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I’ve been writing about my startup for the last five weeks and haven’t said a word about what it is that we’re actually building or even what my company is called. (No it isn’t Stealth Startup). Let’s start with the company name, it’s called DataDistillr. You can check out our website at DataDistillr.com. What are we building? We are building the ultimate data analytics tool. The goal is to make the world’s data easy to use and query. How are we going to do that you ask? Simple We’re going to tackle the hardest problem in data science: the data itself.

As a data scientist, imagine you could just work with any data you could get access to without having to worry about what format it is in, or what system it comes from. Whether it is coming from ElasticSearch, electronic medical record (EMR) systems, APIs, Excel files, PCAP, Quickbooks, it wouldn’t matter. You could just work with the data. What’s more, imagine you could seamlessly join these datasets without having to figure out complex transformations. Finally, imagine a tool that would let you seamlessly collaborate with your friends and colleagues. If that sounds interesting, you should sign up for early access.

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In my last article, we had just gotten word that we were getting funded, and my doctor found a tumor that required immediate surgery. (I’m fine now, Thank G-d). A little more color, at this point, I had an idea, $1.6M in the bank, not much of a team to speak of, and investors who presumably want some sort of return on their investment. I still was working at JP Morgan at this point but getting ready to give notice. The big question in my mind at this point was, “What the hell do I do now?”

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In my last post about startup life, I wrote about trials and tribulations around getting funding here in the DC area and how I met my mentor Todd who guided me through the next steps and then COVID hit. So it was mid-March 2020, COVID was turning everyone’s life inside out. Around the same time, my boss left at work and I was basically left in a state of limbo as to what exactly I would be doing. I had a lot of free time. Given all the uncertainty surrounding COVID, it didn’t seem especially prudent to approach investors at that moment. (Also remember the stock market was in turmoil as well). At that point, Todd and I strategized that the best thing to do would be to keep refining the pitch deck, work up some demos, and see how the pandemic played out.

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Recently, I responded to a linkedIn article about a cyber attack on a cancer center. The person who posted it basically asked the question, why would a hacker go after something like a cancer center or a school? After reading the posts, it seemed to me that there is a lack of understanding as to why and how hackers actually do what they do.

Why Do Hackers Hack?

One of the biggest misconceptions about hacking is that people think that they are not important or that they don’t have anything that hackers want. The issue here is that people don’t understand why people hack. There are three basic reasons why hackers hack and they are: money, politics, espionage, and malice/mischief. Money is perhaps the easiest to understand, hackers want money. You have it… therefore you are a target. Hackers can steal your money in several ways, either by stealing your credit card and bank info, or by installing some sort of ransomware. What is important to understand that since you have money, you are a target.

Hackers also might be interested in your systems to build botnets, which are armies of computers that a hacker controls, which can be used for all kinds of mayhem. Some master hackers build botnets and then rent them out to other nefarious individuals for profit.

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Facebook has been in the news quite a bit in the last few weeks, and I’ve finally reached the conclusion it is time for me to go. Now, I know Facebook will not care. I do not have millions of followers. I’m not an influencer, nor do I have an Instagram account or use any of their other services.

Why Now?

Over the last few years, I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with social media. I’ve written about it extensively here and elsewhere, but I believe strongly that people are entitled to their privacy. Social media companies believe the opposite, and believe it is their solumn right and duty to invade every aspect of our lives for their profit. I say no more! Basta!

I didn’t delete my Facebook account entirely, however I did put a note that I will not be using it anymore. I had already removed all Facebook applications from my phone, including Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp etc.

It’s More than Privacy

Until recently, my continued objection to social media in general (with the exception of LinkedIn) was the invasion of privacy. I’ve researched and written about how these companies are stealing your privacy and profiting from it. But in the last few months, I’ve been reading a lot of research about the dangerous side effects of social media and come to the conclusion that it is much worse than simply invading your privacy. Social media is about behavior modification.

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I’m an Apple guy through and through. (You can read more about my love/hate relationship here.) My first computer ever was a Woz edition Apple ][ GS and although I had a hiatus with Apple for sometime during college, ever since I came back, I’m all in. My last computer, a Macbook Pro (2014 edition I think) was by far the best computer I had ever owned. Unfortunately, an incident with a can of Dr. Pepper as well as time had led me to the decision that it was time to upgrade. So last year, I got a new MacBook Pro 2018 edition with the touch bar. This enters the hate phase of my relationship with Apple.

Now, I understand the Apple philosophy of remove extraneous features and complexity and agree with it in principle. However, simplicity should not come at the cost of functionality. The new Macbooks, as everyone has noted come with USB-C ports instead of the smorgasbord of ports that existed on previous editions of the machine. Whilst this certainly looks more elegant, after I received my machine, I had to buy a bunch of dongles so that I could use my peripherals. This was a minor annoyance, but I thought a one time thing. How wrong I was…

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There is a data format called HDF5 (Hierarchical Data Format) which is used extensively in scientific research. HDF5 is an interesting format in that it is like a file system within a file, and is extremely performant. However, the HDF5 format can be quite difficult to actually access the data that is encoded in HDF5 format. But, as the title suggests, this post will walk you through how to easily access and query HDF5 datasets using my favorite tool: Apache Drill.

As of version 1.18 Drill will natively support reading HDF5 files.

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