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When you’re trying to wrap your head around challenging new ideas, your natural instinct may be to chip away at it in several attempts. Read a bit, take a break, come back later - like attacking a mountain ascent in short sprints. This may feel like you’re making progress, but you’re actually doing yourself a disservice. Every time you re-engage with the difficult material, you’re forcing your mind to re-enter a state of intense flow. This refocusing requires mental energy - energy that depletes your limited cognitive resources. Each time you dip back into flow, you have to: ...

Introduction One of the things that makes machine learning hard is that you have to run a lot of experiments. You have to try different models, different data sets, different hyperparameters, different features. And each experiment can take a long time to run, especially if you’re working on deep learning problems. You can’t just run them on your laptop or desktop. You need more computing power, and you need it fast. ...

Paul Graham once wrote that “a startup is a company designed to grow fast.” For a startup to grow fast, especially a B2B startup selling SaaS products to other companies, it needs sales engineers. Sales engineers are the technical experts who work closely with sales teams. They exist because selling enterprise software requires deep technical knowledge that salespeople typical don’t have. The salesperson establishes rapport with the prospect and understands their business needs. But when it comes time to demo the product and answer nitty gritty technical questions, that’s where the sales engineer comes in. ...

We (esp. those in the tech industry) have an instinctual aversion to pedagogy. “Those who can’t do, teach” the old saying goes. But the truth is the opposite. Teaching does not indicate an inability to do something. On the contrary, teaching empowers and enables ability. It is the highest form of understanding. When you teach something, you gain a deeper mastery over the subject matter than you would as a passive student. As Leonardo da Vinci said: ...