NYC Data #359: Spatial Data Science Conference, The Pudding, Braze, The Daily Beast, Replit on Building AI Products, Tempus, MixBook, Vicki Boykis on Embeddings
And the sun will soon set on the British Empire!
Hi friends, Summer is over and in my home, it’s US Open season! The Open actually has a fun stats page they update nightly. I think the big difference between the Men’s and Women’s games right now (from a spectator’s perspective) is that there are 3x as many aces on the Men’s side, and ~73% of points are won by the server if the first serve is in (compared to ~65% for women).
As always, help me keep this space up-to-date: please send me posts, events, and job openings. If you know someone who might enjoy or benefit from this newsletter, please share it with them. [image credit: Karsten Moran / The New York Times]
Good Local Posts
Vicki Boykis just wrote an addendum to her opus on embeddings. A great way to take a step back and see how the techniques that underlie modern NLP and LLMs have evolved. I learned a lot reading this, and I find ‘Matryoshka Representation Learning’ a very charming name for a cool concept!
Gian Segato of Replit wrote about Building AI Products In The Probabilistic Era, which challenges some assumptions about how we should think about building software with AI. Like many people, I’m still wrapping my head around many of these concepts. I feel like Gian is several steps ahead here and I’m planning to come back to this one again after I digest what it means to ‘transition from engineering to empiricism’ in software design.
MongoDB has made a Chatbot Demo Builder available in their Atlas Search Playground. Their example: an interactive Manhattan guide!
Upcoming In-Person Events (new listings in bold)
9/8: Building Scalable Systems with ClickHouse & Docker
9/9: Got Data, Now What? Storytelling Through Accessible Design
9/17: MongoDB.local NYC
9/18: Data Management Summit
9/19: Cornell University Artificial Intelligence Investing Conference
9/21 - 9/28: Climate Week NYC
9/25: What's the Big Deal with Postgres?
9/29 - 10/3: MLCon
10/14 - 10/15: Spatial Data Science Conference
10/22: Introduction to Analysis of Public Survey Data
Open Roles
Squarespace is hiring Data Engineers.
The New York City Criminal Justice Agency is looking for a Senior Data Scientist.
Tempus is also looking for a Senior Data Scientist.
Mixbook is seeking a Vice President, Data.
Noise Labs is hiring a Senior Machine Learning Engineer.
Braze is looking for a Staff Engineer, Data.
The Daily Beast is hiring an Editorial Data Analyst.
Miscellany
Technically, the sun still never sets on the British Empire, but since the UK government agreed to hand over sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, it will soon (for the first time in hundreds of years). Fun trivia I came across via Hacker News.
Alvin Chang of The Pudding has a wonderful interactive about a study which matched people to have 30 minute discussions. Click on the avatars to learn a bit about the individuals!
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