jerzyt

The situation in EU may be different than in the US. We also have the age issue, but I think the age is a red herring. People in tech change jobs so often that nobody is hiring for lifetime employment anymore. The best people leave in 2 to 3 years, because they get bored, get better opportunities, get poached, etc. So at 45 this shouldn't be an issue at all. But it is. I think that with age people become more aware of nonsense and are more reluctant to work ridiculous number of hours per week. And this awareness is highly correlated with age, the end result is the same. Have you been looking into consulting scene, where the experience counts more?

Sears has been around for about a 100 years, and they have invented the catalog sales model - they were the Amazon of that era. I don't blame them for not doing things like A/B testing a 100 years ago, but 10 or 20? They were asleep at the wheel. That's when Walmart took off like a space rocket. Essentially the same offering to the same demographic. Yet Sears collapsed.

A better question would be why AI works great for some business (e.g. Netflix, AirBnB, Uber, Waze, Amazon) yet fails miserably for other (JC Penney, Sears). In my view, the older companies are trying to strap on AI on top of a traditional dataset, which never collected any useful signals. The new companies designed their entire business concepts around data, and collected what's needed from the get-go. Sears may have a 100 years worth of useless data. AirBnB has about 13, but so much more informative. Amazon applies A/B testing all the time - would anyone at Sears even know what it is?

A secondary issue with business data is that vast majority of the features are categorical, for example: vendor id, client id, shipper id, etc. These usually get hot-one encoded, and you end up with hundreds of features where there's no meaningful distance metric. Random Forest and XGB are about the only that produce somewhat rational models, but in reality, they are good because they approximate reverse engineering of business process.

And lastly, the hype far outweighs the possibilities, at least until the business are ready to re-engineer the processes, if it's not too late.

So based on the alligator entry in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alligator, alligators are native only to US in China. Given the geographic distance, how is it possible that: a. they are the same species, or b. somehow they migrated through the Bering Sea.

Is your code on github? I'm actually working on something very similar, and would love to get some ideas from what you've done.

First, kudos to the OP. If you don't mind, would you compare and contrast it to newspaper3k?

Take a look at this. It's my daughter's retelling of the whole story of this project. I think she did a great job of showing the progress. I'd probably emphasize slightly different aspects, depending on the pains the next day. https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/179140921692015...

And this is a before/after blog post by my daughter: https://www.natalietomasik.com/blog/big-bear-condo-before-af...

I have done the same thing last year. Yes, it's a lot of work, it did take me over a year. And yes, it's extremely satisfying. I did it on a condo for Airbnb rental. Here's the link to show what it looks like: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/plus/39954647 No it's not a shameless plug, since we're shut down right now due to the virus.

I'm working on gerrymandering. Both parties claim that the other party is better at it. My hypothesis is that some gerrymandered districts benefit the incumbent to the point of actually benefiting the opposing party in the adjacent districts. So, the incumbent has a safe seat, but the net is a loss for his own party.

I'd like to be able to demonstrate and quantify it.

I don't think you can institutionalize remote work. The team has to gel. I've worked with extremely efficient and motivated team, where we basically communicated through Skype and chat. We met at the office once a week. Best job I've ever had.

And I've also worked on a completely disjointed and disfunctional remote team.

Only the team can make it work, not any mandate from above.

I was just about to write a review along the same lines, but you did it already. The article is not going anywhere, just rambling along.

Oh great, someone is down voting me. Another four hours later, and I'm still showing #81 in the queue.

Interesting, I always thought it was the taxi companies lobbies that stopped that. Never thought about the parking lobbies, but it sure makes sense.

Yeah, let me know when it actually works. Started at about 1200 in the queue and 4 hours later I'm still number 81, and have been sitting at 81 for the last hour. Sounds interesting, but I think you launched too soon.

The biggest stupidity in LA is that the train does not reach LAX, but ends a couple miles short of it. This alone would greatly reduce LA traffic. What city planners didn't see that?

There are so many people who don't mind being stuck at "sucking at something" it's outright scary. I'm currently learning Python, and very frequently I feel that my solution is not elegant, and I hate it. I imagine a lot of people would just go along with it. Maybe not on HN, but in general.

Client data confidentiality. I know it's a weak argument, but if the contract requires that we store data in-house, there's no choice.

Medically, they are different, but the risk factors are very similar, and I can't see why the quarantine would change the ratio of the two.

It would be nice for Fitbit to publish some research. They have the data.

I'm not replying to myself but to all who posted to confirm my suspicion. I'm amazed that I've been so blind to it. It's so blatant. And now it makes sense how many of the challenges are: traffic lights, school buses, etc.

Thanks for the link. Interestingly, I grew up in Poland, under Marxism-Leninism, but none of his books were ever pushed on us, so this is somewhat of a surprise for me. I'm going to give it at least a quick scan to get an idea.

Which one of Lenin's books do you have in mind? I haven't read any personally, but he's not usually referenced with any of the others.

Clausewitz, on the other hand, definitely qualifies, although it's a much longer read.

It just occurred to me that Machiavelli could be grouped with Sun Tzu and Saul Alinsky - each one of them wrote an incredibly insightful and influential book on strategy or leadership.

Are there any other authors/books in this category?

I've been wondering if the captchas are Google's way to get cheap image classification by humans.

In real financial data you'll often see departures from the Benford's law. For example, if a company has $50 expense limit for dinner, you'll find a lot of invoices for $49.99. Same goes with approval limits at different management level. Not as useful in practice as in theory.

Does anyone know what percentage of the call centers are not actual employees but contractors? The contractors are usually demand based, therefore "invisible" in these stats.

I really like you being open minded about it. Kudos for that. I see a lot that a lot of online retailers want you to create an account before you can browse. You can browse Amazon, the biggest online retailer, without an account. Something worth considering.

I completely agree. So many business shoot themselves in the foot requiring to sign up to quickly. At least let me have a taste of what I'm signing up for. Quite often there's a complete mismatch between my needs and the vendor's offering, and I don't want to waste time.

Fundamentally, the issue is that in real time you may not be able to make the trade that your algorithm chose. You could get close if you had the actual book prices at any given time, but even then, you might lose to someone who is 1 millisecond faster. So no, backtesting can simulate reality. Interactive Brokers offers a simulated account where you can practice "live" trading, although it's still not the same, since there's no money involved. But if I see a paper tested on an IB simulated account I'll be very interested, and it'll be too late already.

Thanks for sharing - great info. I still think that the potential energy (no pun intended) is huge, so if the engineering challenges are solved, it may not compete with solar, but should be competitive with wind.