Erik Bernhardsson

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The hacker's guide to uncertainty estimates

2018-10-08 It started with a tweet: New years resolution: every plot I make during 2018 will contain uncertainty estimates — Erik Bernhardsson (@fulhack) January 7, 2018 Why? Because I've been sitting in 100,000,000 meetings where people endlessly debate whether the monthly number of widgets is going up or down, or whether widget method X is more productive than widget method Y. Read more…

I don't want to learn your garbage query language

2018-08-30 This is a bit of a rant but I really don't like software that invents its own query language. There's a trillion different ORMs out there. Another trillion databases with their own query language. Another trillion SaaS products where the only way to query is to learn some random query DSL they made up. Read more…

Business secrets from terrible people

2018-08-16 I get bored reading management books very easily and lately I've been reading about a wide range of almost arbitrary topics. One of the lenses I tend to read through is to see different management styles in different environments. Read more…

New approximate nearest neighbor benchmarks

2018-06-17 As some of you may know, one of my side interests is approximate nearest neighbor algorithms. I'm the author of Annoy, a library with 3,500+ stars on Github as of today. It offers fast approximate search for nearest neighbors with the additional benefit that you can load data super fast from disk using mmap. Read more…

Missing the point about microservices: it's about testing and deploying independently

2018-06-04 Ok, so I have to first preface this whole blog post by a few things: I really struggle with the term microservices. I can't put my finger on exactly why. Maybe because the term is hopelessly ill-defined, maybe because it's gotten picked up by the hype train. Read more…

Interviewing is a noisy prediction problem

2018-05-02 I have done roughly 2,000 interviews in my life. When I started recruiting, I had so much confidence in my ability to assess people. Let me just throw a couple of algorithm questions at a candidate and then I'll tell you if they are good or not! Read more…

Waiting time, load factor, and queueing theory: why you need to cut your systems a bit of slack

2018-03-27 I've been reading up on operations research lately, including queueing theory. It started out as a way to understand the very complex mortgage process (I work at a mortgage startup) but it's turned into my little hammer and now I see nails everywhere. Read more…
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Erik Bernhardsson

... is the CTO at Better, which is a startup changing how mortgages are done. I write a lot of code, some of which ends up being open sourced, such as Luigi and Annoy. I also co-organize NYC Machine Learning meetup. You can follow me on Twitter or see some more facts about me.