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A large insurance company as of X years ago implemented iteratively reweighted least squares in pure SQL running against the claim database to fit their risk mo

A large insurance company as of X years ago implemented iteratively reweighted least squares in pure SQL running against the claim database to fit their risk models. Honestly their implementation was impressive, in a WTF way, but doing literally thousands of queries and then manual adjustments of coefficients meant it took days to fit models that would have taken seconds to download the relevant data and train a model with actual statistics software.

Shish2k 5y ago
Your insurance company used SQL? Luxury! My insurance company had everything in a collection of inter-linked Excel spreadsheets on a shared file server, millions of dollars a day being moved around with VBA macros :P (Though for the specific use-case of statistical analysis, perhaps excel is actually the lesser evil...)
FireBeyond 5y ago
I worked for a health insurance claims benefit management software company whose flagship was written in a language called DB/C (random bonus, the two co-owners of the company felt that two spaces for a tab stop was too small, four too large, so had standardized on a three space tab). DB/C (or Databus) is a COBOL-esque language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_Language_for_Business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_Language_for_Busin...). Over time, TCP/IP, sockets support had been bolted on, with varying degrees of rigidity to spec (and a whole ton of unimplemented "we don't need THAT" stuff). But the prize for eyebleeding was the co-owner who had a megalomaniac (he could be heard, and I quote word for word, saying things like "People are idiots, I don't know why they would write [software X] that way. I can do it in a weekend" (and he would do "it", too, in 60 hour long benders. But not well. And with a whole bunch of arbitrary bullshit that you'd expect), masochistic, NIH obsession. He wrote a fully functional XSL parser and interpreter. In a COBOL-esque language. And while functional, oh boy, you probably saw few things uglier in your life.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > (random bonus, the two co-owners of the company felt that two spaces for a tab stop was too small, four too large, so had standardized on a three space tab) That's how I indent my code. Not just because I think it looks best, but as a small rebellion against the whole tech industry's over-fixation on powers of two.

Shish2k 5y ago

Your insurance company used SQL? Luxury! My insurance company had everything in a collection of inter-linked Excel spreadsheets on a shared file server, millions of dollars a day being moved around with VBA macros :P (Though for the specific use-case of statistical analysis, perhaps excel is actually the lesser evil...)

FireBeyond 5y ago

I worked for a health insurance claims benefit management software company whose flagship was written in a language called DB/C (random bonus, the two co-owners of the company felt that two spaces for a tab stop was too small, four too large, so had standardized on a three space tab). DB/C (or Databus) is a COBOL-esque language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_Language_for_Business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_Language_for_Busin...). Over time, TCP/IP, sockets support had been bolted on, with varying degrees of rigidity to spec (and a whole ton of unimplemented "we don't need THAT" stuff). But the prize for eyebleeding was the co-owner who had a megalomaniac (he could be heard, and I quote word for word, saying things like "People are idiots, I don't know why they would write [software X] that way. I can do it in a weekend" (and he would do "it", too, in 60 hour long benders. But not well. And with a whole bunch of arbitrary bullshit that you'd expect), masochistic, NIH obsession. He wrote a fully functional XSL parser and interpreter. In a COBOL-esque language. And while functional, oh boy, you probably saw few things uglier in your life.

CRConrad 5y ago
> (random bonus, the two co-owners of the company felt that two spaces for a tab stop was too small, four too large, so had standardized on a three space tab) That's how I indent my code. Not just because I think it looks best, but as a small rebellion against the whole tech industry's over-fixation on powers of two.