Improving a surface interpretation of “big data”

A silly little piece appeared in The New York Times discussing a hypothesis of a Harvard economics professor that Apple might slow down its operating system ahead of major product releases in an attempt to encourage consumers to upgrade.

One of his students used Google Trends data to investigate this hypothesis. In the article, two graphs are compared — one that shows Google Trends search volume for “iPhone Slow” and the other for “Samsung Galaxy slow”.

iphone_slow

It is shown that the spikes in searches for slow operation of Apple’s products seem to correlate with new iPhone release dates, whereas there are no search spikes in the data for the Samsung Galaxy.

samsung_galaxy_slow

These graphs are horribly misleading on their own. Both products have grown in popularity over the years, so the increase in search volume over time reflects nothing more than their widespread mainstream popularity. This could have easily been removed from the graphs by adjusting these trendlines relative to the “base” searches, e.g. “iPhone” and “Samsung Galaxy”. In the graphs as shown, it’s hard to tell whether little spikes are actually hidden within the compressed and precise trendline for the Samsung Galaxy.

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Joel Spolsky’s business operating system

Joel Spolsky wrote his first blog post in a year today, announcing Trello, Inc., a spin-off company for the successful project management product Fog Creek Software developed, Trello.

Trello has announced a $10M+ venture financing round and they are going to expand the product and team. This was a bit of a surprise to me, because Spolsky had always been critical of the VC-funded tech startup industry on his blog over the years.

But in the blog post, he explains, he has really been critical of the kind of company that this industry typically breeds. So, he has made his life’s work creating companies with a different “operating system” altogether.

highNotes

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Delta customer service: exclusions may apply

Some friends of ours invited us to spend 4 days with them in Paris in late August. They had some rooms free in an apartment they had rented and so all we needed to do was figure out how to fly there.

I don’t normally travel to Europe in the summer and know it can be a busy time of year, so figured I’d have to do a bunch of research before booking these tickets. What I never expected how this would send me into a rabbit hole where the major airline, Delta, would prove to me how poorly it can treat customers and prospective customers who are about to spend thousands of dollars with them.

Doing research

My research started, as many a traveler’s does, on the web. I used hipmunk and expedia and seatguru and all the usual tools to shop around. Because this was a short trip (only 4 days total), we were hoping to perhaps use some of those thousands of American Express membership rewards points we had built up over the years to at least get a Business Class upgrade for the overnight (red eye) flight from Washington, DC to Paris.

We figured this was an appropriate splurge. It’s one of the rare times my girlfriend gets vacation time away from grueling medical school hours, and for me, this trip is days before my 30th birthday. Given that we’d need some comfy sleep after an 8-hour flight and 2-hour drive to the airport before that, we were hoping we’d be able to recline a little on our flight over to Europe.

Digging around, I find rates for tickets are all over the map. But eventually, I get a couple of promising leads. First, Delta has a SkyMiles frequent flyer program, and they have a relationship with American Express, especially if you have an American Express + SkyMiles credit card. I don’t have one of those, but I realize that I’ve had the same American Express “Blue for Students” credit card for like 12 years, and that this card is now discontinued, so I should probably upgrade to something that actually earns me some travel points.

I sign up for SkyMiles and get instantly approved for this credit card. So far so good.

But little did I know I was about to enter the tangled web of fine print that dominates so much of corporate America and consumer interaction today.

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5 years ago, I was bored

I wrote this to a friend five years ago, a few weeks after I had quit my job to embark on the crazy ride that has been Parse.ly’s founding story.

You said to me, “I am glad that you left because you sounded unhappy there.”

But you know, I wasn’t exactly unhappy.

I was just bored.

I’m eager to work on my own stuff. I had a good work environment and I learned a lot. I was making money, had flexibility about hours and work from home, and was respected on my team.

But I had a couple of realizations. First, I didn’t see a future for myself in financial firms. I just don’t like their core business enough; in fact, I think their core business is somewhat superfluous and that financial firms should be way, way smaller than they are. They should make less money, have less power, etc.

Second, my specific project had this split personality. On the one hand, it wanted to be this cutting edge framework to really empower application developers throughout the company. On the other, it was a lost project — lots of code, lots of ideas, but no solid product and no real customer.

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Disable Google Hangout’s auto-mute on typing

Note: This post is a few years old and I’m not sure if the advice still applies. But, if you’re interested in tips about how to optimize your work-from-home setup, I’ve written an extensive guide: Best remote work equipment in 2020.

Damnit, Google. Sometimes, you make product improvements that are awesome. Other times, you make “improvements” that are downright depressing regressions.

In an effort to stop the annoying sensation that happens when you are on a Google Hangout video conference and you hear nothing but your colleague’s “tap-tap-tap” on their loud programmer keyboards, Google added a feature to the software that automatically detects when someone is typing and auto-mutes them.

This is a nice idea, but what about when talking while typing is what you actually want to do? In this case, Google provides no recourse. And indeed, recently I gave a walkthrough to my team of a new code project, but constantly cut out because as I was showcasing ideas in code (and even simply navigating code with my keyboard using vim), Google would constantly mute me and make me cut out. Damnit, Google! You suck!

Well, Internet users unite! We have a working fix for this “feature”.

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