Being data driven

I picked up an issue of Foreign Affairs while flying back to NYC from SFO. It features this long interview with U.S. General Stanley McChrystal and I thought it was pretty interesting how striking some of the similarities are between fighting in a war and developing software.

From: Erik Bernhardsson

Annoy

Annoy is a simple package to find approximate nearest neighbors (ANN) that I just put on Github. I'm not trying to compete with existing packages, but Annoy has a couple of features that makes it pretty useful.

From: Erik Bernhardsson

More Luigi!

Elias Freider just talked about Luigi at PyData 2013: The presentation above is much better than one I put together a few weeks ago. In case anyone is interested I'll include it too:

From: Erik Bernhardsson

ML at Twitter

I recently came across this paper describing how they do ML at Twitter. TL;DR Their approach is pretty interesting. Everything is a Pig workflow and then they do everything as UDF's. This approach seems pretty interesting.

From: Erik Bernhardsson

I'm featured in Mashable

This article from today in Mashable describes some of the fun stuff I get to work with: Erik Bernhardsson is technical lead at Spotify, where he helped to build a music recommendation system based on large-scale machine learning algorithms, mainly matrix factorization of big matrices using Hadoop.

From: Erik Bernhardsson

Slides from NYC Machine Learning talk

Slides from the talk. Slightly edited because (a) some of the slides make little sense taken out of context (b) Slideshare seem to have problem converting some of the stuff. Collaborative filtering at Spotify from Erik Bernhardsson

From: Erik Bernhardsson

NYC Machine Learning meetup

From the NYC Machine Learning talk I had last week: Haven't looked at it yet except briefly. Unfortunately the quality isn't the best.

From: Erik Bernhardsson

Momentum and mean reversion might just be volatility bias

The Economist just published an article called The best, the worst and the ugly.

From: Erik Bernhardsson

Calculating cosine similarities using dimensionality reduction

This was posted on the Twitter Engineering blog a few days ago: Dimension Independent Similarity Computation (DISCO) I just glanced at the paper, and there's some cool stuff going on from a theoretical perspective.

From: Erik Bernhardsson

Tumblr's awesome project names

Not sure how I managed to miss this, but I'm watching this Tumblr presentation and they talk about their projects named after Arrested Development topics: Gob, Parmesan, Buster, Jetpants, Oscar, George and Motherboy. Still, the best software project name is probably still Apple's BHA.

From: Erik Bernhardsson

A neat little trick with time decay

Something that pops up pretty frequently is to implement time decay, especially where you have recursive chains of jobs.

From: Erik Bernhardsson

Luigi: complex pipelines of tasks in Python

I'm shamelessly promoting my first major open source project.

From: Erik Bernhardsson

Create SQL Insert Statements from a Spreadsheet

In this article, I will show you how to create SQL insert statements from a spreadsheet

From: Dan Vega

Top posts

These are some blog posts which have gotten a disproportionate amount of traffic (10,000+ page views): 2022 We are still early with the cloud: why software development is overdue for a change 2021 Storm in the stratosphere: how the cloud will be reshuffled Building a data team at a mid-stage star...

From: Erik Bernhardsson

Domains for sale

Contact me at mail at erik bern dot com!

From: Erik Bernhardsson