bkbleikamp's comments

bkbleikamp | 5 years ago | on: Show HN: Developer Friendly Production Access

It's free for up to 3 people if you want to try it out, after that the pricing starts at $199/mo for 10 seats; we've been working with early customers iterating on pricing that makes sense, so we're happy to talk more to learn what works for you.

bkbleikamp | 12 years ago | on: Inside GitHub's Super-Lean Management Strategy

> Who slogs through producing the documentation, and keeping it up-to-date? Once a new product/feature is launched, who sticks around for the bugfixes, support, etc., since presumably everyone will be more excited to allocate themselves to the next new big thing?

Doing this work is part, and perhaps the most important part, of shipping a feature. It's not just boring work. If someone isn't prepared to support something, they shouldn't ship it.

bkbleikamp | 13 years ago | on: Zen Writing Mode

A few of the other projects that people are working on: GitHub for Mac, GitHub for Windows, libgit2, internal tools, ops, Gist, Git

bkbleikamp | 13 years ago | on: How we keep GitHub fast

Why should internal tools be ugly? Well designed tools help people work better and more efficiently—putting a little bit of thought into them is not a waste of time.

bkbleikamp | 13 years ago | on: Why I'm not a founder

Depends on what opportunities were out there. I'm not opposed to starting my own company, I just don't think it's the only way to happiness.

bkbleikamp | 14 years ago | on: Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews. Here’s How You Fix It

It's not worth mentioning. Almost every case has been a coincidence and they've gone out of their way to explain the review filter (which functions similarly to Google's PageRank algorithm and attempts to filter out spammy reviews using various factors).

Each court case related to this has been thrown out.

If you trust Google to be fair with PageRank then there hasn't been any evidence that should make you more concerned about Yelp.

Business owners complain about getting demoted in Google's PageRank algorithm quite a bit, too.

bkbleikamp | 14 years ago | on: Try right clicking GitHub's logo

What browser/OS are you in? It looks pretty reasonable in Chrome on OSX; we spent a decent amount of time trying to get it as close as we could. Some browsers do weird math on resizing.

bkbleikamp | 14 years ago | on: Try right clicking GitHub's logo

We do it so that when people zoom in on the site (using `⌘ + +` on a Mac) the image doesn't become pixelated and ugly.

We do it with most other images, too.

bkbleikamp | 14 years ago | on: Google is out executing Apple lately.

Open sourcing an operating system as nothing to do with executing well.

Releasing a music product with serious UX issues isn't that impressive.

The Gmail redesign is nice. But not in direct competition to Apple.

bkbleikamp | 14 years ago | on: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

There are significantly more stories of businesses having a great experience with Yelp than a bad one. But it's not exactly a great story for the Chicago Tribune to highlight all of those businesses.

What does it say to you that a judge threw the case out?

bkbleikamp | 14 years ago | on: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

I am not sure what you mean.

Why would filtered reviews distribution match up to the unfiltered reviews?

Typically a "fake" review is either going to be someone who is raving about a business to try to boost the rating or someone who for some reason wants to bad mouth the business (e.g. a competitor) so it makes sense that 1 and 5 star ratings are the most filtered.

bkbleikamp | 14 years ago | on: Lone Yelp review dogs business owner

I worked at Yelp on their product management team for about 18 months.

It's essentially impossible for anyone in the company to manipulate, delete, or add a review to a business page unless the reason is related to Terms of Service. Even then, you cannot do it without someone noticing and double checking that the reason something was removed was legitimate.

The algorithm is (in my mind) similar to Google's PageRank—it's not a trivial piece of software, it takes a full time team to maintain, edit, update, fix, improve, etc. Whether or not a business is an advertiser is never taken into account.

Yelp puts consumers first - that means sometimes they remove legitimate reviews. Everyone on the product and engineering teams knows this, realizes it sucks for businesses, but would rather err on the side of all reviews being legitimate. The reason they keep working on the algorithm is to improve this and make it more accurate.

The sales staff has strict rules on what they can and can't do, they do not have access to editing, managing, or deleting reviews and I never once saw an email come to product asking for a review to be removed or added.

Thousands of businesses work with Yelp, are happy with Yelp, and have happy customers. Even businesses with 5 stars get negative reviews sometimes. You cannot please everyone.

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