Yelp Dataset Challenge Round 3 Winners We recently opened the fourth round of the Yelp Dataset Challenge. This announcement included an update to the dataset, adding four new international cities and bringing the total number of reviews in the dataset to over one million. You can download it and participate in the challenge here. Submissions for this round are open until December 31, 2014. See the full terms for more details. With the opening of our fourth iteration of the challenge, we closed the third round, which ran from February 1, 2014 to July 31, 2014. We are proud to announce...

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Welcome back! Today we have Wei, Rachel, Jen, Virginia and Anusha sharing their experiences. Wei is an engineer on the consumer team and she brings amazing user experiences to our customers. Rachel and Jen are both engineers on our international team, bringing the power of Yelp to all of our international communities. Virginia works as an engineer on our partnerships team and Anusha is an engineer on our infrastructure team. Overall, we all had a blast getting to know each other, meeting other amazing women in the industry, hearing some great stories from inspiring women role models, and sourcing some...

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As you probably heard, Yelp attended Grace Hopper this year. Nine software engineers from different teams attended and, for many of us, it was our first time. It was a unique experience to see so many talented women in one place. In addition to the talks and panel discussions, we also had the opportunity and pleasure to represent Yelp at the career fair. It was amazing to see a consistent flow of students and industry talent, all happy customers, stop by our booth to speak with us and tell us their stories of using Yelp. We had such a great...

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At LAUNCH Scale last week, I gave a talk to over 75 co-founders (CEOs and CTOs) on how we’ve scaled traffic here at Yelp. It brought back memories of Darwin biting through our ethernet cable and reminded me of the run up to our IPO, making sure we had enough capacity to handle the expected surge in traffic from the world’s press (and more recently, the launch of Yelp in Hong Kong!). For close to 8 years, I’ve had the privilege to work alongside some of the best engineers in the world and have seen the meticulous work and thought...

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Yelp loves Python, and we use it at scale to power our websites and process the huge amount of data we produce. Pyleus is a new open-source framework that aims to do for Storm what mrjob, another open-source Yelp project, does for Hadoop: let developers process large amounts of data in pure Python and iterate quickly, spending more time solving business-related problems and less time concerned with the underlying platform. First, a brief introduction to Storm. From the project’s website, “Apache Storm is a free and open source distributed realtime computation system. Storm makes it easy to reliably process unbounded...

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A/B Testing Experiment Frameworks and MOE We recently open sourced MOE, the Metric Optimization Engine, a machine learning tool for solving global, black box optimization problems. An example application for such a system is optimally running online A/B experiments. A/B testing segments the users that come to a site into buckets, or cohorts, and show different versions of the site to different cohorts of users. One can show 50% of users one version of a site (version A) and 50% of users another version of a site (version B). After some amount of time we can see which version of...

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October will be a busy month for all of us, with a lot of great conferences and events happening back-to-back. We start the month off with an SF Python meetup in collaboration with PyLadies. Zach Musgrave will be presenting on performance profiling in production. Later this month, Scott Clark will be presenting on MOE for SF Machine Learning here at Yelp HQ too! If you’re not familiar with MOE, it’s our black box optimization engine to help you with real world metric optimization. We’ll also be at Grace Hopper on October 8-10, StrataConf on October 15-17, and at HTML5DevConf on...

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Yelp is happy to announce that we’re headed to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in October! Admiral Grace Hopper was a pioneer in computer science. She was a driving force behind the development of English-based programming languages and an inspiring example of how intelligence and perseverance can overcome technical and cultural adversity. The Grace Hopper conference, presented by the Anita Borg Institute and ACM, is the largest gathering of women in computing in the world. Its mission to “connect, inspire, and guide women in computing and organizations that view technology innovation as a strategic imperative” is...

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