skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just get the impression that someone who wants to do A/B testing after reading this article will just create a different version of the website, and probably analyze the average of the results in each version and end up deciding solely on that.

Hope they don't miss the second point of the do's, it should be more emphasized:

> Don’t conclude too early. There is a concept called “statistical confidence” that determines whether your test results are significant (that is, whether you should take the results seriously). It prevents you from reading too much into the results if you have only a few conversions or visitors for each variation. Most A/B testing tools report statistical confidence, but if you are testing manually, consider accounting for it with an online calculator.

By the way, Excel can do it.
Why is everyone obsessed with AB testing sign up button color? Sure, it's easy to test, but it's such a tiny factor, in amongst huge things like copywriting, page layout and the inter-page structuring of user journeys...
Startups in India making web-apps. Don't carve a niche
If I am talking to a current customer, I bend over the upper right corner.

Maybe I've been living too long in Japan, but this made me cringe.
That's because that is the most "oh-wow" example you can give to a person who has never tried AB testing before. Lot of people still don't do A/B testing because they either don't know about it or they don't think it works. Sign up button color examples works well for educating both types of people.
I agree, the article seems to be going nowhere. It is neither criticising, praising or analysing but rather tell a mundane story with no conclusion to speak of.

The author himself doesn't seem to be overly concerned with the iDevice's accessibily as the last sentence states.
Dropbox has a music player now?
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I work with large 3D models in my day job.

Hmm, maybe I should switch the competition's product to use software rendering, and I'll use OpenGL/DirectX, for side-by-side comparisons.

Wow, I'm "destroying" my competition...
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I've lived in the area for three years, and I have to agree. There's isn't nothing in the Valley, but there isn't a lot, either, It really is kind of a wasteland of suburban homes with office parks. It's definitely not particularly interesting for tourists.Very bad public transit (Caltrain is better than nothing, but...), and fairly poor ratio of things to see to miles of suburban wasteland to drive through. SF isn't my favorite city either, but it beats the Valley by miles at least!
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Can web app revenue stay stable or do web apps that make at least $1000 profit/month "doomed" to eventually grow substantially?

The user base of most web apps is driven largely by epidemic effects: Most new users are "infected" by a previous user, either as a feature of the application (e.g., paypal's create-an-account-to-receive-your-money) or via old-fashioned word of mouth. As such, the growth should look approximately like a logistic curve.

In general it takes at least 5 years to reach the saturation point on the logistic growth curve; google reached that point a few years ago, and facebook is reaching it now. Prior to that point, you're still growing approximately exponentially.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying: If it takes you 5 years to reach $1k/month in profits, you might end up staying there; but if you can reach $1k/month in 2 years, you're probably going to end up a lot bigger than that.
I've never been to a HN meetup before - I'm looking forward to this.

Anyone bringing laptops to show off their work?

If you're interested in Tornado or realtime in general, I'd love to talk.

Also, if you have a good graphic design contact with knowledge of web fonts, bring them (or their contact details) along!
The author is asking Apple to dismiss its business logic which has made Apple the best.

What kind of an answer did he seriously expect?
Don't feed the troll (_delerium).
These SJ responses to email seem to be passing the Turing test (for now). I've thought about how many are automated one-liners, like this one, based on some context-aware text processing algorithms.
Wow, a one-line, canned, non-answer from Steve Jobs is good enough to warrant an article that makes the front page here these days.

Come on people, really?
Mobile developers stampeding to tablets, Appcelerator finds
How Wi-Fi Drains Your Cell Phone
True, true.

Wonder what the result would be if the video maker had tried using the WebGL extension... if this FishIE thing supports it.
This wouldn't necessarily have to be a web app. If you are talking "web" then it could be any monetized site. This could be a blog, informational site, simple ecommerce or even a collection of a number of each of the above to combine for the amount that you are looking at. Of course, you are likely going to have a smaller upside with a blog than you would with a web app. In other words, TechCrunch (a blog running on Wordpress) is a successful tech news site but it doesn't have the same potential as Facebook.

I don't see why there would have to be a high failure rate for web apps which might bring in 1 - 2K per month. That's a business and as long as it's paying for it's cost and your time then there would be no reason for it to fail other than flagging interest of the owner. That range for two developers with no other income would be a problem, but for someone who spends a few hours a week on the app and has a day job, then it might be a nice income boost.
> that's the nature of society

Haha. Exactly. I think you don't really believe what you read about other societies where this is/was common. And the police are a component of society, but is just having some policemen around enough to prevent crime? If so, I'd be selling you a great Russia investment story.
The Apple Threat to Online Advertising
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Reading this i was wondering if any HN-ers based in Scotland are willing to get together and do a similar meetup?
You only hear people complaining about something on the internet when it doesn't work. So it always sounds like every product launch, ever, is a complete failure. Apple's especially, since they're high-profile.

So here's an opposing anecdote for you: my iPhone 4 is completely fine. No problems at all.
The thing is, there are tons of different and case specific physical disabilities. What works for some of them, doesn't work for the others.

But anyway that's no excuse, they could create some accessibility mode based on an keyboard shortcuts for the iPad for instance. Most of the games wouldn't work though, and the web experience wouldn't be that great, but it would be a start.
Just for the record, the example in that article is not about serif vs sans-serif. That was just the simplest example possible. The "Ew" means, "it didn't do what the standard spec says it was supposed to," NOT "I don't like serif fonts".

Whether or not ePub lets a book designer choose a font is not up to Apple. ePub is a published standard that Apple pretends to support. The point of the article is that Apple lets book designers choose fonts for many elements in a book, but not all. This is completely non-standard and will lead to hacks.

Whether you would like Apple to choose 6 fonts for you to choose from, or book designers to offer different choices is completely beside the point. Or at the very least, a very different point.
I believe it's known as Campbell's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Law
Write your whole stack in JavaScript with Node.JS
Is this a big deal? I don't know enough about nanotech to tell.
I have not seen a software project where there is not enough work for somebody.

What I've found useful, and which worked reasonably well for teams which have been working over a period of time together is to collectively estimate complexity of tasks that must be completed.Say on a scale of 1-5. That gives you a reasonably agreeable scale of measurement (not a universal scale, but the one that the team accepts). As time progresses, you see how many such tasks are completed by any person in a given time frame.

Not that this is foolproof, or that it works right from the beginning of a project, but over a period of time, you tend to get a good sense of how productive each member is.

[Edit: Typo fixed]
Has anyone created a magic steve-email-response ball yet?
I didn't even know Evernote had an API... but now that I do I will check it out.

Not related - but this is one of the sweetest sushi menus I've ever seen: http://findmaden.dk/menu/438b98d9-989e-4ea2-8bc0-46e4b6eca27...
Didn't know there was slang for that, had to look it up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_rape_drug

"flunitrazepam, also known as Rohypnol or "roofies""
I'm pretty sure large batches of phones that lose signal when held is a defect. I'm glad you can't reproduce it, it means that not all phones are defective. Many of the videos show the phones going from full bars to 1 or zero. This is not finicky but a defect.
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The psychological trauma will probably still be the same regardless of the actual time.
I'll be there, probably a little earlier, around 5pm.

Will have a "Hacker's Delight" book on me, which should be a pretty good sign. ;)
I'm using Clojure for my PhD thesis project, implementing a distributed computing framework for building P2P applications. I've also been creating an audio synthesis and musical live-coding system, available here:

http://project-overtone.org

Clojure has without a doubt been the most eye opening language I've learned in the last 10 years. I highly recommend giving it a try. It has powerful yet incredibly simple to use constructs for dealing with state in a multi-core world, and I think it far surpasses everything else out there today for parallel programming. The centerpiece being a built-in software transactional memory system that enables composable, deadlock free, multi-threaded coordination.

Beyond solid support for concurrency, the standard library provides an elegant set of programming tools that will make you realize how even expressive languages like python and ruby make you jump through lots of unnecessary hoops. In Clojure you represent everything with basic maps, sets and sequences, and the standard library has extensive tools for manipulating these things. (By the way, your code is also available for manipulation with these same tools.)

Macros let you peel away every last bit of boiler plate, and what you realize is that in the end all of programming is just arithmetic, iteration, branching, and assignment. Everything else is just getting in the way of your core logic. I think Clojure lets you get to the center of your problem with the least overhead possible.
Guess I need to re think my argument then eh?
Sounds pretty decent, although there is still the problem that it doesn't tell you if someone is slacking off or is simply not very fast.
I find it hard to argue that piracy is beneficial. I am of the mind that intellectual property rights are currently inadequate from my own experiences in patent law.

My main beef is that the RIAA and MPAA have a defunct business model and they are wielding the U.S. legal system as a tool to punish non-violent criminals severely.
Yikes, this is the typical silliness that seems to be the post-web 2.0 trend. Rather than people coming up with new ideas and new ways to make companies, they do something derivative, spend a lot of time in design, then rush to san fransisco to huddle in with the other masses of 20-26 year old MIT/Stanford graduates who are following all the VCs and Angels on twitter.

I thought being an entreprenuer was about being free, and not about confining yourself to a certain space and trying to meet the expectations of certain people, who are only trying to maximise THEIR profit? What's the difference to a job then, apart from the potential stakes?
If you want more information you might want to look at the High Scalability
web site "http://www.highscalability.com. They discuss a lot of issues
related to big, high-performance web sites, and how they scale. Some of the
posts are also relevant to smaller sites that want to improve scalability,
without investing in expensive hardware upgrades.
Amazon’s Chief Scientist on "WeBusiness" (Web 3.0)
It was more than a non-answer.

Steve knows what's best for Apple. It's his company.

Making multiple versions is not what makes apple's products stand out. It's not something that makes them special. Making multiple versions would dilute Apples core products & business logic.
Noone (in US or UK) is bothered when I write notes on business cards I receive, so I get the impression folding would be fine too.
What about language acquisition? I think it's quite established that ability goes down with age. My experience seeing retired people (with plenty of free time) taking language classes is that they take quite a bit more time to achieve the same results. Pronunciation is especially hard to fix.
You should also read Charlie Mungers - "Poor Charlies Almanack". Charlies essays discuss incentive design and biases in human psychology.

http://www.poorcharliesalmanack.com/

The first step in creating a system which exploits biases is to understand all the biases humans are subjected to.

I also recommend tversky and kahneman's works for understanding incentive structures.

Its a fascinating field, hope you have fun!
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Nickolas Zakas' Slideshare presentation mainly covers the four areas of performance and goes deep into it, while my aim was to cover as many aspects as possible (not restricting it only to JavaScript) and add brief description wherever I could. Also, when we talk about performance, we usually talk about milliseconds - so if doing something shows even slightest improvement on at least one of the browser (e.g. accessing object properties by dot notation works faster on Safari and doesn't make difference on other browsers), it helps in keeping a watch on that practice. Even JSLint does the same.
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Chrome's acceleration is not of the entire page. It is only acceleration of things like 3D transforms and a few other things.
The advantage of XHTML over JSON is that you don't need a specialized client to work with it. You can use the browser, which is a general-purpose client, and that will benefit you hugely during development and testing. There's a whole world of tools for testing web pages, both browser-based and library-based, and all of that can be used with your service if you use xhtml representations.

>Nope. In JSON only strings are strings. Numbers, booleans and null are Javascript numbers, booleans and null.

I assume you've looked at a JSON message. On the wire, it's all strings. Null is represented by the four characters n, u, l, and l. It's the message parser that turns that into a real null, and an XML parser can do that too.

I'm not saying that JSON doesn't have an advantage when your client language is javascript, but even in javascript the best-practice is to use a real parser for JSON rather than just eval. If you've got to use a real parser anyway, you can also use the xml parser that's built into the browser. Combined with a library like jQuery which gives you xpath-like retrieval it's pretty easy:

<div id="article">
<dl>
<dt>Title: </dt><dd id="title">Adventures in JSON land</dd>
<dt>Authors: </dt><dd id="authors">
<ul>
<li class="name">Jane Doe</li>
</ul>
</dd>
<dt>Published:</dt><dd id="published">false</dd>
<dt>Tags:</dt><dd id="tags">
<ul>
<li class="tag">JSON</li>
<li class="tag">Javascript</li>
<li class="tag">data format</li>
</ul>
</dd>
</dl>
</div>

Retrieve that into msg, and then:

$("#title", msg) -> "Adventures in JSON land"
$("#authors:first .name", msg) -> "Jane Doe"
$("#tags li", msg).length -> 3

To be fair, an extra step is needed for turning true, false, and null into real boolean and null values. That's a solvable problem, and so is turning the xhtml into a javascript object just like the JSON parser does if that's what you want.

Also, notice that I recommended the service be able to produce BOTH json and xhtml. Special-purpose clients can use the json representation, and general-purpose clients can use the xhtml representation. That gives you the best of both worlds, and the code that produces either/or from an internal data structure is easy and small so it's not likely to introduce inconsistencies between the two representations.
FWIW, my boss is a wheelchair bound c4-5 quadriplegic with limited use of his hands, and he recently got rid of his MacBook 'cause the buttonless multitouch trackpad didn't work for him, but he's loving his iPad...
We have a freemium model, and yes I'm saying 10% conversion to the free plan. From there we try and convert them to premium.
Zuckerberg has "Total Control" over Facebook
You're confusing the issue exactly the same way Biden is doing it. I'm pretty sure that you do know that "authentic" does not mean "made to the proper spec" and that you didn't write this out of ignorance. That's exactly the stretch I'm talking about.

Yes, I do care that my Pink Floyd CD is authentic, because I would be pissed off to find out that I shelled out money for Pink Floyd studio album and got a recording of my neighbor singing in the shower or a recording of a Pink Floyd live performance. But that doesn't really have much to do with piracy. In this case we're talking about fraud, not illegal distribution.

Interestingly enough, the situation is not that much different when it comes to material goods, like Xanax or Kevlar vests. If my doctor told me to buy Nexium and I decided to do exactly what he said and buy that particular brand and a pharmacy sold me a knock-off, I would be pissed off because I paid for Nexium (as opposed to a cheaper pill with the exact same dose of esomeprazol). I would be pissed off because I was scammed. I would definitely not be pissed off that Nexium's brand was infringed by whoever made the knock-off.

I do realize that there's a cause-effect relationship there: if it was difficult for people to copy someone else's brand, I would be safer from that kind of fraud. But it's a long way from recognizing that relationship and putting the piracy and counterfeits in the same bag.
So we both agree that society is good.

I'm not sure how society being beneficial makes it wrong profit from making something (if that's what you're saying - to be honest, I'm not suite sure).
Where in the Midlands? and, yeh, I'd be up for it (depending on the locale
I have a blackberry - not a fanboy. I've watched multiple videos where data transfer rates dropped significantly when the antennae are touched in the same way making me think this is not just a software problem. Either way, software problems are big too - this is what tech blogs do.

edit: go check out Apple fanboy blogs/forums... you'll see panic there as well.
This has been demo'd a long time ago already [1], and it seems they haven't done anything yet ? Wtf.

[1] http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/massive-twitter-cross-site-scri...
That is sweet. Thanks.
There's no magic, web apps don't just take on a life of their own.

To build a web business takes a lot of hard work, dedication and persistence, just like anything else in this world that's worthwhile.
Wow, interesting analysis. But don't you this it is a too generic statement? A lot depends on type of product and type of market.
No, that was not it.

http://camworld.org/screwed/
http://camworld.org/screwed/oprah
The basic steps for this are: store everything in UTC, do all arithmetic in UTC, store user's timezone info and convert to that at the last second. Python does not have built-in TZ information so you need pytz installed.
Yes, there are quite a few sites that make 1/2000$/m, and yes, you rarely hear of them. That's not to say it's easy. It does tend to take some time to get there (ie. a few years).
In many countries, 1/2000$/m is a full time income, not just a nice income boost :)
Still a good analysis of using the security by obscurity model for URL's
Rob Pike Interview On Software Engineering (2004)
A bit of hyphenation does wonders. I put together some code to add it to NSString: http://blog.tupil.com/adding-hyphenation-to-nsstring/
Or maybe...wait for it...you're just incredibly defensive about Apple and/or your new iPhone 4? And the story (sorry, "story", as you put it) started at Macrumors, not at Gizmodo, though it's humorous that you try to discount it because of the Giz connection.

There is nothing remarkable about a new product having issues. What matters here is that there's some mythology about Apple perfection that just isn't (and has NEVER been) backed by actual reality. So far there's the breakable unbreakable screen, the easily scratched unscratchable back, serious colour issues in the screen, and a possible antenna issue (hey, who ever holds a phone in their hand? BTW - Is Jobs left handed?), and that's among a very small number of pre-shipments. We shall see.
Thx for thinking about it. I do make profiles of people, from Crunchbase and other sources, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=gabriel+weinberg

But I haven't ever written anyone about them. I know people search for their names, so I can only imagine they are not compelling enough right now to share. Not sure if there is a way to make them so.
WIND mobile was fine.
Every time I show off Visual Website Optimizer it knocks socks off versus the product from the big ad company.)

A tangential question: Do you have any similar recommendation for an Analytics tool that knocks socks off vs the free product from the big ad company?

I know there are several competitors out there, but I haven't heard the pitch yet that would lead me to switch.
The spend was $24.83. The second picture was a possible spend for one campaign, but since most were denied then it didn't actually spend that money.
I'd venture out to say that we just don't hear about the smaller web-based businesses that make good money, because they aren't making millions or have millions of users (mainstream tech media only covers businesses like these). Similarly, a big VC deal is a sure way to get noticed.

So yes - I truly believe that is possible to build small, sustainable web-based businesses selling a digital product or service of sorts. And if you're clever about running your idea as a business, then there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to quit your day job in favour of working for yourself.