skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ooh, I think you gave me a good idea for a blog topic.

1) You can run multiple A/B tests at the same time without compromising results, if you assume they are independent. Your stats teachers at college will be mad at me for this, but "That is a safe assumption 99% of the time." (Shh!)

2) In terms of prioritizing your time, I wouldn't worry about things you think are likely to be marginal unless they're at key areas in your application where a 1% marginal lift would matter to the business. For example: 1% improvement in observed results of the font selection dialog box: worthless to the business. 1% improvement in the shopping cart: heck yes worth it to the business.

3) We often underestimate how effective certain changes are going to be. If you throw up a test and get statistically insignificant results, that doesn't cost you anything and you still learn something: oh well, learned that users do not empirically think the difference between A and B is supremely compelling. If on the other hand you say "Eh, this is likely to only be a 1% factor" and it turns out to be a 10% factor ("BUTTON TEXT?! WHO CARES ABOUT FREAKING BUTTON TEXT?! TEN FREAKING PERCENT?!"), you'll get statistically significant results and learn very valuable things.
Facebook Overtakes Yahoo: Now the Second Most Visited Site in U.S.
I am currently trying to develop a karma system in our community and can attest to the "leaderboards are bad" observation from personal experience.

"The typical thought-process goes something like this: there's an activity on your site that you'd like to promote; a number of people engaged in that activity who should be recognized; and a whole buncha other people who need a kick in the pants to jump in. Leaderboards seem like the perfect solution."

...were my thoughts exactly. However, virtually the same day that I introduced a leaderboard into the mix, contributions plummeted and have stayed low since. This was a couple of weeks ago. I suspect that the top contributors got their recognition and now have little incentive to continue contributing, while people who found it confusing or did not want to contribute continue staying still. In other words, I got exactly the opposite effect of what I wanted.

"Do not display negative karma." I can attest to that as well. One user is quite controversial in the community and was voted down badly for contributing. Controversial or not, having negative points for trying is really discouraging.

I suppose I should now go and undo those mistakes. A hundred nights more and we'll have our overnight success.
Does HTML+CSS really count as coding?

When I read the title I assumed it referred to HTML+CSS gurus and why they should learn javascript + some server side languages + databases.
Right, but unless you run a gigantic site, can you really test stupid little things like button designs, when you need thousands or even tens of thousands of conversions to have enough data for a meaningful result?

I feel a bit burned, because last test I ran took me a week to set up. I wanted to see if having extra display ads would affect the ratio of people who convert from visitors to repeat visitors. I put new users into groups, and after two days I had 800 people in both groups. Then later on with data in hand I realized that the change wasn't large enough / I didn't have enough people in my test to get a significant result.
Yup, definitely a high five for AquaSoft. I am super-pleased by the manner they have adopted Visual Website Optimizer. They are doing >10 A/B split tests per month and at any given moment 2-3 tests are being run on their site.

People who fear that A/B testing can hurt their revenues in used in _real_ world setting should learn something from AquaSoft as their livelihood depends on their eCommerce store and they are continuously running multiple A/B tests on it.
So, who shouldn't learn to code?
And New Zealand!
We have Colours and such over here.
Not always - a lot depends on your existing conversion rate. See this blog post for details http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/what-yo...
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I was in your shoes years ago. I dropped out of computer engineering and ended up getting a degree in english literature - and I kept improving and learning programming and systems design. Now I am a literature nerd who can also code. That is a tremendous advantage for me since I meet and work with people from all walks of life. The pay is lower outside of the pure CS / programming disciplines but I don't regret it one bit. Hope this helps. Stick with school and maybe think about why you are in that super boring course when you could either go all the way and test out of it / talk your way into upper year courses, or learn something unexpected/unknown.
To me it just looked like a typo and immediately let me think "mhh, when the author can't even spell check his headline, what could the article be worth".

You never should do such things.
> Mozilla and Opera refuse to support H.264

Correction: It's not realistic for Mozilla and Opera to bear the costs of supporting H.264 (nor the bloggers and other typical Web users for encoding and uploading H.264).
The only alternative to 'sham' governments imposed from outside are 'strong men', Saddam, for all his shortcomings functioned remarkably well in that role as did for instance Tito in former Yugoslavia.

Tribal friction needs an equally strong force to overcome it if a country is not to explode into its constituent parts.

So if you remove the strong man once he's established terrible stuff can happen, sometimes worse than what the strong man himself did. (Again, for instance Yugoslavia was definitely not the best country in the world to live in under Tito, but it was a lot better than living in a civil war).
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Amazon introduces Kindle for BlackBerry
I have no problem with Mac and Apple products. I think they look cool and are works of art but I also hate the fact that Apple is trying to close down their system and throwing us back in time.

The future lies or rather should lie in open systems and Apple should respect that. It's not for Apple to decide what a user can download on his iPhone after he has bought the damn phone.

Again they make great products but they must lose some of their Big Brother control. kthxbye.
Pretty awesome. The description is great, but there's one false note: "If you were 'actually' traveling into the fractal your speed would be faster than the speed of light." 2 objections:

a) What is the speed of light in the mandelbrot set? What zoom level do you designate to be 1m?

b) The 'speed' the camera is traveling at is hugely variable. It's basically slowing down by an order of magnitude every constant window of time. So if the final image is 1m wide, you're travelling 10^n's of universes every second at the start. The above sentence doesn't come close to doing this idea justice.

Update: the sentence is from the original at http://vimeo.com/1908224

---

I went over the video a second time to see how often the camera 'steers'. The entire second half drops pretty much straight down a radially symmetrical 'well'. There's 2 obvious changes in bearing between 2 and 5 minutes. In the first 2 minutes it's harder to keep count because much of the time there's no radial symmetry. I suspect the bearing is changing almost constantly.

Summary: the video was made by choosing a point about 2 minutes worth of zoom in, and then pretty much dropping straight down, except for a couple of tacks. Whoever did this was probably trying to maximize the diversity of views; at any point in the video a different tack may have ended up back at something like the starting point much sooner. It's mind-blowing to contemplate.
Unfortunately, there is a certain amount of tedium to life. Whether that is doing the dishes night in/night out, chasing down invoices, doing your taxes, provisioning servers, some things just need to get done. Unless you can pay someone else to do them, then there is the tedium of managing those people, paying them, etc.

Anyone can excel at the things they like. It is highly unlikely you will make it through life isolated to only the things you enjoy. Ultimately, you'll need to learn to take care of business whether you enjoy it or not.

You're almost certain to need credits outside of your major. Even if you enjoy learning, there will be some classes you are going to need to grind through. "Bank" your easy A's now, save those grade points for a rainy day.
The US has in the past effected regime change through assassination, for instance against Fidel Castro.
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Yes, they do. The supposed advantage of a twin engine plane is that you can fly if one quits. The FAA makes you demonstrate that you can handle the plane on one engine before they turn you loose with a twin-engined plane, but the unfortunate reality is that the fatal accident rate for twin engined (small, piston) planes is worse than singles. The problem is that the probability of an engine failure is twice as high in a twin as in a single. In a single, if the engine quits, you're a glider, and the plane is fairly straightforward to handle. As long as you don't hit anything too solid, you'll be OK if you keep the plane under control through the landing. In a twin though, you have to do everything just right, or you can end up out of control and hit the ground nose down and die.

In most light twin planes, both props turn the same direction, and so the plane has a natural left-turning tendency when climbing. If the left engine goes out, you're in a very bad situation, because now the plane really wants to go to the left. If you indulge it, you don't get to go where you want. If you don't, you may get a worse climb rate (which is already very bad.)
Did you even read that comparison before posting about it?

It explicitly disclaims that the only reason Theora won was because of Youtube's utterly awful H.264 encoder--which they have since replaced with x264 for exactly that reason.

gmaxwell, one of the Theora devs and the author of that post, has personally requested that I bonk every single person who makes any claim as to Theora being nearly as good, equal to, or better than H.264, because such claims create expectations which they know they cannot possibly reach. The single worst thing people can do for Theora is to market it based on false claims.

Therefore, BONK.
Oh I know that, I have wasted enough time getting maphacked on battlenet.
Correction: It's not realistic for Mozilla and Opera to bear the costs of supporting H.264

Not quite true. Google pays Mozilla $50m/year; the maximum licensing fee cap is less than 10% of that.

(nor the bloggers and other typical Web users for encoding and uploading H.264).

Uploading and encoding H.264 is free. If you distribute more than 100,000 encoders, you have to pay 20 cents each.
It has crossed my mind that there's a need for a "hacker gigs" sort of job board. It would handle both contract gigs and full-time jobs for hackers, designers and the like, with an emphasis on attracting the sort of people who hang out here.

Quick survey: would you use something like that? To find jobs? To advertise jobs?
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If there is value to designing something that is hard to implement, by all means do so. I don't object to that.

But when there are two designs that are equally good, start with the easier to implement one. If you know how to code, then you'll have a sense which one that is. If not then you'll consistently make things unnecessarily hard to do.
I remember reading his blog a few times. Pretty cool that it landed him a job. Do you know what he does there, exactly?
Yeah but it was much tougher for them than those few guys that were lucky enough to be in the beta. The tournaments that came first couple of years after the game came out were almost exclusively won by beta players, such as Grrr and Maynard. It took some time for the Koreans to come in and start owning everyone.

Now that the most talented Korean pros are guaranteed to be in the beta, good luck out training them.
Why would Google make this acquisition if there was no value in the product, if they intended to do nothing similar, if they could make no use of the work done to date, of the outcome of the experiment, of the experience of the team?

They wouldn't. Google just acquired the leading experts at monetizing search on the iPhone. Can't you see the value in that for Google from many angles?

Everything Google does has to fit Google's scale - and that is at odds with architecting a product at a startup. So you rewrite it, you get the new DNA incorporated into existing product lines, and you move forward.
The original wasn't memorable?
Okay, I followed the instructions in that post, and unless I made a mistake you cannot show an improvement from 10% -> 11% conversion rate if you only had 2000 users to play with.

Let's say that from 1000 visitors I have learned that my conversion rate is 10%. Standard error = 0.00948683298. So with 95% confidence conversion rate is actually between 8.14% and 11.86%. I run an experiment on 1000 visitors and seemingly have a improved conversion rate of 11%. But with 95% confidence it is actually between 9.06% and 12.94%. This heavily overlaps the previous result, so the result isn't significant.

My takeaway from this is that it isn't worthwhile to do very small tests, but it is possible to get reliable results when doing fewer, bigger changes.
It also kept it from aging quite as quickly. I can still play most sprite based super nintendo games, but most n64 games make me gag. Early 3d is pretty hideous.
Although note that even before, git checkout `git merge-base A B` was always possible
Being more than twice your age I can assure you of one thing. You will get these feelings in College, in your job and in your business. Even with your partner wife etc. You need to find a method that works for you to cope.

During College I got terribly bored of lectures and was quite ahead of my class mates - and wouldn't be surprised some of the lecturers. I decided to infrequently attend lectures and studied for exams and assignments only. Piece of cake really to sail through. My social life improved by 1000%. I loved and love learning. I would go into the library and borrow all sort of interesting books from anthropology to physics (even dated one of the librarians). I was fortunate to study in London. Visited all the museums - the patent library (amazing). I worked part-time in a fish-and-chips shop (was a great experience to learn customer service). It was like physically surfing. I even took diving classes and went diving in a reservoir in Scotland. Really if you want not to be bored is easy. Refocus - you are there to earn a degree that is your target. Learning is a different and solo activity.

It is much more difficult if you get these feelings in your work. Again you can channel energy into other activities, you can put research into areas of your job that others consider routine. Changing a job would merely put you into a similar spot once the novelty wears out. Divide your efforts into

- must do
- this is my life things

The must do you do for survival and you handle them as best as you can. In the this is my life things you add the variety.
The beta specifically, or just sc2? The actual game will be mac compatible.
It depends on what you want to do. The college CS curriculum typically is good for teaching students to become professors. If that is what you want, stick to CS.

If you want to go more toward the software engineer approach you have a few options. You can stick with CS, but try to work on actual projects. For example, you can contribute to an open source project or start a company. The main thing is to work on projects that aren't cookie-cutter tasks, such as the ones that are common in school.

Switching majors so you can learn something new is also a great option. What are your other interests? If you do go with the school route, you will probably learn more about problem solving by learning a new field. You can still use your programming skills with many majors.

Another option is to get a job. Frankly, I think college is overrated. School is good, but there it is not the only route. You could probably get a good position at a startup, and will probably learn more than in school.

I didn't get interested in programming until I was a sophomore in college. I graduated with a BS in Engineering Physics. I'm glad I didn't major in CS, and I was still able to pursue software development. You will have plenty of opportunities in school to try new things. I have to say that I have learned more about problem solving (at a faster rate) while in the workforce, than in school.
Ya, those are always fond memories. I remember when the mutalisk still shot a gas cloud... good times
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Finding a good developer/designer is always a hard task, and if someone reads Hacker News it is definitely a plus, but

1. I think it will be hard to find developer in the region you need. For this you better really visit your local group meeting(like JimBastard advised) or some educational institution to find some graduating students.

2.Someone reading Hacker News won't be a good developer/designer every time.
I apologize in advance if any of this is repetitive with things I have said before:

1) There is a difference between what you and I think are really stupid little things and what reality thinks are really stupid little things. For example, I think it is likely that you can (with a suitable A/B testing framework) change a call to action on your site in under five minutes of coding, counting the time to redeploy. Many engineers would consider that a stupid little change. Empirically, exactly that test has resulted in double-digit improvements before. So totally do that.

2) An A/B test which leads to the result "Not enough data to tell" doesn't convey zero information. It conveys an important bit of information: "Well, neither of these two alternatives lit a fire in the hearts of my users." That should give you the ability to recalibrate your efforts in the future.

3) With the context that I run a very part-time business: for the last couple of years I aimed at doing four A/B tests a month and getting a 5% increase out of one of them. If the other three end without significantly significant results, oh well. (See http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo/results -- one in four isn't too far off what I actually get. Nota bene that is a convenience sampling of results I've actually accumulated, not all of them.) Of more applicability to you: you have to accept that A/B testing is a process which converges on awesome rather than a button which is onclick: deliverTheAwesome(). Over time, I promise you, it really does work. (It almost can't not work.) However, individual tests will frequently return null result or tell you that the new code you just spent time writing is a waste.

4) I try to avoid doing tests that take a week to set up unless I have a good reason to suspect it is going to seriously move the needle, because for the same amount of work you can throw a lot of smaller things at the wall and see what sticks. For example, I've put off an A/B test that I absolutely have to do until I am gainfully unemployed just because of the implementation difficulty. (A: current site selling online and downloadable software. B: what are you talking about, thee is only an online version.) Especially if you're new to A/B testing and don't have a good example that you can point to yourself and say "Bemmu, you feel like quitting, but REMEMBER THIS?! Oh good golly that worked out right. Test on!", test some stuff which takes 10 minutes to bang out alternatives for. Conversion buttons, calls to action, positioning of buttons, that sort of thing.

5) "Things that really move the needle" and "things that take a lot of time to implement" do not relate to each other. In fact, they sometimes have so little relation it is hilarious. Ask me how many weeks I have burned in developing features no one cares about versus how many minutes it took to change five words on my purchasing page. ("Buy a single copy via ..." -> "Get instant access to ...") Sure, go ahead and test the button designs. Let reality tell you what matters rather than thinking you have a good idea. I haven't the furthest clue.
I'll be honored if I actually managed to inspire the great patio11 to write a new post :) And yes, I did learn that the thing I was testing doesn't have a very large effect, which was valuable to know.
I would disagree. There are a lot of different kinds of coders out there, and many should not waste their time learning anything about visual design.

For instance I find myself in back end roles. Take my current job. That is a mix of analyzing software for what needs to be monitored, writing said monitoring, and fixing or escalating when said monitoring indicates that something has gone wrong.

Nothing I do comes anywhere near anything resembling an end user. So what point is there in my learning about graphic design?

On the other hand every good person I know who does front end development also knows something of design. If for no other reason than to establish a common language with the designer.

But taking your point one step farther, I think it is important that everyone learn something about the jobs of the people we interact with every day.
Every so often an article crops up discussing Yahoo's popularity, and I am again and again amazed at the fact that so many people still visit Yahoo in general. I haven't used their portal since late 1999, and I don't know many other people who do. There are a few ancient relics out there who still use yahoo mail, but even they seem to be fewer and further between (somehow gmail just appears to be more...professional, My friends would put gmail on their resume, but would not be caught dead with a yahoo mail account... it is akin to a hotmail account for professional purposes)...

I would really love to see a thorough study of yahoo demographics and traffic driven, as well as how much of it is actually through partnerships (in Canada, Rogers partners with yahoo, so they kind of force feed you a lot of their services through the yahoo portals) and not direct yahoo traffic.
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Oh, my: it's the fourth time in less than a month that I'm going to talk about my site, http://job4dev.com

It's free to post listings, provided you give enough information about the company and a good job description.

This site has been online for three years now, but it was only focused on the Brazilian market. Just recently we put a international version. We are working on new features that we hope will make the hiring process smarter, less of a trial-and-error approach.

Even without those features, I'd say without doubt that job4dev is where Brazilian hackers and qualified developers find out about job opportunities, when they can't find them through regular networking.

We want to make the same thing for all of the world, now. We need to break out of the chicken-and-egg problem, and I guess that HN is good place for that.

Please, take a look at the site: feel free to put your listing there, and feedback would be much appreciated.
I think you just described inserting to a SQL view. Never done it myself, but sounds helpful.