hvass

Highly recommend checking out the podcast Exponent and the blog Stratechery, both by Ben Thompson. He is a great analyst and both Exponent and Stratechery focus on the intersection of tech and business strategy.

There's a new biography on him, A Mind at Play

https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Play-Shannon-Invented-Informatio...

What do you think?

Yep! Music in the front pocket. Nailed it.

Interesting. I didn't know this was a thing. Thanks!

Thank you!

Thank you--that's helpful!

Good point but I do get them replaced for free since my iPhone is still in warranty. If I have to pay again, I will probably change.

Installed! Thank you!

I recommend that you read Brad Stone's new book on Uber and Airbnb. You'd get a sense of how much Uber means to Travis. In my opinion, the last thing he'd do is to step down (I am not making a comment whether he should or shouldn't—it's just something that I clearly don't see happening voluntarily.)

Other than this, the author has some great writing and you can read a recent interview with her over at The Daily Stoic: https://dailystoic.com/elif-batuman-interview/

Great job! I am Canadian and donated to ACLU this weekend. Fantastic decision, guys.

This is gold:

"Since Scott's original proposal, many further symbols have been proposed here:

(:-) for messages dealing with bicycle helmets @= for messages dealing with nuclear war"

"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." Marcus Aurelius (from his Meditations)

I understand where you are coming from but usually a naive and simple 'just', especially coming from an outsider can be exactly what you need. Maybe you are so entangled in the problem that you've lost the proverbial forest.

It says this right before the bolded part:

"When you use our services or view content provided by Google, we automatically collect and store certain information in server logs. This includes:"

I am not sure this applies to regular phone calls, no? Can someone explain here because I am certainly not understanding. Is this only for, say, Google Voice or related services that they have?

Facebook can't do ads properly? I don't have any ties to FB but man, Facebook does ads extremely well. I am not sure on what argument you are basing this on.

What is defense in depth? It is mentioned as a core principle.

So much this. We are currently using Lync and to quote you: absolutely fucking terrible.

I would highly recommend looking into Cal Newport's blog (Study Hacks), he has published a significant number of posts on how to learn better.

www.calnewport.com/blog/

You're definitely going to like The Obstacle Is The Way if you want to go deeper into stoicism.

It is based on that line from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and it's about turning obstacles upside down.

-Connect with your Google Analytics and focus on the entire journey - click to conversions.

-Download Avinash Kaushik's custom reports for Google Analytics to see the ROAS (return on ad spend) of your campaign. There is a great custom report called E2E Paid Search.

-Read the intro articles on PPCHero.com

-Make sure you understand broad, phrase, exact match. You need to know exactly when your ad will be showing.

-Make sure you use ad extensions to increase your CTR.

-Google cares about your Quality Score. Learn about it and obsess over it.

-Is your landing page aligned with your keyword/ad? Google cares.

-Is your landing page providing a good mobile experience? Lower your bids for mobile devices if it doesn't so you don't waste money.

-Read the AdWords certification guides - they are a bit long but will help you avoid silly mistakes.

-Always test. Test bids, copy, ad extensions, etc.

-Do you only want to target a specific geo? Always think who is seeing your ad. If you don't serve customers in a specific region, should they be seeing it.

-Have a list of negative keywords. If a visitor uses specific keywords from your negative keywords list, your ad will not show up. Think about the user's intent - if a user types a specific keyword, does your ad help him solve his problem?

-If you're using broad match, obsess over the exact keywords typed in. You will see that your ad might not be showing up for the right searches.

-Focus on your campaign structure and go as granular as possible. One keyword theme per ad group - don't lump variety of keywords in the same ad group.

-Learn about dynamic keyword insert--it will help you boost CTR.

-Obsess over outcome (see point #1) - every click costs you money. What is your Cost per conversion? Are you getting any ROI? What is working, what is not working?

Meditations have already been discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5160713

There are great recommendations in there if anybody wants to dive deeper into Stoicism or understand Meditations better.

That's what I thought too. But the curve is already looking pretty scary.

I would be curious to know what percentage of teams with statisticians / data people actually use tools like Optimizely? A lot of people seem to be building their own frameworks that use a lot of different algorithms (two-armed bandits, etc.). From my understanding, Optimizely is really aimed at marketers without much statistical knowledge.

Of course, if you're a startup, building an A/B testing tool is your last priority, so you would use an existing solution.

Are there much more advanced 'out-of-the-box' tools for testing out there besides the usual suspects, i.e. Optimizely, Monetate, VWO, etc.?

I recommend two resources on creating dashboards, both from very experienced practitioners:

1) http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-dashboards-strategic-...

2) Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few - http://www.amazon.ca/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effective-...

The heuristic whether to use real-time information is the following and I am paraphrasing Avinash Kaushik:

"Will a decision be made in real-time based on this information?"

You can try http://inbound.org & http://growthhackers.com/

This is a pretty good post: http://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2013/08/how-to-find-m...

You make two points:

1) You do not want to "fork over any money' to WSJ. 2) You are frustrated by paywalls.

Notice how it is all about you? :-)

Have you considered that other people are here to discover great and high-quality content and are not frustrated by paywalls and are gladly willing to support quality writing?