A Corollary to ExperimentCalculator.com (with examples)
There’s a lot of talk about A/B testing on Web sites these days, but most people don’t have a good concept of how many people need to see an experiment in order to produce a statistically significant result. It’s more than you probably think.
My favorite online feed reader, NewsBlur, launched a major redesign last night. NewsBlur’s biggest drawback has been that the JavaScript-heavy user interface occasionally got in the way of users rather than assisting them. This redesign attacks that problem head on. The upside of NewsBlur has been that it works really well at its core purpose, fetching feeds and displaying them for the user. It also has solid native mobile clients, enabling you to keep read status in sync across devices. Finally, the entire source repository is available through GitHub. You almost certainly won’t run your own NewsBlur instance, and you probably won’t be submitting patch requests, but the transparency is appreciated. Finally, it offers social features that are comparable to the ones that Google Reader killed some time ago. The clock is ticking for Google Reader, and I strongly encourage you to check out NewsBlur.
The New Yorker is the first publication to create an anonymous drop box for sources based on Strongbox, an anonymized document sharing tool by Kevin Poulsen and Aaron Swartz. What the architecture really shows is how difficult it is to achieve anonymity and security on the Internet, given the amount of data exhaust created by just about any action online. If nothing else, this underscores what an amazing technical achievement Bitcoin is.
Graciousness looks easy, but of course it is not.
Nice little essay on graciousness from Esquire magazine. People who don’t aspire to be more gracious scare me.
A stark but recurring reality in the business world is this: when it comes to working with data, statistics and mathematics are rarely the rate-limiting elements in moving the needle of value. Most firms’ unwashed masses of data sit far lower on Maslow’s heirarchy, at the level of basic nurture and shelter. What is needed for this data isn’t philosophy, religion, or science — what’s needed is basic, scalable infrastructure.
M. E. Driscoll defines data engineering. This is my job. (By the way, if it sounds like something you’re good at, we are hiring at Etsy. Email me.)
A lot goes into deciding whether to fire the thrusters for one second.
After years of complaints about Cascading Style Sheets, many stemming from their deliberately declarative nature, it’s time to recognize their power. For developers coming from imperative programming styles, it might seem hard to lose the ability to specify more complex logical flow. That loss, though, is discipline leading toward the ability to create vastly more flexible systems, a first step toward the pattern matching model common to functional programming.
O’Reilly editor Simon St. Laurent talks about the power of CSS. CSS selectors have won in the marketplace of ideas for good reasons.
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The last campaign book you need to read
Now that I’ve read Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes
, I’ll never look at elections or election coverage the same way again. More importantly, I’ll never look at media criticism the same way again.
First of all, let me start by saying that it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read, period. It’s brilliantly constructed and incredibly well written. Ezra Klein wrote about the book’s impact when Richard Ben Cramer passed away earlier this year.
The most brilliant thing about the book is that Cramer writes with sympathy for all of the candidates that he covers. I wouldn’t have wanted most of the book’s subjects to be President, but I felt bad for all of the losers and the eventual winner as the book unfolded.
I think, though, that the lasting impact of the book is that it makes it clear that all of the political themes we discuss today are just echoes of the same themes that we’ve been arguing about for decades. For example, here’s a snippet from a 1988 Gary Hart speech:
That sounds like something any Democratic politician might say today. His explanation of Texas conservative politics decades ago that could be a word for word description of the Tea Party today. None of this stuff is new.
Most importantly, he lays the idiocy and destructiveness of horse race campaign coverage bare. The desire to reconstruct actual events into a narrative that the pack can write about, the eagerness to chase pseudo-scandals to keep things interesting, and the need to discipline candidates who don’t meet the expectations of the media horde — he sees and reports on it all.
If you’re interested in politics at all, I’d skip the contemporary accounts and go back and read What It Takes. It’s all already there.