3D in D3

2015-06-21

I have spent some time lately with D3. It’s a lot of fun to build interactive graphs. See for instance this demo (will provide a longer writeup soon).

D3 doesn’t have support for 3D but you can do projections into 2D pretty easily. It’s just old school computer graphics. I ended up adding an animated background to this blog based on an experiment. The math is simple.

The hardest challenge about becoming a manager

2015-06-05

Note: this post is full of pseudo-psychology and highly speculative content. Like most fun stuff!

I became a manager back in 2009. Being a developer is fun. You have this very tangible way to measure yourself. Did I deploy something today? How much code did I write today? Did I solve some really cool machine learning problem on paper?

The lane next to you is more likely to be slower than yours

2015-05-28

Saw this link on Hacker News the other day: The Highway Lane Next to Yours Isn’t Really Moving Any Faster

The article describes a phenomenon unique to traffic where cars spread out when they go fast and get more compact when they go slow. That’s supposedly the explanation.

Better precision and faster index building in Annoy

2015-05-26

Sometimes you have these awesome insights. A few days ago I got an idea for how to improve index building in Annoy.

For anyone who isn’t acquainted with Annoy – it’s a C++ library with Python bindings that provides fast high-dimensional nearest neighbor search.

Annoy – now without Boost dependencies and with Python 3 Support

2015-05-03

Annoy is a C++/Python package I built for fast approximate nearest neighbor search in high dimensional spaces. Spotify uses it a lot to find similar items. First, matrix factorization gives a low dimensional representation of each item (artist/album/track/user) so that every item is a k-dimensional vector, where k is typically 40-100. This is then loaded into an Annoy index for a number of things: fast similar items, personal music recommendations, etc.

Ping the world

2015-04-26

I just pinged a few million random IP addresses from my apartment in NYC. Here’s the result:

Some notes:

What’s going on with Sweden? Too much torrenting?
Ireland is likewise super slow, but not Northern Ireland
Eastern Ukraine is also super slow, maybe not surprising given current events.
Toronto seems screwed too, as well as part of NH and western PA.
Russia has fast internet.

The world:

Black Box Machine Learning in the Cloud

2015-04-22

There’s a bunch of companies working on machine learning as a service. Some old companies like Google, but now also Amazon and Microsoft.

Then there’s a ton of startups: PredictionIO ($2.7M funding), BigML ($1.6M funding), Clarifai, etc, etc. Here’s a nice map from Bloomberg showing some of the landscape.