michaeltoth

I just moved to the Bay Area and visited Big Basin for the first time two weekends ago. I had never seen trees that large in my life.

I'm grateful that I took the opportunity to go and see it when I did. It's crazy to think that less than two weeks later there is so much destruction there.

There's a big difference between saying Trump didn't conspire with the Russians (what Greenwald said" and saying the Russians didn't attempt to interfere. It's astonishing how people conflate these two things

I was expecting a generative art algorithm for drawing trees

I'm always shocked by the lack of integration among Google's various products. The amount of time my Google Home replies to a simple question with "I'm not sure how to help with that" is mind-boggling. Some variation of "I don't have a great answer, but I've sent some Google search results to your phone to review!" seems like an infinitely better (and obvious) alternative for the global leader in search, but they've for some reason ignored this for years.

SEEKING WORK | Data Scientist

Location: New York, NY or Remote

Email: mt.toth [at] gmail.com Website: https://www.michaeltoth.me LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelttoth Github: https://github.com/michaeltoth

About: Experienced (5+ years) Data Scientist with experience in R, Python, SQL, and Command Line tools for data science and analytics work. Worked in different roles dealing with data science, analytics, and product management with a particular focus on financial technology companies. I excel in helping early and mid-stage companies make sense of their data and set up robust data science practices. I can also help with setting up dashboards and performing ad-hoc data analysis. I also have extensive experience writing about topics in data science for both technical and non-technical audiences, including sharing data & analytics as a form of content marketing. Please email if interested in talking!

This is a cool idea, but I imagine this isn't legal, right? Creating an actual business out of this would have to require buy-in from the content creators

1000x the current mining power is 10% of global energy consumption. So they'd be spending 10% of global energy consumption for a year. This is infeasible unless done by a consortium of world governments, and to what end?

It's doubtful that they would diverge significantly, unless the currency controls are so onerous that Bitcoin mining is the only solution to get money out of the base currency. Why would anybody choose to mine at a significant loss? Certainly not at the level the article is implying, with costs of mining approaching $1MM and Bitcoin (presumably) priced far lower.

Thanks for the detailed response. You point out some interesting challenges that I hadn't fully considered. Overall, do you still prefer to contracting process and role to a traditional position?

A bit off topic, but I'm curious - how did you get started in contracting and how do you go about finding clients? Is it through people you've worked with in the past, or do you somehow advertise yourself? This is something I've considered moving toward but I don't know where to begin. Thanks!

Yes, the payments are interest, so you need to pay tax on these even if you reinvest in further loans.

Scientists are also incentivized by the publishing system to find noteworthy results, which often leads to finding evidence where there is none, especially in fields like nutrition where the signal to noise ratio is so low

Except a ride from Brooklyn or Queens is $2.75 and a ride from Philadelphia is around $80 on Amtrak. Also, you're assuming that he lives directly above 30th Street Station and works directly above Penn Station, otherwise the travel time is likely to be over 2 hours.

It's going to be harder to do just about anything related to data analysis in Haskell than in R. In R I can load a dataset, do some formatting, and produce a well designed plot in fewer than 5 lines of code. Haskell might run faster, and it's certainly more versatile, but for data analysis it isn't even comparable.

In the United States bonuses are taxed as ordinary income.

Companies may withhold a higher percentage than a standard paycheck, but this is generally because they treat the bonus as if you will continue to receive that income throughout the entire year, and withhold at the corresponding higher rate. When taxes are filed you will receive a refund for any taxes overpaid.

When people refer to interest they often are referring to investment gains, rather than actual bank interest.

Specifically, it is generally assumed that a diversified investment portfolio will earn ~4% after inflation on average, and by spending 4% of your portfolio balance at any time you are reasonably safe in the assumption that your money will not run out. At 3% it's all but assured that your money will not run out. These are conservative assumptions and take into account the fact that in any given year your investment performance could be significantly less than 4%

Thanks for the articles. I recall reading about this last year when the paper was published, but I had since forgotten about this form of attack. This is definitely interesting.

Not really.

For an attack to be possible, the attacker needs to generate an alternate blockchain faster than the honest blockchain. This problem can be thought of as a binomial distribution where the "success" is the honest blockchain mining a block and extending its lead by a block and the "failure" is the attacking chain being extended by one, reducing the gap by 1 block.

p = probability of honest blockchain extension by 1 block q = 1 - p = probability the attacker extends by 1 block

If p <= q, the probability of the attacker catching up at some point in time is 1. This is what makes a 51% attack possible.

If p > q, the probability of the attacker catching up is (q/p)^z where z is the number of blocks behind at the beginning of the attack.

There is a reasonable possibility for small values of z (small number of blocks behind), that 40% control would allow for the creation of an alternate blockchain longer than the honest chain, but this is mitigated by the fact that transactions require confirmations, which extends the number of blocks and makes the likelihood of an attack very unlikely.

I wouldn't underestimate the effort of buying new Altcoins, especially with dollars. If you already own bitcoin it is easier, but buying new altcoins requires that you go through potentially untrustworthy channels on smaller exchanges as new exchanges generally won't have them available.

This chart plots the "share" of each question on the site, so the total is always 100%. If you read the chart from left to right you will see that the languages whose share increases become wider while those whose share decreases become narrower. It can be a bit difficult to read with this many options.

It's a bit slow and prone to crashes, but mapnificent is a decent tool for this: http://www.mapnificent.net/

I think this is a good idea for a site, but I'd caution that it could give users a false sense of security. As the site gains popularity, the site-specific passwords are only as secure as the master password used to generate them. Therefore it is still important to choose a strong master password when using this tool.

This may be obvious to users here, but to most people the fact that the generated passwords seem random may lead to a false sense of security in this matter.

What hosts does everybody use for these side projects? I'm interested in working on some of my own, but I'm just wondering if everybody is paying for hosting and as you expand into multiple projects how you keep it from getting too expensive. I'd really appreciate any information.