Viewing profile — jrauser

I never worked for google (interviewed but was rejected) but I have suspected this is true -- that there was a sweet spot where google was a magical place, but that time has long p…

One of the better decisions I ever made was not ignoring emails from folks recruiting for Amazon in 2003. It was a different place back then, and truly like "the world's largest st…

I wrote a talk entitled How Humans See Data that puts several of these ideas, among others, into a coherent framework based on research by Bill Cleveland. https://www.youtube.com/w…

Fair enough. I maybe should have put language in scare quotes. :)

In 1999, front end templates were written in an internally developed macro language named catsubst and served by a C (maybe C++?) application named Obidos. Later (starting in 2003-…

Your control is greatly reduced in aerobars, but more importantly, your ability to defend your space is hugely reduced, which makes riding in a pack extremely dangerous. This video…

I participated in the drafting of these tenets along with several others. Many years later, I'm pleased by how much I still like them.

I'm like this, but when I have too much caffeine I notice that it's harder to turn the monologue off. It becomes a little shouty in fact. Brains are weird.

You've got it more or less. The way I say it is that bad ideas can't hide in writing. You can fool yourself and others with a powerpoint or a spoken argument. But clear writing dem…

CLR

Starry Messenger - Galileo Very fun and readable. He's so excited to tell the world about what he's learned.

In practice I find prophet far superior. Prophet can deal deftly with the kind of problems that show up in real-world data like missing values and radical changes in trend from sho…

Perhaps related to Sturgeon's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

The specific anecdote may have been fabricated, but the principle is sound. An example is the marshmallow problem[1], where a group is given some materials and is asked to build, u…

As a data scientist: What do you want to know about the thing you're building and how it works?

Keogh has produced a bunch of interesting work. Toward Parameter Free Data Mining is a gem: https://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/SIGKDD_2004_long.pdf Of course SAX is also super interest…

Did you even read the headline? “Supplements won’t prevent dementia...” The first half of the article is all about various dietary supplements and how there is no good evidence for…

Jeff talks a lot about this in his recent letter to shareholders. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518... He suggests that a great memo takes a week or more…

Jeff's letters to shareholders are pretty good. Here's a recent one: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518... Because of its audience and goals it's necessar…

I agree completely. It's also important that the audience can actually tell the difference between good writing and poor writing and give useful feedback. You can't just ask people…

I've seen a couple companies try to adopt the Amazon-style narrative, and they both failed. I think the only way it can happen is if leadership demands it and is absolutely unrelen…

To the contrary, clear writing make it much easier for the audience to assemble complex ideas. Poor writing definitely makes it harder, and it turns out that the vast majority of p…

I've written documents for Jeff, and IMO, the six-page narrative memo is a key part of Amazon's success. It's so easy to fool both yourself and your audience with an oral presentat…

Constraining people via arbitrary norms is harmful. Putting people into tidy little boxes is harmful to those that don't neatly fit in their assigned box. The smartest HR person I …