Notes, links and comments, May 2, 2015
I’m going to be out-of-sorts this week, due to a colonoscopy. (Between the prep, the procedure, and the recovery, that’s a multi-day disablement.) In the interim, here’s a collection of links, quick comments and the like.
1. Are you an engineer considering a start-up? This post is for you. It’s based on my long experience in and around such scenarios, and includes a section on “Deadly yet common mistakes”.
2. There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding the business model at my clients Databricks. Indeed, my own understanding of Databricks’ on-premises business has changed recently. There are no changes in my beliefs that:
- Databricks does not directly license or support on-premises Spark users. Rather …
- … it helps partner companies to do so, where:
- Examples of partner companies include usual-suspect Hadoop distribution vendors, and DataStax.
- “Help” commonly includes higher-level support.
However, I now get the impression that revenue from such relationships is a bigger deal to Databricks than I previously thought.
Databricks, by the way, has grown to >50 people.
3. DJ Patil and Ruslan Belkin apparently had a great session on lessons learned, covering a lot of ground. Many of the points are worth reading, but one in particular echoed something I’m hearing lots of places — “Data is super messy, and data cleanup will always be literally 80% of the work.” Actually, I’d replace the “always” by something like “very often”, and even that mainly for newish warehouses, data marts or datasets. But directionally the comment makes a whole lot of sense.
4. Of course, dirty data is a particular problem when the data is free-text.
5. In 2010 I wrote that the use of textual news information in investment algorithms had become “more common”. It’s become a bigger deal since. For example:
- It seems to be quite profitable to do automated options trading based on the parsing of tweets.
- In a funny example, Tesla motors stock gyrated due to Tesla’s April Fool’s press release about a new wristwatch product.
6. Sometimes a post here gets a comment thread so rich it’s worth doubling back to see what other folks added. I think the recent geek-out on indexes is one such case. Good stuff was added by multiple smart people.
7. Finally, I’ve been banging the drum for electronic health records for a long time, arguing that the great difficulties should be solved due to the great benefits of doing so. The Hacker News/New York Times combo offers a good recent discussion of the subject.
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