Perhaps instead they could build a central store of potential ad clicks and their base rate likelihood of being clicked. Then, instead of clicking everything, they could click ads at the same rates an average user would, across the network.
I'd learned Dvorak using a Kinesis keyboard. I use both Dvorak with the Kinesis and QWERTY with a standard keyboard. The slight difference in profile is enough that I've never had interference, and use both comfortably. That said, it hasn't been an enormous speed increase; I'm roughly equally as quick with either.
The author didn't do a very good job interpreting these statistics. The conditions that would exist when someone would choose to invest in solar panels exclude a large fraction of homes; solar panels are a recent enough addition for most that homes which have been allowed to fall into disrepair are excluded. They further exclude homes that don't have a view, homes that are part of a multi-unit bloc, and, in some cases, duplexes.
Their success metric may just be reversion to the mean; since they started by selecting the people who had made the most calls, you would expect the number of calls to come from those specific people to fall in the coming years. Since there was also likely some underlying health condition, you would expect the between-year variance to be large. It might well be that their program has no effect whatsoever.
With the cost of re-training for new jobs going up, and the value of un-skilled labor going down, there are certainly more and more folks for whom it's more expensive to get a job than any benefit that they'll receive from it.
So there can be lots and lots of stuff, but if you aren't very good at learning, and you don't own capital, the world can become quite unfriendly - even if we've gotten really good at making things and most of us own quite a few digital watches.
Pikimal is looking for people interested in NLP, search, and information retrieval. We've a fast-growing collection of facts, facets, and evolving definitions of common adjectives, but we'd like some help making these assets more useful.
We code in Ruby, but have had good experiences hiring people without Ruby experience. We're also looking for a best-in-class SQL tuner for contract work.
Pittsburgh, PA (no remote) http://pikimal.com/jobs
We're looking for Semantic Web and Ruby Developers but if you're a strong developer who doesn't know Ruby yet that's no obstacle. We have extremely flexible hours, collaborative coder DNA, good tools, a strong team to work with, and great health care.
Pikimal is working to change how people use the web to make decisions. Once users tell us what's important to them, we can tell them what's best for them. Since all of our recommendations are based solely on facts, users receive results separate from marketing.
Please include a link to public code you've written or your Github repo when you apply. Feel free to reach out directly to my first name @pikimal.com
There are other options besides social or text-based algorithms. My company, Pikimal, is pursuing one - we're pulling together facts on items and are allowing people to weight those facts to dynamically create recommendations. We've added some "user rating" facets but are just barely past our minimal viable product.
I very much agree with you that social is limited. It's a filter which avoids spammers, but it also filters out experts and users. It also solves some of the problems introduced by the generic nature of search algorithms.
I'm betting my time on the idea that the solution which wins will combine an understanding of the product space, the value of new features, a current understanding of price, and which can be customized transparently to the needs of the user.
It's the early days of the Internet. We've invented sail and gunpowder, and we're just coming to the New World. If you're on Hacker News, you're a navigator - a captain - a fierce programmer. Marketers and social networks, data gatherers and marketers - your foes are numerous and powerful. Take your desire to do something wonderful, find a crew you want to sail with, and get started.
We're looking for Semantic Web and Ruby Developers but if you're a strong developer who doesn't know Ruby yet that's no obstacle. We have extremely flexible hours, collaborative coder DNA, and we provide good tools, lunches, and great health care.
Pikimal is working to change how people use the web to make decisions. Once users tell us what's important to them, we can tell them what's best for them. Since all of our recommendations are based solely on facts, users receive results separate from marketing.
Please include a link to public code you've written or your Github repo when you apply. Feel free to reach out directly to my first name @pikimal.com
I did this as well - I quit my job, started reading Ruby books and wrote the Alpha version of Pikimal.com. I did this because I'd been the CMO at another start-up where I'd really not understood the dev process well enough and had thought that it had real costs so I have a pretty good sense of the benefits.
We're pretty busy, so let me cut to the chase:
The good:
I'm credible to our tech folks. I understand when to slow down to integrate a library, and I'm more than willing to find time to re-factor. I learned that pair programming can be awesome, that bringing on new people slows you down, and a lot of other things that probably seem obvious to technical folks but are non-intuitive when you imagine software as assembling widgets.
The bad:
Ultimately, we gave up 3-5 months that we could have been hiring, fund-raising, and building software. On balance, I think that this was good for me and bad for this start-up.
The ugly:
As soon as I'd hired people, I think that we should have thrown out most of the code I'd written. We kept it because it worked and was fairly fast, but I'd made A LOT of newbie mistakes that have slowed things down.
So, tl;dr? I'd suggest learning to code but I'm not sure that you should do it for your current start-up. At the very least launch something more sophisticated than a CRUD app and THEN get started on your small biz.
Having studied economics and programming, I think that programming is advantaged. Econ taught me some principles that serve me well in understanding incentives and behaviors, but programming teaches a way of organizing thought which is more broadly useful.
Thinking about what I'd studied in public school, I wish I could trade hours spent learning rules of grammar for hours spent learning how to create and organize symbolic logic.
I'd had some good success with Facebook and my last company. We'd had enough Facebook fans that we were able to run regular contests a few times a week and to use it as a platform to talk about what we were excited about. The interaction that's possible means that even if you seed it with the sort of content you'd use in a newsletter you need to have time every day or so to handle the interactions that it generates.
Hiring Rails Developers and developers who'd like to become Rails Developers in Pittsburgh. We're building web-based decision tools meant to complement search and need folks interested in working on the front end and helping us to improve our algorithms.