The humans of Numerai

[nyuton]

What a journey, mate! Congrats!

[nyuton]

Hi Everyone,

I started out as a solution architect for enterprise management systems, but then I felt the drag towards machine learning and data science. I started learning on my own and got also some medals in Kaggle competitions until I found Numerai.

Since I have a decade long history of “save much and invest in tech stocks”, I got financially independent recently. Now I don’t have a full time job and Numerai is my most time consuming hobby. I’m not doing it for the money, but it’s hard to deny that it feels good, when I get the Wednesday payouts

I’m also an amatour triathlete, did an Ironman. Recently picked up karate as well to train with my son together.

I used to be a globetrotter, but I settled down at home in Hungary with my wife and 2 kids.
I’m still a couchsurfer host! Numerai visitors are welcome!

We can get in touch on LinkedIn

Life’s great! If you let it be

[objectscience]

bumpity bump, let’s keep those intro’s rolling!

[smcmanus13]

Hi all,

New participant here. I grew up in Galway, Ireland - left at age 21 for Japan to teach English during the 00s economic crisis. Evenutally ended up back in England doing a PhD in Clinical Biology/Nutrigenomics, had a child, did a bunch of different things in between including working in education, publishing a bioinformatics papers, writing some popular media pieces and working data engineering/data science jobs. Currently working on data science projects in manufacturing/agricultural sector for a DSAAS startup.

Submitted my first model yesterday - I filtered features for assumption of inter-era stationarity and then ensembled some models together. Experimenting with neutralization methods at the moment.

You can find me here and here off of Numerai. Would be excited to hear from and colloborate with others (both fellow new comers and more seasoned participants).

[malembetirick]

Hi all,
First of all I wish you all the best and happiness for this new year.
I plan to launch very soon a platform of automated management of aws ec2 spots instances which would allow you to :

• save up to 90% of the costs
• develop, test and iterate quickly in a secure way, new algorithms of artificial intelligence
  I would be delighted if you could take 2 minutes to answer my survey
  Quick survey .

[monticola]

Hello everyone,

my name real name is Manuel, 34, spanish. I am a software developer, nothing fancy to say about my professional career.
On my free time, I like doing somehow interesting things to try an feel alive. I was introduced to Numerai by my workmate and I have had fun here since then. I have trained some, predicted some and staked some. I don’t know much about machine learning and have never applied it professionaly. I just took some courses.
I like birdwatching, I find it relaxing. I name my models after birds, so if you see a model named by the scientific name of a bird, it’s probably me.

I wish the best to everyone here

[svendaj]

This is a fantastic topic!!! To keep it rolling here is my entry.

My name is Josef Švenda and I live in Prague, Czech Republic, EU - the most beautiful city of the world. As born in 1960 I am definitely a contender for the title “The Fossil” of Numerai community, although with @gammarat it might be very close. Sorry @robbo_the_fossil you have no chance .

In 1978 I wrote my first program - solving linear equations with matrix operations in Basic on 16kB RAM school computer (loader pushed in in hexacode from front panel, interpreter loaded from paper tape and interaction via electric typewriter). In 1979 I started to study econometrics and operations research at Economics University in Prague and there I initiated my interest in AI. I have programmed rule based expert system with fuzzy logic reasoning and graduated in 1984 with thesis on model of reasoning with uncertainty based on fuzzy logic and stayed at university as a research fellow for a couple of years more.

Then commies fell, I went to business - selling software - from 1996 to 2018 in Autodesk and Oracle in number of very interesting countries (my best memories are from Israel and Georgia). Although rewarding, it was intellectually not very demanding. So, when I had some more time after my stint at failed biodata startup, I went back to my original interests in math, AI and stock markets.

I have joined Kaggle to learn Python and deep learning and when I was boasting on LinkedIn about learning Fourier features, former ORCL colleague told me about the hardest data science tournament in the world. I was hooked instantly and when my models reached Top 10 it just felt great. Since then, I am on Numerai #tournament almost daily, always learning something new. Lately it was unfortunately mostly about automation/backend and less on #data-science (I believe it reflects my performance ), but as eternal self-delusional optimist I believe it will change. My models are prefixed with JOS_ and it would be great if search box on Leaderboard page would not trim trailing underscore.

Part of my fossil profile is my favourite writer Milan Kundera (read anything from him but lately become quite actual his Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe), movies of Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovski . As atheist I love anything from late Christopher Hitchens and as sceptic I like Nassim Taleb as well as people he despise such as Stephen Pinker (especially his The Blank Slate). In music I have slight preference for J.S.Bach and Mozart’s operas, but i do not discriminate much and listen to anything from world music to RATM.

I hate majority of taxes (especially income, corporate, value-added and capital), but it makes me no anarcho-capitalist or bitcoin fan. Rather I dream of single tax which would be supplying lean state with needed income without citizen harassment and bureaucracy. Luckily there are good candidates to achieve this ideal, so if you share my taxation disgust, check APT Tax and it’s Swiss version Micro-Tax initiative and spread the word. In US (not my concern) it could be also Fair Tax Act and movement.

Kudos to @richai and Numerai staff to making it all possible, you have built great thing.

Anyway - the best parts of Numerai is you - the community! So noobs: keep it rolling!

[shi_luo]

My name is Shi, I’m 23 years old, from Wuhan, Hubei, and currently studying Data Science at NYU.

Reading about your experiences makes me feel both overwhelmed and exhilarated. I find it miraculous that completely different people from all over the world are deeply engaged in studying the same specific topic.

During my undergraduate studies, I learned about the “Basic Stacks” of Data Science / ML, including my favorite courses by Andrew Ng. At the same time, I’ve been constantly wondering, “What value do I bring as a junior data professional?” With the increasing capabilities of LLMs and the growth of Agent frameworks, as the barrier to simple coding lowers, this question has evolved into a deeper existential crisis: “What will I do after graduation / with my life?”

My current answer is to challenge myself through direct value creation. I’m using Kaggle and Numerai to engage in some goal-oriented building, and if I’m good enough, I’ll directly earn bounty from Kaggle and Numerai as I iterate and improve.

Beyond financial gains: I love quantitative analysis. I see it as a means to “cut through BS,” which aligns with my core values. I admire the unique abilities of Taylor Mason (a brilliant quant) in “Billions,” where “Quant funds herald the demise of traditional funds.”

I dislike how people get overly excited just hearing the term “AI.” I believe the current FOMO among users and investors has led to an unreasonable bubble in generative AI. Or rather, while generative AI has enormous value, people’s perspective on it is heavily biased. I prefer the terms “Machine Learning” or “Statistics.”

My recent interests: Khalil Fong, R&B music, aerobic exercise, mental health, “Complex PTSD,” Drake’s early works, Yoga Lin, and missing my friends.

Thank you to Numerai and to all the incredibly sincere people here. I wish you the best!