Technical reasoning bolsters cumulative technological culture through convergent transformations
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abl7446 Understanding the evolution of human technology is key to solving the mystery of our origins. Current theories propose that technology evolved through the accumulation of modifications that were mostly transmitted between individuals by blind copying and the selective retention of advantageous variations. An alternative account is that high-fidelity transmission...
Knowledge about others reduces one’s own sense of anonymity
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04452-3 Social ties often seem symmetric, but they need not be1,2,3,4,5. For example, a person might know a stranger better than the stranger knows them. We explored whether people overlook these asymmetries and what consequences that might have for people’s perceptions and actions. Here we show that when people know...
Buliding for the 99% developers
https://future.com/software-development-building-for-99-developers The common theme in these conversations, even bigger than the need for the product we were building, was an overarching need that is currently underserved: building for real developers, or what I like to call the 99% Developers. These are developers who are getting work done outside of the...
The transmission game: Testing behavioral interventions in a pandemic-like simulation
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abk0428 During pandemics, effective nonpharmaceutical interventions encourage people to adjust their behavior in fast-changing environments in which exponential dynamics aggravate the conflict between the individual benefits of risk-taking and its social costs. Policy-makers need to know which interventions are most likely to promote socially advantageous behaviors. We designed a tool...
Sequential consumer choice as multi-cued retrieval
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abl9754 Whether adding songs to a playlist or groceries during an online shop, how do we decide what to choose next? We develop a model that predicts such open-ended, sequential choices using a process of cued retrieval from long-term memory. Using the past choice to cue subsequent retrievals, this model...
Behavioral consistency in the digital age
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09567976211040491 Efforts to infer personality from digital footprints have focused on behavioral stability at the trait level without considering situational dependency. We repeated a classic study of intraindividual consistency with secondary data (five data sets) containing 28,692 days of smartphone usage from 780 people. Using per-app measures of pickup frequency...
Red flags to look out for when joining a data team
https://eugeneyan.com/writing/red-flags/ Data: No data, or data that’s poorly organized and/or inaccessible. Without basic data infra in place, a data scientist would face an uphill battle trying to contribute value via analytics or machine learning. Most will likely be frustrated with the grind of data acquisition, organization, cataloging, and building pipelines....
Everything I've learned about recruiting and interviewing
https://kellblog.com/2022/02/16/everything-ive-learned-about-recruiting-and-interviewing/ Thoughts on The Recruiting Process Know what you’re looking for. Most troubles begin here because people fail to ponder and debate what they are actually looking for, so you do the equivalent of walking into Costco without a shopping list. You should know the answers to these questions; keep...
How to be a 10x software engineer
https://michaellin.substack.com/p/how-to-be-a-10x-software-engineer The difference between the best engineers and junior engineers boils down to an issue of mindset. They use the right tools, ask the right questions, and know how to prioritize. Skills that have little to do with coding that even non-technical people can develop. 1. Not investigating tooling enough...
Algorithms tour: How data science is woven into the fabric of Stitch Fix
https://algorithms-tour.stitchfix.com/ The Data Platform team provides the data and compute infrastructure—along with a collection of internal SaaS products—that allow the vertically-aligned data scientists to effectively and efficiently carry out analysis, write their algorithms, and put them into production. The platform nicely encapsulates properties like data distribution, parallelization, auto-scaling, failover, etc....
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a collection of excerpts from interesting research, blogs, events, etc...