Viewing profile — erikbern

Spoiler alerts but this exactly the plot twist at the end of the book "Around the World in 80 Days" by Jules Verne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_Eighty_Day... T…

> Pay yourself and a VC-appointed board member below market rate, hire six good engineers, lease some office space, buy equipment, pay for legal and accounting services… and presto…

Founder of Modal here. We've spent a ton of time on this, including building our own distributed file system optimized for low-latency high-througput workloads. We don't use K8s or…

Annoy author here. What you're describing is Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) which is something I spent a lot of time trying back in 2009-2012 but never got it working. It has som…

I don't really buy this argument that you can rent and pay $1000/month, or you can buy an equivalent home and pay $1000/month, but now you can deduct interest rate and build equity…

haha, author here, I do admit that Matt Levine is one of my favorite writers today

I'm one of the authors – there's actually slightly newer benchmarks at http://ann-benchmarks.com/ Reminds me it's probably time to re-run the benchmarks and publish newer numbers

i'm the author – would love to read any existing literature on this if you can provide any pointers!

I wrote the code and you're wrong :) 1. Diagonal moves have a slightly higher weight. 2. I have an edge weight of 100 to go through another person. This makes it possible to go _to…

This is probably just a variant of Berkson's paradox, similar to Google's observation that success in programming competitions is negatively correlated with job performance: http:/…

They should have used containers.

I've found these tools extremely useful to understand user behavior. We rely on Fullstory all the time to improve the user experience, to identify bugs, and to debug user issues. T…

classical music has notoriously bad metadata on spotify – it just doesn't fit into the data model of artist/album/track. i think that causes the system to filter out a lot of the l…

only thing you can do to influence the collaborative filtering system is to make users listen to both you and some other artist. as i mentioned in another reply, CF is really what …

We had to build some explicit filters for this at Spotify. For instance we blacklisted Christmas music from being part of the listening data – until them people would get a ton of …

Spotify re-runs the latent vector models regularly and re-indexes them into Annoy indexes. There is no need to do that in real time, you can be a few weeks delayed and it's usually…

I built the foundation of this system while at Spotify. While it's true that we looked at a lot of different signal, at the point when I left (early 2015), it was all based on coll…

I interview 20-30 people per week and send most of them Hackerrank tests. I'm a big proponent of vetting that people can write code, but 99% of the questions on HR are waaaay too "…

Author here. It's slightly embarrassing that this turns out to be an old idea – it wasn't my intent to rip it off. I'm fairly sure I must have seen it a long time ago and then forg…

Somewhat speculative, but as a Swedish person living in the US, a huge difference between the gov't spending is that very little is means tested in Sweden. Doesn't matter how much …

Right. Both the matrix S and the identity matrix will project the stationary distribution onto itself. So any linear combination of them will project the stationary distribution on…

Yes, this is correct. The second table shows conditional probabilities. Almost everyone moving from ObjC goes to Swift, but conversely out of the people moving from Swift it's more…

This is a great point. It's a model that predicts something about the future. I could have backtested it on historical Google stats to figure out if it's a good model :)

Author here. Yes you are reading this incorrectly. Look at the contingency table. objective c to swift: 5216 swift to objective c: 1639 (sorry about the small font size though. had…