Show Notes
In this episode, we continued our season of talking to data educators and spoke to Laszlo Sragner.
Laszlo runs Hypergolic, a boutique consultancy in London specialising in Machine Learning Product Management.
Formerly, he was Head of Data Science at Arkera, a fintech startup in London, where he built market intelligence products with Natural Language Processing for Tier 1 investment banks and hedge funds.
Before that, Laszlo worked in mobile gaming for King Digital (makers of Candy Crush), specialising in player behaviour and monetisation.
He started his career as a quant researcher implementing trading strategies at multiple investment managers.
We talked to Laszlo about consulting in the area of machine learning, what data scientists can learn from software engineers, how to upskill data scientists to be better programmers and make programming their craft, and of course how AI tools will impact all of this.
You can find Laszlo online:
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laszlosragner
In the Code Quality 4 Data Science community: https://cq4ds.com
Laszlo's company, Hypergolic: https://hypergolic.co.uk
Laszlo's newsletter, "Deliberate Machine Learning": https://laszlo.substack.com
More from Half Stack Data Science
In this episode, we tackle the question of learning in the age of AI. Among other things, we talked about: whether worrying about AI is the same as worrying about calculators why David gets all his students to turn AI features off while learning why rising token prices might end up being a great thing whether AI slop is worse than human slop what we can learn from sailing as we think about our future in an AI world
In this episode, we discuss: - Will people really just write all their own software instead of buying it? - Is the change management around GenAI projects any different from other technologies? - What is the right approach when giving people freedom to vibe code internal tools? - Is there room for a new role to emerge as a bridge between vibe coding and useful internal tools, a technical connector of AI capability and business value?
In the first episode of the new season, we discuss: whether it's a good thing that we can produce more with GenAI, how GenAI will force us to consider the purpose of education, how we are supposed to develop wisdom if GenAI can just build everything for us, how AI-written code introduces "cognitive debt", and in a roundabout way we discuss whether GenAI will kill software companies --- David’s book, The Well-Grounded Data Analyst is out! https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-data-analyst If you want to find out more, we have a whole episode about it: https://halfstackdatascience.com/s3-finale-the-well-grounded-data-analyst-with-david-asboth
In this episode, we wrapped up 2025 by reflecting on what we talked about on the podcast, where AI is and where it's heading, and looked ahead to 2026. We also discussed some of our favourite sci-fi books we read last year!
In this episode, we spoke to Kirsten Hill. Dr Kirsten Hill is a researcher, writer, and the founder of bisque — a survey platform that actually cares if you get good data. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, has led research for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and has worked with over 100 mission-driven teams on measurement & evaluation. This past year, she authored her first book, Ask Better Questions, a top release on survey design — and realized that writing the book wasn’t enough. If she really wanted to change how people do research, she had to build the tools that would make it easier to do it right. With real-time AI feedback, intuitive design, and built-in best practices, bisque makes it easy to create surveys that get you the answers you actually need. We spoke to Kirsten about how and why surveys are often bad, why she believes the major survey platforms aren't fit for purpose, why she's building her own survey platform "bisque", how she's using Large Language Models to develop a working prototype, and what advice she has for other non-programmers who want to build things with AI. You can find her on: LinkedIn @kirstenleehill TikTok @kirstenleehill Substack kirstenleehill.substack.com