I'm pretty surprised, and a little disappointed by, this addition. The FB board is already a who's who of "Silicon Valley Standard Perspectives".
As Facebook's biggest challenges continue to be about the unexpected consequences of the breadth of its technology, Drew doesn't seem to add any perspective that I'd expect the board to be missing right now.
I was an eng at FB when the "View as" feature was being built. I wasn't involved in the project at all, and my memory is hazy (this was probably 7 years ago by now), but I remember people being like "wow this is crazy and probably a bad idea".
I don't actually know if View As generating access tokens was how it worked originally, or if that was a later refactor. Just, in general, spoofing privacy / access control is really scary, no matter how you do it.
However, at the time, Facebook was getting a lot of shit (rightfully) for not helping users understand the privacy model, and the View As feature was actually incredibly useful for helping users understand what was public. So my guess (pure speculation) is that yes, people acknowledged it was scary, but decided the value was worth the cost.
I'm no VC, but I have made a few investments in companies, independently. I'll give you my immediate impressions.
It's a very cute project! Nice animations.
How does it work? My understanding is that you have a pricing table somewhere you say a banana is worth $1, a taco is worth $10, etc. When you press the button, it converts a dollar amount into some number of those goods.
Comparing costs to real-world things is a commonly-used strategy, e.g. "For less than the cost of a coffee a day, you could ____!", so that's interesting.
It seems like overkill for an API; seems like you could just build it into your marketing copy (and not rely on just emoji, which render inconsistently).
'My assumption is that conversion will definitely be higher by using visual representation of price tags. Especially against "spatial learners".'
Sure, but that's easy for anybody to test, in-house.
It doesn't seem like enough value-add to use as a stand-alone business; if somebody else were to want to use it, they'd have to not just pay the service, but also the cost of maintaining a sales relationship, contract, etc.
I believe in the rough benchmarks of ~4 hours of work a day.
I also believe that people are widely scattered around that mark.
I've been doing an experiment where I print out my work day in 5 minute increments, with three tick boxes next to each time-period - "Hard" work (Coding), "Soft" work (reading e-mail), and being distracted. As the day goes along, I tick off the increments as I remember to do so, and I get a pretty interesting picture of my day:
- I rarely do "hard" work for more than 45 minutes at once
- I do about 1.5 - 5 hours of "hard" work / day, depending on meetings, sleep, drinking the night before, all sorts of things
- I'm improving my ability to focus on "hard" work over time.
Sorry, I phrased that poorly. I meant that I, personally, based off of my own biases, was expecting it - not that it should be obvious to everybody based on global factors.
In fact, I meant to communicate more that I am pleased to have my own biases confirmed rather than this being a global trend that everybody should be able to see.
I'm not super familiar with codeeval, but it seems like (from the sample puzzles on the homepage) the puzzles are pretty standard engineering interview questions. That is, they are often short algorithms, which bias towards using scripting and "convenient" languages.
Still, surprising to see Java so high, and such disparity between Python and Ruby - the increase in C# is wholly expected.
Actually, if you search for "Tiananmen" you do still get filtered results.
Searching "Tianamen" (note the missing "n") is not filtered, though. I wonder if this was a purposeful loophole in Google's filtering, or an engineering mistake.
I don't know much about what it's like to hire an independent contractor (i.e. how much oversight and control is typically practiced), but is it really possible that Microsoft wouldn't have noticed how blatant the ripoff was before pushing the site live?
To me, the "independent contractor" excuse is pretty lame, and seems pretty common (the fusiongarage guy's ripped-off article uses the same excuse, just off the top of my head). If you hired them to do a job under your name, then it's your responsibility to make sure that job meets your standards before publishing it under your brand.
Sorta forgot about this thread, but hopefully ou see this.
K is super-great at vector operations; element-wise addition between two lists of equal length, for example; more powerfully, mapping lists to functions.
The DB stuff we were doing were columnar databases, so it was incredibly fast at doing data analysis and correlations. Not so fast at adding single rows, but if you wanted to take a list of transactions and compare things day-over-day, or do sophisticated statistical operations, you simply had to write a line or two, and watch it take multiple million-element lists and give you an answer in milliseconds. I'm still pretty convinced it was voodoo magic.
When I used it, there was a pretty hefty license fee, but there's a trial version which limits the amount of memory it will use, but can still do quite a bit to give you a sense of the speed (as long as you're doing it right). Remember, no stinkin' loops!
I worked at a K shop last summer, and when I was learning the language, I tried using sensible variable names. I was told in no uncertain terms that, when you write K, local variables should be one letter, globals should be two, and functions should be three.
It sounds like a total disaster, but after about two weeks (which is a long-ass time to learn a language), everything made perfect sense, and I really enjoyed using it for the rest of the time. It's very powerful and fast to execute, and after you get the hang of it, it's fast to write, too.
It seems like there's a lot of different applications, finger commands, pen commands, etc. If Microsoft can come with some kind of consistency across the different use cases, this could actually be a worthy piece of hardware...
As Facebook's biggest challenges continue to be about the unexpected consequences of the breadth of its technology, Drew doesn't seem to add any perspective that I'd expect the board to be missing right now.