Hacker News: Drbble

New comment by Drbble in "Why I Left Google"

Drbble — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:57:40 +0000

Yes :-(

New comment by Drbble in "Why I Left Google"

Drbble — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:56:14 +0000

Passing the torch to the next generation of tourist cum expert. You can't expect these folks to stick with their avocatiom more than a few months before quitting.

New comment by Drbble in "Why I Left Google"

Drbble — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:53:33 +0000

This has changed a lot for the better in recent years.

Also, a lot of geniuses are socially inept. I doubt you said everything right in your interview either. It helps to smile and keep going when one person in ten shows a flaw.

New comment by Drbble in "Why I Left Google"

Drbble — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:50:51 +0000

Why would you ever work somewhere where employees were not considered part of the company?

New comment by Drbble in "Why I Left Google"

Drbble — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:48:50 +0000

Inheritance is explicitly discouraged in style guides, except for specific cases of extensible framework classes with a vendor / customer split.

New comment by Drbble in "Why I Left Google"

Drbble — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:46:35 +0000

Now look at the Java Generics FAQ.

New comment by Drbble in "Feynman's Clock"

Drbble — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:32:26 +0000

The way we treat agreements after death affects how much trust the living place in each other.

New comment by Drbble in "Over-engineering considered useful"

Drbble — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:29:03 +0000

Completely rewriting things is one of the worst decisions an intermediate engineer makes. That's what killed Netscape.

Applying learning to a new project, now that is something different.

New comment by Drbble in "Over-engineering considered useful"

Drbble — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:27:15 +0000

"smell" is ill-defined!

New comment by Drbble in "Why multi-armed bandit algorithm is not "better" than A/B testing"

Drbble — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:25:55 +0000

The point is that with less significance you are less confidential what your conversion rate "would have been" under other courses of action. You can't say "this or that test has higher conversion" because of some simulation that has totally different structure than your real website.

Statistical about managing unknowns, not creating knowns, and everyone ignores this!

New comment by Drbble in "Why multi-armed bandit algorithm is not "better" than A/B testing"

Drbble — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:21:11 +0000

It's the old normal. See also the famous article about how most medical research is mathematically wrong.

New comment by Drbble in "Why multi-armed bandit algorithm is not "better" than A/B testing"

Drbble — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:19:02 +0000

Same way every product from GWO and T&T on down: show a pretty graph that ignores the underlying assumption that it's even possible to use statistics to conjure certainty from uncertainty, and trust that users will never know or care about the difference.

/former AB test software dev who fought my users to try to stop them from misinterpretation results, and failed.

New comment by Drbble in "Craigslist is Squashing Innovation, and We’re Letting It Happen"

Drbble — Thu, 31 May 2012 14:03:16 +0000

AirBnB attacked Craigslist users, not the website itself. AirBnB didn't post a copy of CP online. The spammed users could have tried to bring action against AirBnB under CAN-SPAM.

New comment by Drbble in "F1 - The Fault-Tolerant Distributed RDBMS Supporting Google's Ad Business"

Drbble — Thu, 31 May 2012 05:14:16 +0000

Google's web index is NoSQL, called BigTable, which Cassandra cloned.

New comment by Drbble in "F1 - The Fault-Tolerant Distributed RDBMS Supporting Google's Ad Business"

Drbble — Thu, 31 May 2012 05:08:00 +0000

and another 5 years to get hardware running with the performance characteristics of the original software.

New comment by Drbble in "F1 - The Fault-Tolerant Distributed RDBMS Supporting Google's Ad Business"

Drbble — Thu, 31 May 2012 05:06:05 +0000

You might be interested to learn about Analytics, AppEngine, Predictions API, Developer Storage, and I/O 2012 is a few weeks away...

New comment by Drbble in "20 lines of code that beat A/B testing every time"

Drbble — Wed, 30 May 2012 03:42:51 +0000

It's funny to see the startup crowd rediscovering age-old techniques... Seen the Amazon.com home page recently? Does it look the same every day for a month?

New comment by Drbble in "Hunting Down My Son's Killer"

Drbble — Wed, 30 May 2012 00:03:29 +0000

Can you get a 1-year refillable prescription? I have prescriptions that are refillable X times in Your months.

New comment by Drbble in "Couch hacking - A proof of Ikea's excellence"

Drbble — Tue, 29 May 2012 15:16:11 +0000

Occams razor tells me that if IKEA's system saved any more money than Google's etc, Google etc would switch systems.

New comment by Drbble in "Couch hacking - A proof of Ikea's excellence"

Drbble — Tue, 29 May 2012 15:11:12 +0000

IKEA makes simple pieces designed for reuse across their whole inventory, so it is natural that their components extend to third party aftermarket designs.