Hacker News Reader

EternalDataon OneLogin: Breach Exposed Ability to Decrypt Data

I'm thinking of splitting my logins into a set of essential information in a paper journal -- while keeping some transactional passwords on 1password. 1password was one of those times where I decided to trade off convenience for absolute security -- which I'm realizing is a mistake.

EternalDataon Older Adults Learning Programming: Motivations and Frustrations

Super interesting reading -- thanks for this!

EternalDataon Improving Stack Overflow jobs search with machine learning and R

Great read. I loved the honest balance between engineering features and how much they ultimately ended up mattering to users. Oftentimes, the features we select can be quite arbitrary -- it's good to do gut checks by running real-time validation of results as often as possible. Fortunately, at Stack, you've got the userbase to do just that :)

EternalDataon Upstart – Find newsletters to promote your business or side projects

Great idea! Email newsletter have such great ROI, it's just a pain to find out who owns them and getting into contact with people who are looking for sponsors.

EternalDataon Google’s AlphaGo AI defeats team of five leading Go players

I thought this was supposed to be a few years away -- i.e beating Lee Sidol was impressive, but Lee wasn't nearly the top player in the world?

Wow, this must be what it feels like to be living on a parabolic curve...

EternalDataon Kik Messenger App Debuts Own Digital Currency Amid Bitcoin Boom

Not sure the cryptocurrency boom and gift certificate utility are super-correlated -- Target has been trying to trap me and my USD with those checkout cards for ages. Usually the incentive is social shame for not just giving straight cash to my friends as gifts -- here, I'm not so sure?

I guess it's about as viable as Dogecoin.

EternalDataon Don't use Hadoop when your data isn't that big (2013)

I feel like there should be a general law or rule of sorts -- don't use technology for the sake of using technology.

EternalDataon Ask HN: How do I switch from being a passive consumer to an active producer?

I've recently taken a step in this direction by being really deliberate about my media choices and designing around them. For example, as a consumer, I realized I was obsessive about looking over r/Politics and forever updating news sources of sometimes dubious quality, which distracted from all productivity for me at times. I've decided to order print editions of the New Yorker, and focus on long-form pieces from ProPublica as a rule to scratch that itch.

I feel like part of the solution to reducing consumption at the very least is to realize what the initiating triggers and needs of your consumption are, and trying to find a way to sate them in a way that allows you to chunk a time to engage with high-quality solutions to your consumption needs -- and then that frees up more time to be a creator.

As for the active producer part -- the only insight I've really gathered is that you want to commit yourself to something big and imposes costs on yourself (i.e time already dedicated to that project) to make yourself follow through (i.e use the sunk cost fallacy to your advantage).

EternalDataon Recent Graduates Are Most Likely to Work in Sales, Making around $40K

I feel like an apt title for a book about late-stage capitalism would be "A Society of Salespeople".

With that said, I'm not exactly sure what type of career path somebody studying, say, political science could embark on -- it seems to me that there's a lot more demand for accreditation in certain fields than there is demand for actual practitioners.

EternalDataon Uber board director and CTO under pressure in sexual harassment investigation

https://backchannel.com/how-the-tech-press-forces-a-narrativ...

"A company’s narrative moves like a clock: it starts at midnight, ticking off the hours. The tone and sentiment about how a business is doing move from positive (sunrise, midday) to negative (dusk, darkness). And often the story returns to midnight, rebirth and a new day."

I feel like Uber is starting to see if it can hit midnight.

EternalDataon Sam Altman Considering Run for CA Governor

There's an interesting inflection point when it comes to age and politics nowadays. Ossoff is 30 and is now the best hope the Dems have at picking up a seat in suburban Hillary country. Macron, at 39, is the youngest French leader ever elected (emphasis on elected) and the youngest head of state.

Granted, both had deep experience in politics before cutting their skin in the game and staking themselves out in a major way. But I no longer see age and perceived experience as a major obstacle to policy-making and electability -- especially in an age where most people are yearning for a different kind of politics.

EternalDataon Hospitals across England hit by large-scale cyber-attack

It seems like for that amount of money, you could have tried doing a bug bounty instead :/

I get that this is probably social hacking/phishing, so not really analogous -- but I wonder if there's a way to apply that kind of mentality to good. I wonder if there's white hat phishing (though I guess that might be oxymoronic).

EternalDataon As IPOs Pick Up, Big Startups Hold Out

Yeah, very fair point on this. Are private secondary markets just by default eternal bull markets? What's the price correction mechanism? Devaluation due to massive supply/demand imbalances?

Interesting space to get involved in, for sure.

EternalDataon As IPOs Pick Up, Big Startups Hold Out

It's going to be interesting to see how long private markets can maintain irrational bubbles hidden away from transparency.

I think a lot of people are "rich on paper" and scared to know exactly what that means.

As a corollary to this, I've recently seen private secondary markets boom quite rapidly. There's probably a huge opportunity there.

EternalDataon A novel approach to neural machine translation

Haha, this really was TLDR-length. Kudos!

EternalDataon How the TensorFlow team handles open source support

It's really cool to peer behind the hood of really massive open source projects. I have to give kudos for the TensorFlow team for staying on top of what must be a massive amount of work!

EternalDataon Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?

A lot of employers still use degrees as a rough proxy for ability and dedication. This may be especially prevalent in data science since the field itself tends to have a lot of Masters/PhDs occupying the field -- which will tend to bias the hiring process towards viewing degrees as a strong positive signal.

With that said, a lot of companies hiring for data science roles fall into the category of software startups -- larger companies like Google or Facebook are looking for specialists who tend to hold degrees. But at smaller companies, you can be more of a generalist and there, the old mantra of "show me what you've built" often applies. You could build out a data science career if you found just the right company.

By no means is it easy, but I wouldn't say it's a waste of your time (unless you have some incredible opportunity cost you're using up).

If you were to go about doing it, I found this blog post that can help you with your plan of attack: https://www.springboard.com/blog/learn-data-science-without-...

EternalDataon Puerto Rico files for biggest ever U.S. local government bankruptcy

Also, to add another wrinkle to this discussion, most pension funds won't weight themselves 100% in stocks (corresponding positions in cash/bonds average much lower real or nominal return), and most pay significant management/consulting fees on top...

EternalDataon Puerto Rico files for biggest ever U.S. local government bankruptcy

You're overfitting. This is exactly the problem I'm describing. Case in point, you've omitted 2000-2010.

Real (CPI as inflation) averaged annualized return on the DJIA 2000-2010: -2.219%

This is with relatively mild inflation.

Of course, 1960-2000 looks better when you literally put in the apex of the software bubble when P/E ratios shot skywards...part of which corrected over the decade following.

Expecting a 8% nominal or real return is simply nuts in my opinion because you are staking yourself on a really small sample size with crazy inflation to boot. Nominal or real is a nuanced distinction to what is plainly just bad overfit thinking. The introduction of just one decade with low inflation and bad returns can wreck you -- case in point: Dallas Firefighters/Puerto Rico ($43bn + of unfunded pension obligations)/Detroit etc. etc. etc.

EternalDataon Puerto Rico files for biggest ever U.S. local government bankruptcy

I feel like local governments are going to be the first to really be affected by significant pension overlays that are not properly accounted for -- a lot of pension funds assume rates of return that are historically farcical. I think the industry average used to be about 8%.

"During the 20th Century, the Dow advanced from 66 to 11,497. This gain, though it appears huge, shrinks to 5.3% when compounded annually."

http://davidgcrane.org/?page_id=702

It doesn't auger well for the future of stable financial markets. Weak localities will fail, and eventually the states that have to support them. Puerto Rico is the canary in the coal mine.

EternalDataon SQL is 43 years old – Here’s why we still use it today

Good old SQL. Your reliable friend that always shows up with the right amount of booze and gas money, and which, when you stop to think about, basically hasn't ever majorly fucked up around you.

EternalDataon Former miners out to put Kentucky on the tech map

It's interesting to have local politics geared towards attracting talented people, but there's precious little that can be done if talent is fractionalized at a national level through the concentration of urban bubbles to immigration policies that stem inflows of talented people...

Talent is distributed unevenly, but I don't think a series of competing local lobbies will change that. I've always thought that all of the local ecosystems for which talent flows unevenly should think seriously about banding together and working on policies that 1) increase overall talent availability 2) distribute its spread more evenly -- 1 would involve working to get Congress to create incentives for entrepreneurs/high-skilled workers of all kinds to come to America in the first place, for example, while 2 might be a combination of infrastructure/tax policies.

EternalDataon Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

I wish I knew that 80% of impact really does come from about 20% of work -- and I'd have organized my work life accordingly.

EternalDataon Taming Recurrent Neural Networks for Better Summarization

Very cool! Would be awesome to eventually run the summaries the RNN generates in a production-ready capability, and see how it does. Reddit has a few TLDR bots that I think are more extractive and could use an update.

EternalDataon AIGrant: Get $5,000 for your open source AI project

Very cool initiative! The more support that comes to recognizing the open source projects and research that go into so many useful tools -- the better.

EternalDataon Stockholder Proposal Regarding a Report on Users Owning the Twitter Platform

Douglas Rushkoff wrote decently well about this topic -- his argument was that Twitter was a company that never should have gone public and which would have been much more interesting had it been more decentralized and privately controlled. Maybe not as interesting financially -- but interesting in the sense of control and technological vision. Public markets can do all sorts of strange things to a company -- I think as IPOs start to wane in frequency, a lot of startups are going to take a long hard look at public markets and some might decide to take a hard pass on them, despite the gold pot at the end of the rainbow.

EternalDataon How morale changes as a startup grows

Critical reading. Startups are such different beasts depending on what stage they're in.

EternalDataon Machine-owned enterprises are inevitable

The really interesting thing that will come out of this, I think, is defining what are usually human-only attributes. The notion of ownership being anything less than associated with individual humans was displaced by the mythology of joint-stock companies, which can own things as an extension of the will of many humans. Now when you're explicitly talking about ownership by entities perceived as non-human -- that could get interesting very fast.

EternalDataon Distill: a modern machine learning journal

Looks very good (especially the team behind it!), but I wonder if there's a discrete step down to where you make machine learning materials accessible to the general public beyond data visualizations and clear writing. This will certainly be a more interactive experience, but it seems to cater to those who are "in-the-know" and require a bit more interactivity/clarity. It'd be nice to discuss the format changes or the "TLDR" bot of machine learning that makes machine learning research truly accessible to the general public.

EternalDataon YC AI

Thanks so much for highlighting this!