Linear Digressions

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

We started Linear Digressions 4 years ago… this isn’t a technical episode, just two buddies shooting the breeze about something we’ve somehow built together.

8 Okt 201822min

This week, we’re dusting off the ol’ particle physics PhD to bring you an episode about ambitious new model-agnostic searches for new particles happening at CERN. Traditionally, new particles have bee...

30 Sep 201824min

If you’re a data scientist, you know how important it is to keep your data orderly, clean, moving smoothly between different systems, well-documented… there’s a ton of work that goes into building and...

24 Sep 201816min

A very intriguing op-ed was published in the NY Times recently, in which the author (a senior official in the Trump White House) claimed to be a minor saboteur of sorts, acting with his or her colleag...

16 Sep 201818min