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“A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

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Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#31

Post by crasshopper »

maxerickson wrote: post #29
crasshopper wrote: post #22

Let'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?

Probably everyone knows the math; I just think they're exaggerating the relevance of this model to real life.

I'm with the commenter (here) who said that real life is more likely to be an initial-value-dependent or path-dependent PDE. Someone else said having a high-IV person on your team will raise the slopes of everyone else which seems also right: the issues are multidimensional, not affine 1-D.

Ousterhout is taking sides (smarter > more experienced) which is fine; he can make that argument. But using y=mx+b as x→∞ doesn't count as an argument; it's rhetorical flair, not rhetorical substance. The substance of his reasoning seems to be "That's my opinion based on my experience in my past jobs".

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#32

Post by stephencanon »

Furzel wrote: post #25
arjie wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

"Look at what I've done" is neither the y-intercept nor the slope in this increasingly stretched metaphor. It's a definite integral (area under the curve).

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#33

Post by sillysaurus3 »

mindcrime wrote: post #27
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #4

Why 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 sufficie…

Thank you for providing a counterargument.

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#34

Post by tfigueroa »

It's a bit of a false dilemma to choose between experience or aptitude.

In the start-up period, though, aptitude is a better strategic choice in that you need people who can grow as quickly as the venture.

Later, you need the people with experience, even if they're a bit slow. They're the ones that have been bitten by the edge cases, the deadlocks, the XSS openings - and know to avoid them.

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#35

Post by maxerickson »

crasshopper wrote: post #31
maxerickson wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, do you think Ousterhout or the people quoting him are confused about this?

Probably everyone knows the math; I just think they're exaggerating the relevance of this model to real life. I'm with the commenter (here) who said that real life is more likely to be an initial-value-dependent or path-dependent PDE. Someone else said having a high-IV person on your team will raise the slopes of everyone else which seems also right: the issues are multidimensional, not affine 1-D. Ousterhout is taki…

I read it more as an illustrative example to open up the following discussion than a terribly serious model of real life.

He does riff back on it, but it's five minutes of perspective tossed at teenagers, not anything formal.

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#36

Post by tptacek »

Furzel wrote: post #25
arjie wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

You could try to "guess the slope" if the slope were static, but it's not. Aptitude and track record are, in my experience, not correlated. I can get specific about this if you want, but I don't want to be tiresome about this subject (you can find similar comments in my history).

A short preemptive summary is: the last 10 amazing hires we made would not have been distinguishable from their online portfolios.

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#37

Post by mscarborough »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #4

Why 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…

Worse than being simply annoying and deceptive (since there are plenty of ways to get around it if you care), it's also literally useless.

For example, I just went into Incognito on another machine out of curiosity. I unclicked 'I am 13 or older' and then clicked on random grayed-out whitespace, and it showed the full article. Unless they kept my home IP from previous requests, but at that point, why bother with the age gate? Lawyers?

Not sure how anyone can defend this deceptive UX bullshit.

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#38

Post by tptacek »

Swizec wrote: post #28
Fishkins wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

This (a hiring funnel premised on teaching people stuff) works amazingly well. It is almost unfair how well it works.

Re: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

#39

Post by cpwright »

crasshopper wrote: post #22

Let'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→∞.

If you read the full answer, you'll realize that he points out you'll pick the better slope, unless you think you'll be dead before the two lines intersect; so he clearly understands it.

If you're going to pick apart the math, we might as well pick apart that not everything can be modeled well as a linear function.

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