jib

I don't think there is any correlation between exciting/boring and profitable. Index funds ar one of the more profitable strategies (as they don't involve paying some guy a ton of money to play lotto for you). They are certainly boring. Taleb argues that people Investing are really bad at estimating the value of catastrophic failure (or blowout success) and invests accordingly. He is playing the other side of Y combinators strategy, very much in agreement with Fred Wilson, Y combinator etc, just the other side of the spectrum.

Rands has some good articles about culture. http://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-culture-chart/

It isn't about the statements (our core values sound dumb and Like a slogan when read out tbh) but it is about what the underlying culture that caused someone to write those statements are about. we don't ship until it is great. Having a CEO who consistently make multimillion decisions of not shipping because the product is just good is what it is about. One of the core values sums that up in a slogan matters because what it conveys is that we are so proud of our products that we will eat a big loss rather than selling something that honestly most people would be happy with but still be left with a feeling of "they cut a few corners there". If it's not great quality, top of the line, it doesn't go outside our doors. And the entire company is bought into that. That's the real meaning of the slogan. And that is important even tho the exact words aren't.

I dislike contact states personally. They are mostly noise. People set them, don't set them, forget they set them, had some program set them etc.

For me it is fairly simple - usually texts in my company are higher urgency, location agnostic, communication. Only reason I would text is I need someone sooner than they see an email/Lync message, but I don't need them urgent enough to interrupt with a call. "I'm running late from this meeting, can we delay?", "you ok for lunch in 5?" etc. people typically respect that rough, unexpressed, protocol.

The commodity names really puts me off. You're targeting a luxury-ish market, and you're advertising things under commodity names.

I dont go around thinking I want to buy a "BEAUTIFUL WHITE MODERN/CONTEMPORARY FAUX LEATHER SECTIONAL SOFA"

That's what it does. Not what it is. Brand name, brand style, something catchy - whatever it is, I want something I can chunk in my head. BEAUTIFUL WHITE MODERN/CONTEMPORARY FAUX LEATHER SECTIONAL SOFA I can't chunk at all. And it doesnt sound very appealing.

In the same vein - your related products are the same type of items. You're not telling me "You can have this awesome living room if you get this sofa, with this table, and this..." Frequently bought together or something like that, ideally listed as a range or theme or something to give it a feel of cohesiveness.

Austin isn't Texas though. Austin and Paris sounds characteristic for who he wants to be?

And nothing (or rather no one) really changes in Tolkiens books. I think that is a fair point. People ARE (good, evil, shadowy, treacherous, wise) they don't become or evolve and are not typically multifaceted.

Poker (in any casino) is raked in some way, either by seat fee or by pot rake, so the game is stacked against you.

You can certainly overcome that edge by being more skilled than your opponents (which is a nice difference from most other casino games), but over the entire population of poker players, playing poker is a losing proposition.

In the eyes of a casino, there is no difference in running a poker game or any other game (except possibly that poker is a pretty expensive game to run, compared to how much you can rake without it being obvious that the rake is significant, as it has fairly slow rounds and few participants per staff needed to run it).

Harrington on Hold'em is a good starting place for (tournament) poker. It's an old book but it teaches solid fundamentals.

I think this is the most significant point. Filler material doesn't work anymore. I can and will watch reruns of old content rather than unexciting new content or filler stuff like commentary.

I will gladly pay a premium for someone to present me good content in an easily consumable manner, but I don't want filler stuff like talk shows etc about the content - that isn't where the value add is. The value add is in creating a package of actual content that I want and presenting it to me in a way that doesn't require a lot of work or nickel and diming of me?

I watch a bunch of magic the gathering on twitch, and there are two competing "brands"for casted live tournaments - WotC themselves, and starcitygames. WotC thinks they should be ESPN with a lot of talk in between, SCG thinks they should be just content, with a few really talented commentators mostly doing colour and play by play. SCG gets much higher viewership and better feedback despite running an objectively lower level tournament series, from having more content and more in tune with audience commentating talent.

I think that is a microcosm of where we will be going. Content and a small pocket of talent rather than huge productions that tries to cover gaps in content.

Really? I've had a very bad experience with the college pass. I will try again this year though as they have a service I really want (fast on demand cover of 80%+ of all the games).

ESPN are atm really bad at online. I want to give them money to watch college football (it doesn't air on normal TV in Europe obv except the odd game).

Their price is ok (20 euro a month or so) but their app is completely broken. On iPad it kicks me out every few mins claiming I logged in somewhere else (I didn't). They had major issues with the streaming. The app is not searchable in a meaningful way.

Last two years I have paid them for the first month but have ended up using pirated streams/YouTube instead to even get to watch the games and then cancelling in frustration.

Before they are ready to move to an online first model they have a bunch of work to do. It is clear it is not a focus at the moment at least.

And same with people who I interacted with...

QWCTF - Capten, Foureau, TwinTurbo, Pimp all the other Synergy and Lords guys, Nii! (We were the worst and nicest), Skalman and many more...

Utopia - All the Malaysians from HaLL, the swedes from AV, The mishmash that was PAX, all us monkeys, the hasbeens in Mordor who you still couldn't mess with, the annoying Absalom guys, the other random alliances that formed and broke up.

EQ - all the dawnraiders I played with, the dream team with Zohran, Ashigaru, Filroden, Stragen, Veggi, Ganewate and his brother, Graouwl, Qujam, Stamford and their team and way too many more to mention..

UO - all the smiths in Brittania, including the UBB guild led by Ulysses... Min, and the other independents, Ethereal and his two crazy Canadian sidekicks in our guild, the two Danish pks (dog something?) and so on...

All those games are filled with memories of both events and people.

I think I have stories from all my games. Utopia - plotting against the 4-500 people strong enemy alliance by building a network of 2-300 loosely connect people with various interests, balancing various alliances and allegiances, trading together a team of 25 dedicated team mates, racing for the top but being pulled down by trying to manipulate one alliance too many. And doing it again next 2 month round.

EQ - pulling all PoF bosses without touching any trash mobs, swimming through lava with a one hit kill boss behind me to save time, spending 3-4 hours with 70 other people to clear council of rathe, progressing from killing dragons in the ice zone to clearing plane of time, aoe kiting an entire zone... (Eq bard is still the best designed class I saw in any game)

UO - getting an order for 200 suits of coloured ore, working to complete it like mad for 2 weeks and being robbed by a bug in the new stealth feature just before completing the sale... Hitting GM smithing, buying a tower with 3 friends, exploiting blade spirits for resists forever... First time buying a house (just north of Minoc)

QWCTF - first time winning a clan game by timing quads perfectly on e1m2 for a full map (I could still run that map in my sleep), taking on and beating a clan miles better than us by playing from the same room, playing a match entirely with the boom stick in a clan game and still typing kills, the feeling of flying into a base with perfect grapple moves despite two guards with ro and str/res runes, the feeling of bouncing along on the long stretches of e4m3 with floor grapple speed jumps...

All of that more than 10 years ago and still vivid memories for me.

I think the age thing is relevant, but more as "everyone has a few early experiences they anchor and way future experiences against". I'll always compare games to pirates, UO, EQ, privateer, d2 and qwctf because they were my seminal games in various categories. Other people will have other games they measure against, whether that be wow, Starcraft, cs, myth, monkey island, syndicate, fallout or whatever you first were captured by.

I disagree on it being the only game. There are people I played EQ with from 10 years ago who I am still in touch with and would consider friends, and we spent a lot of time in the game talking about just about everything.

I also had the same experience with people in quake that I played with - I am sure if I caught up with some of the guys from the swedish QWCTF scene back in the day we would have a bunch of things to talk about, same with the community around the webgame Utopia.

I think it depends on how much time you put into the game and how engaged you are with it. Communities can develop around all types of games, but I agree that UO was a very engaging game and I still remember the people I played UO with 17 years later, even though I am not in touch with them anymore.

I played UO 98-99 on Europa. Back then I enjoyed being able to play a game where I could do smithing almost exclusively. Just hanging out with other people who enjoyed a very small aspect of the game, and being able to service others. There was a nice feeling of earning the trust of a community (people had to give you their things for you to fix, and you could theoretically just keep them, but play enough and your character built a reputation as a reliable person in the community, rather than having it rules based or anything) that hasnt been in place in other MMOs that I've played.

I went back to play it last year I think, and it was still an enjoyable, but thoroughly broken game world. For me it was mostly nostalgia, and after a few months of playing it vaned, but the content still held up surprisingly well, especially as it was never really meant to be balanced.

All you can eat isnt all you can eat. It is throttled after 15Gb.

There is no mobile options in Ireland with decent caps. Living here and in a place that has ADSL1 and 4G available I tried finding a plan that would me actually consume media using 3/4G - there is no plan that doesnt throttle after at best 20Gb that I could find.

"Should your data usage exceed 15GB in a 30 day period and your usage affect other network users, we reserve the right to limit your Service."

They are saying that the variation in tests can be lowered by including covariant variables in selection criteria. Let's say one product of many I sell a "drivers license test kit" and somehow know the age of my site visitors. I have an idea of how to change how I advertise the kit on my website. Most of the people who would buy the kit are in a very specific age bracket (16-20 year olds depending on legal age in your country). My site has an even spread of visitors ages. if I random split my test pool and it ends up with an imbalance in ages my results will be skewed so I can lower amounts of tests needed if I don't form test groups OR control groups where all 16-20 year olds are on one side. I "know" those tests would be irrelevant so I just don't run them. If they would have yielded relevant results I'm screwed but if not, I saved time.

For your 1 and 2, yes and yes. They measure different things. But I can see that "a test population of site visitors of an even age distribution" would yield answers faster than a random distro. You are asserting a belief rather than testing for it, adding a given, so reducing problem space, so trading lower variance in results for higher uncertainty of the significance (because maybe your assertion that age drives interest is wrong, and then all tests are wrong). P (this test is totally meaningless) goes up, but P (if this test is meaningful the results are likely close to true) also goes up? That's how I read it at least.

It's related to jackpots, so no.

Lets say a lottery is set up to pay out 60% of money in over a year, but those payouts are done by 40% 9 weeks out of 10, and 240% the 10th week. If you only play the lottery on the 10th week, then your EV is +140%, even though the overall EV is still 60%.

From the article it was a version of this that happened.

As a non-american, this is really weird to me.

I grew up around plenty of guns at my friends - they were moose hunting rifles mostly. And they were under lock and key unless actively used for hunting, with guns locked in one location, ammunition locked in another (at least one of them in safe).

The police where I live now (Ireland) don't carry guns except for a few special units.

The fact that wearing guns is something that is every day business and that you can even discuss about is so alien to me that it is fascinating to see. I am glad I dont live in a society with those values though.

More guns means more people killed by guns. That said, I don't know the solution once you already have a proliferation of guns in your society. Personally I don't believe that maximizing the saturation of guns is a long-term solution but I recognize that it is a difficult situation.

Reddit is mostly entertainment for me.

I read /r/cfb for a good overview of what is going on in college football. I glance through /r/nfl to get an idea of nfl and when I want extra entertainment I read the frontpage.

There's a few work related ones I read occasionally to keep up to date on issues with our products, but outside that it is mostly entertainment tbh.

Well it is a good story, right? Like Wizards of the Coast's really expensive table: http://www.peteradkison.com/blog-entry-3-wizards-of-the-coas...

I dont have one. There are some people who have some good traits and habits that I would like to acquire, but I dont get the role model thing. To me it is about process rather than person. "This guy has a great way of doing X" rather than "I want to be like this specific person".

Swift have one of the biggest moats in the world. They are in all banks already, other businesses are not, they are already trusted and they sell both the service and the hw to access their service. So they can charge a lot for their services. What the banks want is a 100% reliable and traceable communications system that everyone trust. Good luck breaking into that market. :)

I imagine they dont mind paying a lot because they dont actually need to send that much information.

http://www.swift.com/solutions/pricing/fs_pricing_easier_200...

That looks to be a bit old version of their prices.

I've met some of the nice Belgian guys that run their support - not a job I'd really like. If there's a business where you need to be conservative, and defects are really not ok in any way, it's theirs.

But that is even worse, right?

That is paying a fixed price for someone to gamble for you.

If you look at it objectively, a more sane pricing model would be that you get a discount on the flat fees compared to what you would pay for a non-managed fund, but with a bonus paid on earnings.

The value proposition from the fund managers is that they can significantly outperform a non-managed fund. If that is true, then what they lack is capital to actually play on a large enough scale (if they had the capital they would just play with their own money after all). Pension funds have a large amount of capital that they want to accrue interest on.

The win-win scenario is that the fund managers agree to handle the money at a lower cost than what having them in some form of indexed managed would be, but that in return they take a share of any profits that are generated.

If you just add on a flat % fee that is higher than what the indexed fund would charge, then the fund manager isnt assuming any risk.

But the important part isn't annual return, it's annual return compared to similarly risked options. Which are in the 7-8% range for the last 10 years depending on when you start counting.

I'm paying you to beat the average - I can achieve the average myself, at a lower risk by just investing evenly across the board.

If the funds delivered 8.24%, and matching S&P would have gotten me 7.5%, then you're in fact keeping 15% of what you gambled for. And if you had delivered 7.0% I would have eaten that loss compared to the average.

Except with a mortgage you're not running a risk that next year you will suddenly have an extra 50k added to your mortgage.

Actively managed money has a very nice angle going. They can charge money to actively manage your funds, while still getting to keep a share of any profits generated.

Insurance companies have to pay money to get access to the same funds, to do the same gambling.

It is somewhat insane that you can run a business where the choices are:

a) Do admin work to balance an indexed portfolio for price A b) Gamble with money for price (B + X% of profits)

And somehow people feel its ok that the price of B is higher than the price of A.

The argument is they are gambling with just a downside, so why are they not just buying indexed funds, right?

If you lose money on actively managed funds, you lose the money. If you win money on actively managed funds, you get a small part of the win, and give away a large part of the win to the guy who was gambling (how large is clearly a contract question). If the part you give away is too big, you are playing a fools game. The article isnt describing how much was fixed costs and how much were bonuses paid on outperforming funds, so it's hard to tell if they are indeed playing a fools game, but it seems at least possible.

Why pay someone to gamble for you if he will take 95% of the winnings but not eat any of the losses? If this is this because the managed accounts actually under-performed to expectation - ok. If it is because you're paying too big bonuses on exceeding some easy to reach baseline - not ok.

I think that is a reasonable argument. .

Here's my view, based on 10 odd years in various CS roles.

I think there's confusion about good/bad customer experience and what that means. Great staff doing great interactions is important, but if you focus just on that you're missing out on two important earlier layers.

No-one really wants to talk to customer support. Ever. So trying to be good at talking to people is nice, and you better be good at it when you need to or you will lose some customers (whether that be through lack of acquisition from bad stories or people actually quitting), but it's like the third level of defense, and it is arguably less important than the first two levels.

The first level is "Make sure your stuff just works". Actively work towards eliminating defects. The best product is the one that just works. People hate on Ryanair in Europe - I think it is vastly exaggerated. They get the point that having things just work is huge. They "just work" better than any other airline. They suck completely at the third level, and are only ok at the second level, but they are good at the first level. And sometimes good at first level, and good prices, is all you need.

Second level is - if things for some reason dont work, make it easy for me to fix it myself. Again - I dont want to think about your thing, I just want it to work, but if you're making me think about it by having it break, at least make sure I can do all my thinking and solving in one go - best way to do that is to let me fix it on my own. Sky broadband does a decent job of this. Their routers come with built in self-service menus rather than random error screens. Along the lines of "Something is wrong - lets start by plugging and unplugging the wires. Here's what a micro-filter is and looks like, check if you have one of those in place. Ok, lets power-cycle the router, you do that by just unplugging this wire..." 100% better than having a generic error screen or referring to online help.

Third level is - If you failed at the first two levels, make it easy and nice to talk to you. Important, not least for PR reasons, since people who failed the first two levels and also fail on the third will be really pissed off with you, but arguably less important than the first two layers, if they are done right. The other reason it is hugely important is that your improvement points on level 1 and 2 will come from 3. If your team isnt set up to continuously feed back what they are hearing from 3 and use that to improve 1 and 2, you're not going to get better.

The fourth bonus level is "f you failed the first three, at least have a decent social media setup to manage your awfulness".

A good CS organisation recognises all three levels at least, and spends time on all of them. You continually work on moving things from the third level up to the first, or at least the second, and doing that proactive work is part of what makes a good CS team.

It is a stupid EU law: http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm

I studied to be a chemical engineer at one point (with engineering physics, but ok).

Of the guys in my class, and wildly guessing, I would say that less than 50% work with something chemical related, mostly either in pulp, oil or fuel cells. A bit more than 50% work with something related to programming or computer modeling, and outside that a variety of odd jobs.