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p33pon Financial Model Color Formatting

As much as people in finance love their excel spreadsheets, it’d be lovely if the programming skills of data scientists were adopted. Excel is so horribly inefficient when it comes to reproducibility, auditing, and updating. I can only imagine how much time is wasted throughout enterprises updating models like this because someone some time made a change that wasn’t documented — giving erroneous results.

p33pon Why Financial Planning Is Exciting at Least for a Data Scientist

It really depends on the business model. There are some tools out there for some financial forecasting, but IMO, most are too specialized to do what you’re referring. Ultimately, things haven’t changed much. Most large corporations are still using these excel models to do the exact same thing.

p33pon Netflix Posted Biggest-Ever Profit in 2018 and Paid $0 in Income Taxes

The article also is not true. Netflix paid 15 million in taxes in 2018. It says so right in the 10K: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1065280/000106528019...

p33pon Compounding Knowledge

Do you have any specific online resources you could point to in order to learn cloud architecture?

p33pon Netflix Flexes

Ben and James talk about this on their podcast. I'd recommend giving it a listen to see them extrapolate on your thoughts.

p33pon Netflix Flexes

I imagine you could say that about most things you spend your time on. Reading books? Huge time suck. Playing games? Huge time suck. Watching videos? Huge time suck. I think Ben explained it well in his podcast related to this. When people have $200 a month budgeted for entertainment, the marginal cost of a Netflix subscription isn't that much especially given the amount of potential content the service can have.

Ultimately it depends on what you want to spend your time on, but I'd argue most want some form of entertainment, and Netflix fills that role for a lot of people.

p33pon Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets

Can you provide a link to the O365 version control? I can't find anything online about it.

p33pon Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets

This is pretty neat. Tangentially, does anyone have a good way of version controlling excel files? I deal with people in the finance domain all the time, and for some files that come across my desk, it's terrifying to see multi-million dollar decisions being made in a file where anyone could change anything and not know any better.

p33pon Shane Parrish has become an unlikely guru for Wall Street

When Shane was first starting out with FS (I picked it up around 2013, and I don't think he was around much before that.), it was great. He explained his intentions with the blog as a way of writing down what he was learning and then sharing it with others as an accountability type device. I really do miss the FS of old. It has devolved into exactly what you describe. Shane has turned it into a business. I don't blame him at all for doing so. There was obviously enough demand to do so, and I'm sure the time commitment was ever increasing.

p33pon Apple’s Social Network

I've been shocked that Apple hasn't stepped more in to the home automation market. Homekit is one thing, but an entire product line that is highly integrated with the Apple ecosystem and has the Apple design, feel, and ease of use seems like a smart strategic move in a market that is so highly fragmented.

p33pon Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

Professor Christensen says it better than I ever could: “Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Feelings that you are making a meaningful contribution to work arise from intrinsic conditions of the work itself. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work.“

p33pon Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

Completely worthless is in the context of my degree in actuarial science. As someone else said, it’s an exam prep major. I learned more problem solving and critical thinking skills in mathematics, and I’ve found that much more helpful in my career.

p33pon Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

By all means, if you can get through the exams, you will be left with a low stress, well paying job at an insurance company, and you’ll likely have great job security. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But as Christensen talks about in one of his books, those are hygiene factors. You can find fulfilling, motivating work as an actuary, but salary should not be the main reason for choosing a career.

p33pon Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

They would be better off getting exposure to anything and everything related to finance, statistics, and operations research. Actuarial science specific topics include pricing and reserving of insurance products. I would love to see more CS students with an understanding of finance and time value of money.

p33pon Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

You are correct, and I view it as an attempt to remain relevant in an area they feel threatened by. We will see what the exam ends up being like, but I have little faith in the SOA being able successful test someone’s experience in “predictive analytics” with a five hour proctored exam.

p33pon Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

I would be really impressed if someone with an actuarial science degree has any experience with machine learning. That is not a skill that is taught outside of self learning or an absolute need. It may be more applicable in a property casualty company where there are things like telematics.

p33pon Actuarial science ranked as most valuable college major

As an actuary, I can not recommend it to anyone with a technical background.

I have degrees in mathematics and actuarial science, and I consider my actuarial science degree completely worthless. A mathematics and/or computer science degree will teach you more in terms of how to think than anyone with an actuarial science degree. If you’d like to take a major where your professors literally teach to the exam/test, then you’re in luck, because that’s what your degree will get.

Having been in the workforce a handful of years now, there are a lot of intelligent actuaries and also a lot of arrogance about the work they have done.

I personally am frustrated with the career, but the salary in a low cost of living area makes it difficult to transition into something else.

Given all of this, the valuation of how majors are ranked is silly to me. The criteria almost automatically weight actuarial science as the favorite.

p33pon Ask HN: Best books on the psychology of religion?

The Evolution of God by Robert Wright is a good read. I think it’s important to understand morals/religion in historical context, and Wright does a great job of adding this context and how religion has developed over the centuries.

p33pon 3 Reasons Why Replacing Microsoft Excel Is Worth Money to a Boss

Here are some links that may help solve your problems.

Comparing spreadsheets is standard since Excel 2013.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-two-version...

Power Query may be of use to automate ETL type processes, which is standard since Excel 2016 and is a free add-on prior:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/introduction-to-mic...

p33pon Ask HN: What is your primary source of news in 2018?

Mind sharing which blogs and newsletters?

p33pon I've finally found a Windows laptop worth ditching the MacBook for

Dell XPS 15 9560 model, with Intel's quad-core i7 7700HQ processor, 32 GB of RAM and a Nvidia GTX 1050 graphics chip.

Is it really a hardware issue though? Seems more like a MacOS vs Windows problem.

p33pon It’s COBOL all the way down

Your second question is what I would really like answered.

p33pon Ask HN: How do you talk to your GitHub community?

100% recommend discourse for this. It is what Hugo uses, and I find it very useful and well laid out.

Example: https://discourse.gohugo.io/

p33pon For Two Months, I Got My News from Print Newspapers

I honestly enjoy Axios as a starter for news. They are relatively unbiased, gives me what I need to know, and tells me why it's important. If something has peaked my interest more, I'll turn towards WaPo, NYT, etc for further in depth analysis. Have you looked at Axios before?

p33pon Ask HN: As a data scientist, what should be in my toolkit in 2018?

I would go as far as saying the tidyverse is an essential piece of working with R. Base R sans tidyverse is not a pleasant experience.

p33pon Ask HN: As a data scientist, what should be in my toolkit in 2018?

And don’t over use viz. Pictures do effectively communicate, but often people visualize without understanding. The result is pretty pictures that eventually people realize communicate little effective domain insight. You’d be surprised that sometimes simple and ugly pictures communicate more insight than beautiful ones do.

I don't necessarily agree with this. Yes, a sound understanding of the domain and knowledge of the mathematics and statistics are vital to gaining insights. But. I would make a very clear distinction between exploratory data viz and explanatory data viz. Data visualization when presenting those insights is an important part of driving decision making.

p33pon Confidential metrics for Snapchat features

They is referring to Evan's inner circle at Snap I assume.

p33pon Confidential metrics for Snapchat features

I wish it wasn't such a clickbait title as the information in the article is pretty interesting.

From an investor perspective I don't see how Snapchat is appealing at all. The general numbers provided here only reaffirm my opinion.

From an employee perspective, the workplace at Snap sounds toxic and to be avoided.

p33pon IOTA Surges Past Ripple

I'm also very interested in hearing the answer to this.

p33pon PwC Hong Kong first Big Four firm to accept bitcoin

Legitimately curious how a bitcoin debit card works