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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”

#41

Post by SilasX »

arjie wrote: post #10
greenyoda wrote: post #3

One 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.

If it were trivial to get people to take the time to test your slope, then yes, doing projects would indeed be a waste of time.

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

#42

Post by SilasX »

w1ntermute wrote: post #14
JoshTriplett wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps HN could either do this automatically for Quora links, or simply prohibit Quora links that don't already have this added?

Given that Quora is in YC[0], neither of those things are likely to happen. 0: http://blog.ycombinator.com/quora-in-the-next-yc-batch

So, the Scribd treatment, then? (Scribd links were encouraged despite constant complaints about the difficulty of use relative to PDFs.)

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

#43

Post by crasshopper »

maxerickson wrote: post #35
crasshopper wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems like a way to lend scientificity to his opinion. There are other ways of saying smarts>experience. Invoking y=mx+b here seems deceptive.

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

#44

Post by bduerst »

crasshopper wrote: post #43
maxerickson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems like a way to lend scientificity to his opinion. There are other ways of saying smarts>experience. Invoking y=mx+b here seems deceptive.

Analogies are inexact by definition, which doesn't mean that the speaker is being intentionally deceptive by using one.

I don't think anyone took this beyond the anecdotal evidence provided. We can argue motive and hypotheticals all day but the fact remains that this is just a blurb thrown at fresh undergraduates.

It's a motivational speech (delivered via heresay on Quora) not a thesis.

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

#45

Post by jlees »

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…

I have a similar position. If the content is valuable enough then it's tolerable to have a gate. Quibb is another similar platform, but I don't know of anything with the quality of Quora answers - Stack Overflow is the closest, but it's very specific and Quora covers a lot of content the various Stack sites don't.

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

#46

Post by jlees »

teraflop wrote: post #13
yathern wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Clicking "close" doesn't make the blurred-out content visible.

Perhaps you can use Chrome developer tools to delete the blur from the DOM :)

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

#47

Post by cpeterso »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #9
arjie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it's because everyone knows you can add ?share=1 at the end and have it work. https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-profound-life-lesson... Still, I'm not a fan of this either.

Perhaps HN could either do this automatically for Quora links, or simply prohibit Quora links that don't already have this added?

I recommend the "Quora Share" Firefox extension. It automatically adds share=1 to quora.com links:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quora-share/

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

#48

Post by thewarrior »

tptacek wrote: post #36
Furzel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

That sounds very interesting. Could you elaborate ? How did you figure out their aptitude if their track records weren't so different from the rest ?

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

#49

Post by spacehome »

jlees wrote: post #46
teraflop wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clicking "close" doesn't make the blurred-out content visible.

Perhaps you can use Chrome developer tools to delete the blur from the DOM :)

The blur is not applied client-side. An image of blurred text is sent from the server.

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

thewarrior wrote: post #48
tptacek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds very interesting. Could you elaborate ? How did you figure out their aptitude if their track records weren't so different from the rest ?

[deleted]
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