This is a really good interface but the assumptions backing the results seem weak. The growth rate on conservative and aggressive portfolios are high. The recommended amounts of saving should be as % of income. Recommending someone that makes 100k save 100 dollars a month is not great. It's also sad that the maximum amount saved per month is 1k where even just maximizing 401k is 1.5k a month.
This is a good point. As far as I remember Amazon had/has a contract with the CIA for 100s of millions. When the rich own the media there is always a risk that they will hire those that push their agenda. Amazon could greatly profit from government contracts. I wouldn't argue one article proves a conspiracy, but it's so incredibly hypocritical that you have to wonder why WaPo would publish it. Especially when it means future leakers might not want to go to them for fear they will work with the govt to imprison them.
One critical point I feel this piece does not touch on is how diversity of experience is great in the workplace. It's a huge benefit as a developer (and obviously other professions too) to work on teams with people who have lived very different lives. The Mirrortocracy[0] covers this well, but it should be clear to us all that being exposed to different views helps refine our ideas and process.
It's partly up to us to make diversity happen. We can prioritize offers that have diverse teams, and when we get a chance to hire to value diversity of experience.
I absolutely agree, though I always feel like culture and nationality are very underplayed in this discussion - I believe an American, an Eastern European and a Chinese national would bring a lot more diverse world views to the table than a female and a male American (or black and white).
> It's a huge benefit as a developer (and obviously other professions too) to work on teams with people who have lived very different lives.
I can see how that would be true for some types of development, but there are also many type for which I don't see offhand how it would matter.
For instance, if I were doing web design for my employer's shopping cart site I could see how having a diverse team could greatly help because the team would have people on it that are part of or identify with more of our customer demographics.
I as a white male mid-50s atheist tall fat guy could easily inadvertently come up with a design that might turn off non-whites, females, young people or elderly people, religious people, short people, or skinny people. Even if I don't end up doing something to offend people, I could simply miss opportunities that people of other backgrounds might see.
In fact, I've seen that kind of thing. I saw a company that was making CD-ROM caching software in the '90s find a nice cluster of sales when an employee who was also a Mormon pointed out that this software worked extremely well with the CD-ROM genealogy databases that were becoming quite popular among Mormons. Without that Mormon employee, they would have probably never noticed that Mormons could be a distinct market segment for this product that was worth specifically targeting.
What I actually work on, though, is backend stuff like processing orders and subscription billing, interfacing to payment processors, reporting sales tax in the US and VAT in Europe, analyzing A/B tests, and so on. Would having a diverse team working on this actually produce any different results?
If you can get a remote job Portland Maine is an amazing place to live. Don't expect to get any kind of high quality tech job in Maine though. I've lived in both I don't think sf is so bad.
This happened for a short while at an old workplace that had an extremely toxic environment, this didn't improve the environment. People were expected to clock in/out when they arrived as well as for lunch and breaks. Developers were salaried not hourly. I suggest leaving as fast as you can, asking to have tasks add up to 40h a week of work shows a fundamental misunderstanding of development by management.
One thing to remember if you keep him on and he continues this behavior you might not find out about it for a while. People won't always speak out and tell you. What happens when he starts harassing your new hires? If he is new to the company and already this bold what happens in a year or two?
This actually happened last year at their biggest tournament. A well known bug caused several champions to be disabled midway through the tournament. This happens regularly that champions are disabled due to bugs at international events.
I thought this was a pretty good follow up to show the strengths and weaknesses of this approach: https://vwo.com/blog/multi-armed-bandit-algorithm/. Personally I think this approach makes a lot more sense than a/b testing especially when often people hand off the methodology to a 3rd party without knowing exactly how they work.
Here are 2 good articles that follow up on the arguments presented by VWO in that article.
From the first link below: "They do make a compelling case that A/B testing is superior to one particular not very good bandit algorithm, because that particular algorithm does not take into account statistical significance.
However, there are bandit algorithms that account for statistical significance."
The points raised are valid, if they matter is a different beast
Even in the tests shown, conversion rate was higher for the MABA algorithms than simple A/B testing. "Oh but you get higher statistical significance!" thanks, but that doesn't pay my bills, conversion pays.
Careful. It wasn't always higher for MAB even though the tables shown there make it appear so at first.
Those tables are showing the conversion rate during the test, up to the time when statistical significance is achieved. You generally then stop the test and go with the winning option for all your traffic.
In the two-way test where the two paths have real conversion rates of 10% and 20%, all of the MAB variations did win. Here is how many conversions there would be after 10000 visitors for that test, and how they compare to the A/B test:
Note that MAB-10 loses compared to RAND this time.
(The third column in the above two tables remains the same if you change 10000 to something else, as long as that something else. MAB-10 beats RAND in the first test by 9 conversions, and loses by 18 conversions in the second test).
Having spent countless hours working with third party apis that are poorly documented and business critical I can understand how unexpected changes can be frustrating. But asking people to do things your way with no incentive is even more frustrating for everyone. It comes off as you not respecting their time or the product and apis they have already built.
We very much respect Pinboard's time and are willing to give them just about as much of it as they need. Am willing to spend our time as well! We are looking to improve all of these integrations over time, beyond what their API can support and the best way for Pinboard to do this is to own that integration completely.
OK, but considering that people don't work for free to help others make money do you think it's reasonable to ask maciej or anyone else to do what you're asking them to? You say "it's the best way if they own the integration" as if owning it and the headaches it entails helps developers at all. Why not go for the suboptimal way and maintain it yourself, like you have been all these years?
I get that your service looks bad when integrations break but you could make a different contract requiring developers to give you a heads up in advance of any API changes and then you do the work of keeping the integrations working.
> We very much respect Pinboard's time and are willing to give them just about as much of it as they need
Demanding someone make changes and then offering them as much time as they need is missing the point. It's not the deadline that's offensive, it's the request for free work that you benefit from.
I would guess someone showed them an a/b test where showing the clown led to less mistakes. Of course it's still fairly disgusting behavior for a company to take. But are morals really that important when you have algorithms and data?
