ryansloan

I learned recently that this is similar to what happened in Canada - it started with one province (I can't remember which) and spread from there.

I look forward to the inevitable postmortems/analysis of this process after the election is over. Some interesting research and writing came out of both of Obama's campaigns.

It's interesting to me that this article focuses on how they might be using data to understand who can be persuaded. I recently read a book by Eitan Hersh called Hacking the Electorate about how campaigns use data to perceive voters (and how they primarily focus on public data). Hersh suggests that persuadability isn't a focus of campaign initiatives because it's too hard to do in a way that is cost-effective. He suggests this is the main reason campaigns focus on mobilizing people who are likely to vote for their candidate. It will be interesting to see if campaigns are able to build better models for persuasion this year.

We were just talking about this at the office this week and came to a similar conclusion. However, someone pointed out later that you could have a valid Secret Santa configuration that was not a Hamiltonian Path - you could have two (non-overlapping) paths and still have a valid secret santa: For people A B C D E F, you could have the graph covered by two separate circuits:

A->B->C->A

D->E->F->D

Unfortunately real-life intervened and we didn't have time to decide if this was an NP complete problem or not...

Warning: Anecdata follows...

When I was a student, I had some great teachers who were tenured and some great teachers who were non-tenured. However, nearly all my awful teachers did have tenure. A lot of the people I know were in a similar situation. Some were good teachers who got complacent and lazy, and some seemed to have slipped through the cracks from the beginning. Small N, but I can see how tenure definitely creates some messed up incentives.

That said, I think there are two sides to this issue. Making it easier to get rid of bad teachers is a start, but it's also important that there's a good, transparent way of evaluating whether a teacher is good or bad. I know a lot of teachers, and they all feel as if the way their performance is measured is pretty broken. They're measured based on performance on standardized tests that don't test the right things, etc. I think if you want to attract and retain good teachers, you have to establish better metrics, too. With the wrong metrics, what you end up with is a big pool of teachers who are successful at checking off the right boxes.

(I realize this performance measurement thing is a hard problem in just about every industry!)

Interestingly, I found this kind of hard to read. I think there's just too much leading in the body text - I could feel my eye moving as I was reading. Decreasing the line height to 1.25em felt better to me.

Agreed. It happens a lot (in all my previous jobs I had mostly non-technical people as leads), but they have to work 10x harder to be effective. I think that even a limited technical background does a lot of things for you:

1) You can scope your team's features and commitments more effectively if you have some understanding of the technical complexity of each ask.

2) Understanding the technology (and the skills of your people) means you have better intuition about the right people to bring into the room when a problem arises

3) It's easier to be empathetic with your team when you have engineering experience, because you know that many times the spec is just the tip of the iceberg.

4) Credibility. A group of devs will have a lot more respect for you from the start if they know you're not just a bureaucrat and you can code (even if it's not as well as they can)

When I was a college student I worked on the other end of this: a faculty member and I were technical consultants for the University as they were evaluating some software systems. Let me just say: colleges can be a pain in the neck. There is a TON of regulation on higher education (from student-related regulation, FERPA sort of stuff to financial regulations on grant money and such) which can be a big barrier to entry.

I don't know enough about your niche to say anything definitive (and I'm not really an expert, anyway) but I was working on selecting a research and export control system and there was a ton of regulatory policy we had to learn/consider. I'd say you should start by talking with faculty members who are directly involved with the process to see what you're getting into.

The one question that was pretty constant across the departments I worked with was "How long will this company be around, and what is our support commitment?" Universities usually avoid spending money on IT if they can, so they want a product that is going to be well-supported. Switching solutions is costly, so that makes them fairly risk-averse as well.

In addition, the procurement processes are usually bureaucratic nightmares, but that's the same with large companies :)

Good question. I'd imagine that's part of the logic behind giving you "complete control" :) I'm also interested to see how they associate old photos and other pre-Facebook content with dates.

Looks like a digital, semi-automated scrapbook. From my understanding, it's not an overhaul of the profile, but another view of your online identity. If they pull it off it could be pretty cool.

I have to say, I think they blew it with this one. Spinning DVD-by-mail off into a separate business might make sense, but I just don't get splitting the ratings/suggestions up by not integrating the services. Considering that one of Netflix's greatest strengths is the (very good) rating system this is a questionable decision, and I think they'll catch a lot of heat for it from the crowd that maintains accounts on both services.

My father (who has always been self-employed) once said "the best thing about being self-employed is that I can choose my own hours. I can work whatever 100 hours a week I want."

I usually change mine to "Sent from my mobile" or "Sent from (xxx) xxx-xxxx" I keep a line like this for two reasons, one of which is proofreading related, but the more important is to let them know that the reason for my terse reply is not because I don't care or I'm upset, it's because I'm in transit (or just away from my desk).

I always say Management is taking out the trash.

It's funny you would say that. In my Intro to Software Engineering class my team basically built this (location-based restroom finder with ratings etc.)

George Constanza was my inspiration haha.

We called it "Poopt" though.

I think "tips" is one of the neatest features of Foursquare, and I see this as the same concept only the information comes to you. When I am in a new city I'll sometimes pull up Foursquare to look for a place to eat/drink/be merry and I read through these tips. If that information was delivered to me based on groups that I consider myself to be a part of, I would be one happy camper.

Very cool.

But will you have to buy a full pallet of them from the aisle next to the socks?

I have a close friend who studied Economics. He always said he wasn't cheap, just "opportunity cost aware."

I definitely agree. Introducing the material isn't enough, there have to be quality educators who are also knowledgeable of computing. You mentioned hobbyists and professionals and I think this is a fantastic idea. Actually, Georgia Tech's College of Computing has a program designed to take out of work IT professionals and help them become teachers: http://bit.ly/17xgiT [cc.gatech.edu] Pretty neat.

I think this is really, really important. We start teaching students the foundations of chemistry, physics, and various areas of mathematics as early as Sixth grade, but Computer Science is largely ignored. Hell, it's hard enough to find a decent CS curriculum in High Schools. Students who would never dream of studying computing might find that they have a passion for it if they are exposed to it early enough (in a kid-digestible way, of course) I remember reading a study (I wish I could find it to cite) that showed that students who were exposed to CS courses early were more likely to have a favorable opinion of the field ("it's not just for nerds") Finding people who are capable/willing to teach CS is one of the biggest problems here, I think.

This seems like a good candidate for http://sadtrombone.com

I think before you can convince students of this, you need to convince prospective employers. To a lot of them, GPA is an easy filter.

I think you're both probably right. It's a habit I've wanted to break, but I just haven't gotten around to it. ;)

In all seriousness, I think it probably -is- wise to eliminate the procrastination before I go from "intern extraordinaire" to "fully functional productive member of society" but it's just a tough habit to break. I've also found that it's not as bad when there's some passion behind the project. I know that's a pretty obvious observation, but it supports the "do what you love" folks.

Looks interesting. I'll bookmark it to read later.

I can relate, especially to the bit where he says "I can only seem to accomplish anything when I have far too much to do, for the simple reason that I have no shortage of projects to work on as a way of not working on the most important ones." I think a lot of college students have this mentality, which may be why people think we come across as "lazy." I've found that the sure-fire way to get me working on some relatively unimportant task is to put a more urgent one in the pipe.

I think 220 Billion is a highly inaccurate number as well, but I'm not sure if I agree with his assessment of the Y2K stuff.

Granted, it -was- overhyped (stock up on batteries, rice, haz mat suits, etc.) but there would have been fairly significant problems if the companies developing these systems didn't prepare. The possible effects were exaggerated, but I still think it's a better example of "crisis" management than mass delusion or panic.

I think it's a combination of factors. The obvious factor is that there is no COBOL content there. These communities tend to be focused on new and developing technologies, which aren't really relevant to their work most of the time.

I think the less obvious factor is related to the COBOL mentality. In COBOL's heyday, they didn't have communities like this (yeah yeah, usenet, BBS, I know, I know) so they figured out how to live without them. The old whitehaired COBOL gurus passed these traditions down, and it just became a way of life. Any COBOL-related help you need can probably be provided by the lifer in the cube down the aisle. They are a fairly self-sufficient group.

That being said, I am interested to see how the COBOL community changes when people from my generation start taking these jobs. I didn't stop reading when I was hired, and I don't think that most of the others will, either.

I worked as a COBOL programmer for two years (well, technically I did 2 summer internships and two short winter stints) so I have a little insight into the "community."

I worked at a (successful) company that develops banking software and processes bank data. The majority of our data processing and operations codebase was written in COBOL, running on some Unisys mainframes. There is a growing population of .NET developers on the team, but for the most part the cube farm is full of COBOL programmers. In general they don't read HN, use StackOverflow, or any other online community that I'm aware of. For the most part, when they need support they ask one of the local dinosaurs. I have noticed that most of them don't use their career to define themselves like a lot of "modern" programmers (myself included) do. I think it's more of a 9-5 for them.

And they don't seem to hate COBOL, either. In fact, a lot of them like it. I think part of the reason is that it's one of the first languages they were exposed to, and one of the first mainframe-based languages that "made sense."

It really is everywhere (although 80% seems high), but you don't usually find it in any of the glamorized jobs. It's heavily used in the banking, healthcare, insurance, and payroll industries.

I'm still working for the same company, but I'm doing .NET stuff now.

> One thing to watch out for though, is competent developers who are unreliable over time. They have the skills, but they spend their time surfing.

I think this is more a problem of motivation. I think if you throw enough interesting projects into the pipe (with the boring, necessary ones, of course) it helps keep them on task. Says the guy who's replying to a HN thread at work...

I don't know about taking to too far, even if it is a rather pessimistic (or even realistic) view of things. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone, and a lot of people don't realize that. They only know what they see in the movies: lots of money, fast cars, etc. I know I fall into that same mental trap sometimes.

I've got a lot of respect for Seth Godin, but sometimes I feel like his blog posts are just regurgitating facts we already know. Yes, it's important to talk to whoever will be consuming your product. Yes, it's important to set clearly defined goals. He doesn't even mention fact that here are also drawbacks to heavy design up front. Not really anything new, but maybe it helps to be reminded every once and a while...

I was thinking morgue, but kennel is probably more accurate.