DLarsen

Location: Prescott, Arizona

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: I've mostly built around data-heavy systems, and I'm familiar with the typical tools in that space. In this era, it's possible that my domain experience in adtech, rare disease and now IP/patenting is more interesting than the details of my tech chops. I have a pretty decent sense of how "analytics" or "insights" tools play out in the real world, and I know what holds up to scrutiny in decision-making scenarios. I enjoy early-stage projects quite a bit.

Résumé/CV: https://dataxam.com/larsen-resume-2024.pdf

Email: david.larsen+hn@gmail.com

Note: I have a job, but as a father of five (incl. a bunch of teenagers), it pays to be risk averse.

"Are (legally and morally) entitled" vs "act as if they are entitled"... yes, a big question.

I've been thinking a lot about team formation and competence hierarchies in the age of AI. I'm particularly concerned about the disruption that occurs when performance and output outruns competence. In such a world, it's not obvious whose judgment to trust and how risk/reward should be allocated.

I like the creativity of the new form factor.

My son and I are working on a spending journal which puts forth a new kind of form factor for tracking expenses. Our emphasis is less on the accounting angle and more on the behavioral side. We use the journal for self-evaluation of individual spending decisions and as a tool to communicate spending intent within our household. It turns out that between myself, my wife and our teens... not everyone naturally geeks out with spreadsheets, and this collaborative journal has been a decent middle ground to coordinate spending.

I remember near the start of HashiCorp, Mitchell and I spoke about buying one of his side projects. In seeking to rustle up some funds, friends asked me why anyone would offload a profitable project at such a price. Mitchell essentially explained that he was moving on to focus on bigger and better things. Boy was he right.

Someone else beat me to the punch on buying the website, but Mitchell’s clarity of purpose was profound.

https://spendlight.com

My 13-year old son and I have been working on a behavior-oriented personal finance tool. I've kicked this idea around for years, and we had a chance to use it as our subject for a 12-week entrepreneurial program. I built a version of it for personal use years ago, but had fun looking at it through the lens of a more serious endeavor.

It's not feature complete, but the demo of the SMS-based journaling input works pretty well: https://spendlight.app/demo

MPP | SaaS-savvy Product Leader | Remote

Get in on the ground floor (2nd hire) of a new B2B, data-heavy venture.

We're looking for someone with hard-earned street smarts, and can help establish an outstanding working relationship between engineers (me for now!) and our subject matter expert (a 30+ year lawyer). Experience in finance, legal and data viz are a plus. A fruitful previous working relationship with DataSci professionals is a mega plus.

At the heart of our company, we seek to manifest a new business paradigm as usable (sells like hotcakes) SaaS. Big challenges, big potential reward, and (to shoot you straight) plenty of pitfalls on the product front that you can help us avoid.

We've got a good support network for both funding and advisors, all with legit unicorn-level chops.

Connect and message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/larsenal/ to learn more.

I think I'm going to start asking potential employers where they do their banking.

Location: Prescott, AZ

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Resume/CV: https://dataxam.com/about

Technologies: Python, SQL, R, dbt, Snowflake, Postgres, D3, Spark, Flask, HTML, CSS, Scala, Ruby, etc.

Email: david.larsen+hn [at] gmail.com

Mostly interested in nascent data product work. If your data asset strategy is critical to your organization's success, you'll find me to be a capable, thoughtful contributor.

Integrating into the operations on a provisional evaluation basis is a whole lot of work and the stakes are high. As my grandpa used to say, "There's nothing easier than doing nothing." Both parties (our company and the airline) brought the right people to the table, but for the system to really be evaluated we needed an entire crew base to use the system in a "realistic" fashion. There was a fair bit of understandable skepticism about how the system would perform under the stress of real user input, but due to the overall complex nature of the system there was a non-trivial learning curve and lots of crew members didn't see a lot of value in spending their time help us put the thing through its paces. As an example, the system would allow crew members to specify a highly detailed, specific set of flight preferences that were either declared as ranked priorities and/or they could select specific flights. If a crew member was forced to "try" our system, they could put in a generic set of input ("I like the Vegas flight."). However, we suspected that once they were faced with the opportunity to share their real schedule, they would have a lot more incentive to put in a lot more particulars, which would stress our optimization engine differently.

Does the algo work? Is it better than the status quo and under what circumstances is it susceptible to failure? Does it know when the whole system is over-constrained?

If we assume the algo rocks (because you have operations research veterans), what stage of planning does your system address? What is the experience required and cost of manual intervention?

Fun problem. Human factors and edge cases abound. So much is at stake for a system that already works (to any predictable degree).

I'd love to hear more though.

We ran a pilot with one carrier for a subset of their crew for maybe a year, but eventually failed to gain further traction. Very tough sales and implementation cycle in spite of the fact that we could convince many individuals (bothe crew and management with their competing concerns) of the benefits of our system.

About a decade ago, I was part of a startup trying to disrupt crew scheduling. It's a non-trivial operations problem when you aim to honor crew preferences, union-negotiated affordances, FAA legalities, etc. We were only involved in the pre-planned schedules. At that time, the airlines we were courting had entirely different human-hravybsystem to resolve real time issues. There was some level of reserve redundancy baked in so the human planners had some wiggle room to work with... but redundancy is expensive to maintain. As a relatively new engineer at the time it was a pretty neat domain with big $$$ at stake. As it turns out, pretty much nobody wanted to take the risk on a new system even if it had provably better schedules for all parties. All it takes is one snafu for the whole thing to turn into a major regret.

Great feedback. There are several sample lessons, but from your feedback I see how I can make them easier to find.

I built https://www.spendlight.com/ for my wife and I to not just track spending but to get a handle on our sentiment around our spending choices. While we still have different reactions to spending decisions, it at least gave us the language and ground rules to work towards our personal finance goals.

If you really want to gain knowledge and confidence in the fundamentals, spend some time watching (in real time, NOT sped up) an excellent artist. Good art is often very slow. I saw a huge improvement in my own (self-taught, hobby-level) art when I began to get comfortable spending 10 hours on a drawing instead of one. I enjoy drawing portraits and can recommend this guy's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/stephenbaumanartwork

The footer has more links for "Legal" than for "Product"... a sign of the times.

Catasys | REMOTE | Sr. AI Engineer | good pay

We're in the healthcare space working on some pretty compelling problems at the convergence of behavioral health and chronic conditions. I come from an ad-tech background where the general theme was to use loads of data to help advertising be "more efficient"... which is to say we tried to help sell folks on things they usually didn't need... meanwhile in spite of noble aspirations to clean up the industry, ad-tech has gotten creepier over the last 10 years. (I'm glad there are still folks working on that problem.) But today I'm so happy now to be directing my effort toward a somewhat surprising opportunity to A) benefit humans and B) be more efficient from a cost perspective. The general idea is that we find cases where providing behavioral health care (think treatment for SUD, anxiety or depression) has a very good chance of improving the management of one or more chronic conditions (think diabetes, COPD, asthma, etc). I don't want to over-sell it as a mythical win-win-win (the individual, the insurance companies, and our company), but so far the model is working pretty well. We're growing both in terms of business as well as our capabilities.

My team of 2 is looking for 2 more to join our fully remote team. If you're a thoughtful, experienced practitioner who has built successful (and let's face it maybe a few unsuccessful) ML or AI systems, you might be perfect. If you're searching this post for buzzwords, as a means of shameless SEO I'll mention Python, Tensorflow, Keras, Spark, Scala, SageMaker, Deep Learning, RNN, LSTM, R, ggplot, and (why not) Flask. Note that we may or may not use all of these _right now_ (the team is new and much TBD), but I'm hoping to catch the attention of the right folks in the midst of so many job HN postings.

Ping me via LinkedIn messaging or my email (dlarsen at the company domain name) if you're curious about the role. Having recently joined the company and this team, a lot of the considerations that are probably on your mind as a job seeker are fresh in my mind as well, and I'd be happy to have a candid conversation about the company, the role and how you might fit in.

https://www.paycomonline.net/v4/ats/web.php/jobs/ViewJobDeta...

I enjoyed reading this recent post from Nathan Barry, which tells some of his story: https://nathanbarry.com/homeschool/

If you enjoy Mark Twain, the John Greenman readings (https://librivox.org/reader/107) are fantastic.

I am going through this Udemy course with my kid and it's really enjoyable. The instructor is clear and really enjoys the topic:

https://www.udemy.com/course/analog-electronics-robotics-lea...

I've recently ramped up work on something along these lines aimed specifically at personal finances (see my profile if interested... won't spam this thread). It's a spending journal which helps folks gain insight into their own spending habits and make better spending decisions. I've been using it as my own personal tool for years, and have recently (after being laid off) made it available for more folks.

What I found from my (currently) small circle of users, is that ease of use to enter the decisions was key. The SMS input has been key, and I'd recommend you consider it as a way to appeal to folks who would resist installing "yet another app with who knows what kind of data/privacy practices."

I'm working on https://spendlight.com a SMS-powered spending journal.

With all the uncertainty and risk to our personal finances, it seems fitting to work on a project that will (worst case) help me buckle down and improve my spending habits.

Ages ago, my tool tried to do both weekly and monthly but then I had the realization out that almost all of the monthly items were not ones I was having trouble with in the budget. The fixed expenses were (obviously) fixed. And consumption-based utilities would vary month to month, and that was easy enough to track and reconcile every so often.

In other words, the budget would get "broken" more often in the week-to-week habits than the monthly ones... hence, the resulting focus of my tool.

Nice domain and nice concept. I too am among those with a home-grown approach to managing the budget. Mine is more of a spending journal than it is about planning or reconciling the entire budget, with motivations similar to those who would have a meal journal. I focus on the decision making process and self-evaluate spending according to my budget and my overall values.

My approach won't appeal to a lot of folks, but there are dozens of us who find it super useful: https://www.spendlight.com/#how-it-works

We're on the same page regarding privacy. Except for taking money for the subscription, I keep my hands off bank accounts. And for those wanting a complete air gap, there's always the printable paper version: https://www.spendlight.com/download/paper-spending-journal

I think Rand Fishkin has some good thoughts[1] regarding the broader implications of companies like Hitwise failing. Regardless of data collection methods (which is a totally valid discussion), losing visibility into the areas of internet behavior dominated by the big players will carry a cost.

1: https://sparktoro.com/blog/avasts-shutdown-of-jumpshot-will-...

Hitwise | Santa Monica, CA or Camarillo, CA | 6-month Contract | Onsite

I'm looking for a data analyst to join our Data Quality team, for approximately six months, to maintain the integrity of Hitwise data. We'll need someone who is comfortable using various methods of data analysis to investigate and validate large data sets. If you love hunting down critical insights within highly dimensional data, you'll find strong camaraderie with this small, focused team. Many of our clients are well known brands; we expect you'll have a lot to be proud of at the completion of this 6-month engagement.

Required: Excel, SQL, cheerful customer-friendly attitude

Relevant: Python, R, BI tools

Unless you prefer to start with a HR-styled chat, contact me directly (Direct of Data Science & Data Quality) at dlarsen@hitwise.com.

P.S. We're also looking for product-minded data scientists. If you're into things like multilevel regression and post-stratification AND you have a great intuition about how to sensibly apply such techniques to sophisticated data products, throw me an email.

I've setup something very similar at my hobby project spendlight.com. The public site is now largely neglected with too many placeholder images, but I landed at the same conclusion that no sync is a feature... because mindful spending.

Are you the primary spender in your household or is it a team effort? I've found that what helps me may not help her due to different upbringings and mindsets about money.

I agree with you that the CSV the primary valuable artifact. Most of the pie charts and such don't add any value. The real opportunity to improve lies in the thought process I face at each individual spending decision.

Hitwise | Santa Monica, CA or Camarillo, CA | Full-Time | Onsite

Hitwise is forming a new team that will own an internal data integration initiative behind our analytics product. We value a broad understanding of not just the technical landscape but also keen interest in the product itself. We often face intriguing challenges with trade-offs in both technical and product dimensions.

We are looking a pragmatic team player who values data over dogma. We hope you're sympathetic to the trade-offs and decisions of previous engineers faced with a complex and evolving business. We value experience identifying and mitigating technical and product risk. You'll fit in well if you are a life-long learner, happy to pick up a new programming language or framework as needed.

Required: - Serious proficiency with Java, Kotlin, Scala, Python or similar language - SQL - wisdom - cooperative attitude

Relevant: Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, Spark, Pig, Python, Flask (or similar), AWS/Docker development, Bamboo or Jenkins, statistics, Airflow/Rundeck or similar, online consumer insights/analytics or online advertising, PagerDuty or other monitoring/alerting systems, basic familiarity with anomaly detection and alerting

Unless you prefer to start with a HR-styled chat, contact me directly (a lead engineer here for ~7 years) at dlarsen@hitwise.com.