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datan3rdon US Secret Service: “blockchain is an opportunity to track money”

Agreed, seems like a very elegant method to create your own black budget.

datan3rdon Stochastic gradient descent written in SQL

  with persons as (select * from Person)  
  select Name from persons  
  where Birthdate < '2000-01-01

datan3rdon Big data is dead

Detailed web event telemetry is where I have seen the "biggest" data, not application-generated data. Orders, customers, products will always be within reasonable limits. Generating 100s of events (and their associated properties) for every single page/app view to track impressions, clicks, scrolls, page-quality measurements can get you to billions of rows and TBs of data pretty quickly for a moderately popular site. Convincing technical leaders to delete old, unused data has been difficult; convincing product owners to instrument fewer events is even harder.

datan3rdon Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?

My idea is for everyone to have their own personal website/app/space (could be very basic, prebuilt templates, drag and drop, something your grandparents could set up). That would then lead to the development of social networking protocols or being able to subscribe to web content modules. Basically, I want RSS feeds for web components/modules, but then a personal portal to interact with the items i subscribe to.

I, as userA, with site www.squarespace.com/userA, could subscribe to all or part of userB's site www.wix.com/userB or www.userB.com/photos but not www.userB.com/crazyBlog. Then, on your own site/app, you choose the things you are subscribed to that you want to "re-publish" or add comments to or share. userB could also choose to not let you follow their space.

This decentralizes away from any particular company and should limit the unintentional crazy that is broadcast across current platforms.

datan3rdon Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

I think email might be a good system to model this on. In addition to an inbox, almost all providers provide a Spam folder, and others like Gmail separate items into 'Promotions' and 'Social' folders/labels. I imagine almost nobody objects to this.

Why can't social media follow a similar methodology? There is no requirement that FB/Twitter/Insta/etc feeds be a single "unit". The primary experience would be a main feed (uncontroversial), but additional feeds/labels would be available to view platform-labeled content. A "Spam Feed" and a "Controversial Feed" and a "This Might Be Misinformation Feed".

Rather than censoring content, it segregates it. Users are free to seek/view that content, but must implicitly acknowledge the platform's opinion by clicking into that content. Just like you know you are looking at "something else" when you go to your email Spam folder, you would be aware that you are venturing off the beaten path when going to the "Potential State-Sponsored Propaganda Feed". There must be some implicit trust in a singular feed which is why current removal/censorship schemas cause such "passionate" responses.

datan3rdon IQ Test Made by Mensa Norway

My IQ is a perfect 100!

datan3rdon PRQL – A proposal for a better SQL

Awkward syntax — when developing the query, commenting out the final line of the SELECT list causes a syntax error because of how commas are handled, and we need to repeat the columns in the GROUP BY clause in the SELECT list.

There are some SQL varieties that actually allow a hanging comma! Also, the provided examples seem comma-dependent, no?

As someone who writes a ton of analytical SQL, i think this would get super messy for long, complex queries with casting, case statements, windows functions, etc.

Most people just need to learn to write better SQL!

datan3rdon Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

Was an actuary for 8 years, got my Associateship (roughly halfway through the progression to Fellow). Failed a few of the exams a couple of times, passed a few on the first try. At the time, each exam had a roughly 40-60% pass rate, so by the time you get to the 4th or 5th exam, you are dealing with a pretty smart, invested group...AND it is still difficult to pass.

My job mainly consisted of statistics and data applied specifically to insurance, which I found very boring. I was in life insurance, which is quite simple (people only die once!). Health insurance would have been more interesting, but I am in favor of single payor, so this would have been difficult for me. Property & Casualty (vehicles, property, events, umbrella, custom, etc) would have been the most interesting.

Once I decided to leave, I got an MBA (core courses were trivial due to actuarial knowledge of stats, finance, econ, accounting, etc), and ended up in Analytics/DataScience at tech companies, where my skills transferred quite well.