I’ve been a manager for 2.5 years and I’ve been too long away from programming. There is something just so wonderful about being able to work again in a world where there is a right and a wrong.1
I decided to start to finally2 teach myself iOS development today for: first, because I’ve never done it before and second, because it’s an opportunity to learn a new language and re-learn an old one3 I haven’t done for over a decade.
We’ll see how it goes. I’m not optimistic.
(via my Uncle Francis)
Me: Why did you send me this?
M—: It was a nice review. I thought it was interesting that this is only the second review on Yelp of his business.
Me: He’s probably too busy and with so many referrals he doesn’t have time for Yelp.
Dr. Oz admits diet products he advocates are crap
Is the reason he doesn’t actually endorse any particular brands is because he might lose his medical license?
The Troubling Case of Chris Hedges: Pulitzer winner. Lefty hero. Plagiarist.
Actually reading it, the conclusion is obvious.1
One concidence: Chris Hedges was a reporter for the New York Times from 1990-2005 which overlaps this incident.
In 2008, I had a friend who was the co-founder and CTO of a startup. He was getting a lot of pressure from the other co-founder to get into TechCrunch. I said, “Why the fuck does anyone want to be in Techcrunch?1 The only people who read it are your competitors.”2
…
This morning just before I woke up, I dreamt that I found out that TechCrunch had made it into the top ten most popular websites.
In my dream, Michael Arrington still owned them and through a systematic analytically-driven approach of A-B testing subject lines, content, and marketing, they had applied it to an entire network of blogs to make it very popular. Michael had picked up ballroom dancing as a hobby and even his ballroom dance blog, through this approach, had become far more popular than it deserved to be.
I started thinking, “Wow, that’s crazy. I remember back in 2005 when TechCrunch was so unknown Michael had to comment on Scoble’s blog to get traffic.3 Who would have thought it could become so popular?”
…
Then I woke up and remembered that nobody reads TechCrunch.4
When I first heard someone use the term “the sharing economy” last year:
Me: What the fuck is “the sharing economy”?
Someone: It’s a catchall for businesses like AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit and the like.
Me: Sounds more like they should call it “the slavery economy.”1 Give it a few years for that bubble to go the way of GroupOn.
…
What did I mean?
Well to take one example, this was sent to me recently by a friend because it appeared on her feed and she was curious how they got the numbers:
Let’s do the math, shall we?2
LinkedIn brags about their use of A-B testing.1
Here is a fucking clue, guys. When you vary where a mail header (from:2, to:, subject: line, etc.), you bypass peoples’ mail filters and of course e-mail open rates will test higher.
So many companies don’t know the limits of analytics. To those idiot business analysts that are data-driven instead of data-informed: please DIAF. ktnxbai!