elq's comments

On: How Netflix Reinvented HR

[elq]

re: friends - I think people are just put off by Patty's "we manage the company like a sports team, not a family" philosophy.

[jedberg → elq]

That's probably true, but even the sports guys are friends. :) Even when they get traded and have to play against each other.

[weisser → elq]

I'd say the best sports teams share a close bond of friendship. Look at the Red Sox this year. They came back after two dismal seasons to win the World Series and the team culture was largely responsible for that. Little was expected from most of these players but the right group of people can make the seemingly impossible happen.

On: How Netflix Reinvented HR

[elq]

I've been at Netflix for close to 6 years.

Working there, IMHO, is no more demanding than any other company.

There are no bonus', the salary is just raised - the average pay for engineers at Netflix is something like $200k which is fairly competitive to the "total compensation" from other employers.

I might be wrong here, but being treated like an adult, a very liberal vacation policy, and 100% support for anything and everything I need to do my job; are more valuable than what most people consider perks...

And they're certainly not a "uncle scrooge" culture - I've never once had to justify a purchase and as far as I can tell unless you're asking for something odd or fairly expensive (>5k or so) manager approval isn't even needed.

Anyone's experience at Netflix is going to be heavily influenced by their manager, and sadly, Netflix doesn't seem to be much better than any other company at finding or growing good managers.

[mackwic → elq]

Thank you for your feedback. It helps to understand.

On: How Netflix Reinvented HR

[elq]

There are no regular firings at Netflix. If a manager is really happy with all of their team, there is no pressure to rank everyone and can the lower n%. This alone suggests that it's most certainly not like stack ranking.

On: Netflix uses FreeBSD 9.0

[elq]

> Netflix could port the DRM if they wanted to

I'm pretty sure the DRM used in the Netflix silverlight player is Microsoft's "PlayReady", so no... Netflix can't port it if they want.

On: Linear algebra tutorial in four pages

[elq]

Gilbert Strang made a great series of lectures on the big ideas of calculus sans most of the computation - http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBE9407EA64E2C318

On: Deep Learning 101

[elq]

Math. math. math.

Linear algebra. Bayesian statistics. MUST know these inside out, upside down.

Vector calculus. Convex optimization.

A boatload of machine learning literature. The ideas coalescing into deep learning are based more than a decade of research.

If you know nothing about math... I can't imagine getting to the point of understanding deep learning (which is a fairly rapidly evolving area) without at least 2-3 years of very hard work.

This class is a reasonable attempt to give a quick intro to one major source for DBNs https://www.coursera.org/course/neuralnets understanding this course is a good benchmark.

On: Google apps whitelist hardcoded into Chromium open...

[elq]

They were apparently trying to understand performance issues with adblock, so they can fix them...

  // TODO(mpcomplete): remove the extension-related histograms after we collect
  // enough data. http://crbug.com/100411
  
  const bool use_adblock_histogram =
      ChromeContentRendererClient::IsAdblockInstalled();

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=100411

On: Yahoos Bristle at Mayer’s New QPR Ranking System a...

[elq]

Yahoo isn't exactly an attractive company to many developers now, IMHO.

[cantankerous → elq]

Yeah I'd tend to agree. Given the press about the company, I can't say legions of talented developers are beating down the Yahoo's door to get in.

On: Nexus 5

[elq]

There are no free nights and weekends with this plan.

On: High-res Nexus 5 official Press shot

[elq]

LTE is based on GSM.

The specs found in FCC docs for what is believed to be this phone suggests that the phone contains radios that support the Sprint network which is CDMA, but does not support the Verizon LTE band.

Perhaps in the not so distant future VoLTE will be common and phones will be, conceptually at least, portal across any network.