>A life spent mostly hoarding money and possessions is a wasted life
I find it interesting that an article whose tone is one of optimism is so judgmental.
231 karma · joined March 1, 2013
I find it interesting that an article whose tone is one of optimism is so judgmental.
To me, it's important for a society to explicitly acknowledge mistakes.
FWIW, I'm American, and I wish that our government would formally acknowledge people who have clearly been affected by less than fortuitous circumstances.
Was at Dreamforce last week and it felt like one giant sales-pitch-cum-Anthony-Robbins event.
Let me know if you have a few minutes to chat, and how best to contact you. My email is in my profile. Thanks!
Credit card skimming is big money. A cheap, innocuous device like this could be very interesting.
From the press conference reported in the link: "Jeff is very excited about the AWS business and he believes - like the rest of the leadership team does – that in the fullness of time- it is very possible that AWS could be the biggest business at Amazon."
“I fucking hate dark chocolate”
What about, "I don't like dark chocolate"? It seems like the author doesn't want to be negative, and profanity increases that negativity. But he seems to take half measures.
I really appreciate the overall point, however -- the manner in which people express themselves can affect how they think.
The Twitter IPO isn't costing the city money. Due to the tax deal struck between the city and Twitter, the city could have gotten more money, if everything else was exactly the same.
The projections are also based on this: "if all employees unload their shares at the midpoint of the offering price range, the lost revenue to the city could add up to $34 million."
Not all employees are going to unload their stock, I have to assume. And I don't think you can just assume everything would have been exactly the same if the tax deal didn't exist, right?
It seems to me that this headline could have been: "The Twitter IP will cost SD tens of millions because twitter left San Francisco due to the city's unwillingness to negotiate."
With software, you can find a way to get it to work. Given the right knowledge, you can accomplish your goal. (Assuming a goal that other people of similar skill have achieved it, and not proving P=NP type stuff.)
With marketing, even if you do everything "right", there's still a huge chance at failure. Being experienced, knowledgeable, and focused doesn't mean you'll accomplish what you set out to do.
I think it's related to the fact that you control software when you write code. Marketing has so much outside of your control that even doing everything right still only results in a < 100% success rate.
The developerforce event route sounds very interesting.
Why share it? From the comments, I understand that it was shared by someone else, and the original creator didn't intend for it to be put on HN.
Why judge it? That's the question I'm trying to figure out while reading this thread.
The whole exchange seems to be @rabois saying "no, that's not a startup. No, that's not what I meant by CEO. No, he doesn't count."
What's his point in making this statement, except to attract attention?
From an individual's perspective, that's hard to understand. To a business, it really isn't that difficult to justify the cost.
One of my criticisms of HN commenters is the inability to empathize from a company's POV. Just because it doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean it doesn't make sense!
Companies (especially big ones) have different priorities than individuals. I may think it's stupid to 10x infrastructure costs by using AWS. A company may say "that's 1% of my budget, and it keeps my development running smoothly and developers happy with the familiarity and flexibility. I make that 10x cost back in 30 minutes, every day. Not worth optimizing."
However, one major component of businesses that private individuals do not understand is the value of risk reduction. In a major sense, many businesses are in the business of reducing or quantifying risk.
To an individual, it may not be worth $100k to make sure everything runs correctly. To a business, that might be an easy decision.
It is especially compounded because private individuals don't typically calculate the cost of their time. If a business can spend $100k to make sure their website doesn't go down, their ROI calculation is: probability_of_downtime * cost_per_unit_downtime + cost_to_fix + cost_to_report_causes + cost_to_explain_why_it_happened.
At $100 - $300 per hour per employee, costs rise FAST.
Businesses need to control risk, and will pay money to do so.
It was also one of the first movies to combine significant CGI with real-world interaction.
Your approach answers the following questions in the recipients mind:
* why is this person contacting me?
* what is it going to cost me (time/money/etc.)?
* what's in it for me?
* is this some sort of scam?
[edit: formatting]
The whole thing felt very self serving and not very informative.
I believe it acts as a check to make sure that the class is well taught, and the questions of an appropriate difficulty level.
If every student receives an F for a 40% correct (and they all only get 40% correct), a curve normalizes that. Students who understand the material as it was presented and tested better than others receive a higher grade.
Makes good sense to me. The problems arise in the Harvard situation, where nobody is curved down. If you down curve inflated scores downward, then a curve only serves to inflate grades and is less useful.
I wouldn't encourage people to try this, but your statement "there will be a hundred other morons... who will plow over pedestrians" is hyperbolic. Especially since we can look back to the original record.
The money laundering part seems obvious, since that happens with most criminal enterprises. But the business services around it really are analogous to legitimate operations.
I find that higher standard requires a significant amount more time, effort, and ultimately prevents me from accomplishing what I need to.
It depends on the application and how you're using the result. Most of the time, for me, it just doesn't matter.
It may be worth noting that much of what i'm talking about is for personal understanding (e.g., baseball statistics) or is not mission critical and will never see the light of day.
Sometimes good enough is just that.
I do appreciate the thoughtful response you wrote. But often my decision is this: do I spend 2 weeks trying to understand a technique, or do I spend 1 day using it, understanding that my analysis has limitations. When you only have 1 day, my choice becomes "do what seems like it will work" or "do nothing." I agree that more complex techniques (neural nets, etc.) may need more understanding. But because they do, they are also inaccessible to me.
Maybe I can sum it up like this: it's not always necessary to do an analyses in a completely scientifically sound manner, if I can answer the questions to my satisfaction. Especially relevant when the other option is to not get anything done, and get stuck in a textbook trying to understand complex theory.
It's bit me once in a while, but that doesn't matter in what I'm doing. (And its usually pretty easy to recover from.)
Also worth a mention that I would not call myself a data scientist, nor do I operate in that role.
It's all tradeoffs, all the way down. I just happen to choose mine differently than someone who might call themselves a data scientist or statistician.
By freeing myself of that level of effort, I can test a lot more stuff and build things a lot faster. In what I do, that's more important than having something be "scientifically accurate".
Similarly, when I am coding a prototype, I don't do unit tests. Don't need them, and it takes me longer to develop.
Sometimes I don't need a mathematically proven process. I often find a use for something like a Monte Carlo simulation, without rigorous methodology, because it works for me, and for what I'm doing.
By analogy, not every website needs a multiple tier, doubly redundant architecture. Sometimes a "dumb" setup with a single webserver and database on a single server gets the job done.
In fact, when I worry less about scientific validity and focus more on what is necessary to get the job done... I make a lot more progress.
It feels a lot like scientific elitism to me.
You could also put a cookie on the users computer, so you know if that cookie is present for 5 subsequent signups that have little/no activity, it's probably a cheater.
You are right that it doesn't protect from a targeted attack. In my experience (10 years as a sysadmin and dev), I've never had a targeted attack -- all the attempts against my machines are drive by.
Having port 22 open can end my IPs on a list of "let's try to break later".
It's not close to a complete solution, but I find it beneficial.
Some time ago on HN I remember reading about a company that embeds forms on websites. So if I filled out a contact form on Site A, the third party collects the information, stores a cookie on my computer. Then when I visit Site B, the cookie uniquely identifies me, and the third party company gives my email address to Site B, even though I didn't fill out a form.
Is this what you're suggesting marketo does?
I'm pretty curious how they advertise the fact that they do something like this as well.
Just as a FYI, the layout doesn't work on my Win7 Chrome browser. The content appears below the content div.
You may be interested in the comments in this article - http://drawrdesign.com/twitter-bootstrap-for-cakephp. It's from a plugin for a PHP framework (CakePHP) where someone built a bootstrap template for Cake.
While there are similar projects, I encourage you to complete your work to your own satisfaction. I believe there is a need for a framework you can download that jump starts your application. I know many developers who have their own packaging of this, so it's something that's commonly used.
Again, nice job!