NewSQL – RDBMS on Steroids
No this is not a misprint. Yes we mean NewSQL, not NoSQL. Recently a colleague asked me about NewSQL and I had to admit that I hadn’t kept up. While it initially had a lot of press, much less so now. Was it still relevant? And if so under what circumstances should you consider it?

How to implement a neural network: Part 1
This is the first part of a 4 (+2) parts tutorial on how to implement a simple neural network model.

Otto Product Classification Winner’s Interview: 2nd place, Alexander Guschin
The Otto Group Product Classification Challenge made Kaggle history as our most popular competition ever. Alexander Guschin finished in 2nd place ahead of 3,845 other data scientists. In this blog, Alexander shares his stacking centered approach and explains why you should never underestimate the nearest neighbours algorithm.

Is Analytics Career Right for You?
An analytical way to decide whether you should pursue a career in analytics. We shared some economic ways to getting started and mind-set required for entering into this exciting field.

Mimicking a Google Form with a Shiny app
In this post we will walk through the steps required to build a shiny app that mimicks a Google Form. It will allow users to submit responses to some input fields, save their data, and allow admins to view the submitted responses. Like many of my other posts, it may seem lengthy, but that’s only because I like to go into fine details to ensure everything is as foolproof and reproducible as possible.

HTTPS for CRAN: how and why
R gained some basic support for https in version 3.2.0 via the method = ‘libcurl’ argument in base functions download.file and url. The global option download.file.method is used to make this the default. Unfortunately the implementation has a few limitations: there is no way to set request options (authentication, proxy, headers, TLS options, etc) and the functions do not expose an http status code or response headers. Because they also do not raise an error when the request fails with an http error (as do the other download methods), this leaves you to guess if the retrieved content is what you were expecting or an error page.

ggtree with funny fonts
showtext is a neat solution to use various types of fonts in R graphs and make it easy to use funny fonts. With showtext, we can draw phylogenetic tree with different types of fonts even with symbolic/icon fonts. – See more at: http://…/#sthash.Oe5ZVPnJ.dpuf

10 Reasons Why Now Is the Time to Get into Big Data
1. It will keep your data secure
2. It opens up brand new revenue sources
3. It’ll give you an advantage
4. Better Visuals
5. It’s very easy to set up
6. It helps your business evolve
7. It can significantly cut back on maintenance
8. It brings you closer with your customers
9. It’s easier to analyze risk
10. You’ll be able to improve your products