tom_b

10 ms·

1.
by tom_b 6y ago
My BS in CS is from NC A&T. My MS in CS in from UNC-CH. Anybody who thinks the hackers from Duke/UNC consistently outshine the hackers from NC A&T is a damn fool. I was regularly FLOORED by the skills and raw programming chop
2.
by tom_b 6y ago
I think this a much more nuanced question than a yes-or-no answer can cover. Looking at LinkedIn or indeed.com with just a simple search for Clojure with no geographic qualifier (in the US), we see a very small number of listed openings - 2
3.
by tom_b 6y ago
I was unable to bring Datomic in-house. Mainly because our organization has a huge agreement with Oracle and all our database servers are essentially "free" to teams. So I cheated. I created some schema designs that were immutab
4.
by tom_b 6y ago
Congratulations to Cognitect. Hopefully the acquisition will help Rich's retirement funding. (see 'History of Clojure' for the not-so-insider joke here) I have had the pleasure of "using Clojure in anger" and for
5.
by tom_b 6y ago
I think much training for dog aggressiveness is more about helping people to understand drives and managing "triggers" than training them out of the animal . . . it seems underappreciated by many normal dog owners. My last dog had
6.
by tom_b 6y ago
Thelios Major from System76. 64GB memory 8 GB GeForce RTX 2070 Super with 2560 CUDA Cores A couple of NVME SSDs. I install Centos as the OS. Setup, including Nvidia drivers was very easy. Probably could be built from components
7.
by tom_b 6y ago
Tax policies to reduce smoking rates seem to show reasonable effectiveness: "the rule of thumb in the United States is that a 10 percent price increase on a pack of cigarettes results in anywhere from a 2.5 percent to a 5.0 percent ove
8.
by tom_b 6y ago
I remember being at the first Clojure/conj - I had just spent some time learning a bit of Common Lisp and stumbled onto the conference announcement somehow. This was very fortunate for me - after attending the conj, I was able to use C
9.
by tom_b 6y ago
I have enjoyed all of those and the Stockfighter attempt in this space as well. They all seem to have hit a hard obstacle in convincing the general, non-FAANG hiring market that they can provide "better" candidates that any old s
10.
by tom_b 7y ago
The response is enthusiastic, but kind of misses the point my original comment was making. All I was saying in that comment is that as a hiring organization, we bring in candidates who on paper have the skills and experience we are looking
11.
by tom_b 7y ago
But stats like that also can signal being over-selective. I would gently suggest that it is a mistake to think in terms of unqualified vs highly-qualified candidates and ML for "callback probability". I don't want a good, bu
12.
by tom_b 7y ago
Matches my experience on the hiring side. In the group between "don't qualify" and "can't afford", we have a hard time with candidates who are unable (or maybe lack the communication skills) to effectively talk
13.
by tom_b 7y ago
YMMV, but in my non-FAANG experience in the mid-/south- eastern US, tech managers seem to make at least 1.25X for X=senior dev salary. Maybe keep that in mind? My dev friends over the last 10+ years have included people who made a man
14.
by tom_b 7y ago
We've found that graph-based community approaches have some really nice benefits in our bioinformatics data. In particular, we have found that these approaches seem to preserve very small cluster structure "better" than tradi
15.
by tom_b 7y ago
Nope. But I think UMAP would be a dimensionality reduction step that you fed into a graph-based community extraction algorithm? In our current code experiments, we have been starting with a k-nearest-neighbor approximation algorithm to bu
16.
by tom_b 7y ago
Glad to see the article mention dropping in the fastcluster package to replace the default R hclust. I would suggest using the parallelDist library as well instead of the standard dist. Clustering in general and hierarchical clustering hav
17.
by tom_b 8y ago
Late 30's? Get off my lawn, youngster . . . I have had several conversations this year with project manager- or dev team manager-types that lead me to believe that non-software companies are beginning a mass move into cloud services.
18.
by tom_b 8y ago
I have been happily running Debian (with xmonad) on a 13 inch Macbook with 16GB of memory and the retina display for almost five years now. The screen works great and I have had great success plugging into multiple external monitors includ
19.
by tom_b 8y ago
Yep, my family had to do the same ER visit for our treatments. Immune globulin is a blood product and I was told it is atypical for any medical center outside of a hospital to have it available. Having to go the ER added a not insignifica
20.
by tom_b 8y ago
Yes, post-exposure costs in the US for human rabies immune globulin (antibodies isolated from the blood of a vaccinated person) in the United States is roughly a $10,000 to $15,000 expense per person (dosage is based on body weight). The v
21.
by tom_b 8y ago
That sounds quite depressing. Would you be willing to share your problem description as given to candidates here? I will say that I have several friends who work in various industries addressing your real question and none of them would
22.
by tom_b 8y ago
The education model (immersive, time-intensive, mastery learning) Lambda School has in place seems like a very sweet spot between bootcamps and traditional university CS programs. But some of that success has to be attributed to riding a
23.
by tom_b 8y ago
FTA (examples of data science): targeting health-care customers for hospitals people who can turn social-media clicks and user-posted photos into monetizable binary code is among the biggest challenges facing U.S. industry
24.
by tom_b 8y ago
Yes. I have taught introductory courses to undergraduate and graduate students with only a MS in CS. I think you would probably be able to teach upper-level courses if you could demonstrate expertise in the subject matter. Workload varies
25.
What makes the US health care system so expensive(theincidentaleconomist.com)
1 points by tom_b 9y ago|3 comments
26.
by tom_b 9y ago
Despite only occasionally hacking around with array programming languages, I have always enjoyed the terse syntax. But I admittedly find weird syntax somewhat engaging. I have wondered what was happening with statistics in the larger group
27.
by tom_b 9y ago
And it's only worse at the staff level. Even getting patient data variables for patients consented to IRB-approved studies is hit-or-miss. Groups build barriers by wanting to "work with" principal investigators (PIs) instea
28.
by tom_b 9y ago
I have not found many-to-many relationships to be particularly problematic in RDBMs from a modeling and usage perspective. Just curious, are you asking about a multi-way relationship between more than two entities? A many-to-many between E
29.
by tom_b 9y ago
Re: Clojure - something seems off with Clojure not being in any of the sub-regions at all. I also noticed that Java is not in the world-wide list and yet is in all the sub-regions. Given that the JVM is such a big part of the Clojure ecosys
30.
Ask HN: Detailed data science/engineer challenges?
1 points by tom_b 10y ago|0 comments

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