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The list sounds more predictive than descriptive.

Likewise, I continue to find myself shocked whenever I see developers' resumes that don't list even a single project they've worked on.

It's part of a bigger problem seen here in Europe (at least for those who don't move away.) Online work profiles like Linkedin are an obsession here -- and these sites are all oriented around highlighting school and businesses associations, instead of around the list of projects one's worked on. Useless for hiring.

This illustrates the two very different approaches to the problem of getting hired:

A) If you convince school to certify you -> you will convince a company to hire you.

B) If you achieve relevant work -> a company will hire you to perform more work.

I swear I was also thinking of inventing a JSON-based replacement for the IMAP just last week.

Finally.

There's a tendency to think that we're all very unique in our preferences, but think about it -- the only way you could really know that, is if you were to already have all of data of what many other people's preferences are. Do we really already know?

I study food, fragrance, software and other types of product preferences. In the studies I've done, often people's very subjective preferences (or so we assume) turn out to be highly clustered into just one or two clusters of highly similarly-preferenced people. Sometimes when you'd assume there would be total disagreement, there's actually total preference agreement.

Fascinating that OP became a worker in a critical part of Google's machine, and he didn't even realize it.

How does everyone feel about a JSON dicts separated by newlines format? (Like the JSON format that mongoimport can accept.)

Each sample of the type of data that I'm often dealing with tends to be nested in nature. Yes, I do have a script that can flatten out the nested dicts into a regular table, but that always results in a blowup into hundreds of columns.

Nice suggestion to share the raw data. I've never seen a researcher do that, I think many don't even save the raw data to disk before extracting what they want, but I always try to.

You really can't overstate the differences between trams and busses. Trams are more like a moving sidewalk, a physical part of the city.

An idea based on scaling up a type of advice that people already naturally give each other in person. I like it.

The reason rankings exist is because often, in the end, a decision MUST be made. Are current rankings possibly worse than a random draw? - conceivably, in some cases, but that doesn't have to be the case.

Your concerns about ranking-context and the general difficulty of ranking are, however, well placed. Solving the ranking problem, for the general case, is a first-class problem on the same level of difficulty as computer vision or language processing.

Personally, I think the world deserves a better approach to solving general ranking.

Think of it as a search engine, like Google.

That's exactly what we do. 50,000+ comparison reviews already analyzed, in 600+ categories. Email us for a beta invite.