Some anonymous comment on the Internet told me once that the 'naming things' bit was about some problem in distributed systems, I guess it was a lie then?
Good slides, not only the advice, but also the steady peace of delivery, the programming ~ writing theme and overall structure.
I misses advice about never naming classes with words ending in -or and -er, is this still a thing?
In the context of functional languages one letter variables are often sold as a feature, where hindrance of cryptic names is overweighted by benefits of being able easier bring smaller amount of text into the mind of the programmer (may require some practice). And personally I also recently observed that this abstract, mathematic notation helps me focus on the very abstract and mathematic core of some definitions in Haskell. It's good to use word "Car" when dealing with cars, but when inside of morphism-monad-whatever 1-line function definition "a" is OK, who knows what datatype will implement it?
One advice that helped me about naming things is not to have things to name in the first place. Very often I used to create lots of variables representing intermediate and not really interesting steps of computation, resulting in horrible names like file_content, validated_content, parsed_content and so on... Just thinking first about how to structure things will prevent many of risky naming situations from even appearing.
The suffix thing is generally a sign you're doing functional programming and should instead explicitly name the state if any is needed.
The problem with that idea is that it clashes with the OOP notion typical in languages like C++, Java, C# and so on. (Though it does make dependency injection and persistence of the state easier.)
Plus some names like "allocator" or "garbage collector" are ingrained in standard.
(FYI the state for an allocator could be a freelist, for GC could be a graph.)
I got that advice from some talk about refactoring in OOP languages, as far as I can remember Manager and Calculator were the discussed bad class name examples, "what do you manage/calculate?". Explicitly naming things you operate on was part of the advice given in the talk.
When I started Haskell I carried over my descriptive variable naming conventions. Didn't go well ha. Just be pragmatic, write lots of software, and adapt.
It sounds like you applied for a senior developer position in some kind of interactive/digital/marketing agency... Skills you mentioned are required in that context. It would be different if it was a game dev company or embedded software shop or fintech software house, but all of them use "senior developer" as a name of a position.
Most small and medium digital agencies I know of use the word "developer" in that way, as someone who sets up and manages CMS for clients, usually also doing customizations using stock plug-ins and sometimes writing plug-ins themselves. Handling all from configuration files, code to looks, UI and even marketing and photo editing when needed. And I can even tell you of some other companies that use title developer for people who only configure Microsoft Sharepoint for their clients, even more in my country people who sell newly build apartments are also called developers. It is just a word, it is not a real problem here.
The problem here in my opinion are your missed expectations and how are you reacting to this situation. I could just tell you "yes, those people don't know what a developer is" but that will not help you grow.
Looking at the whole thing from my perspective you seem to be very disappointed that this company did not meet your expectations and perhaps that you did not meet theirs. It's just a job interview. It's OK. Sorry if they were unpleasant, but it was their choice and arguing what a true "developer" really is will not change the outcome. I understand that you are upset, but what good will come from arguing about agency, that "doesn't even have..." ? There is not really a right and wrong in this situation, just you and that company did not fit together, do not think about it as your failure or as them abusing some kind of universal rule. It may hurt you, because you care, but really it's just a minor annoyance. A mismatch.
In a smaller service business, like a design agency, it isn't uncommon for each manager to be more skilled than their direct reports.
Example... I am a DesignWizard. I have a lot of business leads, more than I can manage myself. I hire minions who can do some of what I can do, but I am still responsible for the quality of the work. The agency continues to grow, and I now have more business than me plus minions can handle. SuperMinion can do all of the design work I can do, so promote him/her to MinionManager. As DesignWizard, I am still on the hook for the quality and delivery of all design work, but I'm trusting MinionManager to actually complete the work. MinionManager is pretty good design work, including CMS stuff (Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal, etc.). If MinionManager didn't know all of those things, I'd often get sucked back into the technical work, reducing the amount of time I can spend selling and growing the business.
Without context the second quote sounded to me not like an accusation of slacking but like a warning that the company is bad place to work at (poor life-work balance)...
I recently asked about the "unlimited vacation" policy and received a vague answer about "establishing expectations with your manager" and then was told they went with someone else.
I thought about if I should ask or not but I honestly don't understand how such a policy could be good for employees so I wanted an idea of the culture that allows it. If that question contributed to them not giving me an offer then good riddance so I don't regret asking.
No need to keep asking. If your get is telling you that something's not quite with this "unlimited vacation" policy -- it's because it's a sham, basically.
And everyone at the company knows it -- including and most especially, upper management. Because that's after all where it originated.
It may seem as a joke, but I really think that manipulating pseudo-anonymous Internet forums like reddit for political and marketing reasons will prove to be huge driving force for bot development in the coming decade. Right now it's super cheap to just hire some students or task interns with the posting, but remember bots don't leak, don't quit the job and while they do not understand reality you just can't teach human to consider 5000 data points for every comment! And the story about vote manipulation, as shady as it is, still proves that machine that does not understand emotions still uses them in a way that trained humans just couldn't.
> On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters
Then there are some speculation what data could it be and how would it be used. From that, it seems that the difference between other "Better audience targeting" tools used for typical commercial advertising campaigns would be mainly scale and accuracy?
As a side note, does anyone else thinks that this specific photo in article about manipulation was used to manipulate my emotions and invoke negative view of the other side?
> As a side note, does anyone else thinks that this specific photo in article about manipulation was used to manipulate my emotions and invoke negative view of the other side?
Yes, he's either got a crazy face or "laughing all the way to the bank" face. They used fairly "stock" photos of Mercer and perhaps Banon, but Trump has a look of confusion and Farage looks mental. For the record I'm neither pro Trump or pro Brexit. I wish both sides wouldn't participate in behaviors like this.
I wonder how long until your browser or an addon can get the gist of the article's subjects compare with image recognition the facial expressions and let you know if there might be some editorial bias. Just something to put in your subconscious before the editor/author works on your subconscious
Note also the image used to depict Leave voters: young men waving flags and wearing waistcoats. Despite the fact that Leave gets a big chunk of its support from everywhere that isn't London and Leave was more popular with the old than the young, they chose to illustrate it like that because they know it'll cause Guardian readers to puke a little.
You can see that sort of thing everywhere, subtle manipulation through image choice. Here's another example:
That article is supposedly about Brexit and Marine Le Pen, but the image chosen for the top of the article claims to be a picture of a Russian journalist (holding up pictures of Trump, Le Pen and Putin). In fact she's not a journalist at all, her name is Maria Katasonova and she is an obscure candidate for a far-right Russian political party. I can only assume the point of doing this is to try and plant the subconscious message that Russian journalism is unreliable.
>Then there are some speculation what data could it be and how would it be used. From that, it seems that the difference between other "Better audience targeting" tools used for typical commercial advertising campaigns would be mainly scale and accuracy?
Some of it is explained on this 5 minutes video (ignore the clickbait title). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo3gOoOSdhY According to this professor one of the things they used for better targetting is a person's Big 5 personality profile that they extract from Facebook likes.
Great video. Lots to think about. Like personality tests in general, test of big 5 personality traits correlate with behavior at about .2 to .3. For example, they have a correlation of .2 to .3 with GPA (http://www.gwern.net/docs/conscientiousness/2007-noftle.pdf). This is a typical correlation level with behavior for all personality tests. To give you a sense of this, simulate a personality test result with 90 zeros and 10 ones. Then add a column of 90 zeros and 10 ones for the behavior you are predicting. Arrange your behavior ones so that 7 line up with personality zeros (were not predicted) and 3 line up with ones (predicted). That's a correlation of .24. If you picked 10% randomly, you would have found (on average) 1 of the people showing the behavior and you would have mistakenly flagged 9 who would not produce the behavior. With the test, you find 3 and mistakenly flag 7. If the test and behavior are spread 50/50, you find 32, when random selection of 50% would have found 25.
Combine that correlation with the problem that the Facebook data is not perfectly correlated with how people would fill out the Big 5 personality instrument. If you insisted that your modelers create a model of the the Big 5 and then insisted that they use the Big 5 scores to predict behavior, chances are that you would have correlations near zero.
The opportunity here is in creating models directly from Facebook characteristics to the behavior of interest. The Big 5 theory may help guide which FB characteristics to test, but then you need to set it aside to create working models.
Oh, so it's also a better underlaying model. Looking now at the company website they are using less popular name OCEAN Personality Model for Big 5.
As far as I know Big5 is not the final, definitive model. There is this famous quote about performance of NLP machine learning system going up after firing a linguist, I wonder if we will someday hear similar comment about psychologists?
You are right, although at least this article presented it more as a personal agenda thing than corporate interest, but it's getting hard to tell where the difference lies between them.
Which one of those runs stories that argue against observed scientific fact? Which one of those repeatedly stokes religious intolerance and anti-immigrant sentiments, to the detriment of a nation built on immigration and tolerance? There is no moral equivalence here.
Coming from Poland, where recently we struggle with news authenticity it took me less than 60 seconds to finds this:
www.cnn.com/2017/02/23/world/pope-atheists-again/
> Pope: It's better to be an atheist than a bad Christian - CNN.com
How this is not a fake news and misrepresentation of what the Pope have said? It's so bad that the story was removed from HN and even pro-atheist reddit didn't bough it...
So it's OK to have fake title that exposes people that did not read the article to false news, especially when most of the people will not click on the story and the untrue title will be everything they will ever see?
EDIT: I do not mean to start a war here, I've read facetube's comment above as "our side is always provably right and other side spreads misinformation" and it seemed as naive and untrue view to me. Here in Poland none of 2 major powers represents my views and both manipulate news, and I assume situation is similar in US. I may have read it wrong, but situations where HN-trusted media spreads propaganda definitely do happen.
I agree, that headline is sensational. What the pope actually said was little more than a restatement of Matthew 7. I'd argue, however, that the potential impact of a sensational headline like this – i.e. the foreseeable consequences of publishing it – pales in comparison to a Breitbart News headline like [1].
Wait, where's the link between the remain campaign and Clinton's campaign? Did US news sites even care much about Brexit? Also AFAIK there's no monetary or commercial relationship between the UK government and any non-BBC domestic or foreign news network - am I wrong?
So he's clearly very expressive and not particularly photogenic.
What problems does that actually expose about his platform, or how does it show that his opponents are correct? It is barely even an ad-hominem attack - am attack on his character or reputation might lead me to believe that his viewpoint is held by untrustworthy people, but his face? It means nothing.
And yet it does have a small subconscious impact, causing a bias in my thinking.
But of course choosing well-timed pictures, also known as "photojournalism", is a long-established method of applying political influence of media. It was done to Hillary Clinton, it's done to Trump.
In fact if you search on farage site:dailymail.co.uk vs farage site:theguardian.com it seems that, if anything, the latter tends to use fewer ridiculous images of him.
The Daily Mail also sometimes uses images of (left-wing) Jeremy Corbyn, such as this:
At least after clicking on some of the more "expressive" photos it does seem that they are being used by media stories that are more "against" than "about" him, like how he refuted the claim that he had promised that £350 million pounds of money...
Absolutely true, the whole idea that there is one dominating factor in success is a dead end. Just looking at SaaS: bad marketing means no growth and wasted product, bad product means no retention and wasted marketing.
The other time this story was discussed here (probably in 2011, linked to techcrunch) someone pointed out very insightful comment from person claiming to be employed at a time at the Netscape in Marketing (or Sales?). According to this employee the real reason why the web server was selling was not the regained technical supremacy, but mere fact that it was boundled with mail and directory servers that customers were actually interested in. I have no way of checking whether it's true, and there are no comments on this story today on both a16z site and techcrunch, but the idea that even someone who made the company succeed and have learned valuable lessons from it may have not seen the whole picture left a deep impression on me.
Free mail and directory servers would not have been enough to overcome a massive performance deficit. Especially not in the 90's when web server performance was still a major issue.
Good slides, not only the advice, but also the steady peace of delivery, the programming ~ writing theme and overall structure.
I misses advice about never naming classes with words ending in -or and -er, is this still a thing?
In the context of functional languages one letter variables are often sold as a feature, where hindrance of cryptic names is overweighted by benefits of being able easier bring smaller amount of text into the mind of the programmer (may require some practice). And personally I also recently observed that this abstract, mathematic notation helps me focus on the very abstract and mathematic core of some definitions in Haskell. It's good to use word "Car" when dealing with cars, but when inside of morphism-monad-whatever 1-line function definition "a" is OK, who knows what datatype will implement it?
One advice that helped me about naming things is not to have things to name in the first place. Very often I used to create lots of variables representing intermediate and not really interesting steps of computation, resulting in horrible names like file_content, validated_content, parsed_content and so on... Just thinking first about how to structure things will prevent many of risky naming situations from even appearing.