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stevesimmons

2,745 karma · joined July 2, 2014

Chief Data Officer and co-founder at financial data aggregation platform Sikoia (https://sikoia.com).

Contact details on LinkedIn or mail@stevesimmons.com.

Previously did military research; was a management consultant; ran marketing, profitability, credit risk, and operations for credit card companies; built trading systems and ML platforms for investment banks.

BE/BSc in Math/Stats/Physics/ElecEng; PhD in Elec Eng, MBA.

World champion programmer, a long time ago (ICPC, 1992), together with Andrew and Craig. Python programmer since 2000. Find my PyData and PyCon UK talks at PyVideo.org.

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stevesimmons··on Banks and Credit Unions to Team Up Against Apple Pay Fees
> Fundamentally 1-3% is actually a very competitive rate for organizing the easy transfer of money and handling fraud

This is a very US-centric take. In the UK, EU and Australia, interchange rates are capped at more like 0.2/0.3%.

stevesimmons··on Astra for Law
Surely the rate of improvement in new LLM models is the equivalent mechanism?
stevesimmons··on Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout
Most runners I know wear running shoes nearly the whole time.

They run in their new shoes, then switch them over to casual use as the cushioning starts to go.

And if you're a really keen runner, you'll have different shoes for each type of training (track, tempo, long and slow) and racing (track, XC, trail, mid distance, half to full marathon). So you end up with a constant flow of "worn but not worn out" shoes. Which you wear when not running...

stevesimmons··on Tiny $70 Xteink X3 e-reader
I got the X4 just before my summer holiday and put "War and Peace" from Project Gutenberg on it as my only ebook.

Five weeks later, I'd finished it, all 360 chapters, 1400 pages.

Apart from finding War and Peace a totally engrossing read, one of my favourite books of all time, I give the credit to the X4... I'd never have finished it if reading the physical book (too large to carry around) nor if reading on my phone (too many distractions).

So thank you xteink!

stevesimmons··on Hacking IKEA Furniture
When we did a full renovation, we had the cabinet maker install an Ikea kitchen, with a custom non-Ikea worktop and a small amount of his expertise to adapt it for our non-Ikea dishwasher etc.

This was a massive cost saving on a fully custom kitchen, and let us shift the budget to custom built stairs/bedroom cupboards elsewhere.

Ten years on, it all still looks as good as new.

stevesimmons··on Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco
For sunbathing in particular, do what Australia does:

- large scale public health campaigns on dangers of skin cancer. With a catchy song and slogan ("slip, slop, slap... Slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen, slap on a hat")

- schools make it compulsory for kids to have hats in summer

- regulate tanning salons, promote fake tans in preference to sunbeds

- doctors check people for skin cancers during regular checkups

And over just a few years, being very brown quickly gets associated with being reckless and unhealthy.

In other words, regulate and educate

stevesimmons··on An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
"Not illegal" doesn't mean we should passively accept it whether we encounter it professionally at work or personally as a customer.
stevesimmons··on An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
Excluding people from services because you can't be bothered to handle their perfectly correct and validated email address is actually a form of discrimination.

My pet hate is my bank refusing to email me bank statement notifications to mail@mydomain.com ("not a personal address"), yet their password validation and marketing emails get through quite OK. Somehow they seem incapable of acknowledging that one department of the bank has made a technical decision in conflict with other departments...

stevesimmons··on Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI
> it is "spend considerable amount of time thinking about and planning your eating".

Nonsense. It doesn't take any more time. Just buy unprocessed, basic food, fruit and veg. When you open your cupboard, cook something tasty from what you have.

When you go to the supermarket, just don't walk into the aisles with snacks. Don't buy anything laden with sugar and fat.

Get into the habit of drinking black coffee instead of Starbucks' calorific drinks; it takes less than a week for your taste buds to adjust.

It's not rocket science. Just most people don't want to admit that every excess 100 calories they eat adds 11 grams of fat to their middle. Which adds up week by week, year by year.

stevesimmons··on Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
To your point 4, we have lots of good reasons why people are gaining weight: they eat more. It's not exactly rocket science.

Obvious reasons include:

a) food is very cheap, especially processed food

b) portion sizes are comically large in the US

c) ubiquity of snacking and eating on the go, which is mostly high calorie

d) few people smoke now, and cigarettes are potent appetite suppressants

e) less social disapproval of being fat. To fair degree, being overweight is contagious

I agree completely with your last paragraph, at a society level. At an individual level, though, it's all on us to exercise self control for ourselves. Just most people don't want to.

stevesimmons··on U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative
> The right to bear arms is critical... The governmental structure of the US is so good...

Not sure many outside the US would agree with these statements.

> People should own a gun for self defense and a car to get where they need to go.

Nor these.

Never felt the need to own a gun. I don't know anyone who does. Haven't owned a car for 17 years. I get along fine.

stevesimmons··on Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding
This Red Blob Games blog post would be accessible to a wider group of readers if it spent just a few sentences up front on motivation and terminology.

If you don't already know exactly what the heuristic function is and that L is something called a landmark marker, and anyway what is a landmark marker anyway, you need to read quite a long way through the blog post to make sense of it.

And when you do finally get to that point, you realise it is all very simple, so why not just say that at the start?

stevesimmons··on New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.
Speaking as a European, current foreign policy is not "reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner". It has already reduced trust to rock bottom.

It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia.

Just this week, amongst other news:

* America's useless adventures in Iran have used up so many Patriot missiles there aren't any left to defend Kyiv against Russian missiles, while Iran is still firmly in control of the Straits of Hormuz.

* Meddling in Greenland went up a notch with landing equipment to start oil drilling.

* State Department funding MAGA-oriented "free speech" disinformation campaigns in the UK.

* The revival of Trump's tariffs under the hypocritical guise of guarding against slave labour. Especially when the US prison system is such a large domestic source of slave labour.

Zero trust left here. Zero desire to visit the US ever again.

stevesimmons··on My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”
why do you want your watch to manage a grocery list? seriously
stevesimmons··on US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
Lots of fossil fuel infrastructure was built in formerly nice places that now you'd never go to voluntarily...
stevesimmons··on Denmark: EVs Make Up 97% of New Private Car Sales in July
Maybe that's a fair price for the externalities of fossil fuels.
stevesimmons··on How the words we teach English language learners changed
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists
stevesimmons··on BYD Launches the Denza Z9 GT EV in Europe and the UK at over 3X the Price
"3x the price" means 3x the Chinese price.

Crucial missing context from the truncated headline!

stevesimmons··on FreeInk: Open ecosystem for e-readers
By the way, I'm in the UK. I bought it on eBay UK from a guy named "Reliable Trove" who imports them and reflashes them with CrossPoint.

I know it's not hard to do, but I needed it to work first time before my summer holiday, couldn't wait for a Chinese import, and had no spare time to mess around with putting new firmware on it.

stevesimmons··on FreeInk: Open ecosystem for e-readers
I got an Xteink X4 a month ago. It's perfect: none of the distractions of a phone, battery life measured in weeks, small enough to carry everywhere, cheap enough that I don't worry about anything happening to it.

So far I have only read one book on it. But that is Tolstoy's "War and Peace" (361 chapters, 1300 pages in paper editions), which I'd never managed to read more than a few tens of pages of before.

Which is pretty solid proof of how nice the X4 is.

stevesimmons··on Launch HN: Parsewise (YC P25) – Reason Across Documents with an API
"retaining lineage"
stevesimmons··on HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88
I'm not sure that follows. I stopped making open source contributions when I switched from mature companies to startups.

Now all my "non-work" time is spent on startup work. And none of that is visible via GitHub.

stevesimmons··on Challenging the Narrative of European Decline
I don't buy into this critique at all... I live in two cities in Europe. I like our size of houses. I like not needing to own a car. I like that in both of the cities I live in there are 8 supermarkets within ten minutes walk. I like that I never have to think about healthcare costs. I've never felt the need for air conditioning. And when I see Americans' lives, they seem full of crappy stuff that I have no need for, food that's positively unhealthy. Not to mention guns, etc, etc.
stevesimmons··on Claude Desktop spawns 1.8 GB Hyper-V VM on every launch, even for chat-only use
... 20 years of not remembering that I only ever want to see distances in km
stevesimmons··on Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts
Which is why NTSC was often said to mean Never Twice the Same Color!
stevesimmons··on Microsoft open-sources "the earliest DOS source code discovered to date"
And mine is a Commodore Vic-20 circa 1981, with 3583 bytes of free RAM. Programmed in 6502 assembler. Can't get much closer to the CPU than that.
stevesimmons··on Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlines
What would your alternative look like?
stevesimmons··on Archaeologists find Egyptian mummy buried with the 'Iliad'
There's a great article on the Ptolemaic dynasty in the latest issue of the London Review of Books. Tons of fascinating detail.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/robert-cioffi/pharao...

For instance, the Library of Alexandria had up to 500,000 scrolls (which of course were all handwritten). And it was partly stocked by confiscating all the books from any ship that happened to dock in the nearby port.

stevesimmons··on Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure
I'd never heard of it either. A comment further down suggests it is Japanese.

Digging deeper, the kyu -- or Q for quarter millimeter -- is apparently a foundational distance measurement in Japanese typesetting, which is metric and operates on a millimeter grid.

stevesimmons··on Bitwarden scrubs 'Always free' and 'Inclusion' values from its site

  - KeePass files synced between laptop and phone on OneDrive, DropBox, etc
  - KeePassXC on Windows and Mac
  - Keepass2Android mobile client
  - Browser integration on mobile. 
  - On laptop, I prefer no browser integration; Copy username and password with Ctrl+B and Ctrl+C
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