Cartesian Skepticism

The Role of MLE The role definition of Machine Learning Engineer varies in different companies. Generally speaking, MLEs from a small to medium size company tend to work around MLOps, sometimes on a production model. They usually collaborate with Applied or Data Scientists in the begining of a new ML service, understanding the data and business needs to create a model. Once the model is formulated, the rest of work will be mostly carried by MLEs.

Joining Zillow Offers venture is one of my most memorable life experience. The team started in late 2018 with a handful of strong engineers and applied scientists. Zillow was also a medium size company of less than 4,000 people. As the ZO business grow, the ZOML (Zillow Offers Machine Learning) team and Zillow both scaled extremely fast. ZOML hired many people. Luckily, there was no layoffs before the ZO wind-down, which happened on Nov. 2, 2021. The company; however, did have a massive layoff (2000+ people) in early 2022.

Quick Sort Time Complexity: Best O(nLogn), Worst O(n^2) class QuickSort: def quick_sort(self, arr): if len(arr) > 0: self.sort(arr, 0, len(arr) - 1) else: print('ERROR: input array is empty!') print(arr) def sort(self, arr, left, right): if left < right: partition_key = self.partition(arr, left, right) self.sort(arr, partition_key + 1, right) self.sort(arr, left, partition_key - 1) # Result: # (smaller values), arr[wall], (bigger values) # Return `wall` as the new partition_key. def partition(self, arr, left, right): pivot = arr[right] wall = left for i in range(left, right): if arr[i] < pivot: self.

1 There are 10 people in a room. Each person shakes hand with 3 other people, what is the total number of handshakes? A Note: we don’t care if person A shakes with B, C, D or E, F, G. But every person reaches out three times. Thus, the total number of hand reach-outs is $$ 10 * 3 = 30 $$ Every 2 reach-outs forms 1 handshake, thus total number of handshakes is 30 / 2 = 15.

1 Q: Given 3 decks of cards, A to K. Randomly pick 1 card from each deck. What is the probability that the 3 cards are in increasing order? A $$ \mathbb{P}(\text{3 different cards} \cap \text{3 increasing values}) = \mathbb{P}(\text{3 different cards}) \times \mathbb{P}(\text{3 increasing values} | \text{3 different cards}) $$ First, make sure the three cards are different, \(\mathbb{P}(\text{3 different cards})\) is \( 1 * \frac{48}{52} * \frac{44}{52} \).