In addition to common things like UI elements, Netflix even A/B tests site performance aspects to see how they affect user behaviour!
https://www.quora.com/What-types-of-things-does-Netflix-A-B-test-aside-from-member-sign-up
miniblog.
"phones, thanks to their centrality in people’s lives as well as the greater likelihood of harm, will always have a faster replacement cycle than PCs"
https://stratechery.com/2019/apples-errors/
(Sales and strategy analysis for Apple.)
One web design style that seems to have become unfashionable: external link icons:
External Page ⍈
I think it's because links are already distracting, and adding icons doesn't help. An email icon is still handy for mailto: links, as they don't open in the browser.
The Stockfish chess engine requires patches to pass a test: it must beat the old version a sufficient proportion of the time.
This introduces an interesting problem: what if a patch set makes it stronger, but applied individually they make it worse?
Which MOOC platforms are the most popular, according to Kaggle users? https://www.kaggle.com/ogakulov/the-mooc-wars-kaggle-s-perspective
Designing online systems so that groups of people are smarter than individuals is not easy. The first collaborative chess games weren't very strong. In Kasparov vs The World, organisers ensured there were several strong players and online discussions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov_versus_the_World
The likelihood of technology problem having a good FOSS solution seems to be roughly
how passionate people get about it x how fun it is to work on x friction when contributing
I'm intrigued to learn that some Stockfish developers think that it would beat AlphaZero under conventional rules for chess engine competitions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero#Reactions_and_criticisms
Even if that's fair, AlphaZero is still a very impressive demonstration of their ML approach.
On building business models on top of open source projects: https://medium.com/@johnmark/open-source-business-models-considered-harmful-2e697256b1e3
(Different things have been tried historically, but businesses need to provide value! FOSS is not necessarily a business opportunity.)
Allowing users to redefine anything at any point has far reaching design consequences, and has helped lisp/Smalltalk IDEs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16586347
"for the most part, our members are watching two-and-a-half episodes at a time"
"Our members tend to start with one show and finish it."
Data driven decisions for Netflix when producing content!
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-features/why-netflix-dramas-sag-midseason-cindy-holland-interview-707986/
TIL Mosaic was not the first web browser, but it played a pivotal role in popularising the world wide web and making it accessible to normal computer users.
Programming languages differ massively in the range of numeric types they offer.
For example, Rust has an extensive selection, targeting machine word sizes and FP hardware (isize, i32, f64) plus unsigned variants.
On New Year's Eve, my family prefers making predictions about the coming year rather than resolutions.
We found this wonderful article of people 100 years ago also making predictions about today, some surprisingly accurate! https://futurism.com/2018-looking-back-century
Insightful article on the economics of Netflix's content business model, and how users consume it differently to historical content providers: https://redef.com/original/netflix-isnt-being-reckless-its-just-playing-a-game-no-one-else-dares-netflix-misunderstandings-pt-3
Refusing to implement impossible features: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050607-00/?p=35413
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