Erik Bernhardsson

How hard can it be to compute conversion rate?

I’ve read about 100 management books by now but if there’s something that always bothered me it’s the lack of first principles thinking.

I was reading yet another blog post titled “Why our team moved from <language X> to <language Y>” (I forgot which one) and I started wondering if you can generalize it a bit.

I just realized last Thursday that I have spent two full years at Better, incidentally on the same day as we announced a $15M round led by Kleiner Perkins.

Here’s a fun analysis that I did of the pitch (aka. frequency) of various languages.

This is a pretty dumb post, in which I argue that functional programming has a lot of the bad parts of libertarianism and a lot of the good parts: Both ideologies strive to eliminate [the] state.

As a project evolves, does the new code just add on top of the old code?

This blog post Data sets are the new server rooms makes the point that a bunch of companies raise a ton of money to go get really proprietary awesome data as a competitive moat.

Pareto efficiency is a useful concept I like to think about.

I generally haven’t written much about software architecture.

I joined Spotify in 2008 to focus on machine learning and music recommendations.

Why does it suck to wait for things?

As you may know, one of my (very geeky) interests is Approximate nearest neigbor methods, and I’m the author of a Python package called Annoy.

I’ve been trying to learn Clojure.

(I accidentally published an unfinished draft of this post a few days ago – sorry about that).

One of my favorite business hobbies is to reduce some nasty decision down to its absolute core objective, decide the most basic strategy, and then add more and more modifications as you have to confront the complexity of reality (yes I have very lame hobb…

Apparently MTA (the company running the NYC subway) has a real-time API.

I do a lot of recruiting and have given maybe 50 offers in my career.

(This is not a very relevant/useful post for regular readers – feel free to skip.

Here’s a conclusion I’ve made building consumer products for many years: the speed at which a company innovates is limited by its iteration speed.

I’ve been spending several hundred bucks renting GPU instances on AWS over the last year.

My blog post about fonts generated lots of traffic – it landed on Hacker News, took down my site while I was sleeping, and then obviously vanished from HN before I woke up.

For some reason I decided one night I wanted to get a bunch of fonts.

The easiest way to be a 10x engineer is to make 10 other engineers 2x more efficient.

Early last year when I left Spotify I decided to do more reading.

I’ve been obsessed with how to iterate quickly based on small scale feedback lately.

(Warning: super speculative, feel free to ignore) As Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”.

Curious about Google’s newly released TensorFlow?

I haven’t mentioned what I’m currently up to.

The other day I was looking at marketing spend broken down by channel and wanted to compute some simple uncertainty estimates.

I was featured in Peadar Coyle’s interview series interviewing various “data scientists” – which is kind of arguable since (a) all the other ppl in that series are much cooler than me (b) I’m not really a data scientist.

This is another post based on my talk at NYC Machine Learning.

This is a blog post rewritten from a presentation at NYC Machine Learning on Sep 17.

This is a blog post rewritten from a presentation at NYC Machine Learning last week.

A couple of people in my old team have been around talking about how Spotify does music recommendations and put together some quite good presentations.

I was playing around with D3 last night and built a silly visualization of antipodes and how our intuitive understanding of the world sometimes doesn’t make sense.

Every once in a while when talking to smart people the topic of automation comes up.

Here’s a problem that I used to give to candidates.

Annoy is a library written by me that supports fast approximate nearest neighbor queries.

The workflow engine battle has intensified with some more interesting entries lately!

I have spent some time lately with D3.

Note: this post is full of pseudo-psychology and highly speculative content.

Saw this link on Hacker News the other day: The Highway Lane Next to Yours Isn’t Really Moving Any Faster The article describes a phenomenon unique to traffic where cars spread out when they go fast and get more compact when they go slow.

Sometimes you have these awesome insights.

Annoy is a C++/Python package I built for fast approximate nearest neighbor search in high dimensional spaces.

I just pinged a few million random IP addresses from my apartment in NYC.

There’s a bunch of companies working on machine learning as a service.

As noted by multiple tweets, my previous post describes a phenomenon denoted Berkson’s paradox.

I saw a bunch of tweets over the weekend about Peter Norvig claiming there’s a negative correlation between being good at programming competitions and being good at the job.

Pinterest just open sourced Pinball which seems like an interesting Luigi alternative.