Perhaps a bit off topic, but seeing the breadth of general discussion about online CS masters programs in this thread, figured I'd ask the HN crowd:
How is a program like the Penn MCIT Online degree[0] viewed by engineering and product hiring teams in industry? I am looking at transitioning from venture capital investing to SWE (and potentially product, given my business background) and this seems like a good option to facilitate that change - education in CS fundamentals (vs. a bootcamp) but still a reasonably short/practical program (10 courses).
Curious if there are engineers/PMs here that have gone through MCIT or similar to pivot into software from another field? Or, if any hiring managers here have hired graduates from these online degree programs and have insight/advice?
I can't speak of the online degree, but the MCIT program is pretty good. I graduated from the standard CS but many of my friends were in the MCIT degree. Given they came from more varied backgrounds, I actually thought the student body was more impressive.
However, I dont know how all of this online stuff is going to effect things. I would just show up to wharton classes and wait for them to not kick me out, but online ... no chance. You also miss out on all the great conversations and doing study groups at the library, etc.
The program is strong, and it will help you get lots of interviews, but I'd do what ever possible to do the in person degree. I c an recommend good DS classes at the school if you are interested in that topic
Throwaway as have done work slightly related to this industry.
I looked in to MCIT online but the outcomes appeared to be very mediocre. One of the testimonials was a student who got a job in sales at a tech company.
Wow that is such a weak statement that I would be embarrassed to write it.
“Considering applying”. Not even considering an offer. They are not even sure if they should apply? How is that an outcome you want to publish?
This is great in terms of UI. Does anyone know if you can use Mail.app with Gmail and keep all emails on the server? I'm currently using Mimesteram which has a great UI and doesn't keep a local copy of all emails. But, I would rather use the native mail app if possible.
Yeah, the disk space issue is what I'm concerned with. I'd prefer not to use local disk space to store a copy of my emails but I haven't been able to find a way to disable local storage in Mail.app.
Why aren’t these firms insuring against this risk? Seems like any other risk that can be managed - pay premiums and so that a third party would fund any erroneous losses.
Because they don't have to? They don't suffer from the risk...
Clearing frequently act like a form of insurance for smaller firms, up to and including asking for killswitches in your trading engines and audits of your risk procedures.
But big firms clear themselves so don't have that. Theoretically the internal risk team is responsible for that but those teams are frequently undergunned.
Cleared themselves. I'd be shocked if any company in the world would act as counterparty to a trade that hedged 'operational risk at Knight scale'.
One of the thing many of us in the industry at the time commented on, was how little was done to bail Knight out. Other than the 'oligarchy' argument that states that the old timers hated them (they did) the argument I subscribed to was, they weren't systematically important. Their entire function in the market could be taken over quickly by someone else with little disruption and largely they were the only ones that lost money on that day (not really but to an approximate).
"If you just hurt yourself, nobody cares. If hurting yourself hurts others, then other people care." That's pretty cold-blooded and brutal, but it does make some sense...
Was going to post this - have users submit the track data! That also might make it easier to expand to other stations where you aren't as familiar with the track layout.
Have you ever thought about using a natural language interface with ledger? For example, the Mac/iOS calendar app Fantastical lets you create an event by typing or dictating a sentence like "lunch with mike at 2 on Tuesday at Wendy's", and the app will parse the input to create an event with the right parameters.
I ask after reading your vacation write-up. Seems like the input side could have been a lot easier if you had a speech or text NLP interface to ledger. "$10 entertainment expense paid from MasterCard today," for example. That could be the holy grail for people who are not inclined to keep a detailed ledger, or for situations where input is difficult. (Theoretically you could email/iMessage/SMS/slack that string and have it picked up by your ledger file.)
Ledger sort of has that built in, actually, but it only works if you have a similar transaction in the past. For example, I can say this on the command line:
Interesting, thanks. I had in mind a system that would basically regex match a string and add an entry to the ledger (similar, but it would probably be a bit more flexible than the built in system).
Separately, I saw you have also worked on a similar system for food logging. That got me thinking...what else could you track with a plain text file in this format? Fitness/workout info came to mind, as well as rewards points, sleep tracking, any others? Would be cool to have a single system to track all these things, which could be linked up to APIs like Fitbit, myfitnesspal, etc.
I don't use that system anymore, actually. I switched to LoseIt, primarily because of the extensive food database. Most of the time I can just scan a barcode or search for a particular thing and it's in there.
Convenience trumps plain text in this case because, unlike with finance, there's no bank statement to refer back to if you fall off the data entry wagon for a day or two. That data is instead just completely gone.
Your comment was enlightening and compels me to ask: where can the public get access to live field reports such as the one you mention? If news companies transform these reports into faux-news, I'd like to bypass them directly and read/watch directly from the source. Are there any publicly-accessible resources that provide access to field reports or "real" news?
Currently, I believe social media is the best source of news; usually it is a first person account.
I was referring to a internal system which reporters and producers share which doesn't have a public feed.
If you watch some news reports, you'll notice a bunch of people at their desks with a small screen next to their larger monitors. That smaller screen is something like an IRC chat which is used to coordinate assets between reporters and producers.
Thanks for the insight. Are there any particular social media sources you like to use? I find that Twitter and reddit are the most real-time, but reddit can often carry its own biases as well. Twitter seems like it could be the best social media news source if field reporters released news directly through their streams (ie not tweeting as a representative of FOX or NBC). Essentially the IRC chat you mentioned above, but public-facing.
Unfortunately I won't be very helpful here as I really just stopped listening/readying/watching news actively. I'll browse a news aggregate like Hacker News and bi-weekly do a Google News browse but that's about it.
I can't find the quote now but it was from an editor of a news magazine who said something like: If you didn't read the news for a whole year, away from civilization, you probably wouldn't miss anything very important.
I posted this comment on another taxi medallion article, but figure it's hopefully more relevant here:
Just a little background on medallion finance:
A few summers ago, I worked in commercial credit and we did a financing for a "taxi mogul." He was replacing several cars in his fleet, and wanted to take out term loans for the full purchase price of the cars (approx. $30k each, IIRC).
The loans would be secured by cash flow, but the business also posted medallions as collateral. Each loan was attributed to the vehicle purchased with the proceeds and secured by that vehicle's medallion.
It's hard to value something like a taxi medallion. Medallions aren't liquid -- they are usually sold in very low volumes at auctions controlled by the TLC (in NYC). Additionally, the TLC limits the number of outstanding medallions. In practice, most of the medallions are concentrated in the hands of "taxi moguls" who started taxi businesses in the early 20th century when medallions were cheap (think $30k). The best approximation for value we had was the prices commanded by medallions at auction. When I was doing diligence on this deal a few years ago (before Uber), prices were accepted as $1.1mm per medallion. (In reality, that was at best the value of the "marginal" medallion sold; i.e. you could probably not put 10 medallions up for auction at $11mm.)
That means that a $30k term loan would have a loan-to-value of about 3% -- a dream for a bank, assuming the medallions can be seized and sold at market value upon default. That also meant that the loans would be approved almost regardless of the integrity of cash flow. Those characteristics allowed the more cunning taxi moguls to borrow a lot of money against their medallions, securing low rates due to the strength of their collateral posting, and lend the money out at higher rates to earn arbitrage.
There was a good amount of discussion about the medallion bubble -- all it would take is a significant increase in the number of medallions authorized by the TLC or a few failed auctions, and a medallion sold at a large haircut, for the value of all medallions to plummet. Granted, the drop in value might not trip loan covenants, but it would significantly erode the balance sheets of these businesses. At the time, we didn't expect that there would be an external force that would hurt medallion values.
Honestly, skyrocketing medallion prices made it clear that additional ride capacity was needed/demanded. The interesting fact is that the medallion market wasn't disrupted by the issuance of additional medallions, but rather a drop in the demand for yellow cab rides -- a scenario that taxi moguls likely hadn't planned for.
All in all, an interesting asset class that most people aren't aware of -- those 4-letter signs on taxis hold no meaning to riders, and almost nobody on the street would guess that they represent assets worth over one million dollars.
Ot of everything that surrounds uber, the interplay and economics of the taxi industry hitting the rocks is interesting to me in an economic case study.
Your example shows that a lot of businesses take advantage of credit to increase their returns but probably are never able to see where the problems are going to come from. Even ten years ago if you'd have said we would be in this situation it would have been unimaginable.
The angle most taxi sympathisers are going for is the 'poor taxi driver' angle. But in reality the taxi drivers can just switch. It's the people who are all-in on taxis who are in trouble, with their business model built around a constant amount of passenger miles which probably hasn't changed in years.
It's pretty disingenuous to say that taxi drivers can just switch. My gut says that most taxi drivers aren't in a position to easily invest in a capital resource like an automobile.
Though it makes me wonder if you could start a business that rents out cars to potential ride sharing drivers. You get $X per hour that they use it and at the end of their shift they drop it off with another rent. Basically reinventing the taxi cab model.
Some people have tried that. I think the issue right now is that UberX rates have dropped so much for drivers, that if you add an intermediate in the middle, there is either very little margin for the intermediate, or a very shitty salary (under minimum wage) for the driver.
A few summers ago, I worked in commercial credit and we did a financing for a "taxi mogul." He was replacing several cars in his fleet, and wanted to take out term loans for the full purchase price of the cars (approx. $30k each, IIRC).
The loans would be secured by cash flow, but the business also posted medallions as collateral. Each loan was attributed to the vehicle purchased with the proceeds and secured by that vehicle's medallion.
It's hard to value something like a taxi medallion. Medallions aren't liquid -- they are usually sold in very low volumes at auctions controlled by the TLC (in NYC). Additionally, the TLC limits the number of outstanding medallions. In practice, most of the medallions are concentrated in the hands of "taxi moguls" who started taxi businesses in the early 20th century when medallions were cheap (think $30k). The best approximation for value we had was the prices commanded by medallions at auction. When I was doing diligence on this deal a few years ago (before Uber), prices were accepted as $1.1mm per medallion. (In reality, that was at best the value of the "marginal" medallion sold; i.e. you could probably not put 10 medallions up for auction at $11mm.)
That means that a $30k term loan would have a loan-to-value of about 3% -- a dream for a bank, assuming the medallions can be seized and sold at market value upon default. That also meant that the loans would be approved almost regardless of the integrity of cash flow. Those characteristics allowed the more cunning taxi moguls to borrow a lot of money against their medallions, securing low rates due to the strength of their collateral posting, and lend the money out at higher rates to earn arbitrage.
There was a good amount of discussion about the medallion bubble -- all it would take is a significant increase in the number of medallions authorized by the TLC or a few failed auctions, and a medallion sold at a large haircut, for the value of all medallions to plummet. Granted, the drop in value might not trip loan covenants, but it would significantly erode the balance sheets of these businesses. At the time, we didn't expect that there would be an external force that would hurt medallion values.
Honestly, skyrocketing medallion prices made it clear that additional ride capacity was needed/demanded. The interesting fact is that the medallion market wasn't disrupted by the issuance of additional medallions, but rather a drop in the demand for yellow cab rides -- a scenario that taxi moguls likely hadn't planned for.
All in all, an interesting asset class that most people aren't aware of -- those 4-letter signs on taxis hold no meaning to riders, and almost nobody on the street would guess that they represent assets worth over one million dollars.
Why don't we launch the nuclear waste into deep space? Seems like that would avoid the burial problem described here, and since space is mostly, well, empty space, wouldn't inflict much harm to other bodies.
The risks associated with a launch accident are far too high.
I googled a little to find a reliable set of launch success statistics but found nothing I was willing to include herein (it's Sunday morning, I got up late and am lazy right now), but overall success rates are in the high 80% to mid 90%. Failing to launch a satellite is one thing, having radioactive material spread atmospherically by a launch failure is quite another.
Then there's the cost. Yeah, that would be high. Especially with adding containers to protect against the risk described above.
A rocket carrying nuclear waste exploding 50 miles above the surface of the earth would rain nuclear waste on a very large area. Given how much of the earth's surface is water, some would probably land in the water of the world's ocean, possibly dispersing it around the globe at all levels of the ocean food chain, maybe not.
If we had a more reliable means of getting the waste into space, I'd be all for this.
Great idea. To start, why not have the app find episodes that match the user's commute time? For other episodes, an app like Overcast could first apply SmartSpeed and then speed up the entire episode (ie 1.1x) to match the commute time. I'm finding myself looking for good (financial) news podcasts that are < 20 mins per episode.
How is a program like the Penn MCIT Online degree[0] viewed by engineering and product hiring teams in industry? I am looking at transitioning from venture capital investing to SWE (and potentially product, given my business background) and this seems like a good option to facilitate that change - education in CS fundamentals (vs. a bootcamp) but still a reasonably short/practical program (10 courses).
Curious if there are engineers/PMs here that have gone through MCIT or similar to pivot into software from another field? Or, if any hiring managers here have hired graduates from these online degree programs and have insight/advice?
[0]: https://online.seas.upenn.edu/degrees/mcit-online/