pskomoroch

This is video of the San Francisco School Board renaming committee making a decision to rename Sanchez Elementary School. They researched the wrong Sanchez.

In the Google Sheet of renaming recommendations, they put a Wikipedia link to José Bernardo Sánchez, a Spanish missionary who in 1806 accompanied a military expedition against the Californian indigenous peoples.

Sanchez Elementary School was named for Sanchez Street in San Francisco, which in turn was named after Francisco Sanchez. Francisco Sanchez was Mexican, born in San Jose when California was still part of Mexico. He died in 1846 and is buried at Mission Dolores near the school in San Francisco.

SFUSD reports the student body at Sanchez Elementary is 81% Hispanic with many students whose primary language is Spanish. Sanchez is one of the few schools in SF with a name tied to Mexican heritage.

Written by a Slack and Microsoft competitor. Teams is still in preview, and the developer platform w/ 3rd party integrations hasn't even launched.

https://blogs.office.com/2016/11/02/introducing-microsoft-te...

Q. When will Microsoft Teams roll out broadly to all eligible Office 365 customers?

A. Microsoft Teams is available in preview to eligible Office 365 commercial customers beginning November 2, 2016. We expect the service to become generally available in the first quarter of calendar year 2017.

Good overview, similar to the year in review conclusions here: https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/2016-bots-year-in-review

Weird, I hit this exact error 2 weeks ago

Isn't it bad form to post email correspondence like this? Will this make founders uncomfortable communicating with you in the future?

"90% of the world is using Excel and similar tools to analyze and visualize their data."

These types of statements always prompt me to ask "what is the specific problem you are trying to solve?". Replacing Excel? What is the unique advantage beyond a different UI? I think the real product challenge here is identifying why using a different UI or tool would have ROI for the average business user the author is describing. If it doesn't, why would they switch? What is your startup's tool going to do to increase my profits and justify the investment and switching cost?

I've often found it is the analyst and approach, not the tools that make a huge difference on these problems, and for those who care deeply about tools there are many open source options (R, SciPy, etc). Creating more generic "small data" tools runs the risk of solving a problem customers don't have.

If anyone has topics they'd like to hear more about in the talk, post them here and I'll try to cover them.

Just to clarify, you have from Friday 11/11 until Monday 11/14 to submit an app (3 days). It doesn't have to use LinkedIn data or APIs, anything that helps veterans is fair game. The judging will be on Nov 29th where celebrity tech judges will give away MacBook airs, iPads, etc.

Happy to help with any pointers to veterans data or hack ideas.

Here's a link to a few infochimps veterans datasets:

http://www.infochimps.com/datasets/veterans-benefits-expendi... http://www.infochimps.com/datasets/national-defense-outlays-... http://www.infochimps.com/datasets/veterans-by-sex-race-and-... http://www.infochimps.com/datasets/veterans-by-sex-period-of...

Blog post explaining more here:

http://blog.linkedin.com/2011/11/07/veterans/

Stay tuned for more links to datasets, APIS, etc.

+1 for Driven Developer-Driven Development. This works with small teams where each contributor has a solid track record, or with a group that has worked well together in the past. Open source projects can get by with a few bad apples as long as the core contributors are solid. I think you can use this model within small companies, but only if you are confident in the reliability and talent of each team member.

If some percentage of your team is unreliable, requires training, or likes to do their own thing (unavoidable at larger companies) - this can backfire.

If the team has signed up for a goal or deadline, the vision bit is important - it can be difficult to keep a loose team of rock stars on target without some structure.

Free sodas freshman year. Chem lab + NaCl + soda machine + Russian roomate.

Agreed "Create more value than you capture" (Tim O'Reilly) is the thing to strive for

There is a "message" button on each github user page.

I just sent this to a few people (including someone who had forked one of my projects and added their S3 keys to a config file):

Noticed you have your Amazon S3 keys out in the open on github. You might want to remove those config files from your repository as described in the thread here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1574211

-Pete

Glad Russell wrote this up, he has been doing some cool things with Pig, Voldemort, & Ruby lately.

LinkedIn - Mountain View, CA

I'm hiring a team to help develop a new user-facing Data Product built on top of LinkedIn's massive dataset of 65 million member profiles, connection graph, recommendations, company database, and other rich information sources - both internal and external. I described a bit about what it is like working on our team earlier this month on the LinkedIn blog: http://blog.linkedin.com/2010/04/20/linkedin-data-scientist-...

To accelerate the application process, feel free to ping me directly (info in my HN profile).

* Senior Software Engineer - Analytics Applications http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=937403

Front end engineer working directly with me & the Data team. You will be wiring up an application and UI that serves millions of users, pulling data from sources like Voldemort and relational databases. Looking for solid developers who can quickly crank out a solid web app in Java, Rails, or Django. Should be someone who iterates quickly and thinks about scale. Interest in information design / interaction is a plus.

* Site Operations Engineer (Ruby on Rails) http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=902262

Another role that might be of interest to HN readers: You will work closely with the Light Engineering Development team to configure, deploy, and monitor production-ready applications using any or many of: apache, nginx, memcached, mongrel, thin, Passenger Phusion, rabbitmq, redis, sphinx, and anything else it takes to get the job done.

We also need more data scientists to focus on the machine learning algorithms & statistical processing behind this and other similar products we have in the works. Experience with things like Hadoop, Mechanical Turk, & Info Retrieval a plus:

* Senior Software Engineer, Information Extraction http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=923006

* Senior Data Scientist http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=944162

+1

To get the spirit of many of these techniques with practical examples in python using numpy/scipy check out the book "Machine Learning: An Algorithmic Perspective" by Stephen Marsland. It doesn't have the mathematical depth or proofs found in these other books, but the code is decent and will get you started doing some basic data analysis.

http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Algorithmic-Perspecti...

Code here: http://www-ist.massey.ac.nz/smarsland/MLbook.html

Nice lists, I often recommend these for people who want an introduction to the field:

"Mathematical Statistics and Data Analysis" by John A. Rice

"All of Statistics: A Concise Course in Statistics" by Larry Wasserman

"Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" by Christopher M. Bishop

"The Elements of Statistical Learning" by T. Hastie et al http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/

"Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms", David McKay http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.html

"Introduction to Information Retrieval" - Manning et al. http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/information-retrieval-book.h...

"The Algorithm Design Manual, 2nd Edition" - Steven Skiena http://www.algorist.com/

Full comment (in case link no longer works):

"Their children were twin girls. Born over one year ago. Severely premature: 24 weeks gestation. Severely disabled. Require 24-hour nursing care for their entire lives. Cannot eat, and will be on feeding tubes for the rest of their lives. Constant medical treatment and medical crises. Maybe someday they will walk. Maybe not. They will never really talk. The financial pressures on this couple were severe: they had already used up all insurance benefit limits, and burnt through their own personal savings with their retirement savings following rapidly. We should put the blame for Sam's death where it belongs. We have the technology to keep little girls like that alive. We have a society that pretty much insists upon doing so. But we put the financial and organizational and emotional burden entirely on the parents. We allow insurance companies to cap benefits, and we have no social system for rescuing people from these straights until they are literally homeless and bereft"

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=84311...

The Analytics Engineering team at LinkedIn is looking for engineers to work on Hadoop, Project Voldemort, and the A/B Platform:

http://bit.ly/hadoop-linkedin

The real world Lisp/Clojure + Hadoop approach is definitely fun to hear about. Also interesting to see a YCombinator team with 8+ people including a domain expert. Mashing up 4+ messy data sources is tough to do. Very unconventional on many fronts.

An “in the trenches” interview on building a machine learning application with Rails & Hadoop. During the interview on FlightCaster, Brad describes some of the challenges of working with flight data, statistical approaches for flight prediction, false negatives in FlightCaster, Clojure, Hadoop & Amazon EC2, YCombinator, and more. Was pleasantly surprised at how open Brad was about the model internals and data crunching pitfalls.

We're just using a single c1.medium instance for the database right now. Trendingtopics.org is a relatively low traffic, read-only site and most of the reads are for a handful of urls on the front page which can be cached.

Also, after processing the raw log data with Hadoop, we only need to store/lookup 3M records in the MySQL presentation layer, which is well within the capabilities of a tuned RDBMS. Many Rails sites are backed by MySQL, so I thought linking Hadoop/Hive to a common data workflow would make for a good example.

I've been hearing that recent improvements to HBase 0.20 could make it a contender: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1022150/is-hbase-stable-a... and some high volume sites like Mahalo are already using it. That said, there are other alternative data stores (Cassandra, Voldemort, Tokyo Tyrant) that might be worth exploring if a database isn't cutting it for you.

The live site trendingtopics.org is using MySQL for all 3 million articles and it handles it pretty well with the right indexing, bulk loads, and memcached. I built the initial demo in 10 days, so I choose Rails w/ MySQL mostly for simplicity and with the intention of adding Solr or Sphinx search. The way the data is stored (key value style w/ JSON timelines) was actually intended to lend itself to replacing MySQL with another fast big-table like datastore.

Related blog post here: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2009/07/31/tracking-trends-with...

Full source code on Github: http://github.com/datawrangling/trendingtopics/tree/master

Dataset on Amazon Public Data Sets: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...

Agreed. I see this type of graph all over the place lately, along with versions that have lines connecting the slices.

If a story or insight doesn't immediately jump out from your graph, you are doing it wrong.

In that case, there is nothing really cloud specific here... you just need to build a standard web app or web service that accepts user input and runs some calculations in the background. Any Rails or Django tutorial will be a good start. If you expect large jobs that require a lot of number crunching in the background then running jobs in batches with Hadoop or MPI are good options. In Rails, you can use delayed_job, SQS, or any of the other work queue systems out there to handle the background tasks.

What do you mean by "billed to me"? Do you mean you pay for the costs of user's computations, or users pay you to compute an answer?

This feature is really underutilized. I render these bootscripts on the fly with ERB to bootstrap clusters on EC2 with a few config vars, the script then determines node type at boot from the security group then pulls full source code from github, which handles mounting drives, NFS, etc.