I've been cooking a recipe recently of my own creation that I really like, and there isn't much similar on the internet, so I'm sharing the recipe here. It's a combination of two great things -- hot-smoking fish with wood chips in a stovetop smoker, and the fermented flavors of Hunanese cuisine. …

A thing that I do when I cook is to re-write the recipes I’m using (whether they’re from a cookbook or my own invention) onto a piece of paper in a very specific way. I think the approach I use is handy, so I’m describing it here in case you’d like to use it. (Or in case you need more evidence about how weird I am.) …

This is my first new post on harlan.harris.name for a while. The occasion is a change of scenery. For about 10 years, my primary blog has been on WordPress, more recently supplemented by Medium. But WordPress and Medium are limited for technical writing, and the trend among data people recently has been to publish …

This post was originally published on Medium

There’s recently been some interesting opinionated writing in the R statistical programming community about how and when to teach the abstracted, easy-to-use approaches to solving problems, versus the underlying nitty-gritty. David Robinson, Data Scientist at Stack Overflow, …

This post was originally published on Medium

I recently attended two small conferences — the ISBIS (International Society for Business and Industrial Statistics) 2017 conference, held at IBM Research in Westchester County, and the Domino Data Lab Popup, held in West SoHo. I was invited to speak at ISBIS (slides here, …

This post was originally published on Medium

Occasionally when chatting with other data scientists, especially with others who are interested in integrating predictive models into production software system, the word “scaling” comes up.

Not this. Although some West Coast data scientists are into this kind of scaling …

This post was originally published on Medium

A particularly good way to get a little more out of professional conferences is to blog about your experiences, I think. It makes you focus your thoughts on things like “what’s the big take-away here,” and “what should I be asking people in the hallways?” Rather than just …

This post was originally published on Medium

A particularly good talk at Strata NY last year was by Brett Goldstein, former CIO of Chicago, who talked about accountability and transparency in predictive models that affect people’s lives. This struck a strong chord with me, so I wanted to take some time to write down …

I, Harlan D. Harris, hereby commit to the neveragain.tech pledge. Please stand with me and hold me to it.

We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies based in the United States. We are engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing …

This post was originally published on Medium

When building a complex system, it’s often helpful to think about the design of that system using patterns and abstractions. Architects and software engineers do so frequently, and the experience of implementing predictive modeling pipelines has recently led to a variety of …