Overall I think it's good that we now have a pretty direct way to pay upfront for increased convenience of faster delivery time. This value is akin to the (opportunity) cost of actually going out to physically buy something if you want/need it almost immediately but starting to increase the market of goods beyond just that you can get in local shops.
Minor niggle: They mention the Amazon Prime Now $8 fee for one hour delivery but neglect to mention there is no additional fee for delivery within only two hours. There is of course the recommended "tip" which sits at around 10%, but for a fairer comparison with the other mentioned services generally providing delivery within a day, I think the free option within two hours is more comparable.
Overall I think it's good that we now have a pretty direct way to pay upfront for increased convenience of faster delivery time. This value is akin to the (opportunity) cost of actually going out to physically buy something if you want/need it almost immediately but starting to increase the market of goods beyond just that you can get in local shops.
Minor niggle: They mention the Amazon Prime Now $8 fee for one hour delivery but neglect to mention there is no additional fee for delivery within only two hours. There is of course the recommended "tip" which sits at around 10%, but for a fairer comparison with the other mentioned services generally providing delivery within a day, I think the free option within two hours is more comparable.
Another scenario where this causes issues that a login equivalent can improve: imagine losing your phone including SIM card. This then causes a full interruption of all services tied to that phone number including actual phone service, and SMS, until the SIM is replaced. This usually takes hours/days depending on your location or carrier.
The other big difference in just swapping out sim cards is the need for a full phone reset and the interruption to the service of whomever you're borrowing the phone!
This is the current system, but with "use this physical item, the SIM card, to login".
This does assumes that the replacement phone in question is unlocked so can work on the other SIM card, but is certainly something that many people do quite often.
Kobo evidently are doing some analysis on completion rates, and published a report last year aimed at publishers using analysis based on similar metrics:
This really would be interesting. I'd like to see data on overall completion % for ebooks. Assessing those books which tend to be completed once started would help identify the more interesting books.
Combined with top selling book lists, this would provide a good filter to decide on potential new reads and could form the heart of improved book recommendation services.
Primary compliments I also have in particular for the author is inclusion of a link to source code and the concise but complete and informative "tools used section" describing the process. I wish more analysis (particularly those presented on more reputable news outlets) was presented with a similar section for reproducibility and exposure to analysis techniques.
I also imagined floating point arithmetic problems when seeing the title. What is really happening here is that a, b and c may themselves have different values depending on the operation - as adding a month here isn't a fixed number of days as month lengths differ.
The article states it perfectly at the end though: "When doing math that deals with time, specifically different units of time, it can lead to unexpected results if you are not careful with the ordering". I think this can generally be extended to "when doing any math that deals with time, it can lead to unexpected results if you are not careful with everything"!
I'm also an actuary, but do some coding in my own time. I'm primarily here due to interest on current technology and programming trends and generally interesting articles.
Our team does a lot of analysis programming in R rather than taking the more common Excel/VBA approach. This allows common practices in software development such as version control tools (and the collaboration they can help with), testing, deployment strategies, etc, to be a major part of the usual workflow that would otherwise be missing from the usual speadsheet world so exposure to HN helps promote this in my mind as good practice.
The main draw of HN for me is the consistently high quality of posts and comments. I can be sure that were I to see the same content posted across general news sites, or other aggregators such as Reddit, then HN would be the only place I'd care to look and be certain that I'd also be learning plenty (often more than the original article) from the HN comments alone.
I had thought about that, and/or have it show information about the colour, but decided against it in the end as I really like the single purpose nature of it.
I've also always quite liked the thought of people loading the site for the first time and not being sure if it's finished loading as nothing appears but the background colour, so then refreshing to reload the site, only to see the colour change and realise that the site is exactly what it says it is.
The main problem was being able to still display readable text, which should lead to using another way of visualising the data instead of leading to using an incorrect graphic.
I also looked into using a stacked bar chart to display the information, more information (and code for generating plot, though I didn't put too much time into making it look pretty) here:
http://www.actuarially.co.uk/post/27156208823/smartphone-ope...
