"computers" entries

Four short links: 23 May 2014

Four short links: 23 May 2014

Educate Users, Hardware by the Numbers, Humans Beating Computers, Hadoop's Uncomfortable Fit

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | May 23, 2014
  1. How to Educate Users (Luke Wroblewski) — help new users in your app, not in a video.
  2. Hardware By The Numbers (Renee DiResta) — slides from her keynote at the Solid conference. The mean success rate across all sectors is 19.8%. On average, only 10% of hardware startups raise a second round.
  3. Humans Beating Computers (Wired) — Newman assembled a small team that became known as the “Air Divers”–the people who would dive deep into the individual complaints and surface with answers. Each was given a couple hundred support tickets connected to a specific issue that the data had identified as a hot-button topic. They would go off and read through each one, then come back and propose a fix. And in the end, this is what turned the situation around. Sometimes it’s easier to put people on the job than try to code the data analysis.
  4. Hadoop’s Uncomfortable Fit in HPC — Hadoop is being taken seriously only at a subset of supercomputing facilities in the US, and at a finer granularity, only by a subset of professionals within the HPC community.