Erik Bernhardsson

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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…

Lessons from content marketing myself (aka blogging) for five years

2018-03-07 I started writing this blog in late 2012, partly because I felt like it would help me improve my English and my writing skills, partly because I kept having a lot of random ideas in my head and I wanted to write them down somewhere. Read more…

New benchmarks for approximate nearest neighbors

2018-02-15 UPDATE(2018-06-17): There are is a later blog post with newer benchmarks! One of my super nerdy interests include approximate algorithms for nearest neighbors in high-dimensional spaces. The problem is simple. You have say 1M points in some high-dimensional space. Read more…

I'm looking for data engineers

2018-01-28 I'm interrupting the regular programming for a quick announcement: we're looking for data engineers at Better. You would be the first one to join and would work a lot directly with me. Some fun things you could work on (these are all projects I'm working on right now): Read more…
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Erik Bernhardsson

... is the founder of Modal Labs which is working on some ideas in the data/infrastructure space. I used to be the CTO at Better. A long time ago, I built the music recommendation system at Spotify. You can follow me on Twitter or see some more facts about me.