If you’re interested in A/B testing on the Web, you should check out John Myles White’s talk at Tumblr on multi-armed bandit testing. You can learn a lot about standard A/B testing from the explanation he gives as a contrast to how multi-armed bandit tests work. I’ve read a lot of blog posts on multi-armed bandit tests, and this lecture is better than any of them in terms of explaining how this sort of testing actually works.
Why I Have Given Up on Coding Standards
Richard Rodger argues that you should toss out the coding standards and let programmers express themselves. I’ve been a fan of coding standards in the past but I find myself changing my thinking on this front. These days, I look at a lot of code written by people whose coding styles don’t particularly appeal to me. I manage. It’s fine. I just don’t think it’s as big a deal as I once thought it was.
Tim Bray suggests that every site should use HTTPS and explains the ins and outs of making it happen.
Christy Wampole’s How to Live Without Irony is one of my favorite essays I’ve read lately. Here’s her advice on performing an irony self-assessment:
Here is a start: Look around your living space. Do you surround yourself with things you really like or things you like only because they are absurd? Listen to your own speech. Ask yourself: Do I communicate primarily through inside jokes and pop culture references? What percentage of my speech is meaningful? How much hyperbolic language do I use? Do I feign indifference? Look at your clothes. What parts of your wardrobe could be described as costume-like, derivative or reminiscent of some specific style archetype (the secretary, the hobo, the flapper, yourself as a child)? In other words, do your clothes refer to something else or only to themselves? Do you attempt to look intentionally nerdy, awkward or ugly? In other words, is your style an anti-style? The most important question: How would it feel to change yourself quietly, offline, without public display, from within?
I have been intending for quite awhile to write something about the dangers of irony. Perhaps at one time “hipster mustaches” were an ironic commentary on absurd facial hair, but now they’re a faddish fashion choice. Likewise, perhaps people started drinking PBR because they were making an ironic commentary on being “broke,” but now they drink it because it’s the cheapest beer most bars serve. How many people wearing trucker hats know why they’re called trucker hats?
I’ve observed the effects of overuse of irony on myself. I often catch myself unconsciously using slang that I once used to ironically skew people I see on TV. The line between irony and sincerity blurs as people repeat behavior that they began as a joke. The journey from making a joke and becoming a joke is a short one. Just ask anyone with an ironic tattoo.
Kottke.org gueest blogger Sarah Pavis collected stories from readers about connections made online, especially by way of Kottke.org. Here are the results. An amazing number of the good and interesting things that have happened to me in life have been a result of the connections I’ve made online — through rc3.org, through The Well, through other people’s blogs. Every Thanksgiving I’m thankful for the Internet and the people I’ve met through this amazing medium.
From Arabesque, my favorite blog for Unix geeks. I always change the sshd port, so I’m delighted to read a sound argument against doing so.
I really liked this post by Camille Fournier, who runs the engineering team for Rent the Runway. When confronted with the problem of giving customers the confidence that the garment they rent will fit properly when it arrives, engineers tend to turn to solutions that involve 3D modeling and “virtual fit assistants.” Unfortunately, real humans are put off by these approaches. The solution they arrived at is much lower tech, but much better for customers. There are two takeaways, I think. The first is that diversity of all kinds on a team is valuable because it leads to a wider variety of proposed solutions to problems. The second thing is that this kind of problem really proves the value of experimentation as a product development approach. Try things and measure the results. You’ll probably wind up being surprised.
The New York Times ran two opinion pieces this weekend right next to each other that both stand at the intersection of the how the government and politics work and social change that results from technological change. In the first, Joe Nocera argues that the big question in the resignation of David Petraeus is whether we’re comfortable with the FBI snooping through our email on relatively flimsy grounds:
But the Petraeus scandal could well end up teaching some very different lessons. If the most admired military man in a generation can have his e-mail hacked by F.B.I. agents, then none of us are safe from the post-9/11 surveillance machine. And if an affair is all it takes to force such a man from office, then we truly have lost all sense of proportion.
The second was about what increased use of data in political campaigns means long-term. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been working in the analytics world this year, so this topic is highly relevant to me. It’s also very complicated. On one hand, improving our ability to collect and analyze data enables us to better understand what people want and expect from our products, or, in the case of campaigns, our politicians. On the other hand, combining our more advanced understanding of human behavior with deeper data sets creates the opportunity for more effective manipulation in addition to more effective communication.
While the people creating big data tools may not be evil, the organizations that use them going forward may not agree to the same principles. The big question in both the Petraeus case and in the use of big data by campaigns is that regardless of our level of comfort with the government, campaigns, or companies knowing so much about us, we don’t really have control over the gathering of that information.
Dalton Caldwell looks at some recent Twitter moves and tries to predict the company’s upcoming strategy. Here’s what he argues that it’s about:
The Discover tab is the future. Rather than forcing normal users to make sense of a realtime stream, they can see what content is trending.
Here’s what I don’t get. You can facilitate the mode of usage that Twitter may envision for everyday users without hurting the power users that have made it what it is. How did celebrities and “brands” figure out how to engage on Twitter? By watching the pioneering users of the service build a following. And many of those users have become celebrities in their own right in the context of Twitter. If Twitter put me on their board (and they should), that’s the advice I’d give them. Passive users may contribute most of the revenue, but the power users contribute most of the energy.
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The Glitch shutdown
This is how you shut down your MMO’s servers for good: Glitch’s graceful exit
It was a wonderful tribute to the incredible energy people put into the online communities that they join. When an online community is shuttered, it inevitably ends any number of relationships that people build over years. The Glitch shutdown was very respectful of that.