ryanferg

I think it really depends on the qualifications of the individual applicant. I've been here a while and I'm senior level but I make more than I would as a professor somewhere and more than I would at the lab I used to work at. If you're interested shoot me an email and we can talk about it there, but I'm not the King of Hiring so I'm not going to throw something out there.

Houston Astros|Houston,Texas| Baseball Research Analyst|Full-Time|ONSITE

The Astros are looking for a new analyst to join our R&D team. We deal with every aspect of the game, from supporting coaches developing minor league players to determining where a left fielder should stand given a certain batter/pitcher matchup. We have mountains of data, and we have an organization that is willing to listen to the analysts and try things out. If you're interested in feeding terabytes of data into powerful machines and leveraging your considerable cleverness, education, and domain knowledge to make a 3" ball go faster- we want to hear from you.

We're a generally Bayesian group, and so we're looking for someone who has experience with some Bayesian tools. On the python side we use quite a bit of numpyro (and we love JAX) and there are some RStan models floating around too. Really we want someone who thinks it's fun to stay at the cutting edge. We have a ton of data, we care about out of sample prediction, and I haven’t seen a p-value since I started working here (which is a good thing).

I found this job on a HackerNews Who’s Hiring post 8 seasons ago and I have really loved it ever since. There is freedom here to explore new ideas and technology. There is organizational buy in- If you can make a case for a course of action, you might see the team try it out on TV that night. I have 2 World Series rings with my name on them and my kids love coming to work (if I stuff them full of cotton candy). You don't have any game time duties, but you do get free tickets.

Knowing about and loving baseball is not a requirement, but it would be a plus. Don't let that keep you from reaching out. If you want to apply or just ask any questions, feel free to shoot me an email (rferguson at astros dotcom)

https://www.teamworkonline.com/baseball-jobs/houstonbaseball...

I got hired to be an analyst for a MLB baseball team off of a HN post like 7 years ago. Because of HN I have 2 world series rings! Life is very strange but I'll forever be grateful for that Who's Hiring post.

I feel you on the live coding. As for the physics/math data engineer, hit me up at rferguson at astros.com if you'd like, we're always looking for solid cross discipline folks

When I was in undergrad, a Cog Psych professor told me a story about an undergrad who made a poster for a regional research conference of no real consequence about the correlation between diet soda drinking and some recall task. The study and the conference were more about teaching students about research more than actually finding anything. When he and his student showed up to the conference, a representative from a low-cal sweetener producer was there, and proceeded to spend the entire conference standing next to the poster refuting the obviously amateurish research. He said for years afterwards, he'd still get mail and faxes about new research that disproved any link between fake sugar and memory problems.

All of that being said, I don't know if there is a substance that we consume that has had more research done on it than artificial sweeteners. For every study like this, there are other studies disproving them, etc. If there is an effect, the effect size is small, and I'm not convinced there is anything there. Also, I'm drinking a Diet Coke right now and in another life I was an Alz researcher so maybe I really want it to not be there.

I work as an analyst for a MLB team. Bad calls are frustrating, but automated systems are not foolproof. It's been a few years, but there have been MLB games where the system is down completely. Can you imagine having to delay a game to get a tech out there? Woof.

But really, I think we give umps an apple watch or something that buzzes whenever the ball is a strike. That data could be available very near real time. And then, once the umps get real time feedback, you never tell anyone you're doing it. The umpires association would be down for keeping it under wraps, as it keeps the robots away, the old school "human element" folks would be happy, and the calls would get better!

I'd imagine thermal throttling will be responsible for actual performance differences across devices (but this is just a guess)

I'm a data scientist (for an MLB team that will win the WS this year!) and I love this. Of course this isn't a whole end to end evaluation platform. But we will get 300-500 applications for a position sometimes, and often folks have no business applying and this would be a great way to filter out some of the noise. Great job!

Funny story. Someone, let's call him Mr. Unlucky, sent me $1700 via zelle a few months ago. I called my bank and asked them about it and they had no info. About a week later, a guy emails me saying he meant to send the money to his land lord John.d.Doe@gmail.com but instead sent it to me, John.Doe@gmail.com. Both me and this unlucky dude called the banks, called Zelle, etc trying to get the charges reversed. No luck.

So lucky for this unlucky guy, I had been receiving John.D.Doe's email for about a decade on and off. I had sent the guy mistaken emails and sort of had a dialog with him. I knew he was in real estate. I emailed him and he confirmed that this unlucky guy was indeed renting from him, and his rent was this $1700 amount. So I took a leap of faith that this guy hadnt been playing a long con on me and forwarded the money. It was reckless and probably stupid but it wasn't my money and I felt bad for Mr. Unlucky. Zelle was no help, had no protection, and allowed this silly mistake to be made. Mr. Unlucky sent me a nice note and we both commiserated about the flaws in Zelles systems. I don't think I would use them.

I used to browse the "who's hiring" every month, even though I had a job I loved. I saw an ad for an MLB team (Astros) looking for an analyst, which was super interesting to me. I sent in an application, went through the process and ended up taking the job.

I don't browse them anymore, there is no way there is anything better for me out there right now.

Not to say that I'm not open to the idea. I'd love for it to be true, I just think large-effect-size effects are not often mired in the controversy that this one is. They're hard to find.

This is really great! I'll have to look into this when I have a little while. Thanks for passing it on. Just on a glance, I disagree that it really shows much of an increase though. Just glancing at the forest plots of those effect sizes tells me that this isn't a very strong effect at all (if it's there).

And there is also the so called 'file drawer' effect. I was at one of the big cog psych conferences a few years ago when a colleague was asking around -'Do you have any failed to replicates for WM training?' Everyone was so excited with the original Jaeggi 2008 paper, went out and tried it, and had a tough time replicating what turned out to be a severely flawed study.

So it definitely transfers 'near'. You'll get better at the dual-n-back test. And possibly other visio-spatial working memory tests. But the question of far transfer- will it make you smarter- is probably not. Here is a link to a 2015 meta-analysis that looks at the question of working memory training (including dual-n-backs) transferring to other working memory tasks:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/084fvteji1tyz8t/2015-schwaighofer....

Melby-Lerva
g & Hulme, 2013, is also pretty damning.

All of these brain training products are suspect. Evidence for far transfer (training in one task transferring to a different domain task) is surprisingly hard to find, and empirical findings otherwise tend to disappear or diminish when replicated.

Many of the pro-brain-training camp have already begun to shift the goal posts. First it was 'simple games increase IQ,' which turned out to be difficult to prove when well controlled studies were performed. Now it's more along the lines of 'These simple games might have preventative effects against age related declines!,' which is an even harder claim to actually prove given the difficulties performing well controlled studies on aged participants.

In the cognitive science world, if we discovered a solid far transfer paradigm, especially one which transferred to something like G(eneral Intelligence), it would be our anti-baldness pill\flying car\4-day cellphone battery. People thought that these working memory transfer effects were the real deal and got very excited about it, money poured in, and the water got muddied by all these scientists with conflicts.

I obviously don't put much stock in working memory training. I wish it worked like they said, but I don't think it does. If far-transfer shows up at all, it's tiny, and doesn't persist after delay.