November 2011
1 post
LinkedIn must have an awesome data team
When I first saw a message from LinkedIn titled Add skills like “Ruby” to make your profile easier to find in my inbox I let out a little chuckle. Cute. LinkedIn crawled my Github or maybe the text content of my LinkedIn page and wants me to make sure they got it right by adding a skill into their formal system.
I click on the email to see this.
They got every single one spot on. I...
October 2011
1 post
On Economics
I read this and was inspired to write this in semi-response.
One thing I have found is that economics has a heartbeat by the decade and that the number of factors is very high.
For example: I used to take Ireland as an example of a European country that degregulated and subsequently out-preformed nearly everyone. I would show graphs, etc. to everyone I discussed politics with.
Then of course...
July 2011
1 post
Statistical Immortality
Presume that there is no God.
Presume that there are either(see update2);
an infinite number of universes,
an infinite number of dimensions,
or an infinite number of non-identical universe “cycles”.
Presume that the human mind can be uploaded to a computer either through;
an atom-by-atom simulation,
or a mathematical deconstruction of the graph of nodes/neurons that make up the...
March 2011
1 post
tech.is_in_bubble?(actual_data) # => false
Yes. Given my limited view, Color is probably overvalued. Yes, Groupon better role out something new, and fast, or it will never give any decent ROI for its investors.
But enough with the anecdotal evidence. For each Color or Groupon there is a Google (also had high valuations) or a Dropbox (quite possibly the most awesome company on the planet).
The real question about whether a bubble is...
January 2011
2 posts
Weave Silk, scripting, and vanity website headers
Weave Silk is amazing.
But I wanted more. I wanted to write my name in Weave Silk for a personal website I’m putting together. After trying to write it out manually and not being happy with the results (colors were never what I wanted them to be, my hand couldn’t stay steady for long enough, I would miss time the wind) I decided to look into the source code, even though I barely know...
Short emails, I'm the last to find out
As my startup has been getting nearer to launch, I’ve made an effort to reach out to people that I’ve helped or connected with over the past year. I wrote individual emails to 95 people, recalling when we spoke last, what they are working on, how my startup is going, etc. These were heartfelt, non-spammy reach-outs.
My first 30 were discouraging. Under half of the people I emailed got...
December 2010
1 post
Fight
I just did it. I wrote my first “Hello, World!” program in my own little programming language. A tiny crest of a hill on my way up the mountain.
The first thing I wanted to do after I came back from a smoke was to throw on a movie. It’s 10 pm on boxing day, and it isn’t like I’m on the clock at a day job. But I think I’ve finally learned that stopping...
October 2010
1 post
Paul Graham is right (using AVC's data)
I don’t like getting into the whole, someone is wrong on the internet thing, but I find the recent discussion that Paul Graham kicked off fascinating:
[P]ractically all the returns are concentrated in a few big successes. The expected value of a startup is the percentage chance it’s Google.
He then goes on to say
Some super-angels seem to care about valuations. Several turned...
July 2010
1 post
An ugly, but insightful, oil spill infographic
People have trouble visualizing large numbers of things. After looking at a terrible infographic on cnbc, I decided to take the ugly-but-works approach. Most people have a feeling for how large the twin towers are, so I decided to map the amount of oil in numbers of world trade center towers. It came out less than I expected, just over 40% of a single World Trade Center’s volume.
This...
April 2010
1 post
Cool math expression with the numbers e, 5, and...
I have discovered a pretty cool mathematical expression:
-5*e^(5arccos((((5^(0.5))*0.5)+0.5)*0.5)*((-5/5)^0.5))
OR
What is neat about this is that:
Besides arccos’s “-1” (which shouldn’t even be there anyway) and e, the only numbers that appear are 5 and 0.5.
The number 5 appears 5 times.
The number 0.5 appears 5 times, counting the square roots as exponents to the...
March 2010
1 post
5 tags
Intelligence Quotient Visualized
This graph shows how sensitive IQ is to small increases at the upper end of the range and why I dislike this measurement system.
Edit: I purposefully didn’t count the dots for you. If you want to know how many there are, use wolframalpha to back calculate them.
February 2010
1 post
8 tags
True, False, & NULL/None/nil/Blank logic in MySQL,...
(NOTE: This blog post is extremely old and may give the reader the false impression that I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m keeping it up because I’m not a coward.)
EDIT: see below for an explanation on the “nil and False => nil while nil or False => False”
Being a Data Guy (in the corporate world, a “Business/Market Intelligence Analyst/Manager”)...
I want privacy because I break the law
To the police and future employers:
I don’t really do illegal things. I’m actually a pretty top notch guy.
Some of the stories in the article may be embellished/fabricated. I do have to say that, right?
Bruce Schneier is one of the greatest minds of our time. Schneier on Security, is a collection of some of his best essays from 2002 to 2008 and has really shaped my thinking towards...
January 2010
3 posts
4 tags
(1.0+2.0)+((3.0+(4.0-5.0))/(6.0-((7.0/8.0)-9.0)))
(NOTE: This post is extremely old. I know this is horrible, horrible code, but I leave it up there for the kids.)
The challenge: calculate all numbers between 1900 and 2100 with exactly one operator between the sequential numbers 123456789 with as many brackets as desired.
The reward: points
Being a data guy I know a fair bit about Excel, MySQL, star schema data marts, statistics, and split...
The Elements - A Perfect Coffee Table Book for...
Most of the time when I get books for Christmas from my nontechnically inclined friends and family I don’t end up reading them because they are either:
An uninteresting variety of This is how the future is going to look, or,
A book I already own (e.g. Alan Greenspan’s “new” book).
So while I was holding my unopened present that my girlfriends parents handed me this...