One hopes that the graph of life is linear and not a differential equation path-dependent on initial conditions...
“A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”
21–30 of 65 posts
Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”
#22Let's race 10 miles. I run each mile in 5:59 and you run each mile in 6:00. You get a mile head start.
Whoops—this fable is only true "eventually", if the slopes remain the same as t→∞.
Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”
#23Why do Quora articles continue to make the front page when we can't read them? I'm greeted with http://i.imgur.com/WTeSt8s.png No, I won't sign in with Google, nor Facebook. How do the people upvoting this read the article? Do they sign in? What possible benefit is there to signing in? They're basically holding content hostage. When I defended Scribd, people came out in droves to point out how wrong it was to hold un…
There's a button right there that says 'close'. I assume you just didn't see it. Granted, I'm not a fan of this either - but it's hardly holding the content hostage.
I never noticed the Close button before, so I tried it w/o the ?share=1 in another browser. I get "Close & Read First Answer". All the answers after the first were blurred. I think this is the first time I've seen a site A/B test how best to annoy people.
Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”
#24One of Ousterhout's examples of this principle is something that comes up frequently on HN: "Before I came back to academia a couple of years ago I was out doing startups. What I noticed is that when people hire they are almost always hire based on experience. They're looking for somebody's resume trying to find the person who has already done the job they want them to do three times over. That's basically hiring bas…
When hiring, I agree that aptitude is probably a better signal than experience. However, I also think aptitude is much harder to assess during an interview. It's pretty easy to look at someone's work history, github, and ask them a few questions about what they currently know. I'm not sure if I know a truly effective way to figure out their aptitude in a short amount of time.
Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”
#25One of Ousterhout's examples of this principle is something that comes up frequently on HN: "Before I came back to academia a couple of years ago I was out doing startups. What I noticed is that when people hire they are almost always hire based on experience. They're looking for somebody's resume trying to find the person who has already done the job they want them to do three times over. That's basically hiring bas…
Intriguingly, that's the opposite of what's popular on HN. HN and /r/programming posters prefer the "Look at what I've done. Here are my projects" approach which is the y-intercept because it describes where they are. Asking them a question they've never heard before and observing their approach is a way (albeit imperfect) of seeing how fast one can deal with a novel problem.
"Look at what I've done. Here are my projects" is definitely not the Y-intercept "Look I went to " is the Y-intercept. With projects and experiences you can start to plot someone's work according to it's own Y-intercept and guess the slope. The hard part is assessing someone's slope when all you have is it's Y-intercept ( freshly out of school ).
Concerning asking tricky question, you can do it the Google way ( How many frogs does it take to build a space elevator ) but even they decided to stop these kind of questions or take a lot of time and find something your candidate can work on, even if the technology is known to him, seeing how fast he can appropriate himself the codebase is really a good way to judge your future new recruit potential
Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”
#26One of Ousterhout's examples of this principle is something that comes up frequently on HN: "Before I came back to academia a couple of years ago I was out doing startups. What I noticed is that when people hire they are almost always hire based on experience. They're looking for somebody's resume trying to find the person who has already done the job they want them to do three times over. That's basically hiring bas…
I used to think this was right (trained in the school of Joel), but now I'm not so sure. I look at it this way: the best predictor of future success is past success. School is pretty non-predictive of your success in industry. General "intelligence" is as well. The best thing I can look at is: do you have a track record of tackling problems and delivering solutions? If you do, you'll probably keep doing that. If not, you're at best a gamble.
Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”
#27Why do Quora articles continue to make the front page when we can't read them? I'm greeted with http://i.imgur.com/WTeSt8s.png No, I won't sign in with Google, nor Facebook. How do the people upvoting this read the article? Do they sign in? What possible benefit is there to signing in? They're basically holding content hostage. When I defended Scribd, people came out in droves to point out how wrong it was to hold un…
Speaking only for myself, I visit Quora so frequently that I pretty much always have a login cookie stored, so I never see the login page.
That said, given my very public and vocal arguments against "walled gardens" in the past, why do I tolerate Quora? For the same reasons I tolerate G+, Facebook, etc. I annoys me and tickles a sore spot regarding the way I want things to be, but the value of the content is sufficient for me to "grin and bear it". But if there were a really good Quora alternative that was more open, I'd work to promote and support it. I don't know of one offhand though, especially considering network effects (that is, the value of Quora isn't the Quora software, it's the people posting and answering).
Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”
#28One of Ousterhout's examples of this principle is something that comes up frequently on HN: "Before I came back to academia a couple of years ago I was out doing startups. What I noticed is that when people hire they are almost always hire based on experience. They're looking for somebody's resume trying to find the person who has already done the job they want them to do three times over. That's basically hiring bas…
When hiring, I agree that aptitude is probably a better signal than experience. However, I also think aptitude is much harder to assess during an interview. It's pretty easy to look at someone's work history, github, and ask them a few questions about what they currently know. I'm not sure if I know a truly effective way to figure out their aptitude in a short amount of time.
Teach them something.
There was an article about it making the rounds a few days/weeks ago. A guy basically takes on a class of 30+ people for two days when hiring, teaches them something, then hires the one who did best. The rest are still happy to have learned something.
Another good approach might be flat out asking "Tell me about the last time you learned something new"
Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”
#29Let's race 10 miles. I run each mile in 5:59 and you run each mile in 6:00. You get a mile head start. Whoops—this fable is only true "eventually", if the slopes remain the same as t→∞.
I'm curious, do you think Ousterhout or the people quoting him are confused about this?
Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”
#30One of Ousterhout's examples of this principle is something that comes up frequently on HN: "Before I came back to academia a couple of years ago I was out doing startups. What I noticed is that when people hire they are almost always hire based on experience. They're looking for somebody's resume trying to find the person who has already done the job they want them to do three times over. That's basically hiring bas…
during the first 3 years we were basically forced to hire from two pools of candidates:
1. people we have worked with before who are known quantities i.e. smart AND good
2. people with minimal experience who we deemed to be smart after talking to them for a few hours
it's worked out well. to be deadly honest nobody else wanted to work for us.