At a previous job, we had a law called "Peeler's Law", named after an engineer who was a top front-line bug-fixer: if you don't have time to add a test, that's when you need to add a test the most.
3,700 karma · joined January 2, 2011
More importantly, though, these stories rarely criticize the systems that cause these horrors — America's broken healthcare system which revisits injuries upon the poor and sick, zoning and development practices that breed homelessness, cruel school lunch programs that punish poor kids for having poor parents.
A _good_ software architect is almost the exact opposite. She's a minesweeper, finding obstacles that would have caused re-work and scope change. She untangles the business requirements so that expectations can be clearly set and communicated. She does research on existing approaches to the problem, becomes acquainted with the relevant open source work and thereby serves as a check against "not invented here" syndrome. If this some of this ends up being best delivered in a document or a diagram, so be it, but the point is to enable the developers, not a masturbatory exercise in self-indulgence.
I've used assignment expressions in other languages too! Python's version doesn't suffer from the JavaScript problem whereby equality and assignment are just a typo apart in, eg., the condition of your while loop. Nonetheless, I find that it ranges from marginally beneficial to marginally confusing in practice.
I know people have been having trouble adapting these kinds of
generative techniques to text. Do you know of anyone making
interesting progress there?
It is difficult to make progress in the field of generative methods
with text alone - it takes effort and creativity to get a generative
system working. A big part of our research focuses on generating
sequences which correspond to handwritten data, and to improving on
that method we have developed generative techniques which allow us to
generate a large range of novel sequences. Our work is still small,
but we are not stopping there, in fact our next major research project
is to generate novel sequences for novel languages.
What I see is that we are still in an early stage when it comes to
the technology used in generative methods to create new words, but I
suspect this is due to a combination of factors. First and foremost is
the fact that the techniques we've developed to generate novel
sequences are highly specialized in a particular kind of context -
we are not going to create random numbers or sequences because that
just doesn't work. Generating a word, for example, uses very specific
computational principles and can only be done if you are aware of the
context in which it is being generated (or "determined" as the
linguists would say). Even so, the general principle has been around
so long, that one could quite easily create several different methods
to create.Our stack is Python + Django on the backend, TypeScript + React on the frontend, but we’re more interested in working with people who are smart and capable than people from any particular background. If you have strong opinions about using different tech, we’ll hear you. Like most startups, we’re built on lots of open source tech and we plan on giving back. We value building a culture of inclusion and transparency. We care about diversity and hope you do too.
Feel free to reach out to me directly: eric at quotapath dot com
We’re looking for engineers to help us accelerate our development. If you’re interested in having a huge impact on a small team, this is a great opportunity. We’re well-funded, but we’re still only 9 people: 4 engineers, 1 designer and 4 others. I’m one of those 4 engineers, and I’m also the technical co-founder. Please ask me questions if you have any!
Our stack is Python + Django on the backend, TypeScript + React on the frontend, but we’re more interested in working with people who are smart and capable than people from any particular background. If you have strong opinions about using different tech, we’ll hear you. Like most startups, we’re built on lots of open source tech and we plan on giving back. We value building a culture of inclusion and transparency. We care about diversity and hope you do too.
Feel free to reach out to me directly: eric at quotapath dot com
Sales compensation plans can be shockingly complex. Too often, salespeople are forced to use unfriendly accounting software or to pass around buggy Excel spreadsheets. At QuotaPath, we’re solving this problem in a new way by creating a platform that’s built for salespeople, not accountants. Our business model is unique, both consumer-facing and B2B (“B2BC”; think Slack). Good UX and beautiful design are at the core of our process. The demand for a product like this is intense and we’re working as hard as we can to deliver features to eager users.
We’re looking for engineers to help us accelerate our development. If you’re interested in having a huge impact on a small team, this is a great opportunity. We’re well-funded, but we’re still only 9 people: 3 engineers, 1 UX and 4 others. I’m one of those 4 engineers, and I’m also the technical co-founder. Please ask me questions if you have any!
Our stack is Python + Django on the backend, TypeScript + React on the frontend, but we’re more interested in working with people who are smart and capable than people from any particular background. If you have strong opinions about using different tech, we’ll hear you. Like most startups, we’re built on lots of open source tech and we plan on giving back. We value building a culture of inclusion and transparency. We care about diversity and hope you do too.
Feel free to reach out to me directly: eric at quotapath dot com
Happy new year, y’all!
Sales compensation plans can be shockingly complex. Too often, salespeople are forced to use unfriendly accounting software or to pass around buggy Excel spreadsheets. At QuotaPath, we’re solving this problem in a new way by creating a platform that’s built for salespeople, not accountants. Our business model is unique, both consumer-facing and B2B (“B2BC”; think Slack). Good UX and beautiful design are at the core of our process. The demand for a product like this is intense and we’re working as hard as we can to deliver features to eager users.
We’re looking for engineers to help us accelerate our development. If you’re interested in having a huge impact on a small team, this is a great opportunity. We’re well-funded, but we’re still only 8 people: 3 engineers, 1 UX and 4 others. I’m one of those 3 engineers, and I’m also the technical co-founder. Please ask me questions if you have any!
Our stack is Python + Django on the backend, TypeScript + React on the frontend, but we’re more interested in working with people who are smart and capable than people from any particular background. If you have strong opinions about using different tech, we’ll hear you. Like most startups, we’re built on lots of open source tech and we plan on giving back. We value building a culture of inclusion and transparency. We care about diversity and hope you do too.
Feel free to reach out to me directly: eric at quotapath dot com
We're looking for engineers to help us accelerate our development as a product and as a company. If you're interested in having a huge impact on a small team, this is a great opportunity. We're well-funded, but we're still only 8 people: 3 engineers, 1 UX and 4 others in product and executive team. I'm one of those 3 engineers, and I'm also the technical co-founder. Please ask me questions if you have any!
Our stack is Python + Django on the backend, TypeScript + React on the frontend, but we're more interested in working with people who are smart and capable than people from any particular background. If you have strong opinions about using different tech, we'll hear you. Like most startups, we're built on lots of open source tech and we plan on giving back. We value building a culture of inclusion and transparency. We care about diversity and hope you do too.
Feel free to reach out to me directly: eric at quotapath dot com
(Please forgive if this is a repost! My original post seems to have disappeared)
At QuotaPath, we're solving this problem in a new way. We're creating a platform that's built for salespeople, not accountants. This means our business model is unique, both consumer-facing and B2B ("B2BC"; think Slack). Good UX and beautiful design are at the core of our process. The demand for a product like this is intense and we're working as hard as we can to deliver features to eager users.
We're looking for engineers to help us accelerate our development as a product and as a company. If you're interested in having a huge impact on a small team, this is a great opportunity. We're well-funded, but we're still only 8 people: 3 engineers, 1 UX and 4 others in product and executive team. I'm one of those 3 engineers, and I'm also the technical co-founder. Please ask me questions if you have any!
Our stack is Python + Django on the backend, TypeScript + React on the frontend, but we're more interested in working with people who are smart and capable than people from any particular background. If you have strong opinions about using different tech, we'll hear you. Like most startups, we're built on lots of open source tech and we plan on giving back. We value building a culture of inclusion and transparency. We care about diversity and hope you do too.
Feel free to reach out to me directly: eric at quotapath dot com
At QuotaPath, we're solving this problem in a new way. We're creating a platform that's built for salespeople, not accountants. This means our business model is unique, both consumer-facing and B2B ("B2BC"; think Slack). Good UX and beautiful design are at the core of our process. The demand for a product like this is intense and we're working as hard as we can to deliver features to eager users.
We're looking for engineers to help us accelerate our development as a product and as a company. If you're interested in having a huge impact on a small team, this is a great opportunity. We're well-funded, but we're still only 8 people: 3 engineers, 1 UX and 4 others in product and executive team. I'm one of those 3 engineers, and I'm also the technical co-founder. Please ask me questions if you have any!
Our stack is Python + Django on the backend, TypeScript + React on the frontend, but we're more interested in working with people who are smart and capable than people from any particular background. If you have strong opinions about using different tech, we'll hear you. Like most startups, we're built on lots of open source tech and we plan on giving back. We value building a culture of inclusion and transparency. We care about diversity and hope you do too.
Feel free to reach out to me directly: eric at quotapath dot com
I'm confused by something like this being an open question, and even more confused about why this debate isn't lighting up the electrical/computer engineering community as far as I can tell.
In case you're not persuaded that people who can afford to pay more taxes should pay a greater share, all of these things are valid reasons for the wealthy to kick in a lot more of their wealth, in relative and absolute terms, than other people.
Sales compensation plans can be shockingly complex. Too often, sales professionals are forced to use unfriendly accounting software from the web 1.0 era, or worse, to pass around Excel spreadsheets, without the ability to verify the calculations or understand how they work.
At QuotaPath, we're solving this problem in a new way. We're creating a platform that's built for salespeople, not accountants. This means our business model is unique, both consumer-facing and B2B ("B2BC"). Good UX and beautiful design are at the core of our process. The demand for a product like this is intense and we're working as hard as we can to deliver features to eager users.
We're looking for engineers to help us accelerate our development as a product and as a company. If you're interested in having a huge impact on a small team, this is a great opportunity. We're well-funded, but we're still only 6 people: 2 engineers, 1 UX and 3 others in product and executive team. I'm one of those 2 engineers, and I'm also the technical co-founder. Please ask me questions if you have any!
Our stack is Python + Django on the backend, TypeScript + React on the frontend, but we're more interested in working with people who are smart and capable than people from any particular background. If you have strong opinions about using different tech, we'll hear you. Like most startups, we're built on lots of open source tech and we plan on giving back. We value building a culture of inclusion and transparency. We care about diversity and hope you do too.
EDIT: feel free to reach out to me directly: eric at quotapath dot com
The original paper didn't receive the attention I thought it would, but I continue to think this is a fascinating result which has deep implications for machine learning and for linguistics.
1. Thompson sampling is great. It's intuitive and computationally tractable. The literature is full of other strategies, specifically semi-uniform strategies, but I strongly recommend using Thompson sampling if it works for your problem.
2. This is broadly true about ML, but for contextual bandits, most of the engineering work will probably be the feature engineering, not algorithm implementation. Plan accordingly. Choosing the right inputs in the first place makes a big difference. The hashing trick (a la sklearn's dictvectorizer) can make a huge difference.
3. It can be difficult to obtain organizational alignment on the intention of using reinforcement learning. Tell stakeholders early and often that you're using bandit algos to produce some kind of outcome — say, clicks or conversions — and not to do science which will uncover deep truths.
[0] along with an excellent data scientist and a team of excellent engineers, of course :)