agentofoblivion

I have one of the happier cases perhaps. At time of hire, my target comp was around $160k, RSUs were backloaded to mainly vest in years 3 and 4. I’m now in those years, and stock has risen a lot. Now I’m making more like $230k. Sure, they used that once to not give me a big raise, but I got promoted once with a 25% raise and it’s hard to complain when I’m bringing home far more than I would have thought. So RSUs can be good.

I think you raise a good point about the nature of a for profit organization and it’s design being optimized for a particular thing, which is very much not a thing meant to generate good answers to tricky political questions that impact a whole lot of people/things. In reality, it’s headquarters is in a politically radical place where conservative voices have a helluva hard time speaking up because they could face career backlash by dissenting with the overwhelming majority views in those rooms, which are not representative samples of America. Google decision makers are not designed to be accurate representatives of America’s constituents.

Ideals aside, I think there’s a clear business reality that the radical left employee base is giving google a lot of headaches. Many might argue this is for the better, but that’s mostly because they have similar political sentiments. It seems like woke culture has made google a very tense place and is gobbling them up.

So its been ~2 years. Have the problems been sorted out? Have original authors published their implementation? Would enjoy an update on these efforts.

I agree it’s not accurate to lump all mentally ill people into a category of having bad brains. And I also agree early intervention is probably the best means to prevention, although I don’t really have any evidence to base that on aside from observing life for 30+ years.

But, I think it’s also counterproductive to pretend that we currently have the knowledge and technology to turn all of these people into productive members of society. Some of them have indeed been dealt a bad genetic hand, and giving them a house isn’t going to fix it. The guy yelling nonsense at the sky and stabbing people needs more than I know how to give him, and it’s too late to make sure his parents feed him his green beans.

So, I’m definitely open to discussing medium and long term solutions, and investing tax money into helping this problem have reasonable outcomes for all the badness involved. But I’m not happy to wait a generation for these to take place, and just hope these violent maniacs don’t kill someone, or throw a five year old kid off the upper floor of a mall...oh wait, that already happened.

I also live in Seattle. I have no idea how to solve the problem, but I definitely don't think letting dangerous people roam the streets, committing acts of violence without consequence, is the answer.

When you have a person that's consistently assaulting random people, that person needs to be forcibly removed from the environment as a matter of public good, regardless of the causal reason for their actions.

It's a real shame they were born with a bad brain that makes them incapable of not being a violent menace to society, and that no cost-effective and humane solutions seem to be on the table. But if I have to make a short-term decision on who's rights to sacrifice first: the ill violence committer or the innocent victim, I choose the former 10 times out of 10.

What does this have to do with Data Scientists? So you didn’t read up on how to log time, made unnecessary mistakes, and an inflexible collective of likely underpaid service reps didn’t care enough to go beyond the letter of the law. That’s hardly a scam. That’s you not knowing what you’re signing up for and then being upset when you didn’t get the outcome you wanted. Hardly deserves front page news.

The author doesn’t seem to have any self-awareness of the total irony of this article.

I don’t think many of these comments are realistic. I’m truth, these clauses are likely defensive, particularly for tech companies. There is an almost 100% chance that if you started a company and left your job, your company will not register your coming or going in the slightest. If you’re some famous person that ends up starting some billion dollar company, and it was in an area highly relevant to your job, you might have a problem. Or if you try to sue them to stop doing something you created while employed for them. But if you’re just a regular person that starts some business that’s moderately successful (already an unlikely scenario), everything is going to be fine. It will likely take you YEARS and YEARS of toiling in obscurity before you come even close to profitability, and that’s if you’re lucky. You think some big tech company is even going to remember you? Even if you build a multimillion dollar business, that’s a drop in the bucket for them, not to mention legal fees, difficulty of enforcing the dubious contract, and the bad PR of squashing a former employee’s business.

I’ve been surprised by Amazon’s commitment to and progress in this area. I only recently learned that half of AWS was powered by renewable energy in 2018. That might not be good enough for these people, but I was pleasantly surprised.

My primary mechanism was reaching out to recruiters and people on LinkedIn that already had the jobs I wanted. I found that just applying through the job site almost never went anywhere. It comes down to a numbers game, so I would sort your hypothetical list of jobs from "dream job" at the top to "I guess" at the bottom, and then start applying from top down. You should absolutely take job postings and required skills with a healthy grain of salt. These are almost always generic, copy/paste artifacts.

An exception might be if you see "Publications in top-tiered journals" as a requirement. Those positions likely actually target PhDs with relevant publications. They might overlook a lack of a PhD if you're a recognized expert in the field, of course. But I interpret this requirement as "we want an academic", and there primary job is likely research and publishing papers. A Research Scientist at AWS is not an academic, as someone at Google Brain might be, but rather someone building applied ML solutions.

This might be overstating it a bit. Just this week I've been studying the AdaNet paper and grappling with Noise Contrastive Estimation. I agree that with a B.S. in physics you'll at least get the calculus you need, but I think a graduate level degree really deepens your understanding since it's not the first time through and you're already familiar with the basic concepts.

Regarding doctors and stats, I share your concern. But I disagree with the statement that stats should be second nature to anyone that's gone through the courses. If I've learned one thing while going deeper and deeper into stats, it's that there's a lot more nuance than I originally understood, and I'm still not there. Just when I think I have a thorough understanding of p-values and the like, I'll read some "I can't believe everyone doesn't understand THIS" blog and see that there was more to the story still again. It's hard to know what you don't know.

Research Scientists are mainly just data scientist in that we’re building models for the business, not just for papers. But we do try to push the boundary and contribute academically. The Data Scientist job family is similar, but lower technical bar and heavier on SQL/basic analysis.

To get into RS position, just know your ML/stats basics well and be proficient in SQL. Nothing super hard about getting an RS role.

I can’t actually think of anything I don’t like about my current job. The main thing I’ve learned from physics is being comfortable with mathematics and the confidence to work through tough technical stuff that I don’t understand. I think the math basics and grit can take you a long way.

That hasn’t been my experience. I have M.S. in physics at a shitty school and went into industry. (I didn’t fail anything, and actually had a 4.0 gpa, just didn’t want to spend more time in school). Eventually switched from material science to data science. Currently an ML research scientist at AWS. It’s been a fun journey. No one gave a shit about what I did or didn’t do in college. It might matter to HR people, which can be the resume gate keepers. But the hiring managers and peers don’t care. In fact, if you polled them, I would guess half would know my background is in physics, a third that I have a masters, and 0 which school I went to.

This year, our internal ML conference ran out of tickets within 90 minutes of opening registration. There is a whole helluva lot of ML research and applications going on.

Note: this is a real question with real curiosity. What are googles best AI tools?

I just want to say that if this describes anyone that's reading this, then please join us at AWS. We're doing a ton of ML, and your talents won't be wasted.

Sitting around and stagnating your career for a nice salary is a profoundly short-sighted thing to do.

What AI tools? SageMaker is awesome. What can Google do for me? All I've seen from them is marketing hype. I also haven't looked very hard.

I get it, I’m cynical. But am I the only one that wonders how much of this is true, and how much “poetic license”?

And that’s just something we tell ourselves to assuage our embarrassment of being cynical and too powerless to help.

It’s important to consider what “the news” is. Pre-cable TV, it was 30 minutes a night to summarize everything in the world. As I understand it, it was closer to a public service than profit-seeking content.

Cable news changed everything, because then there was all day news, and competition between news sources. To succeed, it’s about engagement, not education. This has become amplified with the internet. All of the incentives are in place to manipulate you with emotional triggers and take advantage of your sympathies to get your clicks.

Not only does this not keep you “informed,” it actually helps give you an incorrect worldview that’s overly pessimistic.

To get a much better understanding of the world, and how to navigate this sort of media coverage, read the book Factfulness. It’s a much better use of your time and it turns out that the world is a much different place than the narratives you find in clickbait.

Why do you think that is (the lack of BigCo support)?

I wonder how Dlang would have compared.

Everyone is a fraud. “A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that investigators cracked Cotten's laptop and discovered money was missing. In fact, they have possession of his laptop and identified money was missing through public blockchain records.”

And they may not.

If you could solve the problem better, at scale, I’m sure they would pay you a lot of money to come solve it. Along with Netflix, Google, and all the other places that use standard algorithms designed to solve these sorts of problems.

Many of these commentors have it backwards. I know this because I’m actively working on a similar project at AWS. It isn’t that Amazon wants your data to help it make decisions, so it builds a clever product to get all your data. On the contrary, Amazon has so much damned data and years of experience turning that into a valuable asset, that it has started experimenting with ways to sell that value to other customers. The idea that it wants some mom and pops retail data is just silly. Our biggest problems are scaling the internal services we built 5 years ago to handle all the growth.

SageMaker was a ground floor service and you should expect to see many more services built atop it.

Reply with this to the recruiter instead of publishing an “open letter”, and I’m sure you’ll never hear from them again.

It’s amazing to me that no one has yet pointed out the blatant irony that their name is OpenAI, yet they are concealing far more than what is typical.

16 cargo ships equal all of the world’s cars in pollution, and there are >100,000 of them.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-...