Editor's Picks

• Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math? [200+ comments]
  Do you have any special math books that you hold close to your heart because of the value they delivered specifically to you and your mathematical thinking and skills?...

• Data is Rectangular and other Limiting Misconceptions
  In software we express our ideas through tools. In data, those tools think in rectangles. From spreadsheets to the data warehouses, to do any analytical calculation, you must first go through a rectangle. Forcing data through a rectangle shapes the way we solve problems (for example, dimensional fact tables, OLAP Cubes)...But really, most data isn’t rectangular. Most data exists in hierarchies (orders, items, products, users). Most query results are better returned as a hierarchy (category, brand, product). Can we escape the rectangle?...

• What Do NLP Researchers Believe? Results of the NLP Community Metasurvey [YouTube Video]
  I will present the results of the NLP Community Metasurvey (nlpsurvey.net). This was a questionnaire that we ran from May to June 2022 which elicited the opinions of NLP researchers on controversial issues, including industry influence in the field, concerns about AGI, and ethics. Our results put concrete numbers to several controversies....

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Data Science Articles & Videos

• My journey from R to Julia
  For 15 years I taught “Applied Epidemiology using R” at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health...I started dabbling in Python...but eventually I discovered Julia—a programming language designed for scientific computing with the intuition of Python or R, but with the speed of C++. I fell in love with Julia and I gave up on learning Python...As I learned more Julia, I became convinced that for me learning Julia was a better long term investment than sticking with R...

• Finding Modes and Antimodes
  How can I find the least frequent value (antimode) between 2 modes in a bimodal distribution?...One option is to use kernel density estimation KDE...

• Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out. [YouTube Vide]
  Andrej Karpathy...builds a Generatively Pretrained Transformer (GPT), following the paper "Attention is All You Need" and OpenAI's GPT-2 / GPT-3. We talk about connections to ChatGPT, which has taken the world by storm. We watch GitHub Copilot, itself a GPT, help us write a GPT (meta :D!)...

• Pretraining quadrupeds: a case study in RL as an engineering tool
  How an unlikely corner of robotics research, locomotion, defined RL's new notion of success...This article’s goal is to try and shift the narrative around what success is in RL: how we don’t need to be talking about AGI, how RL can be used to solve specific problems like robotic locomotion, and how we should react to future examples of RL’s success...

• The State of Data Testing
  You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t believe that it’s important to test your data, especially given the increased reliance on data to drive decision-making at companies. Data must be well-tested, accurate, and reliable, but all too often, data is broken, incorrect, and untested...This guide to data testing hopes to change that. We’ll cover the current state of data testing and bring the Datafold view on what data testing should look like with Data -Diff, to ensure your pipelines run smoothly through automated and proactive data testing...

• Deep Learning Tuning Playbook
  A playbook for systematically maximizing the performance of deep learning models...

• Data Stack Designer: Build your data stack
  Discover and build your data stack. Select individual tools to learn more about them, and add them to your stack to visualize them all...

• Bag of Tricks for Optimizing Machine Learning Training Pipelines
  In this post, we will share some of the techniques we use to speed up training, improve the machine learning engineer experience, and keep costs under control...

• Large Transformer Model Inference Optimization
  In this post, we will look into several approaches for making transformer inference more efficient. Some are general network compression methods, while others are specific to transformer architecture...

• Which GPU(s) to Get for Deep Learning: My Experience and Advice for Using GPUs in Deep Learning
  What features are important if you want to buy a new GPU? GPU RAM, cores, tensor cores, caches? How to make a cost-efficient choice? This blog post will delve into these questions, tackle common misconceptions, give you an intuitive understanding of how to think about GPUs, and will lend you advice, which will help you to make a choice that is right for you...

• Google Research, 2022 & Beyond: Language, Vision and Generative Models
  With this post, I am kicking off a series in which researchers across Google will highlight some exciting progress we've made in 2022 and present our vision for 2023 and beyond. I will begin with a discussion of language, computer vision, multi-modal models, and generative machine learning models. Over the next several weeks, we will discuss novel developments in research topics ranging from responsible AI to algorithms and computer systems to science, health and robotics...

• Welcome to the jungle, we got fun and frames
  I’m still in the early stages of a project and doing data analysis on the input data, a dump of 10GB from Goodreads in JSON...When I tried to use read_json in Pandas, the kernel took over 2 minutes just to read the data in. Actually, initially I wasn’t sure if it would even be able to read the entire file, and I’d need to read it in again and again during the exploration process, so this wasn’t an optimal way to go...But to understand the performance constraints, I had to go pretty deep into the Pandas ecosystem...

Tool*

• Diff up to 4 experiments
• Review model predictions across experiments with built-in visualizations
• Save models to a model registry

Jobs

• Data Scientist / Machine Learning Engineer - Epsilon - NYC
  
  Epsilon Strategy and Insights, Data Sciences team is looking for a talented team player in a Data Scientist/Machine Learning Engineer role. You are an expert, mentor and advocate. You have strong machine learning and deep learning background and are passionate about transforming data into ml models. You welcome the challenge of data science and are proficient in Python, Spark MLLib, Tensorflow, Keras, ML algorithms and Deep Neural Networks, Big Data. You must be self-driven, take initiative and want to work in a dynamic, busy and innovative group...
   

Training & Resources

• Resources for Learning Computational Complexity Theory
  Computational complexity theory studies the feasibility of solving and resources required to solve computational problems and is useful to any field that thinks about the analysis and design of algorithms (which is much more broad than one may first think). While there are a good bit of notes and lectures available online, these are scattered across university course pages, YouTube, etc. This guide aims to bring this material together for learning computational complexity theory at the introductory graduate level, especially for those without a formal CS background...

• What's one recent Human-AI Interaction Design paper you found most inspiring? [Twitter Thread]
  I'm updating the reading list for my "Human-AI Interaction Design" course. Too many great reads to fit into a syllabus!...

• How much SQL do I need to know? [Reddit Discussion]
  If the only other programming language that I know is python, then how much SQL do I need to be good at which would be sufficient for a entry level job in any data science role?...

Last Week's Newsletter's 3 Most Clicked Links

• The Economics of Maps

• Bringing "balance" to your data

• Cinematic Techniques in Narrative Visualization

Cutting Room Floor

• Machine Learning: The Boring Parts
• Has ML become synonymous with AI? [Reddit Discussion]
• Bayesian statistics and machine learning: How do they differ?