whyhow

Hey I'm a data scientist with 5 years of experience building predictive models. I'm trying to start my own side-consulting company specializing in scoping machine learning projects and building PoCs and MVPs. I think I may be able to help you here. If you are interested in connecting, please look me up on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/acauthon

Last year around Christmas time I was talking to my wife about what candy I wanted in my stocking. I said something like, "I really like those gold ball candies. I can't remember their name. Maybe ranchero something?"

Then less than an hour later I had an ad on my phone for ferrero rocher candy. It was incredibly creepy.

I know supposedly the Google phone and Google home (in my case a model from Lenovo) doesn't parse your conversation for ads, but I have no other explanation.

I think there is a huge risk that the data being collected just isn't meaningful to the problem being asked.

For example, if you are trying to predict the weather you'd really like information on how big clouds are moving but all you have is wind speed and humidity.

Everyone acts like having fancier machine learning methods will solve their problem, but often the data just isn't good enough and getting better data is impossible.

Wouldn't you call that a network effect? Uber is only effective if you build up a network of customers.

I thought scale meant you could run your service for 1 million users just as easily as you can run it for 1,000 users.

I feel like all (software-y) business ideas that don't require scale would fall under some form of "consulting". Does anyone disagree with this?

This is how you end up with students who are not prepared for the workforce because they haven't been trained on the tools that businesses actually use.

There is nothing ethically wrong with asking students to purchase proprietary services, but it is tone deaf to make them buy absurdly expensive software.

No it doesn't. In my example the bank loaned out $850k to the first small business and $723k to the second. That's $1,573,000. The bank started with $1million.

It absolutely matters how many times the dollars come back to the bank because that is the pathway that lets the bank loan the same original dollar out multiple times.

So the depositor put $1,000,000 in the bank and the bank loans $850,000 to a small business so it can buy more inventory. The small business goes to the widget manufacturer and writes a check which the manufacturer deposits into the bank. So now the bank has 1,850,000 in deposits and 850,000 in loans.

The bank takes the new deposits and loans out 85% of it ($723k) to another small business. This small business goes and uses it to pay its employees and they all deposit the money in the bank. Now the bank has $2.573m in deposits.

The employees and the manufacturer can all withdraw the money at any time. So I struggle to see how this isn't creating money.

The fractional reserve system lets the bank loan the same dollar out multiple times. How isn't this creating dollars? If the bank takes one dollar and loans 85 cents to you and 73 cents to me, isn't there more money?

He doesn't literally mean country clubs. He is saying that the fed's current policies allow rich corporations (controlled by rich people) to get loans at very low interest rates.

This is an over-simplified view of the market. The market isn't a zero-sum game. It's often in an investor's best interests to publish their research on a position (after they have taken it) to convince others to jump in the trade with them. It doesn't do you any good to find a diamond in the rough if no one else knows about it.

It is a minefield though and you should never 100% trust one source on any given investment, but to act like there is some kind of mathematical truth that no one ever publishes any useful stock analysis is just silly.

I think this could be fixed by making each job be posted for a fixed block of time, say five minutes. Then it is randomly assigned to one of the shoppers that selected that job. This would remove the incentive around reaction speed and I don't think the customer would care about the slightly increased time for an order.

If my company could lower the cost of its product by half and still make the same yearly revenue, it would. And all the executives would get huge bonuses.

I don't think this is true forever. I've doubled my salary in my first five years in my career through job changes, but I don't think I can do it again. I guess I have one more 20k jump (if I'm lucky) and then I will have maxed out the salary for my position and market.

Or you could lower overhead by cutting costs, hiring less people, changing commission structures.

The nicest business meal I ever had was during a lunch meeting that I tagged along to with a large insurance carrier. They could probably cut out $30 steak lunches to lower costs too.

In response to the article about USO:

If you wanted to build a financial entity to track oil prices, couldn't you just form a company that just buys a warehouse and stores a large amount of oil? Then its value would be roughly equivalent to the amount of oil it has stored?

Then I guess at the end of the month, the company would buy or sell more oil to align its value. Maybe operate like an etf that tracks an index?

It's probably public since he knows their salaries. you can get a hold of most college employee salaries through state ran databases.

I've seen this too. Personally I think both environments are really valuable. I really prefer meeting folks in person, but my home is nicer for hard problems that require concentration.

I just want to split my time evenly between the two.

I think it is wrong to assume that something is inherently bad just because it is addictive.

I've had zero interest in working on personal projects since I've been working from home. I spend 8-9 hours at my desk in my bedroom. The last thing I want to do is spend another hour there trying to do a personal project.

Yeah of course, I'm just interested hearing potential paths.

Anyone know your typical steps for this process? I guess your first step is to contact your embassy, then look for a local lawyer, then what comes next?

I get that the disease is more deadly. But is this one of those cases where it's better to pull hard and rip the band-aid off in one go? Nobody seems to really want to broach this topic seriously.

If you "rip off the band-aid" then hospitals will be overrun and more people will die because they couldn't get adequate care. The idea is to slow transmission until we get better treatments or even a vaccine developed.

I tried Ubuntu for the first time in years last month. At first I was pretty happy with it, but gradually I grew frustrated. Every time I would install a new library in R (statistical programming language) I would have to spend 10-15 minutes trying to figure out why it didn't work. I'd end up in this deep rabbit hole of missing dependencies that I never had a problem with in MacOS or windows

This is true in all fields. Everyone always over estimates their own profession's impact on the big picture.

Should I just do a credit card chargeback for an postponed event? Are there any drawbacks? I tried to chat with their customer service and it wouldn't let me because my event wasn't eligible for a refund.

You are comparing average salary for software engineers to the revenue number for a lawyer. That revenue number isn't his salary because it is unlikely that he is able to bill 40 hours a week.

A better comparison would be the average salary of lawyers vs the average salary of software engineers. Or the average billable rate of a software engineer consultant vs the billable rate of a lawyer.

Have you looked at what lawyers get paid? The law field has a very strange bi-modal salary distribution.

https://abovethelaw.com/2018/06/the-most-important-chart-in-...

Have you ever reached out to the Airbnb host and asked them to store your luggage before check in? This is something that I think most hotels will allow.

Thank you for the recommendation of Rubicon. I enjoyed reading through this thread so I thought I'd take you up on your recommendation. It was this first history book I've read in probably a decade, so I wasn't sure if I was going to enjoy it but I absolutely loved it.

I think what you are missing is that "greed" is in the eye of the beholder. Of course a business magazine never worships the "greed" of a great businessperson, but they do worship a person's ability to make huge deals.

America definitely worships actions that many would consider to fall under the "greed" term, even if you don't. A great example is that Donald Trump's main qualification for being President was his wealth and business acumen. I think half the country would consider him a poster child for "greed" while the other half think his actions fit in on a resume.

This is silly. I bet your colleagues are making poor R programs because they are not well versed in programming, not because R is inheritanly worse than anything else.

My experience is that people who make bad R programs also make bad python programs. I don't think you should blame a tool for issues caused by the programmer.