lukas

I run a slightly bigger startup than the one you're at and FWIW, I really appreciate it when employees tell me that they are looking for work elsewhere. If you are an engineer (I assume you are since you are talking/worrying about technical debt) you are extremely employable. You will probably get a much better opportunity if you are able to look around while at your current company. Interviewing behind your companies back can be logistically tough and can lead to a worse offer.

It's possible that your company might march you out the door if you tell them you are leaving. I think this would be a real asshole move and not in their interest but it could happen. If this puts you in a major financial bind it might not be worth the risk, but if you are ok with this I think it is probably better for you to let them know.

I don't think you have an obligation to let them know but I think it's probably in your interest.

Really interesting post.

I think working on Machine Learning algorithms early in my career had a pretty significant effect on how I think about running my business.

The biggest factor by far in a model's quality is the amount and accuracy of the training data. In the same way, people seem to learn in direct proportion to the amount and clarity of the feedback they get.

I think groups of people (i.e. companies) improve as fast as the amount of clear feedback people are giving each other and the amount and accuracy of the feedback they are getting from customers.

Jorge - I'm super biased as the CrowdFlower CEO but we work really hard to make sure everyone gets paid and all disputes are resolved. We have a team of four full time people that do nothing but handle community support tickets and we've paid out many millions of dollars mostly without issues. We moved off of Mechanical Turk a few years ago because it was hard to give workers a consistently good experience there. You can see the twitter stream from our contributors and most of the comments are positive https://twitter.com/search?q=cfcomm&src=typd

We are definitely more expensive than turk, although we have big discounts for small startups that makes us comparable.

lukas at crowdflower.com

Chris - I'm the CEO of CrowdFlower. We're focused on large scale data enrichment tasks which sounds a lot like what you're doing. We have no geographic restriction and lots of european customers.

Unlike mTurk we have a platform usage fee to make our business sustainable and to try to break a downward cycle in our marketplace (ie people posting broken or poorly thought out jobs and making contributors frustrated leading to poor quality work). If you are early stage enough (and it sounds like you are) we will waive the fee. Shoot me an email if you're interested and I'll help you get set up.

I played the Escape from Time Travel Lab as a team building exercise and it was an awesome experience - I totally recommend it. I just wish they would put out more games!

This is a huge achievement. I'm an amature 5-dan (aga) and I would not bet on myself against a 9d pro with a four stone handicap. It's amazing how far computer go has come in the last few years.

CrowdFlower is hiring all types of roles including all levels of engineers and marketing/sales. Interns and H1Bs are welcome. We're growing really fast and making a big difference in people's lives.

Detailed job descriptions are available here: https://crowdflower.com/careers

Yeah, because I went there :). It was super subjective, but I'm sure that changing the details wouldn't change the conclusion.

CrowdFlower - San Francisco, CA (Mission District) INTERN, REMOTE, H1B all OK.

We are changing the way the world works by sending millions of tasks a day around the world to our network of millions of people. You can learn more at http://crowdflower.com/company

We're hiring front end and back end engineers (Rails/Bootstrap/Hadoop/etc). Also hiring account management, sales, marketing and admin. You can check out our jobs page here http://crowdflower.com/company/jobs.

We're hiring at CrowdFlower! Lots of positions but I especially like the "Everything Web Engineer Extraordinaire" position http://www.jobscore.com/jobs/crowdflower/everything-web-engi...

Intern, Remote, H1B all fine.

Ask about our unlimited Otter Pop policy.

San Francisco (Mission) CrowdFlower http://crowdflower.com intern, remote, h1b all welcome.

We are the worlds leading microtask company. We send literally millions of small jobs to people around the world every day. Our technology platform helps our customers design great tasks and ensure that people working on the tasks do good work. Someone said it's like map reduce but with people :).

We are hiring all types of technical people from operations to front end to machine learning experts. You can check out our exact engineering job descriptions here https://crowdflower.com/about/jobs but if you are smart and technical and want to tangibly change the world every day then we want to talk to you.

email resumes at crowdflower.com or email me directly at lukas at crowdflower.com.

Anyone that liked that story should pick up a copy of Mathenauts - an anthology of Mathematics themed short stories put together by Rudy Rucker. Many of the stories have a similar feel to that one. You can find it on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Mathenauts-Mathematical-Wonder-Rudy-Ru...

We're hiring lots of positions at crowdflower. We've built the largest crowd sourced workforce and are growing quickly (team, revenue, etc.). We're based out of the mission in San Francisco but we can do remote in some cases and h1b is no problem. We also love interns. Most critical positions are full-stack ruby engineer and dev ops.

Email me at lukas@crowdflower.com.

San Francisco (Mission) H1B

CrowdFlower

We are hiring frontend and backend engineers. We use Rails, Postgres, Redis, R, etc.

Familiarity with Crowdsourcing or machine learning a plus. Help us give everyone in the world access to jobs.

Shoot me an email at lukas at crowdflower.com if you'd like to learn more.

I'm not sure what an optimal minimum wage would be, but surely there should be some minimum wage. Simple thought experiment: if one person or corporation controlled all the world's resources, should they be able to pay everyone some vanishingly small delta above zero? In that case a minimum wage would only increase everyone's wages and make the marketplace fairer.

Obviously on the other hand, minimum wage increases can certainly reduce jobs.

I run a company called CrowdFlower that provides quality control on top of Mechanical Turk and other pools of workers from traditional outsourcing companies to offerwalls (where people earn in game credits for doing our tasks).

I think this article doesn't reflect everyone's experience with Mechanical Turk. We get lots of high quality work out of Mechanical Turk and lots of other companies do as well. It does take a fair amount of work to get the quality right - that's how we got started as a business and that's why many people still come to us.

As an aside, if the author of the article is reading this thread and wants data, we would be happy to talk about it.

I've been getting a little more back into go lately. Online games are hard for me for some reason and I like to play slower than most people on kgs.

Back when I was active I was an AGA 5dan (probably 6dan in japan). If anyone in SF wants an in-person game I'd love to play - shoot me an email at lukas@crowdflower.com. Our office has a couple learning go players and our janitor might be around 1 dan.

"how long it can take for new entrepreneurs to win their first meeting with an angel or venture group" - has anyone had trouble getting meetings with angels or venture groups? In my experience this is the only easy part of running a startup.

SMS prices are much, much cheaper in the developing world. I've heard you can get cellphone data plans in africa for less than a dollar a month?

What does an iteration mean? I can do about 2million shas/process with just the cpu. I think CUDA is much faster.

We made a leaderboard with the best recent submissions, in case anyone is interested: http://shacontest.doloreslabs.com/leaderboard.txt

Sorry! A major lesson I learned from this exercise is how painful it is to package an app for many different platforms/setups.

Thanks to everyone who got it running - it's really cool to watch the results pouring in.

Haha, nice work guys -- great minds. We made: http://shacontest.doloreslabs.com - same approach but server side.

I upvoted you :).

Looks like a fun site. Anyone want to try playing me? My email is lukeb@cs.stanford.edu. I'm a 5dan (aga) but I haven't played for years.

I'm surprised there's so much negativity about this post. Alan Turing made huge contributions to mathematics and philosophy.

But not only that, he was a war hero. How many other people in the 20th century contributed so much to the world on both practical and theoretical levels?

And the British Government drove him to suicide for no good reason.

I think his story deserves far more recognition.

Hey - I left a post on your blog, but I don't agree with your assessment. Generating a similar shape with a random process doesn't imply that our data is has no signal, and if you actually lay out the graphs side by side you'll notice that our graph is somewhat shifted to the right.

Great idea guys! If you have to time to come up to SF you should definitely drop by our Crowdsoucing Labor/Mechanical Turk meetup on June 10th. You can RSVP here: http://www.meetup.com/Amazon-Mechanical-Turk-Crowdsourcing-W...

The Amazon VP of Mechanical Turk is going to come by to answer questions, and I'm sure she would love to talk to you all.

It's fair to say that the chart is meaningless in terms of "what's a good programming language?". But there is clearly different sentiment about the different languages on twitter, and the differences are statistically significant. From a market research point of view, I think there's an interesting signal here.

It's a fair criticism, but the nice thing about analyzing Twitter is that the data is already there. Polling has its own set of issues - how do you randomly and uniformly sample from the pool of programmers? It's probably not something you could do for a quick fun blog post.