And a fourth time on a per-article basis if you, as an individual, non-academic taxpayer, would like you read the very research your taxes have funded.
Has anyone ever paid the individual price for an article?
And setting aside the principle for a second - how many non-academic taxpayers are trying to read articles that don't have institutional access through their employer or local public library?
I'm a non-academic taxpayer trying to read articles and don't have access through my employer or public library. I know other people in the same situation. Emailing the authors directly to request a copy is a known legitimate workaround, but in cases where I'm trying to read a paper on fungal propagation from 1971 (most recent example, from last week) the options are limited.
I would also imagine that if these things were more readily available people would be more likely to use them.
> Has anyone ever paid the individual price for an article?
Before the existence of sci-hub, I spent several hundred taxpayer euros to download taxpayer-funded research from journals that my library was not subscribed to. I was not aware that asking the library for a single pdf cost about 30 or 40 EUR, until the librarian told me. Then I stopped because it was obviously ridiculous.
> how many non-academic taxpayers are trying to read articles that don't have institutional access through their employer or local public library?
A different question to ask. Why should taxpayers not have access to the articles which they funded for? It doesn't matter whether they read it or not. They pay, they have access.
> Has anyone ever paid the individual price for an article?
I would be very interested to see statistics on this, because I suspect the answer is "almost nobody" - as I assume your question was meant to imply.
> ... [How] many non-academic taxpayers are trying to read articles that don't have institutional access through their employer or local public library?
Count me in this population, although to be honest it literally never occurred to me to check if the local public library had journal access.
> Has anyone ever paid the individual price for an article?
For various business interests I have paid full price to read scientific studies quite a few times. And I felt foolish about it later once I learned about Sci-Hub. I'm sure there are many other entrepreneurs that could admit the same. Sci-hub is great and a very important service.
When you say historic buildings, I suppose (hope) you don’t mean listed ones, since they’d be breaking the law? Regardless, it’s a crying shame what people have ripped out of even very ordinary Victorian and Edwardian houses. Decorative mouldings, cast iron fireplaces, original doors, geometric tiling.
He lives in Portugal, where the rules are different especially for those restoring farm houses and villas that have fallen into disrepair, but even in the UK people get rid of amazing Victorian features in houses there aren't listed.
As he likes to make things properly, he rarely takes the 'fitting' jobs - and keeps and restores anything he removes. Someone else usually wants it.
The sad fact is that a bespoke wardrobe costs good money, as do hand made window friends, but they should last for years, centuries even.
You might like to try Write yourself a Git [0] (discussed here previously [1]). YMMV, but I find the best way to learn something deeply is to get hands on. Less of a chance of convincing yourself you understand something that you really don’t.
For less of a time commitment, Git from the inside out [2] is a really nice explanation of the internals, from initializing a repo and the files that creates in the .git directory, all the way to pulling from and pushing to remotes.
I know from (my albeit limited development) experience that I definitely retain concepts I’ve encountered via a hands-on approach better, but I hadn’t made the leap to _this_ sort of hands-on approach! I’d just resigned myself to the long slog of trying to get a commit merged into the master branch haha.
Once again, thank you! I’m going to check out both of those resources!
Even though the full-size filter would surely work with a phone camera, if you could scale it down to a form factor that clips onto the phone, I can see this selling like hot cakes. Might be one of the rare cases where influencer marketing is really effective too. Is it feasible to grind the glass at a physical scale to make that work?
All in all, very cool product, and congrats on making a living from it!
Clickbait title, but I wholeheartedly agree with the article’s main assertion, that startups need product engineers who think about more than just code. Engineers who can make decisions for the benefit of the customer, and ultimately the business.
This is all the more reason to delegate responsibilities, rather than tasks (as argued in Little Tasks, Little Trust [0]), so programmers actually get the necessary experience with UX, design, interacting with customers, etc., and exposure to the consequences of what they build, in order to grow into full-fledged product engineers.
I fear though that such roles, and consequently such engineers, are few and far between.
That’s what qualitative data is for. At the very least, talking to customers and reading their feedback. Preferably followed by organizing that data somehow, and using it to better understand the quantitative data you have.
It’s fair comment, though, that undifferentiated ‘engagement’ is rarely a good metric.
Also, hopefully the people in charge are thinking closely about what time engaged means, for that product. I imagine breaking user actions down to intent, if possible, would help quite a bit with that.
For a product that is supposed to be simpler and save people time compared to the alternative, increasing time using the service might mean people like it and are getting more done so using it more... or it might just mean that it's getting harder to use. Then again, maybe they've graduated from doing simple things with it to complex things, and even though interactions take longer, they're still saving more time and effort overall compared to the alternative and are happy.
I guess the bottom line is I think you have to slice and dice the data a lot of ways and think about what it actually means for your product to be using that data effectively.
Absolutely. I think that’s why it’s so vital to combine both qualitative and quantitative data.
I doubt there are too many people in tech making this mistake, but without numbers there’s a good chance you fall prey to people’s inaccurate perceptions or explanations for their own behavior.
On the other hand, without those first-hand accounts, it’s all too easy to tell a mistaken story about your numbers. In particular, your users’ sentiment towards their time spent in your app is a guess, unless they tell you.
I think timescale is another crucial dimension to evaluating time-in-app, and whether it’s a positive indicator for your business.
For instance, driving up engagement has doubtless been good for Facebook’s financials in the short- to medium-term. Arguably though, that relentless focus has led to the present political climate where they’re fighting off regulation. Whether that’s an existential threat is yet to be seen (one can only hope), but it certainly casts the metric in a different light.
As you say, it comes down to the fact that there is no silver bullet metric; there’s no substitute for thinking about and dissecting the data you collect.
Rather than building dedicated integrations (which can always come later), a relatively quick win that’s tool-agnostic would be to implement webhooks.
I’ve used Typeform’s webhook feature a number of times to good effect, whereby you receive one POST request to whatever endpoint you specify upon each form submission. This may have changed, but when I last used it that was the only way of getting your data out of their system, which was admittedly frustrating. A lot better than nothing though.
Used it for all kinds of things: quizzes hooked up to a loyalty program, to award the user points for all correct answers; satisfaction surveys after ordering a product; writing and photography competitions (again hooked up to the loyalty program); an in-depth annual user survey; etc.
