erikbern

7 ms·

1.
by erikbern 2y ago
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... The following day Fogg apolog
2.
by erikbern 2y ago
> 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, you’re burning through $5M a year Would love to see the
3.
by erikbern 3y ago
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 Docker and built our own custom infrastructure in
4.
by erikbern 3y ago
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 some elegant theoretical properties, but empirically it al
5.
by erikbern 4y ago
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. Landlords can also deduct their interest ex
6.
by erikbern 5y ago
haha, author here, I do admit that Matt Levine is one of my favorite writers today
7.
Trump Suspends H-1B and Other Visas(nytimes.com)
11 points by erikbern 6y ago|4 comments
8.
by erikbern 7y ago
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
9.
by erikbern 7y ago
i'm the author – would love to read any existing literature on this if you can provide any pointers!
10.
by erikbern 7y ago
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 _towards_ the right direction even though there is no path
11.
by erikbern 8y ago
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://www.catonmat.net/blog/progra
12.
by erikbern 9y ago
They should have used containers.
13.
by erikbern 9y ago
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. The result of these tools is a far better user experienc
14.
by erikbern 9y ago
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 listening data or fail to find patterns. not s
15.
by erikbern 9y ago
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 powers DW
16.
by erikbern 9y ago
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 Christmas music recommendations every January. But to your p
17.
by erikbern 9y ago
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 fine. New music doesn't have much data and need d
18.
by erikbern 9y ago
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 collaborative filtering. The reason collaborative filtering
19.
by erikbern 9y ago
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 "algorithmic". Had to go through almost all of
20.
by erikbern 9y ago
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 forgot about its origin. In retrospect I probably
21.
by erikbern 9y ago
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 your income is, you still receive child allowance,
22.
by erikbern 10y ago
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 onto itself. Let me know if I'm saying something really s
23.
by erikbern 10y ago
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 spread out
24.
by erikbern 10y ago
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 :)
25.
by erikbern 10y ago
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 to squint really hard)
26.
by erikbern 10y ago
Author here. You are absolutely right. As I mentioned in the notes, I think this matters a bit less than it might seem like (the stationary distribution does not change if you add a diagonal matrix) but clearly some languages will have a hi
27.
by erikbern 10y ago
I'm one of the original Luigi authors, and used to maintain it for a while, merging PR's daily etc. I left Spotify a couple of years ago. Since then it's been maintained mostly by Arash Rouhani, who is increasingly getting bu
28.
by erikbern 10y ago
There's some rationality to people's fear for terrorism. The impact of a terrorist attack is probably exponentially distributed, like an earthquake attack. Saying no one has died in earthquakes in SF in the last 10 years is not re
29.
by erikbern 10y ago
I switched to Dvorak about ~10 years ago. Took about 1 month to get comfortable. After 2-3 months I still wasn't as fast as qwerty, but it already felt more comfortable to type than qwerty for some reason. Unfortunately I gave up aft
30.
by erikbern 10y ago
"requests per minute" is such a useless unit of measurement. Please always quote request rates per second (i.e. Hz). Makes me think of the Abraham Simpson quote: "My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I

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