crasshopper's comments

crasshopper | 8 years ago | on: The sequence 1 1 ∞ 5 6 3 3 3

crasshopper | 10 years ago | on: Hacking thoughts, literally

Seems more like "electrophysiology" than "a neuroscience revolution". Would be really cool to have played around with those in school though.

crasshopper | 11 years ago | on: What We Do and Don't Know about Software Development Effort Estimation

   Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect,
   even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
The best advice I ever got on project-time estimation (from a biology postdoc) was: make your best, most honest best effort, and then double it.

When I make projections with a spreadsheet, I have a cell that copies my grand total of all costs and call that copy "unforeseen costs". I always hate bidding that high at the start, but the estimate ends up being close to right surprisingly often.

This article says 30% overruns are common, which is within my former boss' +100% bounds.

The other nice thing about doubling your cost estimate is it prevents you from catching the winner's curse and landing an overly-stingy client. Plus if you really can keep costs within your spec for the project, then you win extra profits. You'll never win that "game" if you don't leave room for error.

crasshopper | 11 years ago | on: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept”

Probably everyone knows the math; I just think they're exaggerating the relevance of this model to real life.

I'm with the commenter (here) who said that real life is more likely to be an initial-value-dependent or path-dependent PDE. Someone else said having a high-IV person on your team will raise the slopes of everyone else which seems also right: the issues are multidimensional, not affine 1-D.

Ousterhout is taking sides (smarter > more experienced) which is fine; he can make that argument. But using y=mx+b as x→∞ doesn't count as an argument; it's rhetorical flair, not rhetorical substance. The substance of his reasoning seems to be "That's my opinion based on my experience in my past jobs".

crasshopper | 11 years ago | on: Social Login Buttons Aren't Worth It (2012)

I just mean if you do limit the password length or character type, please remind me at the login screen, because there's no way I will remember across sites who wanted 6-8 characters from [aA9$_!#] and who wanted 12-16 from [a9-].
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