Trust me please don't. they will talk to you but you don't have a chance. girls don't want to date a weirdo. just be a normal person and talk to them like a normal human being that you aren't attracted to about normal stuff. once you have established you aren't a creep THEN try to turn the charm on.
it seems pretty mind boggling that people are that bad at stats ... we have a mandatory stats class for CS ... it doesn't teach some of the stuff mentioned in the article but the stuff mentioned is completely intuitive -- you shouldn't need to take a stats class to understand that.
like if the variance of your result is really high and you're estimating the mean its clear that the number of samples you take is important !?!
You're proving his point, which is that people's intuition is often dangerously wrong. The sample size is actually often nowhere near as important as your sampling method. For an extreme example, I can conduct a billion coin flips with a weighted coin, but it's going to tell me jack about the general behavior of coin flips. Avoiding sample bias is a hard problem, far harder than most people appreciate.
To complicate matters further, "accuracy" is an extremely tricky concept in statistical analysis because error rates work very differently than they do in, say, physics. In physics, when you measure something you can be sure that your results are accurate, so long as you stay outside your instrument's range of error. In stats, your confidence interval just tells you how likely it is that your results are completely wrong, or even worse, wrong by a completely unknown amount. Every statistical inference you make has a chance of completely blowing up on you. That chance can be defined and reduced, but it can never be eliminated. There's also things like frequentist vs Bayesian statistics, where the interpretation of the same data can be completely different.
Zed may be a jerk sometimes, but on this topic he's dead right. Most programmers are far more confident about this stuff than they should be.
After doing some research, I think I've completely abused the notion of the confidence interval. Which I think just helps to prove Zed's point. This stuff be hard.
pat on the back for you -- you understand intro college statistics... maybe you just work with shitty programmers that don't understand statistics????? i dunno but most of my colleagues know stats pretty damn well. but maybe thats just because i'm in school
His post is bullshit, opensource software sucks for this reason ... its built by a bunch of hackers that don't know anything about interaction design or what customers want and need, don't know much about much of anything other than the technical.
Its great when the users are all techies ... but in my opinion most of the desktop apps suck ... openoffice is a piece of shit.
I totally agree with edw519 ... this guy just doesn't know what a product developer does or how to do it. Contrary to the elitist hacker opinion that these people don't know what they are doing ... effective, methodological product developer actually do contribute significantly to finding out what people want. A lot of programmers need to let go of their egos and realize that they are not know-it-alls.
Yeah, and I think the point the author makes is that a college degree is just as bad an indicator of that as a certificate with a number on it. If you want someone with those qualities you can interview them and find out.
whether or not they are relevant is besides the point, I think author isn't saying "end 4-year colleges" but rather that we should change how skills are assessed -- so that a 4 year college isn't required ... i.e you can take a test and if you pass thats it. so college could still be a valid route of developing skills (like the ones you said) but not the only route to getting a job.
Cool idea... I understood instantly what it does ... and I think most of your audience will too... the term "streaming" has become pretty ubiquitous.
How do you plan to monetize?
The plan is soon to launch an API where you pay a monthly fee to integrate streamfile functionality into your own site/domain. Plus we will charge for the regular service, that are currently for free until the 31st of August.
