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"So, how much experience do you have with Big Data and Hadoop?" they asked me. I told them that I use Hadoop all the time, but rarely for jobs larger than a few TB. I'm basically a big data neophite - I know the concepts, I've written code, but never at scale.
I'm a former high frequency trader. And following the tradition of G.H. Hardy, I feel the need to make an apology for my former profession. Not an apology in the sense of a request for forgiveness of wrongs performed, but merely an intellectual justification of a field which is …
For most data scientists, a toolkit like scipy/matplotlib or R becomes so familiar that it becomes almost an extension of their own mind. When fleshing out an idea, we will just open up ipython, write a few lines of code, and display the plot on the screen to get …
In a previous post I discussed the mechanics of HFT. If you haven't read it, go read it now. Now I'll discuss it's social utility and cost. About the title Many people were misled by it, and this wasn't my intention. I was merely alluding to the book by Hardy …
A major problem in detecting biased decisionmaking is the problem of unknown inputs. For example, suppose a venture capitalist has a public portfolio which has funded 75% male founders and 25% female. Is this venture capitalist biased against women? It's impossible to know - perhaps only 10% of his applicants were …
One of the things I like most about India is it's medical system. As an American, I've experienced both the Indian and US medical systems, and at this point I have a very strong preference for the Indian one. Somewhat surprisingly, the Indian medical system is based on free market …
In a recent post, a company selling A/B testing services made the claim that A/B testing is superior to bandit algorithms. They do make a compelling case that A/B testing is superior to one particular not very good bandit algorithm, because that particular algorithm does not take …
In a fairly popular blog post, Raganwald advocates against using various heuristics while filtering out resumes. For the most part, I agree with him. Since it's hard to find good programmers, false negatives are very costly compared to the cost of a false positive (a wasted interview). But I have …
I've recently become motivated to learn Portuguese. Mulheres bonitas sao muito motivado. It's not the first time this has happened to me - in the past I've attempted to learn Spanish, Farsi and Konkani. But it is the first time I've made significant progress and it's the first time that I …
Recently microservices have been getting a lot of attention, both positive and negative. Articles about them tend to fall into two camps, which I'll affectionately label the hipster camp and the neckbeard camp. The hipster camp tends to strongly favor microservices, due to the excellent benefits they provide regarding…
In a series of blog posts, Gary Rubinstein attempts show that the Value Added Modelling scores recently released by the NYC Department of Education prove that VAM (Value Added Modelling) is not accurate. However, whatever flaws VAM may have, Gary Rubinstein (henceforth GR) hasn't demonstrated them. All he has…
So you've decided to leave academia, or are perhaps just thinking about doing so. Welcome to the dark side. I made the transition a few years ago, and since then I've gotten a number of questions about how to do it. Hence, this article. First of all, I'm going to …
Basic Income is a popular policy floating around the internet lately. The idea consists of declaring that the government will pay each living adult a fixed amount of money every month - an amount comparable to a minimum wage job. This policy would then replace all current welfare programs - welfare, unemployment …
In the good old days before the computer revolution, stocks were generally priced by traders using pencil and paper. Analysts would read news, study corporate financials, and then give ideas to traders. Trading happened in a physical trading pit. When a large player (Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan) wanted to …