Hacker News Reader

sonofaragornon How useful was the Netflix Prize challenge for Netflix?

All these rules determine what it shouldn't recommend. What rules would you use to determine what it should recommend?

Would you agree that these rules will quickly become unwieldy and a pain to maintain? And that these will be personalized to your taste but not to someone else's?

Wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to maintain those rules and if the system were tailored to every user? Congratulations, you've just realized you'd like to use ML/AI.

sonofaragornon I might have gone a little bit overboard

How did this get to the front page of HN? It's very poor quality and almost every comment has a negative sentiment.

sonofaragornon Research recitation: A first look at rote learning in GitHub Copilot suggestions

Did I understand correctly? There were 473 "useful/interesting" suggestions out of 453k?

sonofaragornon There’s no such thing as “a startup within a big company”

Just like any other internal hackathon-type event

sonofaragornon How to Become a Data Engineer in 2021

What do you use if you need to process hundreds of GBs of data?

sonofaragornon Colombia is considering legalizing its cocaine industry

You seem to have read a lot of this so I'm genuinely curious: why do you refer to the country as "columbia" instead of "Colombia"?

sonofaragornon I sold Baremetrics

If letting go the $800k was purely PR, then that's some expensive PR. Who reads these blogs, a couple thousand people maybe?

sonofaragornon Ask HN: How Blog/side projects helped you land a job

Is the blog on automation with python still active? I'd love to take a look.

sonofaragornon Ask HN: How Blog/side projects helped you land a job

Hey I remember your package! Why did you write startup in quotes?

sonofaragornon Formula 1 2020: The secret aerodynamicist – are capes the key?

I've always been curious... do you worry about job security given how teams are sold and/or restructured every other year and how heavily they dependend on sponsors and results?

sonofaragornon YOLOv5: State-of-the-art object detection at 140 FPS

I'm a bit fascinated by this Ultralytics. It has super nice website but according to LinkedIn, I think it's just one guy who does consultancy.

The intriguing part is that he has also done research in particle physics (as Ulatrlytics) that has been published in Nature [1].

I had never seen anything like that.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep13945

sonofaragornon Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

Is it really possible to generate $50/day on mturk? What kind of tasks would pay that much?

sonofaragornon Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

This is a great idea. If you manage to pull this off you'd gain extremely valuable experience that would allow you to easily transition later on.

sonofaragornon Ask HN: Physicists of HN, what are you working on these days?

PhD in Experimental Neutrino Physics (2018), now a Data Scientist at a growing start-up.

The transition was an easy one for me as I found a particle physics collaboration shares many characteristics with a start-up.

One thing to note is that responses here will be biased towards physics people that are more interested in the tech side than the physics side.

sonofaragornon Uber’s self-driving car unit was burning $20M a month

I've heard this argument before and I think it made sense the first time I heard it when self-driving systems were uncommon. But now every major tech/car company is working on it, should it still be considered?

I mean, isn't it likely that a new company/startup will show up when self-driving systems are robust in 5-10-15 years?

sonofaragornon Ask HN: What podcasts do you listen to regularly?

The Indicator and Planet Money from NPR

sonofaragornon Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

Any resources you could share along these lines? I'm definitely interested in improving my setup.

sonofaragornon A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency

That highly depends on the amount (in USD) at stake:

$100: Absolutely.

$1000: Tough, but I'd do it if it meant the promised change to financial services

$10000: Unlikely, I'd rather keep my non-perfect coins

$100000: No way.

sonofaragornon AAAS: Machine learning 'causing science crisis'

She has a PhD in Statistics from Stanford. The title of her thesis was "Transposable Regularized Covariance Models with Applications to High-Dimensional Data". (http://www.stat.rice.edu/~gallen/)

I think she knows what she is talking about.

sonofaragornon Demand and Salaries for Data Scientists Continue to Climb

Any Data Scientists from Toronto here? I'm up for a salary review soon after my first year after grad school and I'm trying to get a feeling for how much I should ask for.

Indeed.com shows a $121k average for Toronto. Does that sound somewhat accurate? I'm only making $85k so maybe I should be asking for much more.

sonofaragornon 1500 Private Jets Fly to Davos for Climate Talks

Yep, that was my understanding as well

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46439469

sonofaragornon Your new smart TV is so cheap because it's collecting and selling your data

I'm in the market for a new TV, what should I be looking for?

sonofaragornon What Data Scientists Really Do, According to Data Scientists

How do you measure how solid their plan for the money is?

sonofaragornon What Data Scientists Really Do, According to Data Scientists

This is an important point too. I'm still amused by the story of the "Growth in a Time of Debt" paper. Two famous Harvard economist made an Excel mistake (among other things) that completely changed the conclusion of their study and ultimately affected real-world economic policies.

Here is a summary of the story: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel...

sonofaragornon The IceCube Neutrino Detector at the South Pole Hits Paydirt

Large paychecks from industry/finance

sonofaragornon Data Science Is America’s Hottest Job

I commend you for writing this levelheaded reply. I was about to write one with essentially the same arguments but a much more aggressive tone.

sonofaragornon Jupyter, Mathematica, and the Future of the Research Paper

Thank you for mentioning him, I didn't know of him. For anyone interested here is an interesting talk he gave recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuNj5paMuow

sonofaragornon Reflecting on the founding, growth and maturing of Overleaf

Interesting read.

I've been using Overleaf almost every day for about a year (and absoultely love it!) and I am still not sure how it can be profitable :D

sonofaragornon Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

Try 17:10 instead of 5:10?

sonofaragornon Show HN: TensorFire

This is really cool! Great work!

I wanted to download the resulting image but got a "Failed - Network" error :(