NumberCruncher

This is anything but new. In Germany BMW sells cars since years, where the engine power is throttled by default and the throttling can be disabled for an extra fee. Former colleges of mine are working on the business side of this, trying to figure out the sweet spot for the fees, managing marketing campaigns through every possible digital channels, etc. Serving the devil pays well btw...

> If you cannot start from the real Objectives and have to make up fake ones

The more you understand the real motivation of people the harder it gets to take business goals and decisions seriously.

What I wrote was meant in the context of data science. You can not do ML without having access to real data, not even in highly regulated industries. Obviously you won't touch PIIs. But whether the real data is sitting in your train/test/validation data set or you use it for integration tests, doesn't make any difference from the perspective of an audit.

> I don't think your interpreting the sentence correctly

And I think you are injecting the words "only", "there are" and "everything" here and there just to change the meaning of the sentences I quoted and I have written...

> That doesn't mean an experienced full stack developer would do Data Science better, because he might lack a lot of skills that matter more in that domain.

This resonates with my experience. I had the opportunity to work on a DS codebase written entirely in Scala with all the typing, parallelism, actor model, whatnot. Basically I joined the company because of this technical factor. It was fun until I figured out that DS was "typed IF-THEN-ELSE written by Java devs in Scala returning stuff the users complain about with high reliability within milliseconds". Now I am happy to be back to the single threaded untyped Python world. Still no bugs in production, because we validate all requests to death, have unit tests and integration tests running on real data not on mokups. Basically we follow the principle: if the integration test passes, our typing is just right, or at least good enough. Funnily all the typing errors we catch are caused by wrongly typed data, coming from the productive system written in a typed programming language... what a strange world.

> We don’t need statistics to learn about the world.

A sentence, written by the author on, commented by me on and read by the HN community on devices, which exist only thanks to 80-90 years of rigorous, statistics based QA in engineering, especially in mechanical/hardware engineering.

Anyhow, after spending years on a team filled with social science PHDs, I would not waste my time on reading papers about statistical analysis done by social scientist.

Dealing drugs involves solving interesting problems too nevertheless IMHO it is bad for society and I try to avoid both dealers and addicts if possible.

After 15 years of experience with SAS this sounds to me like saying "knowing how to write and having a pen makes you to a poet". But it depends on how far you can toss a stone...

Either he is onto something or not, but his ego is going to scare any sane person away.

Thanks for the insightful comment.

> You manage problems and projects and enable people to do their jobs well.

This is based on the assumption that people want and can do their jobs well, or at all.

Lucky you, if this sounds strange to you.

I did not say, that is illegal to fire people in Germany. Nonetheless as an employer you have to obey the laws making firing cumbersome. Laws, not made by slave drivers...

This is true, but I remember reading an article where the journalist compared the "only X rooms left with these conditions" claim to the system of the given hotel in real time. Well, as it turned out, the hotel had more than X free rooms with those conditions allocated to booking.com...

In Germany this isn't a legal move. One of my former employees (global telco everyone knows) tried to do the same, namely moving the contracts of the employees to an other company. 200 of them started a class action and won easily. The company had to terminate their contracts (which means the employees are eligible for unemployment benefits, etc.) and had to pay a good severance. Something like (years of employment) * 2 monthly salaries. Some of the employees took the money and went into early retirement.

> several of the dark patterns don't

The "only x room left with these conditions" false claim is used also in the EU.

An other good question: why is dropbox scanning abd opening files outside of the dropbox folder?

My issue with the JS world is that it is leaking from frontend webdev into other domains. 0.1% of your users having a bad user experience because of using a "just good enough" JS library is pretty fine for me, even if I am - as a user - in that 0.1%. But taking down your whole k8s cluster thanks to switching to a "just good enough" JS library from a battle tested python library is the exact opposite of "fine".

Bose quite comfort 35 ii and the 700. We use them 4-6 hours a day due to covid homeoffice and couldn't be happier. IMHO if you want to have something better you have to switch to the studio section and give up the BT.

> The data set itself—gathered by marketing insight firm Nielsen—was huge, representing 45 percent of all food store sales in the city

This means that in the 5 households Nielsen used as a "representative sample of Seattle's population" one person got so overweight that he can't leave his flat any more and therefore he started buying his daily dose of soda online instead of buying it in his favourite store. Soda consumption drops by 20%. At least this is what Nielsen says. But hey, who am I to judge decades of financially successful quackery...

This resonates with my experience. A couple of years ago I invested more time than I proud of into buying the right bluetooth headset for me. I have found a site with pretty detailed reviews and tested their reviews standing in stores and trying dozens of headsets out. I also bought 3 headsets on Amazon and sent back all of them later. My impression was that the reviews on this particular site are 100% unbiased, where all other reviews I read just want to sell whatever product is in focus.

I wonder how a search engine could distinguish between "honest & professional" and "fake & amateur" headset reviews without having a head and two ears?

> It is astounding to me that a state as paranoid as Israel [...] would actively sell some of that highly sensitive tech to other states that not that long ago had a death wish for Israel

You should google up the story of the Swiss company Crypto AG Tl;dr; bought by the CIA and the BND (German counterpart) in 1970 and sold security software to governments all around the world. With built in backdoors for the CIA and BND. It was the main source of foreign intel for decades for the CIA.

"I didn't do it on purpose" and "no one knew what we are actually doing". I gonna call it the "data scientist's switchblade...

> Tinder has an incentive to keep the paid users paid my making sure it is difficult for them to find a match

An evil data scientist would put almost exclusively users on your screen who you are interested in but they are not interested in you to boost your spendings and would mix a small portion of good bidirectional matches just to make his purpose less obvious. Fortunately evil data scientists does not exist... I mean I definitely wasn't paid to do anything like that. Never.

It is the same in Hungarian. "szarni rá" is the exact translation of the German expression.

Being a butt in a seat while your manager justifies his position with "someone has to manage the butts in seats" and his manager justifies his position with "someone has to manage the managers of butts in seats" solves a small part of a big problem.

Not OP, but those questions are 2+ years old.

> "You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have."

I just imagine Moses saying "Who am I to question our being enslaved in Egypt, our society being organized this way, the order of things may reflect knowledge I may not have, hence I have to respect it. Let's just stay here, for ever."

Our society revolves around and is being organised by people challenging, bending or breaking social practices. If I have to choose, what to respect, I gonna respect this.

> Most of that time is spent executing poorly crafted Oracle SQL queries drawing millions of rows into the analytical run-time for, sorting, aggregation, discarding, merging, and spliting tasks.

I always try to follow the rule-of-thumb of "if it can be done in the analytical DB, it should be done in the analytical DB". In my experience Oracle is pretty well suited for all of the "sorting, aggregation, discarding, merging, and splitting tasks". With proper indexing/partitioning processing 81M records shouldn't take 17 hours. Pulling all the data into python and then fighting the lack of (out-of-the-box) multi-threaded data processing capabilities seems to be part of the problem than of the solution.

In my current job if I have to do some analytical heavy lifting I just write the data to AWS S3 (parquet) and read the query-results back through AWS Athena (Presto) into python.

> If your time-machine can follow a continuous path through spacetime between A and B, there is no more problem.

Nope, there are still some problems. It's not enough to be at the right space (=coordinates) at the right time, but you have to have both the right speed-vector and the right-acceleration vector, both compared to the universe (otherwise the milky way moves away from under your feet with galactic speed) and compared to your body (otherwise the speed/acceleration change will rip your body apart). And with right I mean 100% right, because we are talking about galactic speed and acceleration.

If I were you I would do what our working student from Iraq did. Enroll in a German university without tuition fee, do some freelance / working student job on the side until you can turn your student VISA into a normal one.