stevesycombacct

há 2 anosdiscuss

On the contrary, McKinsey can also service as an abstraction between the customer and AI. The customer gets two layers of removal from any real responsibility for the price of one.

stevesycombacct

há 5 anosdiscuss

> RedditIsFun

This app is now called "rif is fun" due to a trademark licensing dispute.

stevesycombacct

há 5 anosdiscuss

I've been on both ends of the child thinking that the haircut is completely fine and requires no advance notice, and a month later the same child being terrified and needing to be held down.

Honestly, with an adult you would be right, but kids are just a crapshoot.

stevesycombacct

há 5 anosdiscuss

In a previous life I worked in secured government spaces where personal devices weren't allowed at all, full stop, and the internet was also restricted to prevent access to most web streaming services.

If I wanted to listen to music while coding, I found a workaround by owning a Shuffle and getting approval for it. The Shuffle doesn't have a USB port and doesn't connect to WiFi or Bluetooth, so it met all the criteria for an exemption.

It's weird having lived in such a strict cross-section of users to need these specific criteria met. Even the OP lists several options that all would fail to meet these restrictions.

stevesycombacct

há 5 anosdiscuss

I find that the same issue is made worse when using a service like Instapaper to store content for reading on other devices later. The pull quotes read like an emphasized point, when in fact they're just text I'm about to re-read or have already read. This breaks the flow of reading by pulling me away from the author's intended order and pushes me to some other part of the article.

Removal of pull quotes entirely would be a Quality of Life improvement in such a case.

stevesycombacct

há 5 anosdiscuss

> I have no (interesting) problems to solve with [...]

In fact, what pushed me into VBA was when $manager thought I would be a good fit to learn it, and gave me the book! I was a lucky case, as the new skills ended up being immediately required.

stevesycombacct

há 5 anosdiscuss

Excel Power Programming with VBA, by John Walkenbach

It's what pushed me into programming and eventually data science in other languages, which led to a significant push in my career.

That's not to say that you should read this book, but instead a remark on how adding high-demand skills to my skillset made me more money than any of the side-hustles or hobbies I've ever tried.

stevesycombacct

há 6 anosdiscuss

I have a lot of heartburn reading something like this. I spent a decade in government consulting trying to implement anything resembling "data science" or "DevOps" and got repeatedly shut down by higher ups or by random bureaucrats that saw any modern practices, including any technology, as a threat.

Excel macros working one day, then prohibited the next by new IT policies.

Directors demanding that service line bosses meet with me to discuss "data-driven decision-making", followed by a solid week of said chiefs telling me that my job is a joke.

Actual honest-to-God employees trying to make a difference in financial openness having their coworkers walk by their desks and loudly shout they "ain't doing that shit" and walking away.

Two years hunting for a database to store 2 GB of data, and only finding one when a new contractor onboarded and knew a guy in the next office over who would let them have a partition of SQL Server.

I wish I was making any of this up. The federal government has massive, massive employee culture issues. This list is... a nice dream.

stevesycombacct

há 6 anosdiscuss

I can narrow it down to a top 4, if that's permissible.

* The Man Who Was Thursday, by GK Chesterton

* The Oresteia, by Aeschylus

* Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand

* The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan

stevesycombacct

há 6 anosdiscuss

Overall I prefer Instapaper to Feedly due to the minimalist design and dark mode on mobile. However, there are strong arguments for either one.[0]

Additionally, I use Feedly[1] to discover content from sites in an RSS-like system. I find that visiting Feedly daily in the browser, then saving content to Instapaper using a browser extension for later works optimally for me.

[0] https://medium.com/@janniks/instapaper-vs-pocket-2019-compar...

[1] https://feedly.com/

stevesycombacct

há 6 anosdiscuss

A gamified method to learn the base functions of a language. Great idea. I'd buy a Pandas pack.

stevesycombacct

há 6 anosdiscuss

As an Altair fan, I'm interested in your plans for future versions, if you're free to discuss those.

While composing this question I was about to ask if you support VS Code, but I see[0] that you do now.

I was also about to ask if you support disabling the 5,000-row limit, but I see[1] that you do that now, too.

So, clearly, you're doing great things with Altair.

[0]https://altair-viz.github.io/user_guide/display_frontends.ht...

[1]https://altair-viz.github.io/user_guide/faq.html

stevesycombacct

há 6 anosdiscuss

I'm finding that the Daily Mixes, found near the Discover Weekly playlist in the "Made for <user>" part of the app, do a good job of this, and will also include similar music not in your library for discovery

In fact, my personal experience is that Daily Mixes do a better job showing me new music than Discover Weekly does

stevesycombacct

há 6 anosdiscuss

They found me on LinkedIn last year and scheduled a sales call, which I agreed to. I'm in consulting, so I need to know about their product in case a client asks for it, or in case I need to recommend their product as a solution to a client's case. They specifically marketed to me its database performance and its use in the cloud, which I won't get into here, since I'm not their spokesperson.

To date, I haven't had a specific need for Snowflake, but that's down to my client's situations, not any issue with the company or its product. If that situation changed, it would indeed result in contracts.

stevesycombacct

há 6 anosdiscuss

One bit of feedback on "3. Mutating values"

The reason that

    _ = [validations.pop(key) for key in ('executed','filter_type')]

is a mutation is because of the .pop() command, which the article didn't state. .pop() removes items in-place, thus mutating the data. Since the function doesn't make a copy of the dictionary, the original variable gets mutated.

This may confuse those wondering what the difference between the two functions is.

Otherwise, I find the article's points reasonable.

stevesycombacct

há 6 anosdiscuss

1. Data science, mostly visualization, sometimes as fiction.

2. Only a handful of times, over the past year. The time needed to write and edit can be long. I'm also trying to write a novel.

3. Medium. I'm a writer for a publication called Nightingale.

4. https://medium.com/@PhilHawkinsDC, my top article is this one: https://medium.com/nightingale/draw-the-rest-of-the-chart-88...

stevesycombacct

há 6 anosdiscuss

The closest service I've found to old-school RSS is Feedly[0], which allows me to subscribe to various news or social media pipelines and group them as I like.

[0]https://feedly.com

stevesycombacct

há 6 anosdiscuss

A "level up" moment in my life was freshman year when a roommate pointed me to DI.fm to explore electronic music streams. The default client to load the stream at the best bitrate was Winamp, which opened me to an entire world of 1. the music I was looking for before Pandora/Spotify/etc existed, and 2. skinnable, user-friendly software.

Those were good times.

stevesycombacct

há 6 anosdiscuss

It's more like 90%.

On existing processes, standardizing collection has been nearly impossible unless I promised that it would be easier, it will take less time, and I'll do all the setup. It always takes leadership backing, and if I don't get it from one leader, I go over their head to the next.

On new processes, if I jump forward and volunteer, I find I'm given leeway to do it my way- that is, a standardized way.

If this sounds ruthless, it is.

stevesycombacct

há 6 anosdiscuss

A significant chunk of my work involves no use of algorithms, statistics, or math. For the most part, my days are filled with one thing: cleaning up data.

If more firms took an educated, standardized approach to their data, I would do my job significantly faster, and the company would have access to their data-related products in far, far less time. Firms I have worked for, overall, refuse to do that.

Instead, such notions are treated as toxic- and I am too, by the associative property. They think I'm making extra work ("You want us to stop copying Powerpoints into Excels and put data into a whole new Excel that stops me from pasting in whatever I want? But I already have it in my own Excel!"), or they think I'm automating someone's job away to be replaced by a robot. This makes getting support from both employees and leaders near impossible.

It could save firms millions a year in reduced labor costs alone to not have entire teams of people sitting in basements fixing problems with data. However, data scientists are sold on what math they can do and what algorithms they can write, not on what processes they can improve.

It's, frankly, hell.

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