skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm an analyst for a gaming company too, so let me offer my perspective. I consider myself to be an ethical, non-creepy person, and I disagree with what this person says.

Yes, gaming companies are extremely data-driven and they measure everything they can. I'm in charge of dashboards that have over 300 KPI's (key performance indicators) on them. What do we measure? A whole lot of shit. ARPU, ARPPU, HC (hard currency) spend/gained, SC (soft currency) gained/spend, Retention, DAU, Spend DAU, Gained DAU, Downloads, Activations, plus funnels for every page, every user action you can think of.

Do I think measuring all this is creepy? No. Why? Because when I come in the morning, I look at my stats. I'll be able to tell within an hour if the build the engineers shipped the night before had a bug that affected 30% of our users in a certain location. I'll then report this to the Engineering team, they can create a hotfix, and users can be happy again. Engineers are happy knowing that we have actual data to validate and confirm their gameplay suggestions (made during scrum/sprint planning sessions). I also report monetization metrics to the VP's. They want to know if the boatloads of money they are spending on user acquisition are actually paying off. And the PM's want to know if users are playing the game, or how far they get into the game.

Yes, we maximize for users who spend over $10k. These users even have names. They're called "whales" in industry parlance. Why wouldn't you want more of them in your game? This is a business afterall. I feel just as bad as the next person wondering whether some of these "whales" are addicts. I don't want to be creating products for addicts. But what if these users are just rich people who have tons of money to spend off the cuff? There's no way we can know because we never get that data. All I see is what's reported in ItunesConnect.

Do we ever record any personally identifiable information? No. Do we ever sell or distribute this data to outside parties? No. Can any of this data ever be used maliciously? No.

Personally, I like the way game companies work (hence why I work in the industry). It teaches you to measure everything. You make decisions quickly. And no one can argue with the facts. You'll know real fast whether the product is shitty and you can do an about-face, gather the troops, and push out something new.
Entirely appropriate, assuming the post is interesting, which this one is. Pity it got lost in the shuffle.

Advocates of formal verification of software remind me of the old joke, usually about a Frenchman but sometimes about an Irishman, who says in some policy debate: "I can see that it works in practice, but will it work in theory?"
The end of...?
Open letter to the unproductive members of Gen Y from the productive members of Gen Y:

It's not the babyboomers taking your jobs away, it's the nerds you made fun of in high school. Sorry your polisci degree didn't work out like you thought it would.
You're making the same mistake that many awful managers make; namely "If the problem seems like it should be easy, it must be easy".

You aren't familiar with Facebook's infrastructure and comparing working on small websites to working on something that scales to roughly 1/12 of the entire population of the planet is laughably naive.

Saying you use a "modul[ar]" approach is nothing but handwaving. You think that facebook doesn't use modules? Or doesn't have a service oriented architecture to some degree? They friggin' developed their own RPC transport!
I do hope you didn't miss this gem :)

> Brogrammers are mostly Silicon Valley / Harvard type douchebags who got into programming. YCombinator drop outs. Years of experience in managed and web languages, but who have no idea how to setup a build system nor work in native code.
I can't really say since I had been doing PHP for quite a few years and had a few years of actual Rails experience before I used it. Sorry.
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Breasts are not genitals. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/genitals
A slightly more mature alternative - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fcfhbkjlcdfcalpimj...

Auto hides all youtube comments, behind a togglable button.
Let's remember that it's not only the people in embarrassing pictures who upload them. Sometimes rude friends or colleagues take pictures of us without even telling us, and upload them.
Do people really think a company whose engineers wrote a PHP-to-C++ compiler because PHP is slow as balls are incapable of solving this engineering problem?

This is either advantageous for them (somehow) or the cost to make it happen it isn't worth it.
Could you please not speculate about things you have no evidence for whatsoever?
What does it mean when a codec is "lossless"?
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A simple "how-to" post to help start-ups get going with UX design.
No application found...
Really an easy installation.
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Think of more like RAR or ZIP compression: filesize it reduced, but no data is lost.

Unlike MP3 which uses a number of lossy compression techniques, including psychoacoustics, that are specifically designed to reduce the bitrate of an audio stream with minimal artifacts.
Also they don't let you edit comments or posts, which is super annoying to me.
While I agree with the premise that being a mindless consumer is probably not a good thing, I strongly believe that consuming is just as important as producing. Exposing one's self to as many different ideas as possible is incredibly important to being able to produce high quality work. If we go with the definition that a person is the aggregate of their experiences, then most of these experiences are things we consume from the external world and other people. Why not try and maximize these experiences?

I personally try and give myself at least an hour a day for just consuming whatever content I'm in the mood for. More times than not, I find use for this information sometime in my life. I think the hardest part is curating this content so it will be the most useful, which I think this post is getting at. Maybe the author doesn't find a benefit to reading their Twitter/Facebook stream which is fine, but this is not a producer vs. consumer problem, it's a signal to noise problem.
I suggest you try out Evernote Clearly http://www.evernote.com/clearly/ . It comes with a browser extension, using which you can convert a blurb of text that is difficult to read into an easily readable one.
Looks neat, I like the logo although the tie can be mistaken for an i! I think a twitter logo instead off the follow us text will look chic. Good luck!
I think we're in agreement. I totally agree that good teachers need to be rewarded and that and bad teachers need to be identified and helped or sacked. We owe that to our kids.

I never said that it cant be measured. It's just really hard to do it right.

The solution is not to simply use private sector type performance reviews since correcting for differences within the school is difficult let alone correcting for differences between schools.

Measuring teacher performance is a hot area of debate around the world, and a consensus for how to "do it right" hasn't yet emerged.

Lots of questions need to be fairly addressed:

-- Will testing be able to differentiate between school-based and non-school-based influences on
student performance?

-- Will testing be able to differentiate between the influences of different teachers on individual students or groups of students? What might be the ultimate extent of increased standardised testing?

-- What criteria are intended to form the basis of a performance-based pay scheme?

-- If the predominant criterion used is to be student progress as measured by standardised testing, what measures will the Government take to ensure the implementation of valid and appropriate testing regimes and instruments?

These questions come from an issues paper published by Australian Primary Principals Association.

Also from the paper:

In jobs where pay is linked to performance:
The criteria for determining the payment of additional rewards are to be objectively determined: whether in volume of product or sales, increase in profits, or additional hours worked. More accurately put, the context of the industries in which systems of this kind work well are those
where outputs and outcomes are easily, and objectively, quantifiable. This quantification can usually (although not always) be reduced to monetary terms.

So how exactly to we quantify and reward the teacher who helps her students develop skills that 'are not quantifiable'?

PS: In Australia primary and secondary teachers can't get tenure, however given a powerful union it is difficult to sack teachers, and this admittedly is a big problem.
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Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay is still up despite it being shut down numerous times. It truly is the boy who cried wolf of torrent indexes.
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It means that there's no loss of fidelity. If you convert raw audio (a WAV for instance) to MP3, vorbis, or other lossy formats and then convert it back, you'll end up with different (lower fidelity) data. Doing the same with FLAC or another lossless format gives you the exact same data back.

In the image space, PNGs are likewise lossless, whereas JPEG causes a loss of fidelity.
I don't think the "A Haskell tutorial" part of the submission title is accurate. It's an mp3 tutorial... which happens to use Haskell. Not everything which uses Haskell is specifically about doing so. :-)
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>Yes, we maximize for users who spend over $10k.

>I don't want to be creating products for addicts. But what if these users are just rich people who have tons of money to spend off the cuff?

Ahhh, ignorance is plausible deniability bliss.
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All of my Facebook photos are transparently hosted by Akamai. For example: https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/393462_...
The hostnames point to a CDN somewhere -- a few tests indicate at least Akamai.
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Thanks for the feedback. I tried using a tie for the "i" instead, but it seemed off for some reason.
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Seems like he has a lot of hate built up inside him

Eh, hes just talking like every other former marine: honesty riddled with swears.
That's odd, it's working on my end, and another commenter's.
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Anyone remember Suprnova.org?
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Neat! It reminds of Google's book http://www.20thingsilearned.com/ without hard covers and with only corner active. (I once had an idea of making a reusable lib based on their book's code at http://code.google.com/p/20thingsilearned/, but never finished.)
Ah, Youtube comments - their IQ sometimes (most of the time?) reaches negative IQ levels. I've learned to avoid scrolling down to read them.

I also found out that you can use AdBlock plus to block elements on a page - useful for removing news blocks, Facebook feeds, and other distracting stuff from websites you frequently read...
"when I come in the morning, I look at my stats. I'll be able to tell within an hour if the build the engineers shipped the night before had a bug that affected 30% of our users in a certain location. I'll then report this to the Engineering team,"

Why aren't the engineers doing this themselves? (Honest question, not snark) Analyzing performance/results data is (should be? :) )part of all engineering.
As someone who already has a bachelors in CS, I'm still looking forward to fill in some gaps in my education with these. For example, I never took a Theory of Computation class.
Irrelevant perspective from an outsider: Your post sent a chill down my spine. That's how creepy it is.
Even if you don't save it explicitly, I find my browser cache is full of facebook photos when I go to clear it, so can retrieve it through there after the fact as well.
Ex-Zynga engineer here. I could see a lot of hatred in his post. Couldn't see credibility.

Creepy stuff:

Spying on players. Getting intimate gaming data, their habits, their networks, and how to effectively monetize given X.

This never happened. Zynga doesn't do behavioral targeting at all.

Creepy/bad stuff in my view:

All decisions are short-term. Let us build X games in Y months.

Bad code quality. There is a team which optimizes for the bad code written by engineers at high speed.

Good stuff:

Speed - They are really aggressive. And they never think twice to throw away something if there is a better alternative.

Decisions - Right or wrong, decisions are made with least and things progress.

Meritocracy - I wouldn't call it pure "meritocracy", but when they know you are a smart guy who can ship stuff, they'll love you in $ and positions. I know several young people at VP/GM positions.

Data-driven - I see this as huge plus. Lot of companies are clueless because of not enough feedback-data. A/B testing, phased rollout, metrics are mandatory for any product/feature.

Zynga is 100% data driven. Zynga is not a tech-company, it is a product-manager-company. Product managers are more statisticians than PM. All decisions are from numbers.
I'd encourage him to get both.

At least in the short term an Udacity education is going to be considered the same as self-taught. A traditional education however is going to open up other opportunities that the self-taught cannot easily obtain. As long as Udacity is free however, there's no reason to not pack in some extra classes if he has the time.
commercial venture.
Come on, baby gets hungry. Baby wants to be fed, now. Mom feeds baby. This happens all day and all hours of the day.

You cannot seriously expect that all breastfeeding mothers will be hidden away for 30m to an hour every 2 hours simply because somebody might see a booby.
I don't think the hacker news / stackoverflow model will work for research papers. People read hacker news articles because they want to keep up with what's going on in the tech community, even if it's not super related to their particular job. Researchers generally don't just read research papers for fun. Rather, they are working on their own research, and they are looking for relevant papers whose results they can use. Hence, it's critical that when they read a paper, they know they can trust the results.

I can skim an article posted on hacker news in 30 seconds and have a general idea of what the content was. I can also skim a research paper, but only if I know that the research was done well (e.g. all the proofs are correct, or the assumptions in the model made sense, or all correct variables were properly controlled in the experiment). If that stuff isn't guaranteed, the paper is useless because I don't know if I can use it for my research. And to figure out all that stuff myself would take a few days literally out of my research. Just because 10 people skimmed it, thought it sounded cool, and up-voted it does not mean the results in the paper are correct.

Other than this review aspect, I really like this product. If they can figure out a good incentivized review system, I think it will be a big hit.
If it helps, this is exactly what our school is built around. Every class we create is available both in a degree track as well as ala-carte to students exactly like yourself. You have the same professor and t/a support, grading and evaluation. You also have the same access to the resources in our learning system. We are tuition only (no fees) so we even charge the same amount as the degree seeking students ($100/credit, $400-$500 per class, $5k for masters). And, if you decide to go through admissions and seek a degree, any courses you take would apply towards that degree.

The only real difference between in degree and ala-carte is that degree seeking students will have more options for how to pay for their education. Once we are accredited, a vast array of financing becomes available for students pursuing a degree. Some are good (grants, scholarships, state subsidies) some are not (Student loans), but having options for our students helps a great deal. We structured our program this way because we come from your exact position: why can't I take the classes I want without all the BS?

I think the reason more schools don't do this is that it would expose the true cost of these classes, which at institutions like Stanford or MIT can easily exceed $5,000 per class. Actually, after fees, housing and books, $10k is closer to accurate. The market for $5k classes is not huge, and without putting everything on a gigantic student loan credit card, few rational consumers would pay the price.
> In fact, the truth is simple: The farther from the cradle of civilization [1] you get, the worse the alcoholism.

Although it's easy to find some correlation here, it's also easy to give counter-examples. Is this a mainstream theory? Any citations?
Reading academic literature takes a certain amount of effort. In a sense you are producing an analysis of that journal article (perhaps for other people's consumption if you're presenting at a journal club; for your own otherwise).
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Yeah, but I wish the S actually meant Simple.
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Why doesn't Zynga do behavioral targeting?
This is exactly right. Anyone with the link would HAVE to have had access to the original photo. This is really a non-story.
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> In Asia, you are expected to act "drunk" when you are drinking with your colleagues/boss. You aren't expected to actually get that drunk, though you can if you want.

Not true in South Korea. They'll have drinking games and challenges you'd be expected to participate in.

> The higher your station, the less drunk you'll want to really get because you may have to take an important call.

Well, it's the boss who makes everyone go out to drink, so if he doesn't want to do it, it doesn't happen.
Good point, however we could learn to make the organic bots do what we need them to without having to learn everything else about how they work - kind of like driving a car without knowing how to disassemble its engine. They're also much more tightly integrated into the existing infrastructure...
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Zynga doesn't do behavioral targeting at all.

This statement seems fundamentally at odds with the following. Could you explain further?

Data-driven - I see this as huge plus. Lot of companies are clueless because of not enough feedback-data. A/B testing, phased rollout, metrics are mandatory for any product/feature.

Zynga is 100% data driven. Zynga is not a tech-company, it is a product-manager-company. Product managers are more statisticians than PM. All decisions are from numbers.
Why can't 1x = 2y?
This is not a binary issue. There are many facets to software development. Knowing Big O will not teach you how to best use git in a production setting. It turns out they are both useful and important.

And that is the crux of the matter. A college graduate that is not driven to learn about the practical aspects of programming is no better for the job than the non-graduate who is not driven to learn about the theoretical side. After only four years of study, I would say that both applicants in the previous example are on equal ground. Both are lacking, just in different areas. It is not really clear at that stage which one of the two will have the drive to fill the gaps.

The dirty little secret is that you cannot apply generic processes to find the best applicant. Doing so will lead to mediocre selection no matter which bias you choose.
His opinion on tests: they can only show the presence of bugs, not their absence.
Sounds cool, can you share a link/download ?
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I don't understand. Who is it that's danagerously obsessed with Khan exactly? My kids' public school teachers had never heard of it.
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You are basically right. That's what makes the job of the federal reserve bank so hard. They need to measure V and T, which you rightly point out is not easy, and then they need to adjust M to keep P stable. And as you further rightly point out they only control a small part of M, i.e. the amount of cash.
It basically works by the Reserve Bank having a good guess at V and T and then adjusting the cash rate hoping that it will encourage banks to adjust their general loan rates accordingly and thus having a significant enough impact on M.
It's not the median, but the marginal cost to advance to the next level.

Again, the marginal cost to advance to the "next level" can only increase if more people are able to achieve it. "Keeping up with the joneses" is a zero sum game.

Also, if we are talking about "keeping up with the joneses", then it's irrelevant to focus on income or wealth. We should focus on consumption - interestingly, consumption inequalities are lower than both income and wealth inequalities.
One of my greatest worries going through Engineering school was working on a product that would inadvertently harm people.

I once wanted to work at a Lithium Ion battery start-up because I wanted to help create an energy source free of geo-political and climate turmoil. Then I discovered those sources were some of the most toxic to the environment both in the harvesting and the disposing of the material.

I then went on to do graduate research in explosives detection. We created machines that would help detect bombs in Iraq and landmines left in a peaceful villages. But then TSA used the machines to look at people's private parts and there was a mass privacy scare.

My point is: you can't go life worrying who might use the things you create for harmful purposes. You may be ignorant, but the alternative will drive you insane.
I'd expect similar skills are involved for coaching, directing, and executive management.
Data-driven: How many users are engaging with feature X, how much are they spending on item Y, how many users click button Z.

Behavioural Targeting: User "A" loves lot of "Strawberry crops" let me show him more of that.
Because doing real data analysis is hard and time consuming. If you are a very data-driven company, you need someone focused on it.
They do. But sometimes these bugs are less obvious and hard to spot without data. In this particular case, it was an animation bug that occurred during a tutorial of a game, whereby the animation caused the game to crash, but only on a subset of older IPhones and under certain memory conditions. So even though the build got through QA, it was tough to understand what would happen out in the wild. Well, on that morning I noticed that a large percentage of our users were starting this particular tutorial step but not completing it. And since all of our data is cohorted by both install date and build version, the engineering team knew exactly where to look to fix the issue, despite no knowledge on my part of a bug ever being introduced.