Adversarial Learning

Adversarial Restarting Mar 20, 2023

It's been a couple of years, so Joel and Andrew catch up on what's new in life and in data science.

Adversarial Distancing, Episode 4: Joel's Fizz Buzz Book Aug 06, 2020

It turns out Joel wrote another book: Ten Essays on Fizz Buzz (Quarantine does strange things to a person.)
In this episode Andrew and Joel discuss Fizz Buzz, what makes the book interesting, the value of deconstructing problems in different ways, Joel's side career in acting, why fluffy talks are easier to write than technical talks, the importance of staying fresh, whether "blocklist admin" is the job of the future, Minecraft classes, and how the quarantine is affecting our kids.
Please listen to it.

Adversarial Distancing, Episode 3: Two Conversations with Jowanza Jun 15, 2020

About a month ago we recorded a podcast with Jowanza Joseph about engineering and COVID-19 and other mundane topics.
While I (Joel) was procrastinating on editing it, a lot happened in the world. And then Jowanza wrote a blog post about his experiences with racism and how they've affected his life.
Which made it feel really weird to just put out an episode with him that doesn't mention any of these issues. So the three of us went back into the (metaphorical) studio and recorded another episode mostly about his blog post, about racism, and about the state of the world. (As always, we are incapable of staying 100% on-topic, but we did pretty good.)
These aren't necessarily easy topics to discuss, but I think we did a respectful job of it, and I hope you find it interesting and worthwhile. The original podcast episode follows the new one, so you get two episodes in one.
Please listen to it.

Adversarial Distancing - Episode 2 May 16, 2020

Joel and Andrew break quarantine (metaphorically) to discuss treehouses, remote work, distance schooling, outschool.com, Joel's attempt to teach his daughter Python, old-school text adventures, socially-distanced eating, the Twitter UI, what happens to school in the fall, OKRs, and whether we should keep the economy closed or re-open it and kill people.

Please listen to it.

Adversarial Distancing - Episode 1 Mar 22, 2020

in which Joel and Andrew briefly break quarantine to talk about Covid-19, social distancing, and the data science grift

Episode 21: The Cold Start Problem for Becoming a DJ Nov 08, 2019

Our guest this week is Pardis Noorzad (@djpardis), former data science manager at Twitter and now Head of Data Science at Carbon Health. Our conversation spans a wide range of topics:

the Tenderloin
Carbon Health
what Duran Duran has to do with Black History Month
the "cold start problem" for becoming a DJ
how long it takes to achieve domain expertise
how many people there are in Canada
how getting that first data science job is like DJ-ing
loyalty
the Go programming language
the Hopper-Causey effect
data science as quality control

Please listen to it.

Episode 20: Churn! Churn! Churn! Oct 30, 2019

Our guest this episode is Carl Gold (@carl24k), Chief Data Scientist at Zuora and author of the forthcoming book Fighting Churn with Data. Use the discount code podadvl19 to save some unspecified amount on it. Topics include * churn * writing a book * churn * running a subscription business * churn * domain expertise * p-hacking * churn * how Joel picks what song to use for the podcast intro * churn

Episode 19: Writing the Same Book Twice May 24, 2019

On this episode, Andrew is joined by Joel Grus (@joelgrus), the author of Data Science from Scratch, whose second edition just came out. They discuss spreadsheets, writing a book, Python 3, type annotations, Jupyter notebooks, reproducibility, and what it's like to do standup comedy at a conference that has a code of conduct. Please listen to it.

Episode 18: Never Insult a Pigeon Driving a Bus Mar 12, 2019

Our guest this episode is data scientist Peadar Coyle.

Topics include

Brexit
whether Europe is a Python continent or an R continent
GDPR
how data science is different in Europe than it is in the USA
Joel's stock rant against "domain expertise"
PyMC3 and Bayesian Analysis
teaching online courses
whether "primer" is pronounced "primer" or "primer"
what Joel and Andrew are most excited about in data science

Please listen to it.

Episode 17: Josh Wills Feb 04, 2019

Adversarial Learning is back from its extended hiatus! Our guest is famous data scientist Josh Wills. We discuss why Josh is a famous data scientist, what it's like working at Slack, data science conferences, NLP's "imagenet moment", whether Joel should remove the MapReduce chapter from the 2nd edition of Data Science from Scratch, and which is the best Rush album. Please listen to it.

Episode 16: My Code of Ethics Will Forbid YAML May 25, 2018

Adversarial Learning is back!
In this long-delayed episode (thanks, technical difficulties)
we are joined by data scientist
Schaun Wheeler to discuss our favorite topic, data ethics. Highlights include:

* Schaun's Medium post "An ethical code can’t be about ethics"
* Do we need a "Hippocratic Oath" for data science
* How to hire data scientists who won't steal people's kidneys
* Why Joel has a Values Mug
* The Manifesto for Data Practices
* Is this all secretly a competency problem?
* Skin in the Game
* Are data ethics issues really just business ethics issues?

Please listen to it!

(More episodes coming soon!)

Episode 15: Could You Rephrase That As An Ethical Question? Oct 12, 2017

Our guest this week is data scientist for good
Lisa Green.

Topics of discussion include

What is ethics
Joel's previous life as a financial analyst and the ethical dilemmas therein
whether there's anything incriminating in Joel's Yahoo history
"identity theft" as a bullshit concept
Google's corrupt bargain with the NHS
what the medical code of ethics actually says
polycentric ethics
the difference between unethical and incompetent
what good a code of ethics does when the "ethical" problems are emergent from the choices of many people
that terrible article about the Seattle Nazi convention
neuroticism
the Joel test
vgr's bad tweet

Please listen to it.

Episode 14: Totally Derivative Sep 25, 2017

Our guest this week is flashcard kingpin and former Partially Derivative co-host Chris Albon.

Topics of discussion include

how good it feels not to have a podcast
machine learning flashcards
being a "natsec bro"
whether Chris would punch a Nazi
whether Chris would sexually harass a Nazi
whether "magister" is a good woke replacement for "master"
whether that Andrew Ng job posting is appropriate and whether any of us would apply for it
killing your heroes
having a day a week without social media
treadmill desks
Chris's next podcast
and somehow Joel gets going on Harry Potter

Please listen to it.

Episode 12: Data Science Myths Aug 07, 2017

Data scientist Vicki Boykis joins Joel and Andrew to variously debunk and rebunk common Data Science Myths. Is data the new oil? Do data scientists spend 80% of their time munging and cleaning data? What happens if you look in the mirror and say "data science" five times? And many, many, many more.
Please listen to it.

Episode 11: Data Conferences Jul 26, 2017

Andrew and Joel come out of hiatus to discuss data conferences: when to attend them, how to get your talk accepted, how to network, optimal heckling strategies, where to stay, and so on. Somehow they also end up talking about fidget spinners, the "objective" section on resumes, the right way to use LinkedIn, why Andrew doesn't think much of data science bootcamps, and why Joel can't convince any data science bootcamps to sponsor the podcast.
Please listen to it.

Episode 10: Stories of Degradation and Humiliation May 22, 2017

Friend of the podcast Tim Hopper joins us as we share stories of Very Bad Interviews we've been on. (As you probably expect, Joel has the most humiliating stories.)

If you've ever gone on a terrible interview, listen and commiserate. If you've never gone on a terrible interview, listen and live vicariously.

Halfway through, Andrew's Internet flakes out and his part stops getting recorded. Thanks to the magic of editing, you'll hardly even notice!

Episode 9: Owning a Planet Mar 20, 2017

Our guests this week are Curtis Yarvin and Galen Wolfe-Pauly, which means that our topic is Urbit ("a virtual city of general-purpose personal servers"). What is it? Why is it? Is is a political project? And does it have anything to offer data science types?

Curtis and Galen try to explain what Urbit is and answer Joel's objections, while Andrew keeps trying to tie everything back to ham radio.

Episode 8: On Flink Mar 03, 2017

Our guest this week is Trevor Grant (@rawkintrevo), an Open Source Technology Developer Evangelist (or similar) at IBM. We discuss how to be a high-energy public speaker, all sorts of weirdly-named Apache projects, the "my name is" meme, why Joel and Andrew don't like Jupyter-style notebooks, Voltron, and how to talk to your kid about "normies".

Please listen to it.

Episode 7: Telling a Bot to Go Shove It Feb 24, 2017

Our guest this week is Juliet Hougland (@j_houg), data scientist and engineer at Cloudera. We discuss that bad Wired article about physics and software engineering, why Juliet knows so much about Urbit, censorship (Twitter and otherwise), dark patterns (LinkedIn and otherwise),
and why none of us was savvy enough to start a social network for data people
and raise $19M.

Episode 6: Good Data Science Is Always Political Feb 10, 2017

Is good data science always political? Our regularly scheduled guest had to cancel at the last minute, so Joel and Andrew decided to talk about politics.

Topics covered include:

the one data scientist who’s not on twitter
how much Joel hates the xkcd cartoon
free speech in Canada (which Joel gets very wrong, please don't @ me)
how one (or one's bot) gets banned from twitter
Joel getting a phone call from his kid's school
#YarvinGate and #YarvinGate2
how good it feels to hold a pitchfork
loving one's neighbor vs tolerating one's neighbor
why everyone hates Kant
Nazi-punching
the pros and cons of street violence
whether companies should take political stands
whether Shopify should power the Breitbart store
what the hell do they even sell in the Breitbart store anyway?
the difference between refusing to do business with customers because you don't approve them and refusing to business with customers because twitter doesn't approve of them

Episode 5: The Legend of Plas Vander Jan 13, 2017

Our guest is Jake VanderPlas, who is a real Data Science Fellow at the UW eScience Institute, and is the author of the recently published Python Data Science Handbook.

Topics discussed include

BiCapitalization
bridging the astronomy-astrology divide
whether the e in eScience is the same as the e in eBay
Myers-Briggs
why Jake keeps saying “transcriptable” like it's a real word
whether newsletters have replaced blogs
how to talk to people at parties
what it’s like being a data scientist in academia
whether students still hook up in the library
why your zodiac sign isn’t what you think it is
whether Pluto is a planet and why people care
teaching statistics using simulation
how to pronounce "numpy"
using deep learning to identify new constellations
building an AI that chooses the right data visualization

This week's theme music has a cool Vegas swanky lounge vibe.

Please listen to it.

Episode 4: Datasets We Hate Jan 03, 2017

Our guest this week is Sarah Guido (@sarah_guido), Senior Data Scientist at Mashable. We discuss datasets we hate, how to pronounce "La Croix", what makes "library science" a science, 9/11, data science networking, Joel's plan to build a Twitter client that automatically inserts a "clap" emoji after every word, and Mashable's "best celebrity feuds" of 2016.

Episode 3: Beantown Data Science Dec 23, 2016

Our guest this week is Andrew Therriault (@therriaultphd). We talk about data science in the big city, politics, slime in the ice machine, labor unions, how easy it is to join datasets, and whether Boston really deserves to be called Beantown.

Episode Two: The Tallest Data Scientist Dec 07, 2016

Our guest this week is Tim Hopper (@tdhopper), the tallest data scientist. We discuss life, blogs, robots, Twitter, and other data-related stuff, but Joel keeps returning to the topic of his height.

Episode One: A New Hope Nov 11, 2016

In the first episode, Joel and Andrew cover who they are, how they met, how they got into data science, why they have a podcast, and chat about topics they have in mind, including but not limited to:

Politics
Technical tool development
Whether to get a PhD
How to get into data science
How to hire data scientists
Ethical questions in data science
Jake van der Plas
Type A vs Type B
Thinkpiece about why Scala is the future of data science
Dave Shing, AOL’s Digital Prophet, a.k.a. http://twitter.com/shingy
Why is Silicon Valley considered a place you need to set up shop

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