Curious what happens with Yahoo fantasy sports. They have been investing in new features this year for the first time in what seems like a decade. Still have millions of active users.
Sleeper is awesome! They're definitely one that I'm looking at (along with ESPN). They currently only offer a read-only API, which means I can't actually set your lineups for you, but I may reach out to them to see if that could ever change. If it does I'd love to add support.
I'm sorry, I wish there were! Unfortunately only Yahoo offers an API that lets my service directly interact with your team. Out of curiosity, which fantasy provider do you use? I think I can find a way to support ESPN but it will take some time.
Good question. I should probably make this clearer on the site.
The short answer is that if a player is injured we won't put them into your lineup unless there's an open spot (ie. we'll never bench a healthy player for an injured one).
Long-winded: we build thousands of simulations of every NBA game based on teams' recent lineups and depth charts, and incorporate current injury data into these. This lets us do some really cool stuff, such as bump up the minutes projection (and thus the value) of guys who are next in line on the depth chart at the position of the injured player. We then optimize your lineups over these simulations to maximize the chance that you'll win your matchup.
We'll see what happens. The main dynamics at play are:
- You're right, if I build out some of the more interesting AI features such as live draft assistant it will become more computationally demanding.
- As long as volume is low, that's fine. If not, I'll have to answer this question earlier ;)
- This will always be a side project. I would only want to start charging if I was really providing enough value to users where it made sense to charge. That said, I hope that by picking the right problems to solve the site can be immediately pretty useful.
I built this tool to solve the most annoying thing in fantasy sports: losing because you forgot to set your lineup. At the start of every week it sets everything for you, which you can then go modify if you want. It announces any changes it makes in an email so that you’re never surprised, and includes nice-to-haves like projected statistics and the probability that you will win the matchup. If folks like the tool, I plan to build out more AI assistant features for use-cases such as the draft, trades and waivers.
Note: You’ll need a Yahoo fantasy team to try it (they’re the only provider with a fully-featured API).
In designing this, I really wanted to build something that was useful and respects the user above all else. I require an email address because I want to make sure you know whenever the AI acts on your behalf, but include a big “Delete Account” button right on the main page once you’re logged in. This will fully and permanently delete all of your information. I also went with a privacy-respecting analytics tool (plausible.io) and will not spam or sell any information whatsoever. You should feel comfortable trying this tool and then deleting your account if it’s not for you.
Background: I’ve always been interested in building AI tools that directly interact with humans. My previous work (data scientist with the Philadelphia 76ers and research scientist at Uber AI Labs) sort of naturally led me to this idea of trying to win at fantasy sports using a pure AI approach. This tool is really just the very first step toward that long-term dream, solving the most basic decision problem in the game.
Would love any feedback or ideas! Also plan to write a blog post or two detailing both the statistical approach as well as the tech stack. I’m not a SWE so particularly appreciate any tips there.
There’s some cool stuff from OpenAI and Uber AI Labs scaling up neuroevolution (disclosure: these were my former colleagues at Uber). Check out the work from Ken Stanley and Jeff Clune, plus Tim Salimans. They solved most of the Atari suite comparably to the DQN from Deepmind (these are RL tasks).
Am a data scientist and don’t do anything with JavaScript but I love seeing stuff like this just to get a feel for the lay of the land and how everything fits together.
Bought a desktop computer last week for the first time since 2005. Installed Ubuntu. Still SSH’ing into it mostly from MacBook, but it’s such a boon to productivity to have an always-on machine right here. And yeah the modularity of a desktop form factor is really amazing compared to Apple product line
I used Anki extensively in grad school. There was a moment when I realized it was really working in a class on linear dynamical systems— all of a sudden everything just got easy. It takes discipline to both create good cards and study regularly, but man the payoff is good. That said... I stopped as soon as grad school was over and haven’t had the willpower to continue consolidating that knowledge.
When I started out of college as a SWE at HBO in 2009, there was a ton of code written in like 1999-2002 still in use. It was cool to see well-written and documented code live on in real perpetuity. Also, most of the engineers who wrote that code were still there! I think things have both changed a lot in the last ten years (power of iteration), and also things in a stable, profitable company are just a lot different than in a startup.
Heard about this game from Tobi Lutke on a podcast. Bought the early access version while I was in bed recovering from surgery and promptly lost track of the next eight hours. Didn't play for a couple weeks after that, then lost a weekend. Terrific game-- it really does build the muscle to search for the bottleneck in any process.
KeepTruckin | Data Analyst | San Francisco | Full-Time
KeepTruckin is on a mission to modernize the trucking industry. With the leading fleet management platform, we are bringing trucks online and fundamentally changing the way freight is moved on our roads.
My team is hiring a senior strategic analyst to help drive business outcomes using data. We have a charter to tackle problems across the company with self-initiated ideas.
I showed up to my interview at Best Buy in Ithaca, NY in shorts and was immediately rejected. I was a rising senior in high school and was really into building computers, so thought I was a shoe-in. The hiring manager told me it was insulting to not dress up for the interview. Honestly it was just something I didn’t even think about, but certainly taught me a lesson of sorts. Now I interview people every week and they’re all in t-shirts.