EternalData

+1 to Python Machine Learning, I feel like some of artificial intelligence is understanding a lot of finer (but critical) mathematical nuances, but some of it is just getting your hands dirty, and the second is definitely more accessible for somebody who is starting to learn.

It still boggles me how liquid virtual assets are.

My family had an old-school mentality and put up their assets in housing where they could. Unfortunately, that ties them to cities around the world, and incurs a penalty in terms of time and maintenance that goes far beyond ("let me build a few backlinks") + school taxes, municipal taxes, condo fees, sewage etc. etc.

As a long-term play, I think as much as people think about investing capital, they should think about investing their time the same way. You put some blocks of time into a particular project that scales well, and it'll eventually provide you with enough passive income to escape being a service layer for hire. In that sense, a job would be a portfolio of investments you can make time-wise in building yourself and passive income assets.

I would argue that the very act of immigration means you're getting a higher-than-average selection of a country's population. Immigrants, after all, are a self-selecting group. People who are willing to upend everything in their lives in order to better themselves and their families would seem, to me, to be quite well-suited for entrepreneurship.

The other reality is that traditional means of economic ascendancy in countries are often restricted to immigrants. Best example I can think of is the non-acknowledgement of certain foreign degrees in America.

Very cool! I'll see if I can contribute in the future :)

The volatility of bitcoin to regulatory announcements is basically sky-high, and I imagine a money making opportunity.

Checked Coinbase right about 30 minutes after it cratered down to 995. Text price alerts don't seem to be working :/

The United States is never going to decay to nothingness.

However, whether or not it becomes the top place for technologists to congregate and build things will become an open question.

That alone, while perhaps not dire to the nation as a whole, will be quite damaging. There, so far, has been an order of magnitude difference between the best technology ecosystem and the second best.

Japan is also looking to open up permanent residency rules, and it has suffered through a nearly two decades long spurt of deflation-driven economic stagnation, with incredible debt/GDP, some of it due to demographic concerns and an inverting age pyramid. Just pointing out that might not be the best counter-example.

It's oddly ominous reading about America's rise on the back of textile patents taken from England and Europe, then poaching of German physics talent and scientific talent from across the world. Germany was, by far, the pre-eminent power in theoretical physics at the turn of the 20th century, with Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck & Born about to be at the peak of their powers. Then the country decided to turn on intellectuals, immigrants, and minorities and turned its scientific prowess to war rather than peace.

There's an old saying out there that history is merely a set of cycles. I suppose we'll see if that is true in the upcoming years.

*one note I would add is that with recent policy uncertainty (i.e healthcare) the advantages of hiring around the world have come into starker relief. That's even more dangerous. Sure, the United States may become less competitive in the war for talent because of walls and tighter borders -- but it'll become less competitive, period, for companies relying on high-skill workers who by definition will be close to or at the peak of their physical and/or mental health.

I think having a dataset on who is really interested in machine learning and applying it in practice can only help Google. Plus, if they kind of lurk on the side, you don't get enough of the Google brand overwhelming Kaggle so that it disrupts the community, but in the back of the minds of people going into competitions and who are in the know, it might help incentivize people who think "Hey, Google is really interested in this".

I applaud what seems like a coordinated attempt to outdo each other when it comes to extreme transparency.

1) Wikileaks revealing the CIA has undermined consumer goods with malware. (this looks like a bigger deal than the Snowden revelations on the NSA side).

2) Russian opposition leader Navalny revealing that former Russian President Medvedev has been accused of amassing a billion-dollar plus property empire, based largely on bribes and subterfuge.

I can only hope this extreme transparency, despite the biases of its torchbearers, lights its way into every hall of power from the White House to the Great Hall of the People.

I've seen your posts on Spark. That's sad to hear.

Are you applying online or via getting coffees with people in the data science team and just talking shop? The latter seems to have a high conversion rate if you can nail it.

This caused panic and chaos for a bit among my team, which I imagine was replicated across the web.

Moments like these always remind me that a particularly clever or nefarious set of individuals could shut down essential parts of the Internet with a few surgical incisions.

There has always been a financial-legal-accounting complex that has accounted for some large percentage of the economy. That used to be a large part of the labor-capital compact -- at least some of the proceedings of capital were going to well-priced labourers who could build the foundations of the upper-middle class or slightly above.

Capital and its holders are getting more and more naked in their attempt to save costs. Individually, this is great -- spurring automation forward certainly frees people up. In aggregate, however, if political/social factors aren't taken into account with automation, there will be a spate of people who think they will have been robbed of their rightful earnings and their purpose in life -- and that will have consequences, intended and unintended.

I think it's just a really interesting way to gate a contact form and get people to think twice about sending off an email. Lots of people have thought about how to avoid spam: finding a way to have to pay to get into an inbox might just be the ticket.

Information is always incentivized one way or another, and people will keep things that contradict their narrative and incentives out of studies. That's a key flaw in peer-review research that I think needs to be addressed.

There should be a guide overall on how RSUs work, especially in an early-stage context, for startup employees. I feel like people toss percentages around but don't grasp the meaning of what they're about.

This guide basically convinced me I need to talk to an attorney and accountant haha.

It makes you think of the power of brands to coordinate human activity.

Every time I see Barbara Oakley I feel the need to post her "Learning How to Learn Talk".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O96fE1E-rf8

Amazon, which has some very large amount of knowledge on your consumer spending habits if you use it regularly is now looking to get the complete financial picture for a not-so-insignificant percentage of the world.

There's some powerful stuff you can do with that.

One of the things I think this story highlights is just how much gain there can be in looking at unsexy things that nobody cares about but everybody needs. I know quite a few startups that are really good at doing that -- no noise, but they're quietly humming away at essential problems that sneak under the surface.

Nice. Super excited to read through and build out a few things myself.

I've been looking for something like this. It's not even the content that really matters, it's more the extra push it gives people to contribute to open source projects. I often find a lot of people don't know where to even start (myself included early on).

It would be ironic if mainstream commercialization of a movement led to the utter dilution of its ideals into nothing more than a catchy, empty buzzword.

continues strolling around in a Che shirt

Crazy story. It's amazing what a state power can get individuals to do for it.

Using TensorFlow with Raspberry Pis is something I've always wanted to try. Time to classify whether I get Thai food or pizza delivered more.

Protections can help soften the secondary impacts of technology.

A lot of the cut paid out to workers in the gig economy is going to fade to nothing. Uber and Lyft, as prime examples, are two capital spigots that are making binary bets that they can essentially cut their labor costs and become profitable through the use of automation (Travis basically said "self-driving and IPO or bust). It's not going to look pretty when workers who didn't have any protections suddenly face up to shifting capital.

Valid, though travelsWith is something that I didn't think the government would be able to systematically canvass unless they had access to passenger manifests.

I wonder if anybody has built a system to correlate Chinese policy actions with economic effects elsewhere. I rudely became aware of just how much Chinese capital controls mattered in cryptocurrencies when BTC took that mini-dive. I'm sure there's some bank out there that's run the numbers -- it's fascinating how many variables might hang on what is essentially a black box.

It's the geopolitical reverse of global search for yield.