Don’t Use Bandits. Multi-armed bandit testing is very popular these days, but it’s critically important that it be applied correctly. Chris Stucchio does a great job of summing up some of the caveats that needs to be kept in mind when applying bandit algorithms. Jeff Carter postulates that large banks can and should be replaced by […]
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Chartbeat Engineering internally came up with a set of best practices on naming things (watch for a future blog post on this!). Here’s a follow up that points out that tests need sane names too. SoundCloud published details on their open-source service monitoring system, Prometheus, which is doing some interesting stuff with multi-dimensional querying. The […]
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Good to know that simple, easy to guess passwords are tapering off. Still shocking to see passwords such as “12345” or “qwerty” are still common. This is the weekly puzzle at io9. They ask a couple variations of the “two jugs sizes 3 gallons and 5 gallons, and you want to measure out 4 gallons […]
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Think of the boy bands when scheduling your developer conference. Really awesome overview of different TCP implementations. ‘Why Clojure?’ answered by a Pythoneer. Immutability encourages pushing application state to the db, the REPL and clojure class loader, and benefits of the JVM. Chartbeat has traditionally been predominantly a Python shop, but we’re introducing Clojure in […]
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Welcome back! This Weekliest Links is a doozy, including some things we read over break. Get yourself a cistern of coffee and cozy up to a blazing fire if you’re getting the same chill we are in NYC and check ’em out: “[Haskell] is the most advanced of the obsolete languages,” starts Gerald Sussman in We […]
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Given a list of thousands of patterns and a text string, how fast can you find matches in the text? This is the problem you need to solve if you want do basic robot-traffic filtering in real time using a list of known robots and browsers. We did this at Chartbeat as part of the […]
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There’s a funny saying I recently came across about statisticians: A statistician is someone who knows that 4 is sometimes equal to 7. Besides being incredibly geeky — and, let’s face it, kind of stupid — this underlies a very fundamental concept in the data sciences: any quantity we measure is drawn from a distribution. […]
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We’ve been ramping up our use of Riak, so coming across Charlie von Metzradt of Graphite telling us How to use Riak Incorrectly was incredibly useful. ECMAScript 6 modules! Looking forward to the future of JavaScript? So are we! Take an early look at what the module syntax will look like in ES6. Get prepared early, and maybe […]
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Scott Murray’s D3 Tutorials are so good that he eventually turned them into a book. Luckily for you, he kept the originals up on the web. An Engineer’s Guide to Stock Options by Alex MacCaw breaks down what every engineer should know. You say you’re clustering data but don’t know how many clusters to expect? Applying a […]
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Opinionated AngularJS styleguide for teams – Angular style and architecture are evolving constantly but this is a very reasonable approach and guide from Todd Motto, with excellent justifications for each decision. Revolutionary Technique That Quietly Changed Machine Vision Forever – Deep neural networks are steadily marching toward dominance when measured by their performance in image recognition competitions, and the […]
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