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v21

1,584 karma · joined February 14, 2010

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v21··on Hire based on interest, not credentials
A lovely interview with Gabe Newell, touching on their hiring processes, and studio management: http://www.develop-online.net/features/1192/Gabe-Newell-on-V...

I think what it comes down to, is if you're Valve, you get to have your cake and eat it too. You get to hire the best, and they're all increbibly motivated to make the things you're making.

"I think it’s obvious, everybody here could get a job in ten minutes. People like [someone walks into the door, it’s Jay Stelly, holding two coffees], people like Jay! Who brings me coffee.

Jay is the most senior engineer at the company [laughs]. And he saw that I didn’t have coffee! There are probably at least five publishers he could call and get a $30 million project in an hour if he wanted to.

The reason he’s here isn’t because he has no other option, he’s here because he can work with the best people we have. It’s here at Valve where his talent can make the biggest impact and he doesn’t have to waste time rolling his eyes at stupid things the marketing and management teams are doing."

v21··on Chromebook
But from a business point of view, looking at an anticipated total cost of ownership, it might be a pretty good deal.
v21··on Robots.txt is a suicide note
Or, if you do, hand over the data in a nicely archivable form, and prevent the need for crawlers.
v21··on Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.
No idea why you were being downvoted. I was just curious, as people were using the terms interchangably and they aren't always used that way.
v21··on Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.
Is capitalism the same as the free market?
v21··on Why I went with them and not you: feedback to an interviewer
I live in the UK, and have gotten good feedback from jobs I didn't get. Even though they were rejections, I often agreed with their points and choices. I liked the companies more as a result. If I had solicited, and then received this email, I would be very grateful - this kind of opinion must be very difficult to find.
v21··on Google indexes Stack Overflow at a rate of 10 requests per second
What's frustrating is trying to Google a question, finding forum threads telling the original questioner to use Google, and refusing to answer the question.
v21··on Show HN: HackerTable.com, reservations at elusive restaurants (3-day project)
_The_ Abe Froman? The Sausage King of Chicago?
v21··on It’s time to stop using Subversion
I have friends still who use CVS (and don't see why it's so bad). In fact, we still have CVS repos around. Change is slooow.
v21··on Life at a startup
But on the other hand unit testing isn't the same as testing. Integration tests, regression tests, stress tests, "miscellaneous automated tests" are all valid sets of tests.
v21··on Used iPads Selling Quickly Online
To people too cheap to get a new iPad, like me.
v21··on I took "abusing the HTML5 History" to the next level.
Wish I'd thought of this. And that I'd made it.

And that it doesn't catch on.

v21··on The Chair
Who'd pay $2 to use a reskinned Craigslist on the web?
v21··on Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You
No, my point is that disruptive students will drag down all the scores of the entire class. In addition, you have to assume for your corrections that the level of disruption is consistent across subjects and time - ie a disruptive class might collectively be less disruptive when playing PE. Or that the kids change their behaviour over time. Or that there aren't more complex interactions between disruptive behaviour and different teachers (an example might be - kids might be less disruptive just after lunch, because they've just eaten and are sleepy. If you teach "the bad class" in a after-lunch slot, you'll appear better than your colleagues.) And - my (UK) experience, up until the age of 11, is that we had a single "home room" teacher, who taught the majority of our lessons, regardless of subject. We changed home-room (and hence main teacher) once a year.

And we haven't even got into the troublesome part of reducing a student's behaviour to a single number. Or the unfortunate way that useful correlates of underlying behaviour stop being useful correlates once you reward people for meeting them. (I'm sure there's a name for this phenomenon, but I have forgotten it)

I support the idea of collecting data. I obviously want to analyse it as rigorously as possible. But there are just too many complex interactions going on when you have 30 people in a room trying to learn for our statistics to produce reliable numbers. At least, that's my intuition. It occurs to me that if you actually collected the data, you could do an ANOVA, and have a reasonable stab at attributing the variation in outcomes to various factors, such as individual students, teachers, subjects, the class they're in, interactions between any combination of the above, and "other". You'll need a lot of data, mind. My guess is <10% of the variance would come down to the teacher alone. But this is just a guess - no doubt people have done this before. They've probably done it multiple times, with different answers depending on the different measures they used, whether they adjusted for socioeconomic factors etc. There's probably review articles summarizing those.

v21··on Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You
The only component of student behavior the predictor will not account for is whatever component of behavioral factors which are uncorrelated with SES, but are correlated with the distribution of students between classes. I.e., there will need to be a systematic reason why rich white kids who are more poorly behaved than the average rich white kid go to classroom 101 but not classroom 201.

The root cause is that they share a classroom with other students who are misbehaving. To oversimplify wildly, take 4 demographically matched classes:

1) A class with some disruptive students , with a bad teacher : outcome - bad

2) A class with entirely generally well-behaved students, with a bad teacher : outcome - not so good

3) A class with some disruptive students, with a good teacher: outcome - not so good

4) A class with entirely generally well-behaved students, with a good teacher : outcome - good

How do you distinguish between classes 2 and 3?

v21··on The Death of Adventure Games
In that case, you're entirely forgiven.
v21··on Ask HN: Co-working "nerd-space" in London, UK?
Well, he should come along to the 'space, because it's an awesome place. But it's not a co-working space.

However, upstairs from the space, there is a coworking space called Rebel HQ - more details here: http://groups.google.com/group/london-hack-space/browse_thre... . I've visited before, and it's a nice space full of nice people.

v21··on Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You
> Can you hypothesize an external factor which would, in a single measurement period (either a semester or year), significantly reduce the scores of 20-30 students of a single teacher while not affecting the scores of other demographically similar students?

Yeah. Classes, like any small social group of people, have their own dynamics. While the teacher should be able to exercise some control and restraint, they'll obviously be less successful as teachers if that's where their energy is going. Whereas a well-behaved class, they can focus all their energy on teaching. If you adjust for the socioeconomic factors of each student individually, you can separate them out, but you can't separate out the overall dynamics of the group from the performance of the teacher.

v21··on Turning into a hacker aged 27
And illegal in the UK. There's an ongoing campaign about these -some nice examples can be seen at http://fuckyeahfreeinterns.tumblr.com/
v21··on The Death of Adventure Games
I like IF, and I'm wearing corduroy trousers. :(
v21··on JavaScript and URLs

    You don't send an image with the expectation that the recipient can jump into the middle of your editing actions in Photoshop.
Actually, that sounds really appealing.
v21··on Designers, how do we get you guys to contribute to open source projects?
They'd love you for it.
v21··on Thunderbolt
But on the other hand, it does work as a move by Intel...
v21··on BBC To Delete 172 Websites Due to Budget Cuts, Geek Saves Them for $3.99
The real issue is "Cool URIs don't change" vs "The BBC is hideously bloated". Keeping these sites online isn't so terribly expensive. Keeping a few hundred extra lines in your .htaccess isn't expensive. I've not seen a decent estimate of the cost savings, and as far as I know one doesn't exist. The material is being archived inside the BBC, as well as in torrents like this one. But the URLs are being broken, for no reason besides sending a message.
v21··on Why do programmers write apps and then make them free
When I was in school, I once needed to get a note from my parents to give to my gym teacher. My gym teacher asked if I had the note, and I said sure, and started to get it out. He told me not to bother, and trusted that it existed and was genuine.
v21··on Why charging $12/year converts higher than $9.99
The £.99 pricing also makes people in shops operate the till every time to make change, preventing theft.
v21··on 20,000 square foot coworking / hackspace opens in Manhattan
Is this really a hackspace? I know it's a woolly word, but a hackspace seems like a different thing to a coworking space - less focused on building businesses, and more on making cool shit and the sense of community.

Sure there's overlap, but it seems to me the ideal time at a coworking space would be quiet crunching on your business, with some interesting people to chat to in the kitchen. The best times at a hackspace are when someone gets an idea, and someone else gets excited, and before you know it you're learning how to cast something in resin. The hackspace is the ideal "Third Space", whereas a coworking space is still ... work. Cool work, and hopefully pleasant and fulfilling to be at, but still work.

v21··on I solved the embedded Chrome OS ad equation and won a Cr-48
If you accidentally close too many tabs, Shift-Ctrl-T will reopen them. And will remember content in forms.

I like Chrome.

v21··on How to reject a job candidate without being an asshole
I've got rejected a couple of times with good, useful feedback, and a couple of times with "We can't afford to hire anyone else for a while". In both cases, I end up happy for the feedback, not pissed I didn't get the position. I want to work for the company more than I did before. I follow the companies with interest, and feel a vague sense of attachment to them. If I saw the people who rejected me at some kind of conference, I would go up and say hi. I would recommend them to my friends.

So - please do this. Unless you don't care about my opinion of you. You may not.

v21··on Excellent analysis of Assange's Wikileaks motivations (from the horse's mouth)
He's not aiming to change the behaviour of the people, he's aiming to change the behaviour of the policy wonks. He's aiming to make them either more open, and therefore far less exclusive. Or he's aiming to have their communications be much more difficult to achieve.

Either way, the power of the state over the people is lessened. It doesn't matter that no-one cares about the contents, it only matters that the state cares that people don't see the contents.

This is a very different motivation than journalists have.

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