Top all-time · #748
Multithreaded
Company blog · multithreaded.stitchfix.comprogrammingdata
Multithreaded is the company blog at multithreaded.stitchfix.com, writing about programming and data. Since 2015, 87 different Hacker News readers have linked it 144 times, most often “Hamilton: A Microframework for Dataframe Generation”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (27) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Stitch Fix's engineering blog on data science, ML and forecasting. Commenters link posts on ARIMA vs bsts, team structure in 'Engineers Shouldn't Write ETL', and word2vec. Praised as a high-quality tech blog.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 27 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Stitch Fix is a full-stack startup creating unique solutions in data-driven merchandising, massively scaled personal styling, and complex logistics.
Most-linked posts?
- Hamilton: A Microframework for Dataframe Generation5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-10-14
- Engineers shouldn't write ETLs5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-03-16
- Engineers Shouldn’t Write ETL4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-11-04
- A Word Is Worth a Thousand Vectors4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-08-26
- Putting the Power of Kafka into the Hands of Data Scientists3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-09-05
- /blog/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-08-06
- The Skynet Salesman3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-07-21
- Aggressively Helpful Platform Teams2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-02-10
- Chainer: Neural Networks in Python2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-12-10
- Simulacra and Simulation; Stitchfix blogpost on constrained matrix factorization2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-12
What Hacker News says?
Internal state is often a problem, look at project like stichfix nodebook, and dataflow kernels, they make things a bit easier by re-executing cells. On of the issue is you always have internal state as soon as you interact with a data source or sink. If you read/write from a API, then rest is stateful. Your file system is stateful... etc. It's an interesting but hard problem, we'll be happy to have more help with.…
Comment linking /blog/2017/07/26/nodebook/
on “Jupyter Receives the ACM Software System Award”Submitted Move Slow and Make Things as a story · 380 points
HN discussionStitch Fix | Machine Learning Platform | San Francisco, CA | Full-time | ONSITE, VISA Stitchfix is a clothing / style personalization service. Search Instagram for #stitchfix, which will tell you a whole lot about us, how much our customers love us and you'll get an idea of our business. Come back when you're done. P.S. we're profitable and did $730M in revenue last year. Still interested? Well then come build Machi…
Comment linking /careers/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2017)”Submitted Engineers Shouldn’t Write ETL as a story · 291 points
HN discussionThis essay talks about the difference between thinkers, doers and janitors. http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2016/03/16/engineers... In it the difference is erased and people are reorganized in a, I think, more productive way.
Comment linking /blog/2016/03/16/engineers-shouldnt-write-etl/
on “Site Reliability Engineering”Submitted Word vectors are awesome but you don’t need a neural network to find them as a story · 276 points
HN discussionSame, the difference I had in my implementation was an added an 8 week moving average. This worked for most of the year and I think even holidays. What was considered normal for the week of Thanksgiving would not be considered normal for a summer week. This was relatively easy using SQL CTEs and windowing functions. I also separately used a package in R called bsts (Bayesian Structural Time Series) for a different w…
Comment linking /blog/2016/04/21/forget-arima/
on “Simple Anomaly Detection Using Plain SQL”Submitted Engineers Shouldn’t Write ETL as a story · 248 points
HN discussion- nl · 2016-05-23
It's true that we (as in everyone working on these problems - not just IBM) don't have this working. Two points, though: 1) This is probably the most active area of research in machine learning/AI at the moment. The same type of progress that was made in image understanding 2 years ago using deep learning techniques is now being seen in NLP. See for example[1]. 2) It isn't at all clear that "making connections" of t…
Comment linking /blog/2015/03/11/word-is-worth-a-thousand-vectors/
on “IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson” Submitted Pyxley: Python Powered Dashboards as a story · 240 points
HN discussionI really like Stitch Fix blog : http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?”Submitted Beware the data science pin factory: The power of the data science generalist as a story · 195 points
HN discussionThe developer blog at StitchFix is excellent: http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/ Most Scala consultancies/companies have their own internal blogs and most are excellent, for instance, underscore: http://underscore.io/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?”Submitted Want to make good business decisions? Learn causality as a story · 187 points
HN discussionStitch Fix | Machine Learning Platform | San Francisco, CA | Full-time | ONSITE, VISA Stitchfix is a clothing / style personalization service. Search Instagram for #stitchfix, which will tell you a whole lot about us, how much our customers love us and you'll get an idea of our business. Come back when you're done. P.S. we're profitable and did $730M in revenue last year. Still interested? Well then come build Machi…
Comment linking /careers/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2017)”Submitted What Color Is This? Part 2 as a story · 182 points
HN discussionStitch Fix | San Francisco, CA | REMOTE or ONSITE Seeking Rails or React or iOS or Data Science or Genuine Empathy. You'll find the finest people you've ever worked with. https://www.stitchfix.com/careers/jobs https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/engineering/ https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/algorithms/
Comment linking /algorithms/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2020)”Submitted Sorry ARIMA, but I’m Going Bayesian as a story · 173 points
HN discussionThey're on a roll for April fool's, this other one is the geekiest one I've seen in a while! https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2021/04/01/fault-in...
Comment linking /blog/2021/04/01/fault-in-our-models/
on “Move Slow and Make Things”Submitted What the SATs Taught Us about Finding the Perfect Fit as a story · 113 points
HN discussionThanks for the reference, I hadn't heard of Stitch Fix. They seem to have a great tech blog: https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2019/09/10/stochast...
Comment linking /blog/2019/09/10/stochastic-optimization/
on “How to proceed when you run out of cash, but you still believe?”Submitted Our Hybrid lda2vec Algorithm as a story · 100 points
HN discussionYeah, the Rails community noticed this a while ago. Put the business logic doing transformations on models and interacting with external dependencies in service classes, which accomplishes three things: 1) Avoids bloating model objects. 2) Avoids creating complicated controllers. 3) Makes it much easier to move to a microservices architecture when the time comes, because business logic has already been grouped into…
Comment linking /blog/2015/06/02/anatomy-of-service-objects-in-rails/
on “MVC is dead, it's time to MOVE on (2012)”Submitted Maintainable ETL Practices at Stitchfix as a story · 99 points
HN discussionGood read, explains a lot. For time series in the past I’ve used Bayesian structural time series with good results. Good article comparing ARIMA to bsts here: https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2016/04/21/forget-a...
Comment linking /blog/2016/04/21/forget-arima/
on “Arima Model – Guide to Time Series Forecasting in Python”Submitted A Word Is Worth a Thousand Vectors as a story · 88 points
HN discussionI think the article overestimates how much we understand about neural networks, and the novel ways we might use them. Take word2vec for example. It's a two-layer (i.e. not deep) neural network that uses a relatively simple training algorithm. Yet, after 30 minutes it can learn impressive relationships between English words. The method is only 3 years old and businesses continue to find novel ways to apply word2vec.…
Comment linking /blog/2015/03/11/word-is-worth-a-thousand-vectors/
on “Deep Learning Is Easy – Learn Something Harder”Submitted Understanding Latent Style as a story · 79 points
HN discussionI think one of the only companies doing this right, and that has the resources to do this right, is facebook, as they seperate AI research and teams that are focused on putting these things into production (i.e. ML engineers vs Ml researchers). Trying to combine these two things into the same role is resulting in continued confusion and frustration. I like this Stitchfix article as an overview ( http://multithreaded…
Comment linking /blog/2016/03/16/engineers-shouldnt-write-etl/
on “Tensorflow and Deep Learning, Without a PhD, Martin Gorner, Google [video]”Submitted Multi-Armed Bandits and the Stitch Fix Experimentation Platform as a story · 74 points
HN discussion
