1,019 karma · joined August 18, 2011
Rather, harmony seems like an interesting side effect generated when Fog Creek built some swank tools for mercurial-based corporate developers, and git won the war while they were doing so.
Most of the value I see in Kiln is in the activity filters, the notifications, the code review tools, the ACLs, and FogBugz integration. Git/Mercurial interoperability is just a cute feature.
1. Go to this page: http://www.linkedin.com/companies?dspFllwed=&trk=hb_tab_...
2. Click 'Stop following' under the company you wish to stop following.
The point has validity, but I've seen more (and larger) problems caused by likable but not-quite-qualified employees than I have by unlikable but qualified employees. A good board of advisors and broad feedback can help spot this problem and offer appropriate prescriptions.
This was me in my first collegiate art elective. I put in enormous effort, but there was no there there. It was a valuable and humbling experience.
I'd used the author's "technique" in high school by making sure to get As in math and science, and simply not trying in the humanities classes. This plan backfired terribly, and in multiple ways.
Backfire #1: I was accepted by my top choice (CS @ CMU), but I wasn't offered any scholarships, and finances pushed me towards a less expensive option.
Backfire #2: it delayed recognition of the gaps in my abilities. I thought I was getting 'B's because I wasn't trying, when I actually had (sometimes serious) unaddressed gaps in my skill set.
Backfire #3: it delayed the realization that I really enjoy some of the subjects I'd blown off.
I've found Selenium scripts much easier to comprehend, modify, and maintain over time than the PhantomJS scripts.
A customer's marketing group was tying visitor data to geodemographic data. They put together a database with tons of variables, went searching, and found a multiple regression with a Pearson coefficient of 0.8+, a low p, decided to rewrite personas, and started devising new tactics based on the discovery.
Fortunately, they briefed the CEO and the CEO said that the dimensions in question (I honestly don't remember what they were) didn't make intuitive sense, and demanded more details before supporting such a major shift in tactics. More research was done, and this time somebody remembered that this was a product where the customers aren't the users, so they need to be treated separately. And it turned out the original analysis (done without fancy analytics) was very close to correct.
If the CEO hadn't been engaged during that meeting, they would've thrown away good tactics on a simple mistake. The regression was "reliable" by most statistical measures, but it was noise.
A similar example holds for validity, where I saw a team make wonderfully accurate promotion response models, but they only measured to the first "conversion" instead of measuring LTV. And after several months of the new campaign, it turned out that the new customers had much higher churn, so they weren't nearly as valuable as the original customers.
> Care to elaborate how how to be more sure of reliability and validity?
I'm not a statistician or an actuary. I'm a guy who took four stat classes during undergrad. I know just enough to know that I don't know that much.
Disclaimer aside: my biggest rules of thumb are to make sure that you're measuring the thing you want to measure (not a substitute), to make sure the statistical methods you're using are appropriate for the data you're collecting, and to make sure you understand the segmentation of your market.
Some people (like you) understand that reliability and validity aren't just "p < 0.05", but that's far from universal understanding. I've seen intelligent people accept and reject hypotheses with woefully inadequate evidence, and I've also seen wild hypotheses built on the backs of strong but meaningless correlations.
Dangerous beasts can be useful, but they must be treated with due care.
The problem being that as we add more data, the chances of spurious relationships increase dramatically, and the human brain is incredibly good at finding a causal explanation for those relationships, even if none exists. This can quickly turn Big Data into a noise-generating rabbit-hole, leading us down blind alleys, and wasting our time.
I love that it keeps getting easier to test our hypotheses, but a search that begins without a logical and reasoned hypothesis is a dangerous beast.
Add in the cost of books, and the total cost of a "budget" college education in Pennsylvania is roughly $55,0000.
As a counterpoint, a private engineering school like Drexel University (also in Pennsylvania) currently costs $51,405/yr, plus books, for a five year program, for a total in the $250-275,000 neighborhood.
They used to claim that your data was inaccessible without your password, but this was always a lie.
For example, there are "freemium" business models where the users are segmented by usage level, or by need of additional features. In those models, the "free" users aren't being sold, they're just potential customers and advocates.
Further, this sort of breach of trust isn't limited to free services. There are paid services that start selling advertisements as well.
Given the choice of being rich during the age of slavery, or being rich today, I'd prefer today.
It was incredibly strange that these sorts of capabilities weren't meaningfully commercialized, even though they were ridiculously useful.
Anecdata: I'm an Apple customer who purchases Kindle books specifically because they're cross-platform. I like that they're at least future-resistant.
As such, I think it's a poor idea to make that a standard part of the interview process.
You mounted an unwarranted defense. There are edge conditions where somebody could do so without a problem, but they're the exception that proves the rule.
Even ignoring the ethics of the request, if somebody is willing to act against their current employer's wishes, they're almost certainly going to act against my wishes as well.
There are plenty of ways to check an applicant's abilities without requesting access to confidential information. This is as true for biz dev as it is for coders.
1) Mayor Nutter's office is working to find ways to support entrepreneurship. A concrete example of this was the city working with First Round Capital to get them to move their offices from Conshohocken to their new space on Locust. Another would be StartupPHL. Or the assistance they've given the Science Center and the Navy Yard.
2) I use Philadelphia public transport regularly. There are tokens and swipe cards, but it basically works. The fancy unified smart-card system is supposed to arrive in 2015, for those who care about such things. I'm just glad the city didn't pull a Melbourne and spend $1.5B on a fare-taking system.
Taxes (especially city wage taxes) are probably the biggest real argument against opening in Philadelphia, but there are certainly some entrepreneurs who find that being directly in the city provides enough value to justify the expense. (Just as some decide to operate in California or NYC.) Whether or not this makes sense depends on what you're doing, who your customers and suppliers are, and who you're looking to employ.
That said, the reason for startups in the suburbs could well be simpler than any of the factors we've previously mentioned. Philadelphia proper has a population of 1.5MM and the MSA has a population of 5.8MM.
1) Many companies already have most of these skills, or can acquire them cheaply and reliably via a service contract. The cloud isn't the only way to outsource operations.
2) The performance/reliability constraints imposed by certain popular cloud platforms can create very expensive development work, distracting developers from doing things that actually create value for customers.
I worked with a successful firm that was close to outgrowing their dedicated server and was considering going cloud. They sketched out an architecture that would get everything to fit into nice little EC2-shaped pieces. But there was a problem: it would take a ton of developer time.
Instead, they spent a fraction of the expected developer cost on some serious hardware, and they were done nigh on instantly. Their developers then used that saved time to do things that actually delivered more value to the customers.
The cloud is awesome when it fits, but it doesn't always fit.
http://www.miketuritzin.com/writing/how-to-be-a-naysayer/
It's clear, concise, and well worth consideration.
Mega might be doing the same thing: saying one thing to attract early adopters, and changing the marketing language once it gets broader adoption by people who don't care about that attribute. It's dishonest, but it would hardly be shocking to learn that a multiple felon was being dishonest.
When I've done UX testing, I've gone out, located the real target market of the specific product we were testing, and tested in-person. A couple times this process included a Craigslist post, but generally it was fully in-person. As such, I'm not qualified to recommend a specific service.