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v3rt3x's comments

v3rt3x | 2 years ago | on: Impossible to cancel AWS – must pay them forever for zombie services?

It's certainly a lesson learned about who to hire and how to wind things down. I wasn't aware there was any issue until I started seeing these charges keep rolling through and had to roll up my sleeves and do my best to resolve it. Just as magazines and other services are not (now) legally allowed to make it difficult to cancel a service - I don't know how AWS can get away with this. If I establish that I am the legal owner of the business entity (who is not technical enough to deal with the problem), which could reasonably be done, it seems perfectly reasonable that there should be some kill switch available. What if I had a rogue employee who setup a run-away process in order to rack up charges? I can appreciate there is a risk management aspect to it for AWS - but this in my view rises to the level of deceptive business practice.

v3rt3x | 2 years ago | on: Impossible to cancel AWS – must pay them forever for zombie services?

Unfortunately, the guy who actually ran this account fat fingered one of the addresses ([email protected] instead of [email protected]) - so there is no way to access the account, put in a credit card, and disassociate it.

I asked them what the process would be if myself or one of these former employees had died - and was given the run-around. Every single thing they told me to do did not work and just exposed another exception.

v3rt3x | 4 years ago | on: Why Some Dads Don’t Take Leave: They Think They’ll Be Punished

Unlike new mothers, there is no sound biological reason for fathers to require extended paternity leave. Throughout human history, fathers have had an imperative to provide for their families and generally couldn’t afford the opportunity cost of taking an extended paternity leave. If there was a biological reason for this, it would have become culturally enshrined a long time ago there would be no debate on its merits. This a “nice to have” not a “need to have”. Our needs fundamentally arise from biology and thus have evolutionary origins. Saying otherwise because it isn’t convenient is “horseshit”.

v3rt3x | 4 years ago | on: Why Some Dads Don’t Take Leave: They Think They’ll Be Punished

Or they just don’t want to… I love my kids but I would prefer work to the tedium of dealing with small children or an infant any day. Most men I know just aren’t wired with the ability to tolerate child care. The last few years of “wokeness” can’t undo a few hundred thousand years of evolutionary biology.

v3rt3x | 4 years ago | on: Retail investors are pouring millions into equity crowdfunding

Warren Buffett's first rule: don't lose money Warren Buffett's second rule: don't forget the first rule

There is a good reason the federal government has restricted participation in private investment vehicles to accredited investors. The odds of winning the lottery on the type of business that needs to resort to crowd funding is vanishingly small. I would speculate that the majority of people drawn to these types of crowdfunding investment vehicles do not have a positive net worth or meaningful retirement savings.

v3rt3x | 4 years ago | on: Bayesian Optimization Book

Agreed, but I would reiterate that Kruschke's work is fantastic and very accessible for the non-academic practitioner.

v3rt3x | 4 years ago | on: Introduction to Locality-Sensitive Hashing

I've used it for a wide variety of search and recommendation problems, albeit not in isolation. In practice, I've found that it is a great way to reduce the size of a search space before handing the problem off to a more precise algorithm.

v3rt3x | 4 years ago | on: Mathematicians Use Homology to Make Sense of Topology

This is a great conceptual introduction to the topic. I've worked on many TDA applications over the past few years and often struggle to explain the concepts to others without adequate background. It is great to see this area start to gain a little more attention lately.

v3rt3x | 5 years ago | on: Yes, experts will lie to you sometimes

It's been interesting to see the degree of magical thinking and arbitrary rules that have developed around masks over the past year. I do not doubt for a second that N95 masks will be highly effective if worn properly, but I've remained unconvinced that the idea that a flimsy ill-fitting surgical mask is anything more than a political totem. If anything, these cloth masks give people a false sense of security for being lax on social distancing rules. Same thing goes for arbitrary distance recommendations (e.g. 6ft vs 3ft) for inclosed spaces.

v3rt3x | 5 years ago | on: What If Data Scientists Had Licenses Like Lawyers?

As a data scientist, and owner of a data science company, this idea is certainly tempting on the surface but unlikely to be effective or necessary in practice. I feel like in the long run, the market is generally pretty good at weeding out bad apples. There will always be companies who want to hire on the cheap and have to learn the hard way that qualified talent comes at a premium.
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