Painless, effective peer reviews
This sounds like a nice way to do effective peer-driven team reviews without herculean effort, which were one of the most effective reviewing techniques (along with upwards reviewing of management) I encountered at Amazon. (Yes, the Amazon approach was very time-consuming and universally loathed.) The potential downside I can see is that it doesn’t give the reviewer enough time to revise any review comments they have second thoughts about, whereas written reviews do, but that would be an easy fix at the end of the process. Also, it’s worth noting that in most cases, a good review requires a bit of time to marshal thoughts and come up with a coherent review of a peer, so this doesn’t completely avoid the impact on effort. Still, a definite improvement I would say.
(tags: hr management reviews performance peer-driven-review 360-reviews staff peers work teams amazon)
The problem with OKCupid is the problem with the social web
This is why it really stings whenever somebody turns around and says, “well actually, the terms you’ve signed give us permission to do whatever we want. Not just the thing you were afraid of, but a huge range of things you never thought of.” You can’t on one hand tell us to pay no attention when you change these things on us, and with the other insist that this is what we’ve really wanted to do all along. I mean, fuck me over, but don’t tell me that I really wanted you to fuck me over all along. Because ultimately, the reason you needed me to agree in the first place isn’t just because I’m using your software, but because you’re using my stuff. And the reason I’m letting you use my stuff, and spending all this time working on it, is so that you can show it to people. I’m not just a user of your service, somebody who reads the things that you show it to me: I’m one of the reasons you have anything that you can show to anyone at all.
(tags: users web facebook okcupid terms-of-service jason-kottke privacy a-b-testing experiments ethics)
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A Java-oriented practical intro to the MinHash duplicate-detection shingling algo
(tags: shingling algorithms minhash hashing duplicates duplicate-detection fuzzy-matching java)
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The two charts indicate that current EU copyright is very unbalanced. When one side is completely satisfied with the status quo and the other is very unhappy then this is not a balanced situation. Given that a good compromise should leave everybody equally unhappy, the results of the consultation also show the direction for copyright reform efforts of the new EU Commission: re-balancing copyright requires at least some reform as demanded by end users and institutional users, most importantly a more harmonized and flexible system of exceptions and limitations.
‘TCP And The Lower Bound of Web Performance’ [pdf, slides]
John Rauser, Velocity, June 2010. Good data on real-world web perf based on the limitations which TCP and the speed of light impose
(tags: tcp speed-of-light performance web optimization john-rauser)
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This is a yet another Java collections library of primitive specializations. Java 6+. Apache 2.0 license. Currently only hash sets and hash maps are implemented.
(tags: openhft performance java jvm collections asl hashsets hashmaps data-structures)