> In one case, we ran a simple a/b test as a proof of concept on whether to pursue the idea further and it added an extra million bucks a year in revenue.
I'm with the people who decided to ship this. The organization will need to fund more maintenance than they would if they waited, but that has real costs. And "keep your 1mm/revenue idea to yourself" doesn't sound like a healthy engineering culture either.
Heh, yeah, that is a special case though. Most people don't work on things that has that kind of impact. If it might, I would suggest going against my own advice.
> Not sure if there is some way to iterate given online feedback.
There have been a some novels and novel-length works written a chapter at a time in public. The Martian by Andy Weir, for example is probably the most commercially successful. Many works by qntm (https://qntm.org/fiction) that are popular in this community have been written that way too.
Weir may have invented a new genre: STEMcore. His narrator-protagonists face a series of puzzles which they resolve with imaginative STEM skills and... well, that's most of it. I mean, he sets up a pretty good near-future world and gives the protagonist one big problem to resolve that helps drive tension (making it a quick read), but ultimately you're reading a short story that ate a physics textbook.
STEMcore (which, to be clear, is just a term I made up) mostly solves problems with STEM. Contrast with something like The Expanse which builds the setting from (some) realistic physics (plus a few enabling premisses) and mostly solves problems with politics and tactics.
I think Fifty Shades of Grey has had more commercial success than The Martian. It was originally published as an episodic piece of Twilight fan fiction (Master of the Universe)
This application of "base rates thinking" was helpful for me - a bit out of left field, I'm aware of the concept and use it sometimes but wouldn't have thought to do so here. Thanks!
Thanks for sharing. I've used megaparsec a little but never looked at ReadP. Your tutorial is concise and helpful, I'd have ended up with better intuition faster if I started there.
What’s even worse is that Island Gigantism is a Germanic derived word followed by a Latin derived word, while Insular Dwarfism has the etymologies the other way around.
Would you be equally happy if you were sick enough to be hospitalized as you are when you're healthy? If not, that's a cost. I doubt the out-of-pocket medical costs are the most important part of this decision.
You guys are missing the point. The point is that people who are anti vax clearly have skin in the game by any measure. The point is not impacted by these little details, so don't go off in some flamewar here
The point has wooshed over your head and flown into orbit. The original context was having skin (perceived or not) in the game and if it would always impact behavior. I'm not trying to convince anti vaxers of anything, just observing human behavior in general.
This doesn't address all of your comment but specifically with patient confidentiality – Israel agreed to share more data with vaccine manufacturers in order to get quicker access to the vaccines. There are obviously problems with bilateral dealmaking and Israeli distribution (the article below points them out), but Israel almost certainly saved lives by weakening confidentiality. I think that was the right call.
In some ways the argument against Excel is like the argument against Electron: if you're comparing it to an elegant, purpose-built and well-tested application, yes... it falls woefully short.
But is that really the right comparison? Lots of people just don't have the skills or time to build a specific applications. Without Excel, what would they do? There are some places where a 90% solution is worse than no solution at all (at least no solution is a forcing function for a "real" application), and in many ways Excel isn't the best expression of the _idea_ of an Excel-like, low-barrier-to-entry declarative programming environment with a built-in UI, but it's truly a wonderful tool. It makes a lot of automation possible for a lot of people.
You're being downvoted, but I think this sentiment is right and if you take it seriously, it's an argument for the SAT. Pretty much _everything_ in the USA is pay to win, not just the SAT, and the more subjective factors like essays, extracurriculars, and even grades, are more biased.
Test prep companies have an incentive to overhype their services but research suggests the improvement isn't that much.
I'm with the people who decided to ship this. The organization will need to fund more maintenance than they would if they waited, but that has real costs. And "keep your 1mm/revenue idea to yourself" doesn't sound like a healthy engineering culture either.