back
user profile
brandonb
9,336karma·1,335submissions·January 17, 2011
about
Data for good.
Co-Founder at Empirical Health (https://empirical.health). Don't die of heart disease.
Before: Co-Founder @ Cardiogram (ML for heart health)
CTO at Sift Science (YC S11, machine learning to fight fraud)
Data Science @ UCSF Cardiology
HealthCare.gov rescue team
Google (Android speech recognition, search ads ML)
brandonb.cc
recent activity (1,335 total)
comment
I think your diagnosis is basically correct -- they like you, but got mixed signals during the interview, so they're essentially offering a "re-do" of one of the interviews. It's n…
comment
Not intentional. This was a bug.
comment
There is an NDA but I used "folks" since I, personally, have returned to the startup world and am not involved in the details of fixing this particular incident. But yes, rest assured that t…
comment
We weren't involved with this specific part of the site but folks are on it! (I wrapped up my involvement several months ago, but others helping out with this open enrollment period.)
comment
I'm a pretty happy camper using Postgres with hstore:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/hstore.html You have the flexibility to store arbitrary JSON blob…
comment
Congrats Jason!
comment
This is very fast progress from Baidu's Silicon Valley AI lab! Andrew Ng only joined Baidu in May, and (nearly?) all of the co-authors of this paper have joined him since then:
http:/…
comment
Thanks for sharing this deck! I think the most striking thing to me and others in this thread is how austere and matter-of-fact this deck is. Obviously your growth and scale is great, so the numbers s…
comment
Congrats to the team! Ben was one of the most brilliant students in my undergrad class and it's awesome to see him employ his talents in such a big way. I worked on healthcare.gov last year and i…
comment
Didn't realize Yoshua & co had a book coming! That would definitely be the one to read. BTW, for anybody who wants to learn machine learning in general, Kyle's blog also seems to be pack…
comment
For those of you who want to learn the nuts and bolts of deep neural networks, Andrew Ng's tutorial on Unsupervised Feature Learning and Deep Learning is getting older but still great:
http:&#…
comment
Cool postmortem! I think items 2-5 are implications of #1: stay focused. My previous startup probably had a similar grand vision as Precog, but we decided to focus on a specific use case (credit card …
comment
Congrats on sticking it through! This apparently happens more often than you'd think. I went through a similar experience a couple years ago:
http://brandonb.cc/what-happened-wh…
comment
Don't you know? It's crucial for startup founders to have an 18th-century dystopian surveillance system of skills. In fact, if you play the video backward, you can actually hear Reid recite …
comment
For those not familiar with the Linux kernel contributors, Alan Cox wrote large parts of the networking stack, was the maintainer of the 2.2 branch, and was commonly considered the "second in com…
comment
The best thing about the Affordable Care Act is that it prohibits discrimination based on preexisting conditions. If a sick person applies for health insurance, the insurance company has to issue it, …