Hi, sorry, meant no offense. Apeconmyth is my old account here on HN, which is why I posted from there. I created the new Papercuts account after making the front page. I'm not trying to play games.
Why would someone so successful with productive work take on something so unproductive?
This looks like classic overstep.
If only there was a rational segment of investors ready to make a counterpoint here about anyone saying they are going to fix Twitter ... LOL ...
This is the universe balancing itself. Elon will have to mess up Elon, and my bet (or wishful thinking) is this inflection point right here. He'll be going to Mars to forget this mess.
I've just tried Mastodon recently and haven't been blown away by my experience so far, but I don't like social media either. It's more a Twitter replacement than Facebook. I'm looking to get out of FB as well...
Could you elaborate on Mastodon? I've been following it for some time, wondering whether it's worth the effort to join? (And try and drag some of my friends along as well ;-) )
This reminds me of the time I was asleep and realized I was dreaming, and freaked out and wanted to wake up. Luckily, I did, and stayed awake for a few minutes before going back to sleep.
The next morning, I remembered this and realized I had never actually woken up, I just dreamt I had woken up. Unsettling.
I've had similar experience. Had a dream about my dead grandpa (at some point I realized he's dead and he turned into a zombie along with other people around - not very nice dream). Then I dreamt that I've woken up, I've seen the dormitory in which I really slept, went to open door cause somebody wa ringing, and it was the zombies :/, at which point I've woke up again, for real this time. My friend from the room said I've sat up on the bed and "looked at him" with closed eyes for like 5 minutes, before waking up.
It might have sth to do with drinking like 2 liters of strong tea and studying for exam whole night and day before.
I experience conscious dreaming, where I am aware of my activities during my dreams and can shape them at will - rather than being subject to events dreamed. I remember everything that happens in them.
This has been one of the side effects of my meditative practice.
I got to see the FDNY in action in my East Village apartment building a decade back after a neighbor's boyfriend set her place on fire. We locked our door and got it popped and it was amazing how quickly and efficiently they took out doors, windows, ceilings and floors as needed to control the fire and get the smoke out. They definitely knew their business and we were back in our 300 sq ft 6-floor walk-up in no time!
A quick heads-up: I left the page open to play with it later and about an hour and a half afterwards, it apparently started blaring quite alarming noise out of nowhere. Didn't hear it myself but it freaked out the unlucky person in the room.
Speaking for the data janitors of the world, I can't believe there wasn't a mention of hiring some of us to do this so-called dirty work, if for nothing else than to save these data scientists from using the word sexy.
After twenty years of financial operations, including a decade in the back-office of a top hedge fund, I eventually accepted that I'm a bit backwards for my desire not to jump straight to a pivot table when encountering a new data set. Like a farmer reaching down to touch the soil, my first step is exploring the rows and columns with little tests here and there to find weaknesses within the information at hand rather than paving over them with instantly flawed reporting.
Anyway, for all the big data scientists out there too sexy to clean up their own data, I'm looking for work and don't mind pushing a broom. Check my profile for more info.
> Like a farmer reaching down to touch the soil, my first step is exploring the rows and columns with little tests here and there to find weaknesses within the information at hand rather than paving over them with instantly flawed reporting.
This needs to be done by more people, more often. I've worked with more than one (often SQL, but it doesn't matter¹) database whereby someone will claim that X is always true. It X is something that can be put into a DB query, then you should do that, and run the query. Every time. In my experience, if it isn't enforced by constraints in the database software, then it isn't true.
¹The nice thing about SQL is that you can but constraints on the data, and use the database to keep various invariants invariant.
Often, you'll find people making assumptions about the data based on the business logic, not the constraints in the database. Such thinking is flawed: you cannot reason about what you think the data is, you must reason from what the data actually is.
Worse, you'll find people making assumptions about what they think the business logic is.
We created a "Data Engineer" job (inspired by Amazon's name for the position) for precisely that purpose. The core schema behind Zalora (we sell clothes online) had over 5,000 tables and well, some of the stuff could definitely be improved. There were so many upstream issues we decided to make fixing them full time work (working with both the developers, and the end users like the people buying the products to put on the site).
I can't comment too much on it publicly but well, it looks like it was worth it. I definitely agree that there is a split between statisticians, and "data engineers" in both personality and interests, and you should have both on your "data science"/"big data"/whatever they call analysts these days team. It is however bloody hard to convince upstairs to pay a lot of money for the work! (as with anything "without deliverables", really)
