yours Isn’t Really Moving Any Faster The article describes a phenomenon unique to traffic where cars spread out when they go fast and get more compact when they go slow.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Sometimes you have these awesome insights. A few days ago I got an idea for how to improve index building in Annoy. For anyone who isn't acquainted with Annoy – it's a C++ library with Python bindings that provides fast high-dimensional nearest neighbor search.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Annoy is a C++/Python package I built for fast approximate nearest neighbor search in high dimensional spaces.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I just pinged a few million random IP addresses from my apartment in NYC. Here's the result: Some notes: What's going on with Sweden? Too much torrenting? Ireland is likewise super slow, but not Northern Ireland Eastern Ukraine is also super slow, maybe not surprising given current events.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
There's a bunch of companies working on machine learning as a service. Some old companies like Google, but now also Amazon and Microsoft. Then there's a ton of startups: PredictionIO ($2.7M funding), BigML ($1.6M funding), Clarifai, etc, etc.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
As noted by multiple tweets, my previous post describes a phenomenon denoted Berkson's paradox. Here's another example: Why Are Handsome Men Such Jerks?
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I saw a bunch of tweets over the weekend about Peter Norvig claiming there's a negative correlation between being good at programming competitions and being good at the job. There were some decent Hacker News comments on it.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Pinterest just open sourced Pinball which seems like an interesting Luigi alternative. There's two blog posts: Pinball: Building workflow management (from 2014) and Open-sourcing Pinball (from this week). The author has a comment in the comments thread on Hacker News:
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Wow I guess it was more than a year ago that I tweeted this. Crazy how time flies by. Anyway, here's my rationale: When I update one line of code I feel like I have to put in a long explanation about its side effects, why it's fully backwards compatible, and why it fixes some issue #xyz.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
For most people straight out of school, work life is a bit of a culture shock. For me it was an awesome experience, but a lot of the constraints were different and I had to learn to optimize for different things.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Febrary 6 was my last day at Spotify. In total I spent more than six years at Spotify and it was an amazing experience. I joined Spotify in Stockholm in 2008, mainly because a bunch of friends from programming competitions had joined already.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I've often said that I try to follow The Pragmatic Programmer's advice to learn a new language every year.
Using Stored Procedures in a Grails Application with Groovy
From: Dan Vega
Chris Johnson‘s presentation from Data Day Texas:
From: Erik Bernhardsson
I just made it to Sweden suffering from jet lag induced insomnia, but this blog post will not cover that. Instead, I will talk a little bit about technical debt. The concept of technical debt always resonated with me, partly because I always like the analogy with “real” debt.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
Just search for “hackers gif“. There you go. Fun for your work emails for the next 500 years. From the awesome movie Hackers. That movie together with The Warriors convinced me that I wanted to live in NYC when I was like… 14 years old.
From: Erik Bernhardsson
