omar_a1

15 ms·

61.
by omar_a1 7y ago
In your example, a 30% mortality rate is a very big deal. If we had a hypothetical cure that killed 30% of the people it was administered to, I doubt it would get very far. I'm not saying the alternative is do nothing. But playing doct
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by omar_a1 7y ago
I don't know how to operate a ventilator, and have zero medical training, but I'm getting frustrated by the comments claiming medicine is trivially easy. Even using a syringe or blood draw on a patient is something one needs certi
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by omar_a1 7y ago
The explorer mindset is how scientists discovered penicillin, x-rays, and vulcanized rubber. Science isn't as cut and dry as the scientific method suggests. I'd say to the extent that this behavior contributes to the reproducibili
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by omar_a1 7y ago
A 60% false negative rate test is better than no information whatsoever. No! It's decidedly not better! This isn't web-scraping where any little bit of information you extract is good, even with a low signal-to-noise ratio. Th
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by omar_a1 7y ago
Uh, sorry to be that guy, but if you have no experience with lab techniques, microbiology, lab instrumentation, or analytical method validation, this isn't the sort of thing you can reasonably expect to accomplish without dedicating se
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by omar_a1 7y ago
For something like bank statements, I'd use the rigidly-defined formatting (both number formatting and field position) to inform how to interpret OCR misfires. My larger concern then would be missing a leading 1 (1500.00 v 500.00), but
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by omar_a1 7y ago
After failing several of these "let's see how you think" technical interviews, I've come to the conclusion that the way I think is deeply and fundamentally flawed.
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by omar_a1 7y ago
It doesn't have to be equivalent, but it can't be entirely one-sided either. Two technicals are a major commitment. Even if we assume the nominal 4 hours, there's still lots of preparation that goes into taking those tests. A
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by omar_a1 7y ago
Sorry, but what you've outlined above doesn't show that you value the candidates' time. You require two rounds of technical interviews before any human contact. It's asymmetrical. By automating the first two steps, you&#
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by omar_a1 7y ago
So much this. Every place I've interviewed at wants cookie-cutter candidates. I didn't think of the solution you had in mind, because I've identified another problem that you didn't consider. And somehow that takes me ou
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by omar_a1 7y ago
Also the closely related phenomenon of holding candidates unfamiliar with the codebase to the same standards as the interviewer, who wrote half of it. Yea, if I had also been working on this particular code for the past two years I'd
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by omar_a1 7y ago
The technical interviews I've had are decidedly not fizzbuzz level problems. They're "implement new features in an unfamiliar codebase in 10 minutes while we watch closely and tell you that every line of code you start to w
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by omar_a1 7y ago
So, I have a related question: What do you do when the comments aren't being made in good faith? In other words, incessant, aggressive, and unsolicited, with the reviewer not backing down even after you've implemented their change
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by omar_a1 7y ago
To your last point, it's actually quite hard to break into this field because of these kinds of interviews. That, and every SWE job posting having a Sr. Prefix.
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by omar_a1 7y ago
For redundancy. Chances are all the lenses aren't covered in spiders. If you have two, you could select the non-giant spider view, or even write up a quick and dirty script for deciding which camera seems to have the minimum number o
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by omar_a1 7y ago
Edge case, but you may need to think of a way to filter out bugs on the lense, or it might occasionally look like Attack Of the Giant Spiders outside. Maybe multiple lenses?
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by omar_a1 7y ago
Thank you! So much of this discussion is formed by a personal dislike of the topic or bad classroom experiences. I, personally, find accounting to be dreadfully boring, but I don't feel that the pedagogy of the field as a whole needs t
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by omar_a1 7y ago
Inorganic gets very complicated very quickly. You end up dealing with Group Theory and 3D symmetry operations before you know it. And this is ignoring bio-inorganic chemistry, which is also very important.
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by omar_a1 7y ago
So, the 'cooler' experiments are also more dangerous, and your example is illustrative of that. I'd be hesitant to hand students a flask of aqua regia (the only acid that can dissolve gold) and tell them to go nuts. Ignoring
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by omar_a1 7y ago
Setting aside the semantics about what constitutes an 'experiment', constant failure due to minutiea you didn't consider in your technique is what actual science looks like. It is deeply frustrating, but it's the nature
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by omar_a1 7y ago
In the same way that handedness has no bearing on programming ability. If your firm were staffed entirely by left-handed folk, it should rightfully raise questions about how that happened. You seem overly defensive about your hiring process
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by omar_a1 7y ago
Because programming ability isn't determined by melanin concentration in the skin, or by what pronouns you use, and hence shouldn't show selection bias in hiring, save for a biased selection process.
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by omar_a1 7y ago
Yup, those are common rhetorical devices for presenting scientific fact. It's like dismissing Evolution as "just a theory."
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by omar_a1 7y ago
So, a quick note that my comments regarding racial representation are somewhat US-centric. I'd expect a company in Europe to be a much higher % white because your population is. > We should be hiring on ability to do the job and not
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by omar_a1 7y ago
That's why I sprinkled the word "ideally" so liberally throughout that comment, as that was the premise of your question. To actually reflect the population, you'd have to somehow address centuries of institutionalized
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by omar_a1 7y ago
Not a number per se, but ideally the racial and gender ratios of the team would reflect the total population of the area (country? Metropolitan area?) in which the company resides, with the standard caveats that random sampling would give
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by omar_a1 7y ago
I'm glad that you were able to deliver a product that helped with accessibility, but part of the considerable effort it took was just in trying to understand what someone else's perspective is. It's less efficient than simply
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by omar_a1 7y ago
Are you asking why you can't listen to an employee that doesn't exist? But more to your point, if these oh-so-competent ML practitioners were doing their jobs right, we wouldn't be having this discussion. The whole reason div
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by omar_a1 7y ago
I agree. I just have low expectations as far as diversity in tech goes (so, one black person and/or one woman on the team would still be a milestone many of these companies have yet to reach), but you make a good point: hiring only o
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by omar_a1 7y ago
It's the methods being used to select, populate, label, and validate the training set that are the problem. Basically, your team is composed of white dudes who don't see the problem with a ML training set consisting largely of pic

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