billsmithwicks's comments

billsmithwicks | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Developers who switched careers, what are you doing now?

That's some adventure! How did you manage to get injured on the job? And what was it like learning to code with the latest frameworks?

billsmithwicks | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Developers who switched careers, what are you doing now?

What would you need to get into day trading, properly, as a full time job? I'm certain that bank defaulter lists are filled with mediocre day traders, so without asking what's your secret, what's your secret?

billsmithwicks | 4 years ago | on: Famous Navy UFO video was camera glare, evidence suggests

I like Mick West, and even though camera glare isn't usually picked up on radar by the navy, it's sufficient to fulfill Occam's razor.

billsmithwicks | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: What ML platform are you using?

I found Redshift to be far inferior to Snowflake as a data warehouse for marshalling any tables or views you need for ML work. There's lots of statistical functions available within Snowflake that will speed things up for you if you need pre-calculations on feature sets.

billsmithwicks | 4 years ago | on: Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles (2019)

Quick, someone find a carpet to sweep this under!

In all seriousness, I hope that the Galileo Project comes up with the goods in the next few years - https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home

billsmithwicks | 4 years ago | on: Twitter based map of Russian troop movements

Christ, stay safe man! If you can go West then do.

billsmithwicks | 4 years ago | on: Putin orders Russian peacekeepers to eastern Ukraine's two breakaway regions

Ding ding, round 1.

billsmithwicks | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who's getting pulled back into the office?

I'm working fully remote (for now), so I'm trying to figure out when the tech industry will be going back to the office in Dublin by reaching out to local recruiters. Most of them don't know yet for sure, but it's like to be some variation of 5 to 10 office days per month.

billsmithwicks | 4 years ago | on: Poll: Why are people leaving their jobs?

For me, the proverbial final straw came when I delivered a dinosaur utility company it's first churn propensity score. Bit of background, my manager and their manager were non-technical and I had this thing running in evaluation mode for a few months with excellent lift in the top couple of percentiles. I had the statistics well grounded, and this thing was due to go in against basically nothing, renewal teams randomly calling prospects.

Anyway, before this thing goes live, I see a few managers printing out pages of Excel sheets and arranging them on a conference table to validate the model with literally pencil and paper. They didn't know what a percentile was until I explained it.

I handed in my notice the Monday following that weekend. Sometimes, if you're not trusted to do a good job, it's not worth trying.

billsmithwicks | 4 years ago | on: Fortification, Part V: The Age of Industrial Firepower

Taiwan vs. China would be all over in five minutes flat, and nobody in the West really cares what China does so long as the trade and financial arrangements are relatively unaffected.