Emmett Shear

"Yelp can also put bad businesses out of business, and does. And it can make an already good business a success, which it also does. What evidence is there that they change the world net negative, rather than net positive? My experience with Yelp has been great: it has encouraged me to explore much more widely which restaurants I attend." - Emmett Shear

"For simple things like adding tables or adding columms, just do it. Add the column/table, then release new app code relying on it. For more complex things (changing the name of an existing column, or breaking a table into two parts, etc.) you need to write a compatibility mode into the application code. New writes go to the new column/table name, reads go to both places. Once that's released, migrate all the data as slowly as you like behind the scenes. When you're done, you can drop the old column or table." - Emmett Shear

"Even more telling, he's willing to abandon the iPhone platform despite this." - Emmett Shear

"This post uses a terrible example. His hidden variable is programmer skill, and he assumes that high skill programmers prefer to work at agile companies over waterfall companies. Therefore, he claims, agile is not really more productive than waterfall. But that's silly; if using an agile methodology is what attracted the high skill programmers, that's why you're more productive! Changes that attract high skill programmers - even if that's all they do - are the most productivity-enhancing changes you can make." - Emmett Shear

"They're not really "Just X, only for Y" - that's just the fastest and simplest way to explain what they're doing. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki..." - Emmett Shear

"Yeah, me-too products are never really interesting. I mean, does the world really need another search engine? There's already Lycos and Altavista. Calling an internet startup's idea "me-too" is a pretty lame criticism. Most of the most successful startups had "me-too" ideas on paper. The proof is in the eating." - Emmett Shear

"I don't really understand your problem fully, but if Mixpanel looks like a good fit I would recommend using them for your new data, and creating a separate system for viewing your historical data. That reduces the requirements for the code you have to write (it only has to be able to deal with historical data, you don't need to figure out how to deal with updates), while giving you maximal features in the long run." - Emmett Shear

"This is a good idea, but the execution is lacking. In particular, the data entry is really painful. There are two big problems: 1. I have to somehow know the calorie counts for every exercise I do and every food I eat. You should let me input the activity/food and calculate the calories. 2. I am not in front of my computer all day. In particular, when I'm exercising and eating I'm not. And that's exactly when I want to add data to a service like this. You need an iPhone app, not a web app." - Emmett Shear

"Why do you think Yelp is actually erasing bad reviews? It seems most likely that this is sour grapes from business that are unhappy with poor reviews, rather than any wrongdoing on Yelp's part." - Emmett Shear

"The PRC is a bad example for that; they're also likely to execute you: http://www.smh.com.au/news...... Nigeria or even Russia would probably be a better example; at least they're not famous for killing people for corruption. That said, your main point is completely correct: this is the system working." - Emmett Shear

"Source: http://www.inc.com/magazin......" - Emmett Shear

"I'm a regular Aardvark user and I never go to the vark.com website...so it wouldn't surprise me that their Quantcast stats are very low." - Emmett Shear

"I voted up your comment; you bring up three very likely scenarios. This is a side issue, but an important one in my opinion: Why did you mention John Edwards there? Did it really make what you were saying more clear? Or was it just a great opportunity to get in a political dig? """ In Artificial Intelligence, and particularly in the domain of nonmonotonic reasoning, there's a standard problem: "All Quakers are pacifists. All Republicans are not pacifists. Nixon is a Quaker and a Republican. Is Nixon a pacifist?" What on Earth was the point of choosing this as an example? To rouse the political emotions of the readers and distract them from the main question? To make Republicans feel unwelcome in courses on Artificial Intelligence and discourage them from entering the field? """ http://lesswrong.com/lw..." - Emmett Shear

"Yes, tons. See "commoditize your compliments". Microsoft is a master of this as well. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/article..." - Emmett Shear

"Treat school like your day job. You only have to be there like 6 hours a day, 5 days a week - it's a pretty easy job." - Emmett Shear

"Quoth the author: In a very dynamic language like Ruby, open classes and method aliasing (e.g., alias_method_chain) mitigate this problem, but they don’t solve it. If you manipulate a class to add logging, all instances of that class will have logging; you can’t take a surgical approach and say “just objects instantiated in this context”. This is not true in Ruby! myinstance = MyClass.new def myinstance.special_method() puts "only on these instances!" end myinstance.special_method()The author's point about avoiding unnecessary binding is well taken, but he should refrain from declaiming on languages he doesn't know that well." - Emmett Shear

"Why don't you like people who do that? (Genuinely curious)" - Emmett Shear