Linear Digressions

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

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