What's the big deal, intuition on query-key-value vectors, multiple heads, multiple layers, and more.
21 May 2023  ·  8 min  ·  deeplearning nlp llm
It started with a question that had no clear answer, and led to eight PRs from the community.
Should chat be the main UX for LLMs? I don't think so and believe we can do better.
9 patterns including HITL, hard mining, reframing, cascade, data flywheel, business rules layer, and more.
23 Apr 2023  ·  20 min  ·  machinelearning engineering production recsys
Also, shortcomings in document retrieval and how to overcome them with search & recsys techniques.
09 Apr 2023  ·  14 min  ·  llm deeplearning learning 🛠
Asking LLMs to generate biographies to get a sense of how they memorize and regurgitate.
Writing good instructions to achieve high precision and throughput.
12 Mar 2023  ·  6 min  ·  datascience machinelearning mechanism
Collecting ground truth, data augmentation, cascading heuristics and models, and more.
26 Feb 2023  ·  16 min  ·  teardown machinelearning production
End of week debrief, weekly business review, monthly learning sessions, and quarter review.
05 Feb 2023  ·  7 min  ·  mechanism leadership
Pilot & copilot, literature review, methodology review, and timeboxing.
22 Jan 2023  ·  7 min  ·  mechanism machinelearning productivity
How to migrate and sync notes & images across devices
15 Jan 2023  ·  2 min  ·  til productivity
Seeking first to understand, earning trust, and preparing for away team work.
08 Jan 2023  ·  3 min  ·  leadership misc
Travelled, wrote, and learned a lot, L5 -> L6, gave a keynote at RecSyS, and started a meetup.
A quick overview of variational and denoising autoencoders and comparing them to diffusers.
11 Dec 2022  ·  3 min  ·  deeplearning
The fundamentals of text-to-image generation, relevant papers, and experimenting with DDPM.
27 Nov 2022  ·  19 min  ·  deeplearning nlp survey
My three favorite papers, 17 paper summaries, and ML and non-ML lessons.
02 Oct 2022  ·  14 min  ·  recsys engineering production
Or why I should write fewer integration tests.
04 Sep 2022  ·  19 min  ·  engineering machinelearning production ❤️
Pushing back on the cult of complexity.
14 Aug 2022  ·  7 min  ·  machinelearning engineering production 🔥
Some off-the-beaten uses of Python learned from reading libraries.
31 Jul 2022  ·  10 min  ·  python engineering 🔥
15 minutes a week to document your work, increase visibility, and earn trust.
26 Jun 2022  ·  4 min  ·  mechanism productivity career
Understanding and spotting patterns to use code and components as intended.
12 Jun 2022  ·  13 min  ·  machinelearning engineering python 🔥
Mindset, 100-day plan, and balancing learning and taking action to earn trust.
22 May 2022  ·  11 min  ·  mechanism career 🔥
Industry examples, exploration strategies, warm-starting, off-policy evaluation, and more.
08 May 2022  ·  14 min  ·  teardown recsys machinelearning
Introducing randomness and/or learning from inherent randomness to mitigate position bias.
17 Apr 2022  ·  7 min  ·  recsys datascience
Thinking about recsys as interventional vs. observational, and inverse propensity scoring.
10 Apr 2022  ·  8 min  ·  recsys datascience
How they differ and why they work better in different situations.
20 Mar 2022  ·  7 min  ·  engineering datascience misc
Hard-won lessons on how to start data science projects effectively.
06 Mar 2022  ·  7 min  ·  datascience engineering productivity
I'm heading into a team lead role and would like to define the vision and roadmap.
18 Feb 2022  ·  3 min  ·  leadership datascience career 📬
What to consider for in terms of data, roadmap, role, manager, tooling, etc.
13 Feb 2022  ·  8 min  ·  datascience career 🔥
Beyond getting that starting role, how does one continue growing in the field?
19 Jan 2022  ·  6 min  ·  learning career machinelearning
Met most of my goals, adopted a puppy, and built ApplyingML.com.
28 Nov 2021  ·  7 min  ·  productivity life
More than two dozen interviews with ML Practitioners sharing their stories and advice
25 Nov 2021  ·  1 min  ·  machinelearning datascience career 🛠
Susan shares 5 lessons she gained from writing online in public over the past year.
07 Nov 2021  ·  6 min  ·  writing
Write before you're ready, write for yourself, quantity over quality, and a few other lessons.
17 Oct 2021  ·  7 min  ·  writing
Simple baselines, ideas, tech stacks, and packages to try.
03 Oct 2021  ·  5 min  ·  recsys deeplearning production survey
Why this is the first rule, some baseline heuristics, and when to move on to machine learning.
19 Sep 2021  ·  8 min  ·  machinelearning career 🔥
Focusing on long-term rewards, exploration, and frequently updated item.
05 Sep 2021  ·  13 min  ·  teardown recsys deeplearning
How to generate labels from scratch with semi, active, and weakly supervised learning.
01 Aug 2021  ·  12 min  ·  teardown machinelearning datascience
Building semantic search; how to calculate recall when relevant documents are unknown.
20 Jul 2021  ·  1 min  ·  machinelearning 📬
Show them the data, the Socratic method, earning trust, and more.
04 Jul 2021  ·  9 min  ·  leadership career
Breaking it into offline vs. online environments, and candidate retrieval vs. ranking steps.
27 Jun 2021  ·  13 min  ·  teardown production engineering recsys 🔥
A whirlwind tour of bandits, embedding+MLP, sequences, graph, and user embeddings.
13 Jun 2021  ·  25 min  ·  teardown recsys machinelearning deeplearning
How to go from knowing machine learning to applying it at work to drive impact.
02 May 2021  ·  12 min  ·  machinelearning datascience ❤️
An overview and comparison of the various approaches, with examples from industry search systems.
25 Apr 2021  ·  21 min  ·  teardown machinelearning production 🔥
Even high achieving individuals experience impostor syndrome; here's how Susan learned to manage it.
18 Apr 2021  ·  8 min  ·  career life learning
More education, achievements, and awards don't shoo away imposter syndrome. Here's what might help.
11 Apr 2021  ·  9 min  ·  career life learning
What do you deeply care about? What do you excel at? Build a career out of that.
Short vs. long-term gain, incremental vs. disruptive innovation, and resume-driven development.
21 Mar 2021  ·  12 min  ·  datascience machinelearning leadership
I wish I started sooner. All have improved my life and several have compounding effects.
Pointers to think through your methodology and implementation, and the review process.
07 Mar 2021  ·  15 min  ·  writing machinelearning engineering
Three documents I write (one-pager, design doc, after-action review) and how I structure them.
28 Feb 2021  ·  10 min  ·  writing engineering productivity ❤️
Access, serving, integrity, convenience, autopilot; use what you need.
21 Feb 2021  ·  19 min  ·  teardown machinelearning engineering 🔥
What the top teams did to win the 36-hour data hackathon. No, not machine learning.
14 Feb 2021  ·  6 min  ·  datascience engineering misc
What I learned about hiring and training, and fostering innovation, discipline, and camaraderie.
31 Jan 2021  ·  16 min  ·  leadership datascience
Stop procrastinating, go off the happy path, learn just-in-time, and get your hands dirty.
24 Jan 2021  ·  9 min  ·  learning datascience 🔥
How to increase the chances of getting called up by recruiters?
16 Jan 2021  ·  5 min  ·  career datascience 📬
Why real-time? How have China & US companies built them? How to design & build an MVP?
10 Jan 2021  ·  21 min  ·  teardown machinelearning recsys production 🔥
A public roadmap to track and share my progress; nothing mission or work-related.
03 Jan 2021  ·  4 min  ·  productivity life
Wrapping up 2020 with writing and site statistics, graphs, and a word cloud.
20 Dec 2020  ·  8 min  ·  productivity life
A short story on flying daggers and life's challenges.
Time to clear the cache, evaluate existing processes, and start new threads.
06 Dec 2020  ·  4 min  ·  productivity life
How he switched from engineering to data science, what "senior" means, and how writing helps.
29 Nov 2020  ·  23 min  ·  career datascience writing
How did you set up your site and what's an easy way to replicate it?
Data cleaning, transfer learning, overfitting, ensembling, and more.
22 Nov 2020  ·  11 min  ·  machinelearning career life ❤️
Interview questions you should ask and how to evolve your job scope.
15 Nov 2020  ·  8 min  ·  datascience career
A personal take on their deliverables and skills, and what it means for the industry and your team.
08 Nov 2020  ·  11 min  ·  datascience machinelearning career
Setbacks she faced, overcoming them, and how writing changed her life.
01 Nov 2020  ·  11 min  ·  career machinelearning writing
What questions do they answer? How do they compare? What open-source solutions are available?
25 Oct 2020  ·  16 min  ·  teardown datascience engineering 🔥
DNS server snafus led to email & security issues. Also, limited free build minutes monthly.
21 Oct 2020  ·  3 min  ·  misc
Not 'How to build a data science portfolio', but 'Whys' and 'Whats'.
18 Oct 2020  ·  15 min  ·  datascience learning career
Step-by-step walkthrough on the environment, compilers, and installation for ScaNN.
14 Oct 2020  ·  3 min  ·  python machinelearning til
Building prototypes helped get buy-in when roadmaps & design docs failed.
11 Oct 2020  ·  7 min  ·  datascience productivity
As careers grow, how does the balance between writing & coding change? Hear from 4 tech leaders.
04 Oct 2020  ·  13 min  ·  writing career leadership
Emphasis on bias, more sequential models & bandits, robust offline evaluation, and recsys in the wild.
27 Sep 2020  ·  16 min  ·  recsys deeplearning production survey
What if the alternative was nothingness?
26 Sep 2020  ·  1 min  ·  life
For years I've refined my routines and found tools to manage my time. Here I share it with readers.
20 Sep 2020  ·  16 min  ·  productivity
My tools for organization and creation, autopilot routines, and Maker's schedule
13 Sep 2020  ·  11 min  ·  productivity
A step-by-step of how to migrate from json comments to Utterances.
Checking for correct implementation, expected learned behaviour, and satisfactory performance.
06 Sep 2020  ·  14 min  ·  machinelearning engineering python
Should I switch from a regex-based to ML-based solution on my application?
04 Sep 2020  ·  4 min  ·  machinelearning 📬
Why read papers, what papers to read, and how to read them.
30 Aug 2020  ·  6 min  ·  learning
Becoming a senior after three years and dealing with imposter syndrome.
27 Aug 2020  ·  2 min  ·  career datascience 📬
How not to become an expert beginner and to progress through beginner, intermediate, and so on.
Examining the broad strokes of NLP progress and comparing between models
16 Aug 2020  ·  23 min  ·  nlp deeplearning survey
Why (and why not) be more end-to-end, how to, and Stitch Fix and Netflix's experience
09 Aug 2020  ·  17 min  ·  datascience machinelearning leadership 🔥
Updating our FastAPI app to let users select options and download results.
05 Aug 2020  ·  3 min  ·  engineering python til
Surprising lessons I picked up from the best books, essays, and videos on writing non-fiction.
02 Aug 2020  ·  11 min  ·  learning writing ❤️
Why OMSCS? How can I get accepted? How much time needed? Did it help your career? And more...
I couldn't find any guides on serving HTML with FastAPI, thus I wrote this to plug the hole on the internet.
23 Jul 2020  ·  3 min  ·  engineering python til 🔥
Ever revisit a project & replicate the results the first time round? Me neither. Thus I adopted these habits.
19 Jul 2020  ·  12 min  ·  mechanism datascience productivity
It's not enough to have a good strategy and plan. Execution is just as important.
12 Jul 2020  ·  7 min  ·  mechanism datascience productivity
I wanted to add my recent writing to my GitHub Profile README but was too lazy to do manual updates.
11 Jul 2020  ·  3 min  ·  engineering python til
I thought giving it my all led to maximum outcomes; then I learnt about the 85% rule.
09 Jul 2020  ·  2 min  ·  productivity life ❤️
Part II of the previous write-up, this time on applications and frameworks of Spark in production
05 Jul 2020  ·  15 min  ·  machinelearning deeplearning spark production survey
Sharing my notes & practical knowledge from the conference for people who don't have the time.
28 Jun 2020  ·  11 min  ·  machinelearning deeplearning spark survey
After this article, we'll have a workflow of tests and checks that run automatically with each git push.
21 Jun 2020  ·  20 min  ·  engineering production python productivity 🔥
Does DS have business requirements? When does it make sense to split DS and DE??
21 Jun 2020  ·  3 min  ·  datascience 📬
A curious discussion made me realize my expert blind spot. And no, Airflow is not late.
17 Jun 2020  ·  3 min  ·  datascience engineering production til
Haste makes waste. Diving into a data science problem may not be the fastest route to getting it done.
15 Jun 2020  ·  12 min  ·  mechanism datascience productivity
Initially, I didn't like it. But over time, it grew on me. Here's why.
07 Jun 2020  ·  10 min  ·  mechanism agile leadership datascience
Crocker's Law, cognitive dissonance, and how to receive (uncomfortable) feedback better.
Can maintaining machine learning in production be easier? I go through some practical tips.
25 May 2020  ·  16 min  ·  machinelearning engineering production
I thought deploying machine learning was hard. Then I had to maintain multiple systems in prod.
18 May 2020  ·  14 min  ·  machinelearning engineering production
An expansion of my Twitter thread that went viral.
09 May 2020  ·  4 min  ·  writing
What I Learnt about evaluating ideas from first-hand participation in a hackathon.
03 May 2020  ·  7 min  ·  datascience lazada
What I learned about measuring diversity, novelty, surprise, and serendipity from 10+ papers.
Why you should give a talk and some tips from five years of speaking and hosting meet-ups.
18 Apr 2020  ·  7 min  ·  datascience writing
Should I join a start-up? Which offer should I accept? A simple metaphor to guide your decisions.
12 Apr 2020  ·  6 min  ·  career
Using a Zettelkasten helps you make connections between notes, improving learning and memory.
05 Apr 2020  ·  6 min  ·  writing learning productivity 🔥
Writing begins before actually writing; it's a cycle of reading -> note-taking -> writing.
Automate your experimentation workflow to minimize effort and iterate faster.
15 Mar 2020  ·  6 min  ·  datascience productivity python
How hard work, many failures, and a bit of luck got me into the field and up the ladder.
27 Feb 2020  ·  12 min  ·  career datascience lazada 🔥
Beating the baseline using Graph & NLP techniques on PyTorch, AUC improvement of ~21% (Part 2 of 2).
13 Jan 2020  ·  17 min  ·  recsys deeplearning nlp python 🛠
Building a baseline recsys based on data scraped off Amazon. Warning - Lots of charts! (Part 1 of 2).
06 Jan 2020  ·  14 min  ·  recsys deeplearning python 🛠
OMSCS CS6200 (Introduction to OS) - Moving data from one process to another, multi-threaded.
15 Dec 2019  ·  7 min  ·  omscs learning engineering
OMSCS CS6750 (Human Computer Interaction) - You are not your user! Or how to build great products.
Moving off wordpress and hosting for free on GitHub. And gaining full customization!
25 Aug 2019  ·  1 min  ·  misc
OMSCS CS6440 (Intro to Health Informatics) - A primer on key tech and standards in healthtech.
OMSCS CS7646 (Machine Learning for Trading) - Don't sell your house to trade algorithmically.
11 May 2019  ·  9 min  ·  omscs learning machinelearning python
No, you don't need a PhD or 10+ years of experience.
30 Apr 2019  ·  8 min  ·  career datascience
Taking the best from agile and modifying it to fit the data science process (Part 2 of 2).
02 Feb 2019  ·  14 min  ·  mechanism agile datascience productivity
A deeper look into the strengths and weaknesses of Agile in Data Science projects (Part 1 of 2).
26 Jan 2019  ·  13 min  ·  agile datascience productivity 🔥
OMSCS CS6601 (Artificial Intelligence) - First, start with the simplest solution, and then add intelligence.
20 Dec 2018  ·  8 min  ·  omscs learning machinelearning python
OMSCS CS6460 (Education Technology) - How to scale education widely through technology.
OMSCS CS7642 (Reinforcement Learning) - Landing rockets (fun!) via deep Q-Learning (and its variants).
30 Jul 2018  ·  6 min  ·  omscs learning deeplearning python
Culture >> Hierarchy, Process, Bureaucracy.
12 May 2018  ·  5 min  ·  leadership datascience lazada
OMSCS CS7641 (Machine Learning) - Revisiting the fundamentals and learning new techniques.
27 Dec 2017  ·  4 min  ·  omscs learning machinelearning python
How being a Lead / Manager is different from being an individual contributor.
25 Sep 2017  ·  5 min  ·  leadership datascience lazada
OMSCS CS6300 (Software Development Process) - Java and collaboratively developing an Android app.
13 Aug 2017  ·  5 min  ·  omscs learning engineering
Tools and skills to pick up, and how to practice them.
25 Jun 2017  ·  9 min  ·  datascience learning career
OMSCS CS6476 Computer Vision - Performing computer vision tasks with ONLY numpy.
15 May 2017  ·  5 min  ·  omscs learning deeplearning python
If things are not failing, you're not innovating enough. - Elon Musk
19 Feb 2017  ·  3 min  ·  leadership datascience lazada
Or how to put machine learning models into production.
13 Feb 2017  ·  8 min  ·  machinelearning production python 🛠
A web app to find similar products based on image.
14 Jan 2017  ·  4 min  ·  deeplearning python production 🛠
Cleaning up text and messing with ascii (urgh!)
11 Dec 2016  ·  8 min  ·  datascience machinelearning python 🛠
A simple web app to classify fashion images into Amazon categories.
27 Nov 2016  ·  2 min  ·  deeplearning python production 🛠
Got accepted into Georgia Tech's Computer Science Masters!
A card sorting game to discover youl passion by identifying skills you like and dislike.
Parsing json and formatting product titles and categories.
11 Oct 2016  ·  9 min  ·  datascience python 🛠
Learning Scala from Martin Odersky, father of Scala.
31 Jul 2016  ·  4 min  ·  learning
Guest post of how DataKind SG worked with NGOs to frame their problems and suggests solutions
17 Sep 2015  ·  8 min  ·  datascience
167 posts, 297,852 words, and countless hours.
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