Linear Digressions

When you think about it, it’s pretty amazing that we can draw conclusions about huge populations, even the whole world, based on datasets that are comparatively very small (a few thousand, or a few hu...

9 Des 201827min

Neural nets are a way you can model a system, sure, but if you take a step back, squint, and tilt your head, they can also be called… software? Not in the sense that they’re written in code, but in th...

2 Des 201817min

Deep neural nets have a deserved reputation as the best-in-breed solution for computer vision problems. But there are many aspects of human vision that we take for granted but where neural nets strugg...

18 Nov 201827min

At many places, data scientists don’t work solo anymore—it’s a team sport. But data science teams aren’t simply teams of data scientists working together. Instead, they’re usually cross-functional tea...

12 Nov 201825min

Last week’s episode, about methods for optimized web crawling logic, left off on a bit of a cliffhanger: the data scientists had found a solution to the problem, but it wasn’t something that the engin...

4 Nov 201819min

Got a fun optimization problem for you this week! It’s a two-for-one: how do you optimize the web crawling logic of an operation like Google search so that the results are, on average, as up-to-date a...

28 Okt 201821min

The Poisson distribution is a probability distribution function used to for events that happen in time or space. It’s super handy because it’s pretty simple to use and is applicable for tons of things...

22 Okt 201831min

If you wanted to find a dataset of jokes, how would you do it? What about a dataset of podcast episodes? If your answer was “I’d try Google,” you might have been disappointed—Google is a great search ...

15 Okt 201819min