carlmcqueen

For awhile I was working on Monte Carlo sims in my job in finance in my early career. Just re-building a existing archaic excel monster in python to be more flexible to new investment models and implement and allow for more levers. Since I was already working with them daily I begin applying Monte Carlo models to a lot more problems I was thinking about. It truly is a fun tool to play with, especially when you're in the thick of designing them.

Anecdotal, and old now: I worked with an ex-NSA agent when I worked at a big bank who worked out of a some of middle east offices in early 2000s. He talked about how new agents often struggle with the size of data (even then) but most good agents work immediately to look at the lack of normal data. Criminals/targets have their own signal of data and by filtering traditional data patterns you're left with a smaller dataset of the targets you're there to find. He used the same patterns to find financial white collar cheaters in bank data.

(example: phones off during day, on from 1am-5am then shut off again, no facebook browsing at all, etc.)

I'm not far into it, so I don't know how good it will be. However FX's 'Class of 2009' seems interesting too where FBI agents have AI strapped to them feeding the dataset at all times. The show jumps between 2009, 2023, and like 2035 or something and the implications of such a system.

Having to ask people be kind about your code on HN is such a shame of reality to me. Half of brilliance is having your working version, used by many people. You had working code that brought reddit to so many reddit users every day that was better than what the official app of reddit provided.

Some of the 'code' running massively profitable departments in finance are spreadsheets, on shared drives, with thousands of linked cells thought up by a brilliant employee who left the company five or six years in the past.

I wish I was kidding.

Thanks for how great you kept apollo.

I know it's my own niche case, but with apple silicone I have more issues with external monitors than I've ever had in my entire life. I run my own business and I've always liked Macs because having the same software as my team makes fixing issues so much quicker but this is the first time I've thought about moving us to PCs.

In my case, it is a start of the day, every single day, issue where I'm unplugging and re-plugging in monitors waiting for it to 'take' and then it's fine for the day.

The fear of language model AI takes me back to my original fear when I joined a data science team at a huge bank with just a bachelor's degree and five years of experience. I was embedded in the mess of databases created by hundreds of large bank mergers.

I was working with really, really smart PHDs and was doubting my hiring to the team. I felt like a lot of these guys had forgotten more than I'd ever known.

During my time in that job, I realized that my experience in navigating the complex databases from working with the business and operational teams gave me an advantage. I took my domain knowledge for granted and was able to work on the problems at hand much faster than the highly intelligent colleagues who relied on IT/DBAs to write their queries. They often had to go back and forth for a couple of days to clarify their requests, leading to misunderstandings and delays.

In the end, I fit in just fine, held my own, and was aware of my individual talents. I enjoyed learning from the PhDs, and they were happy to teach from their backgrounds.

A lot of the experience from the big bank has 0 transferability to any other company. What made me stand out was I knew which tables of the gigantic data environment were the best to use, I had hundreds of already built queries for many different problems and I was dependable. It got me really far before I went off on my own.

Personal response to this, despite owning a home, is that there always seems to be some reason the media/news stories are making the home market sound shaky when they're actually talking about the viability of the house flipping market. The same can be said for wall street with big reports of days that have large losses, etc when over time its generally a longer term win.

I will say the value of not having to worry about your toilets, oven, etc when you're career centered has intrinsic value not tied into the money you'd make over time owning the asset. I hate having to deal with that stuff with the little free time I have.

I live in the midwest and own a non-tesla EV, and the minute you get out of any kind of bigger cities your chances of finding a level 3 are quite sparse. There are a LOT of chargepoint level 2s, but level 3s seem to be at car dealerships who don't offer it to everyone, hotels that don't allow it for everyone, etc.

We did a 80 mile each way day trip to visit someone and bring them back and had to line up lunch in an area with no great food options so we could sit for the 30 minutes to get back up to 80%.

With it being cold in the midwest our advertised '280 range' or '180 range at 80%' never is even close to that.

It's like the olden days before really efficient ICE vehicles.

Really interesting point but I know I've gotten older when he said 'my audience is middle-aged' but the way I read the chart from google is that most of his audience is between 21-34 with a tail of older than that and a steep drop off after the age of 40. That is older millennials for sure, but is that 'middle aged'?

Middle aged traditionally is 40-60.

Oracle people tend to be heavy oracle people too.

At the bank I worked before 2019 at I was on a advanced analytic team, we had this amazing teradata database and then there were these insanely fast (yet older) IBM DB2 databases and then there was a few big oracle databases.

We did amazing things with teradata + DB2 and then a leader who was tired of multiple databases asked us to vote, we chose teradata so we went with oracle and the migration was so bad I left.

Hulu is one, if you need an example.

I'm not a doctor, but as a family member and extended family member, I know that many bipolar children appear with ADHD in their early years and are treated with ADHD medication.

They are treated with stimulants that have no effect on bipolar disorder.

I don't know why I never looked into it more but this comment caught me off guard. I always wondered what hotline was because a friend of mine in high school's dad was a bartender part time in the carribbean and during the summer in chicago and he would source things his son needed or wanted through 'hotline' and I could never find it as a windows user.