svdad

9 ms·

31.
by svdad 14y ago
Love the storm trooper.
32.
by svdad 14y ago
Specifically in the Gates building, I believe... but what about the tribe across the road in Sequoia Hall?
33.
by svdad 14y ago
I couldn't agree more with this. The ML courses that Ng and Koller teach are really missing a lot of the statistical tools you need to do real-world data mining and ML. My experience: I had basically zero math background, but I took ML with
34.
by svdad 14y ago
> However, a defining quality of successful projects I've been involved in is that there is one person driving the overall design and that person runs things closer to a dictatorship than a democracy. Yeah, that's been my experience too
35.
by svdad 14y ago
Oddly, I just finished reading that. Can't say it's terribly prescient -- it was published just three years ago -- but it does echo lots of things that are just happening now.
36.
by svdad 14y ago
> You get the simplest code in the least effort if you solve each problem at the appropriate layer. People who never look down into the layers below them end up with lots of unnecessary duplication and cruft. Well said. True in general,
37.
by svdad 14y ago
Yeah, I think I misspoke somewhat, but not entirely. The Amazon comp structure, at least for the first four years after you join, as far as I know is something like this (and take this with a grain of salt, I haven't worked there): Y1: Base
38.
by svdad 14y ago
In SF Bay area, my experience in the last year or so has been that salary comp is pretty much the same between start-ups and big companies, the only exception being super-early-stage startups (i.e. pre-series A) where they really don't have
39.
by svdad 14y ago
This is awesome. I'm going to lace all my cables now. In these kinds of applications, what do they use to attach the cables to something? It looks like on the rover they have special tie points built onto the rover surface -- is that what i
40.
by svdad 14y ago
I think this is fairly trivially explained in most cases by the fact that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Almost by construction, nearly every article starts with "X is a Y" (modulo grammatical niceties) where Y is a more general class to wh
41.
by svdad 14y ago
Seconded -- OneNote was/is an amazing piece of software. I took all my notes for the CFA on it in 2008, and I used it to great effect apartment hunting off craigslist that year as well. My tablet died a couple of years ago and I haven't rep
42.
by svdad 14y ago
I've found this as well. Just blindly writing test cases doesn't work so well unless you've already understood the higher level operation of what you're trying to build, and obviously does tend to slow down development.
43.
by svdad 14y ago
Very. It's just how my mind puts things together, not something I can try to do or not do. I tend to see programs in blocks and patterns interacting rather than sequences of logical operations, probably why I tend to prefer the object-orien
44.
by svdad 14y ago
In fact, most people outside finance would be surprised at how much sophisticated analysis and interactivity you can build in Excel. Once you start digging under the hood it's a powerful platform. The only addition you need is a pricing fee
45.
by svdad 14y ago
Quite right. Best line from this article: "If you can’t stand to see your child unhappy, you are in the wrong business."
46.
by svdad 14y ago
What I wonder, following this story this week, is how the software quality controls at a place like Knight compare with those for life-critical systems like those in, e.g., aviation. On one hand, you'd think the QA in finance would be prett
47.
by svdad 14y ago
Emphasis on the "aspirationally" -- it really appears not to be how most companies do things, despite overwhelming evidence that doing these things work.
48.
by svdad 14y ago
Yeah, I think this is right. And NBC actually did this for the soccer World Cup, IIRC -- you could buy a package subscription from NBC letting you watch all the games online. I have to imagine there's a market for pay-as-you-go subscription
49.
by svdad 14y ago
No, "preference" implies intention and active choice. A preference does not exist in the absence of a human actor to have it. That there is a majority is a statistical fact. Whether anyone has a preference for male employees is the controve
50.
by svdad 14y ago
Thank you for such a detailed response. It's particularly timely as I'm trying to figure out how to introduce my kids to mathematics. Granted that there is a lot wrong with the current system, I'm curious what you think about the specific c
51.
by svdad 14y ago
Thank you. I had no idea what the "secret" was myself. What would be meant, in the original article, by the "multiplication algorithm"? I know that's a bizarre question, but actually I don't think I could explain what that means to someone
52.
by svdad 14y ago
God I wish that attitude were more common.
53.
by svdad 14y ago
The incentives also don't line up on the buy side. As a buy-side fixed income investor, you can buy a 10-yr US Treasury (AAA) yielding X%, or you can buy a slice of the 10-yr AAA tranche of the Abacus CDO yielding X+0.50% (made-up but repre
54.
by svdad 14y ago
Full disclosure: I worked on a Magnetar trade; not the one that was in the press, but another deal basically identical. And I bought, sold and analyzed Abacus. All of these transactions are explicitly caveat emptor. My grandma couldn't go o
55.
by svdad 14y ago
Only briefly. :)
56.
by svdad 14y ago
My wife and I went out for a celebratory dinner recently when our net worth finally turned positive after years of grad school.
57.
by svdad 14y ago
couldn't agree more. "i only made a little money" -- enough to have started angel investing in 2004 after exiting paypal. enough money to live in one of the most expensive places on earth, probably without having to work too much? check. a
58.
by svdad 15y ago
As an old (37) guy with experience in a couple of start-ups, there's another benefit to having older, more experienced people on the team -- if you get the right people, they will have seen the problems and done the work before, and will sa
59.
by svdad 15y ago
Isn't that Morningside Heights? The southern boundary depends on who you talk to... can go down to 110th or so. I grew up on 119th and Riverside. LOVE that area, even thirty-odd years ago. Harlem doesn't start until 125th on the west side.
60.
by svdad 15y ago
"It's normal that things are hard." This can't be said enough. Everything sucks in some way -- and I mean everything : * working for a big company (too much politics, can't get anything done) * working for a start-up (not enough people, no

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