May 2, 2015

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:

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:

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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