tl_donson's comments

tl_donson | 2 years ago | on: Android’s emergency call shortcut is flooding dispatchers with false calls

so, 2 related questions for people with product experience on something with this sort of scale and potential downsides.

- would this not be one of the best examples of when to use small, incremental canary releases with the emergency feature enabled?

- if you did do a canary release, i would think that one of your first contacts be EMS in the area that you were planning on rolling out the feature to, so that you’d get good feedback directly rather than through news reports. do apple and google just not do this?

tl_donson | 2 years ago | on: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

there’s a logitech bluetooth silent mouse i really like and would carry it on my laptop at work from meeting room to meeting room. i had 3 in 2 years, dropped each once, they were all broken on the first fall.

kinda wish they were able to withstand falls onto hard surfaces but it’s also a) my fault, and b) not an expectation i have of a mouse in general.

but it’s also a good reason to not just take any consumer device onto a sub, because functioning after a drop would absolutely be a requirement.

tl_donson | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: What do you use to communicate data analysis?

entirely depends on the requirements. however having said that, if your customer requests a quick one-off report you can guarantee they’ll ping you in a month asking for an update by 930am when they need to present updated results. if your customer requests a real time dashboard that requires bespoke data integrations there’s about a 50% chance they’ll look at it a couple times per month and then after a couple quarters just stop using it entirely.

tl_donson | 3 years ago | on: Books recommended by profitable founders

if everyone read more books, took career development seriously, etc i do agree that some qualities or skills would lose a bit of market value, but the overall take that no one would be better off seems like way too much if a zero sum perspective.

i think a higher standard of professional competency in general would benefit everyone, and i can’t imagine some sort of equilibrium of skillsets in the labour market where there would be no opportunity to set yourself apart in your field.

tl_donson | 3 years ago | on: Survey of workers’ views on salary transparency

it’s really just an observation about what the market conditions are for a specialised technical position compared to a general project/program manager. i have nothing against my manager specifically or managers in general.

tl_donson | 3 years ago | on: Using machine learning to predict the leads that close

“Working with the medium group gave the biggest uplift.”

Anecdotally, I’ve seen the same thing in a B2C context. The uplift in the highest probability group was so bad that we would leave those leads alone completely, even though the marginal cost of an email or sms is basically 0 as a % of revenue from a successful conversion.

tl_donson | 3 years ago | on: I posted my project on Reddit and received 9 job offers

even if you are employed and can’t make your work public, just a few small projects will improve your chances. i’ve spent the last 6 or so months interviewing applicants for senior programmer/analyst roles and the number of otherwise qualified candidates who have _literally zero_ public repos or projects or code samples is astounding.

tl_donson | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Anyone ever consider bringing a coding exercise for the interviewers

I’ve been this developer in a lot of interviews. We don’t typically do in-interview coding questions so it would be a little weird if someone just threw one at me — although I guess it would depend on the context of the question.

My style of interviewing is to have a as casual a conversation as possible with someone about their experience, ask them to do a deep dive into a solution they’ve delivered, what they could have optimised better, what they learned in the process (technical or otherwise), what were the pain points, etc etc.

I find the best applicants get me talking quite a bit about related projects we’ve worked on. It fits the flow of the interview, which is important. Asking me to whiteboard a random algorithm would be bizarrely out of place, but i’ve 100% whiteboarded hypothetical architectures while responding to questions from applicants. If we’re to that step then it’s usually a pretty good sign.

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