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mikert5671

30 karma · joined May 18, 2018

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mikert5671··on Can We Survive the Next Financial Crisis?
Some of them do beat the market. They are also producing returns that are more robust to a downturn. So even if they dont match the S&P performance, in a downturn they dont lose as much as the S&P does. It's difficult to compare index funds to hedge funds, they have different purposes. When the market is always going up, it looks like a scam.
mikert5671··on Ask HN: how to start a startup when you need a proper salary
This kind of thing sounds great, any suggestions for area of businesses that you would look at starting? Part of the challenge is that the range of things that you could do is massive.
mikert5671··on The mean age of high-tech founders is 43, economists say
This completely misses the point of my argument.
mikert5671··on The mean age of high-tech founders is 43, economists say
Selection bias, if you're starting a company at age 43, you are risking your career and monetary stability. The type of person who can afford this is probably already part of an elite financially secure class. How misleading is this article? They are comparing apples to oranges, people starting companies in their 20s are not the same as people starting companies in their 40s. Take the set of people in their 20s who would be capable of starting a company in their 40s (meaning they have career success, a cushion of money, etc) and compare them to the entrepreneurs in their 40s, then you have a statistic. This is false otherwise.
mikert5671··on Ask HN: Is OpenAI research the latest wargames? Why not vs. climate change?
is this by design or it just doesnt matter having bad code?
mikert5671··on Companies shouldn't give candidates homework assignments
Good luck getting a good engineer
mikert5671··on Changes in midlife death rates across racial and ethnic groups in the US
I would consider myself an amateur neuroscientist, in the sense that I frequently read blogs on the newest publications and findings, have a decent background in pharmacology literature.

Aside from FMRI scans, which give us a very broad picture of the brain, there is no way to really tell "whats going on". We have not developed that yet.

What neuroscientists currently know, aside from FMRI scans, is that certain behaviors are associated with certain genes. They can say, people who had gene X and went through life situation Y, were Z percent more likely to have a bad outcome. This is where the human behavior is deterministic idea (and "evidence") comes from. One specific expert on human behavior is Robert Sapolsky from stanford, who no doubt understands human behavior deeply. Almost all of his conclusions are driven from the method I exclaimed above. Everything is a statistical conclusion on how the average person behaves, which is a huge error in modern science

mikert5671··on Changes in midlife death rates across racial and ethnic groups in the US
The problem with neuroscience is that they know nothing. For instance, it was considered true that neurons in the brain dont change and adapt, and then the concept of nueroplasticity came along, it was revolutionary. Twenty years later, a new study comes along and says that our brains are not as dynamic as we thought afterall. Human history is ripe with "experts" who were wrong, sometimes for centuries.
mikert5671··on The Math Required for Machine Learning
Quick question, do you do much machine learning in your current job on complex and large datasets? I find that the people who claim that machine learning is not math heavy are not solving the actual hard ML problems. Ofcourse it will be easy if your problem maps well to some framework, where jamming your data into a model produces useful outputs, but theres plenty of problems where you cant do that, and the second that happens, you need to understand the algorithms. Its similar to using some javascript framework, where you can plug in solutions great, until you need to do something outside the framework.
mikert5671··on How to Write Unmaintainable Code (2017)
thats not the point, the point is that you cant assume that you really know what the function is doing, too often its doing something else thats really hard to figure out without looking closely. Good code will make it so that you dont have to look closely, you can read the variable and method names.
mikert5671··on Changes in midlife death rates across racial and ethnic groups in the US
Were all in control of our own lives, we live according to ourselves. The buck stops with me on how I live my life
mikert5671··on Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation
Yeah you really cannot find any good information about it without spending hours, google just surfaces terrible generic articles on equity. Real information is surprisingly hard to come by, some kind of SEO has pushed it elsewhere.
mikert5671··on The Dark Core of Personality
This is obvious, most personality traits are normally distributed and biologically driven
mikert5671··on How Jack Ma took on eBay with Taobao
This is propaganda
mikert5671··on Learning Dexterity
This "new technology will create new jobs" is the biggest lie that economics ever told. The crises in the midwest in this country and the subsequent election of Donald Trump is a direct result of the displacement of American workers by technology and offshoring.
mikert5671··on Requests-Scala: A Scala Port of the Popular Python Requests HTTP Client
I personally love the language, its rare to find a language that supports both object oriented and functional programming styles, while at the same time being able to access all the libraries available for java. Its definitely easy to shoot yourself in the foot given the complexity of the language, but if youre a senior engineer and dont need to worry about poor coding practices on your team, the functional abstractions are very powerful.
mikert5671··on Requests-Scala: A Scala Port of the Popular Python Requests HTTP Client
Scala is useful in big data and ML, apache spark is written in it. It works very well for data transformations
mikert5671··on Finetune – Scikit-learn style model finetuning for NLP
more marketing from fast.ai. Its in every single ML thread
mikert5671··on Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations
But can they get the huge volumes of data they have tagged out? The real time pipelines and internal tools? The community of people they will be working with?
mikert5671··on Facebook AI Research Expands with New Academic Collaborations
FB and Google are the only ones pushing the industry forward. The huge amount of data and computing power is what brings these researchers, its not all about money. In the long run the scientific advancements from these companies is a much higher positive than the negatives they have in the present.
mikert5671··on San Francisco's zoning makes it illegal to build apartments in 73.5% of the city
I love NYC
mikert5671··on NLP's ImageNet Moment: From Shallow to Deep Pre-Training
Why is this in the comments section of every AI article?
mikert5671··on Google and Nasdaq Pursuing Nano-Second Precision in Network Time Protocol
Yeah its funny, I still read outrage about those greedy "HFT players", as if HFT was still highly relevant. It was a blip in time of the financial markets when no one had high speed trading but a few. The alpha has been washed away.
mikert5671··on Google and Nasdaq Pursuing Nano-Second Precision in Network Time Protocol
This used to be true. Small HFT firms can find a niche thats profitable, but thats because there isnt enough money to be made by the big firms in those niches.

In the last few years there has been massive consolidation of the smaller HFT players, the space is commoditized and controlled by a few firms.

mikert5671··on Ask HN: Would you rather work for Google or a smaller high growth company?
This isnt true.
mikert5671··on Ask HN: Which industries will be transformed by ML in 10 years?
HFT is not profitable. Its completely commoditized.
mikert5671··on Why read Aristotle today?
I say dangerous because of the way I came about the book. I read it in high school before I knew any philosophy and it formed the basis of my perception about which philosophers are important. A decade later, after much self study, I reread the book and was horrified at the hand waving and blatant bias.
mikert5671··on Why read Aristotle today?
Bertrand Russell also paints an extremely negative view of Nietzsche in that book. The whole work is extremely biased, it's a dangerous book to read on philosophy if you dont already know the field well, theres too much bias and its too difficult to tell what is bias.
mikert5671··on Ask HN: What can you do today that will be significant in 1000 years?
write a groundbreaking philosophy book like nietzsche
mikert5671··on Facebook management moves around but people don’t leave
What are the failures?
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