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smartera

158 karma · joined June 13, 2013

smartera@fastmail.com
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smartera··on Ask HN: Recommendations for Bavaria/Swiss Alps
I recommend spending a night in Wengen (nearby Lauterbrunnen). It has stunning upclose mountain scenery; better than Grindelwald or Interlaken IMO.
smartera··on Good science fiction books about intelligence, AI, artificial life forms, etc.?
I just finished Neuromancer by William Gibson (published in 1984) – a mind-bending story with elements of AI consciousness, corporate overlords, and human augmentation. Personally, I loved the whole book.
smartera··on Ask HN: Where should I buy my next book?
https://www.abebooks.com is great. Amazing selection of new and used books. It connects you directly to book sellers.
smartera··on Ask HN: How do I get fit and healthy as a software engineer?
https://darebee.com/programs/30-days-of-yoga.html

20 min max / day. Helped reduce my stress level, improve endurance & flexibility, and an overall pleasant start of the day if done in the morning. Bonus: no purchases or equipment necessary beyond daily will power.

smartera··on When can I consider a business dead?
A business is dead when you run out of positive free cash flow.
smartera··on Ask HN: I have 3 weeks off, what should I build?
A peer-to-peer backgammon game where you can challenge friends using an invite link
smartera··on Show HN: Tool I created to covert tabular data to a 'pretty' table
Nice tool. I was really hoping though it can help me tabulate messy copied text data from PDF.

For example, from Philips 2018 annual report [0], I copy the income statement, and I get the below when I paste. I found it impossible to get this into Excel or any other table format, without writing a Python program for it. Your tool still made it as one column. If there's a way you can automatically detect the 3 numeric columns below, you can have a large audience of finance folk analyzing PDF documents.

Sales. 17,422 17,780 18,121 Cost of sales (9,484) (9,600) (9,568) Gross margin 7,939 8,181 8,554 Selling expenses (4,142) (4,398) (4,500) General and administrative expenses (658) (577) (631) Research and development expenses (1,669) (1,764) (1,759) 6 Other business income. 17 152 88 6 Other business expenses. (23) (76) (33) 6 Income from operations. 1,464 1,517 1,719 7 Financial income. 65 126 51 7 Financial expenses. (507) (263) (264) Investments in associates, net of income taxes 11 (4) (2) Income before taxes 1,034 1,377 1,503 8 Income tax expense. (203) (349) (193) Income from continuing operations 831 1,028 1,310 3 Discontinued operations, net of income taxes. 660 843 (213) Net income 1,491 1,870 1,097 Attribution of net income Net income attributable to Koninklijke Philips N.V. shareholders 1,448 1,657 1,090 Net income attributable to non-controlling interests 43 214 7

[0] https://www.philips.com/c-dam/corporate/about-philips/sustai...

smartera··on Planet: Imaging the entire Earth every day
Anyone familiar the pricing structure of Planet? I couldn't find that on their website.
smartera··on Show HN: Python app to check you in to your Southwest flight
Just a heads-up, you have your API key in the source code. You may want to consider having a gitignored secret.txt file for the keys.
smartera··on Ask HN: As a data scientist, what should be in my toolkit in 2018?
I have also used Bayesian quantification of uncertainty in pricing forecast models. Decision makers love a measure of uncertainty when one recommends a pricing scenario that can have significant impact on revenue. Also, you get the chance to build multilayer models to combine knowledge from independent samples. PyMC3 is fantastic for building these models within Jupyter and Gelman's Bayesian Data Analysis is a great introduction for different Bayesian model applications.
smartera··on The Advertising Bubble
(I work in market research industry for promotions/ad optimization and effectiveness; off and on-line)

I agree completely with Maciej points. There is one other factor that should be considered; the more ads served to us (normal consumers); the less our reception to them is thus the new ads need to be more powerful. Only giant companies can fund the creativity and subtlety needed for very effective ads on a large consumer scale; everything else is noise in the consumer mind except for tiny well-targeted niches. Those are the two groups (giant companies and very niche businesses) that will survive the consumer-ad bubble burst easiest.

smartera··on Ask HN: What is your job role and what are the side projects you are working on?
Market research / analytics director by day.

Building a niche end-to-end encrypted storage/communication web app by night.

smartera··on CBCrypt: Encrypt from the client rather than send passwords to servers
This is all nice; and as hinkley pointed, Stanford already proposed a better protocol. The primary issue in my opinion is how to trust the JavaScript arriving from the server that it does what it's supposed to do.

In my humble opinion; we need to use the blockchain to save hashes for trusted and open-audited JavaScript files to be confirmed by the user. This, however, needs to be done at the browser level to avoid an endless trust loop with JavaScript/browser extensions. blockstrap.com has figured out how to put file hashes on the chain; so technically it shouldn't be a major challenge to do the first part. The browser part is where it gets tricky!

smartera··on Travelling to work 'is work', European court rules
Same for the Netherlands, a lot of employers reimburse the public transport subscription costs or pay an amount depending on km distance between work and home. That's wherever you live, even if you are more than an hour train ride away.
smartera··on Ask HN: Career trajectory? I'm terrible
Thank you, I hope this is as enlightening to the OP as it was for me!
smartera··on Show HN: New IDE and GUI for R language
You mention "For using FasteR you need fit only several conditions", while it's only Windows and .Net. "Several" makes it sounds like a difficult installation and may prohibit some novices to install it.
smartera··on Alone in the dark
Security/Penetration testing and cryptography fields are great areas to (at least) start alone.
smartera··on Ask HN: What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
Fully agree as well.. Took me a long while to really believe it though. Yet once I did finally "get it", it provided me with a new sense of freedom.
smartera··on Ask HN: Best, simple to use WYSIWYG website builder?
Check out squarespace
smartera··on Show HN: Ultimate mashup Web-based music player (Last.FM API)
This is really great.. Very well thought of UI (love that the left playlist pan is always on even through account registration).

One thing I'd like to see is the ability to add single (or multiple) track(s) from the playlist that you created for me to my own curated list (without having to add the whole list).

smartera··on What will I look like?
Agreed, and filter by pounds lost.. also calculated BMI before and after would be great!
smartera··on Last day to apply for Startup School Europe
Yes, but UK is not schengen, so for any non-EU living in the schengen area this presents a barrier.
smartera··on Ask HN: Promoted beyond my level of competence?
I am in the same position.. got recently promoted to manage a ~20 person team (analytics not programming). It sucks not being able to do actual analysis/project work anymore and the politics are infuriating.

That said, the experience is very valuable. I am planning to take off to start a company soon so managerial experience is definitely handy (not to mention the extra pay!)

My advice is to work on a technical side project to keep your soul from getting crushed (either at work or personal) and learn from the job till you figure out what you want to do next.

smartera··on Ask HN: How To Dethrone Google?
Other than flexible dates and more search options, Kayak has direct search links to the airlines. Google flights (while having brilliant map search) asks you to call a travel agency and in many cases the price was not as accurate as Kayak