skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is of particular interest to me. I spend a good deal of my time as a young single guy immersed in technology and hacker culture. However, when I'm around women or trying to meet women, I instinctively will only discuss generalities as in "I write web applications" and leave it at that unless they are adamant about finding out more, which very rarely occurs.

I'm not necessarily saying this is a bad thing but at the end of the day it does feel kind of bad to feel the need to push a pretty big part of your personality off into the corner because a majority of the women you'll meet don't care and will get annoyed if they have to hear about it. Nothing feels worse than telling a story and watching your audience dart their eyes, grow bored and try to think of ways to feign interest.
Ask HN: The Funnel start of Conversion Rate Optimizing?
First questions is: should every web start-up and SEO company always start by building the funnels first and then try to improve the rings in these funnel and the total visitors before doing anything else. And should therefor my web start-up have a funnel tool as part of the service?

Background:
I got a web start-up Reedge.com that I build because I had a problem increasing conversion on my lead generation company I used to have. We now got a beta with nice multivariate testing, a/b testing, user segmentation, behavioral targeting options etc. So in general we got all the features I needed and it eventually turned into a business since... well Omniture at that time I could not afford and is to complex, so I thought others had the same problem.

Now we improved many parts of of our site and many clients. We realize thanks to some articles that we need a funnel to actually start putting all these tests in perspective. A winning test looks like WOW we got 40% more conversion on this landing-page, but what is the impact on the whole site?

So to prove that Reedge is making you money and show how much... I guess we need a funnel inside Reedge.com. Its a simple addition but it changes a lot of the focus. But I feel now everything starts making sense. The funnel is what its all about using Reedge.com. The tests are just tools to get increase in conversion (in the funnel).

But it implies I entering the area of KISSmetrics and Mixpannel

Second question is then: is the market large enough for more funnel en optimizing companies?

Love to hear your thoughts on this?

Dennis
Just noticed the historical chart at the bottom. It seems that practice of releasing updates is definitely increasing - at the beginning of the year, the average version was actually _decreasing_, as already obsolete 1.5 and 1.6 phones were presumably being sold faster than updates were being released. However, it does look like you're still likely to be left in the cold if you've got something other than a HTC or Motorola (particularly an LG - suckers!) or in some cases even if you live outside the US.

Also, that's a survey of the android market, which will be slightly skewed towards newer handsets (i.e. people who've had their android for a year probably have every app they might use already)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722
As pragmatic realist moves go, it is a great deal less cynically capitulatory than it could be. The part of the compromise that, by their previous words and actions, they could be reasonably thought to be more against is purposefully limited in scope and time.

The way I read it is that they are playing a move in the game which they hope gets a win in one area, with that move only costing their allowing another player to stall in another area. As compromises go, your limited win for their limit stall sounds pretty good to me. It is a lot better than the pragmatic capitulation of your limited win for their limited win. Descriptions of this as "they are selling out" are miss-characterizing this proposal and missing that difference.
Analyzing the increasing length of baseball games with R
I'm also interested in this, and in case you don't mind sending it to me too: colin.f.drake -at- gmail

Maybe you should also consider posting it? It seems like many people would appreciate it here!
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1Zw50qP...
isn't merchant account US only?

Seems like a pretty significant disadvantage for an internet business.
This proposal has been endorsed by Google, Verizon, and AT&T.
That's actually a big purpose of church. If you're Catholic, you go to church functions hoping to find a nice Catholic boy/girl to marry; if you're Mormon, you go to church functions hoping to find a nice Mormon boy/girl to marry; etc.
My guess is that most phones that are still on 1.5 or 1.6 will never be updated to 2.1 or 2.2

If the phone is 2.1 now, it will probably get 2.2 by the end of the year.
Meeting peak electric demands by storing power as liquid oxygen
Allowing a stall as part of a compromise is not the same as giving up.
You have a much greater amount of faith in Verizon and the public than I do.
New Site Bubbalon To Be As Big As Twitter
The bigger problem is music. If you have shuffle on you can get pretty big variations in loudness.
ISS in front of the Moon - Wonderful amateur photographs
If you know your target's DPI, that doesn't sound to me like "the web."
That's being an Ambivert. You and I both.

Ambiversion is a term used to describe people who
fall more or less directly in the middle and exhibit
tendencies of both groups. An ambivert is normally
comfortable with groups and enjoys social interaction, but
also relishes time alone and away from the crowd.
And everything priced at $499 or more. Why buy the cheap brand if it is just as expensive as the brand with the "Apple tax"?

The movie would be called "iPod Killers II" and be just as bad.
Do I have to have a Social Security number and driver's
license with a photo to sign up?

Yes. You can use a passport as an alternative to a
driver's license.

I assume that means you are not operating outside of the US?
that's not a view, it's a simple matter of history.

as for the future they say: "for now, while Congress keeps a watchful eye."
A chat with head of developer relations for BlackBerry
Mike Kirkup talks about OS 6, the Torch, and the new APIs for BlackBerry's clean-break platform.
Does anyone have experiense selling to Chenese users or companies ?

We have a large cluster of users in China for our mobile software (freeware), but we have not an idea how to monetize them. The basic paid-for services we offer are off the use for them and as it was pointed out in the article, it's kind of futile to sell anything to Chinese persons directly.
Or a smaller one.
Strategy: Terminate SSL Connections In Hardware And Reduce Server Count By 40%
Biofilms Over Troubled Waters
you're just being naive.

Yeah, I didn't say that, and I'm not.

I just think this ham-fisted mess of a blog post is a shining example of why Google got its ass handed to it by a superior lobbying effort.
Ah, thanks for the rapid reply. (HN is so cool :).

I think the Posterous set-up is what confused my sense of the relationship.
"I never thought they weren't 'not evil'"

Negation overload! I had to read that 3 or 4 times before I understood what you meant.
I think the current state of regulatory uncertainty cannot last. Eventually Washington will get bored of the issue and — absent regulation — ISPs will go back to their old tricks.
Your cable comes in over the same lines that your internet does.
Different from you is 'unhealthy'?
this is a democracy, what's the alternative to having faith in the public?
Tired of Errno::EADDRINUSE for script/server?
1. I was using the word "wrong" in its normal dictionary definition (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wrong). It is not right, good, or truthful to "shout" your profits/assets in big print on the main financial docs, while "whispering" your losses/liabilities in small print in supplemental documents.

2. If you can't get the rules changed, it doesn't matter what you wish they were.

Are you serious? It matters very much. Public opinion changes both the rules and interpretation of the rules all the time, through voting, legislative action and general intellectual osmosis. Just this week, we got ourselves gay marriage and iPhone jailbreaking. I am especially surprised to see such an ultra conservative opinion on a hacker/startup community.

3. I totally agree with you that intelligent investing takes time and skill. I dedicate maybe a half hour of my workday to investing, and I would guess that your average investor doesn't spend even that much time. Yes, it is terribly inadequate. So what are you doing to do about that? We do not live in an ideal world - we do not have medical insurance only for those who exercise constantly, avoid stress, and never eat anything with sugar in it; or driver's licenses only for those with perfect vision; etc. The rules must work for the real world, not some hypothetical ideal.

3. The rest of your paragraph is a hyperbolic effort to put words in another's mouth.

Actually, I explicitly refrained from putting words into op's mouth: "I am not saying you personally would subscribe to that argument of course". Sorry if that was unclear.
First Flywheel Power Storage Plant Gets Cash From the DOE
From my experience Java programming is too slow and inflexible for a startup while there are good and important libraries, that's why I suggest clojure to use them. That's based on first hand experience using various Java projects for a large traffic site, including Cassandra, Solr, hadoop, restlet, etc. We started with java for coding all of these but replaced most of the code later and not for fun. :-)
When you increase bandwidth for A but not B because A is paying you more money, you are behaving in the exact same way that the internet does: paying for a faster connection leads to more bandwidth. When you slow down B but not A because A is paying you more money, you are actively messing with packets, holding back ones from B while pushing ones from A further up the queue. Speeding up A is not the same thing as slowing down B.
"What did you do at work today?" "I'll tell you next year."
Your post reads like it belongs on Seeking Alpha, with its mixture of bizarre rhetoric and utter misunderstanding of the stock market.

I won't bother with responding to your whole post, but let's address one particularly wrong statement of yours, as an exemplar of what's wrong with everything you write:

"I am not the biggest authority on the stock market but is there not a clear consensus that the current devaluation was caused by the financial firms' failure to recognize mind-boggling amounts of liability on their balance sheets"

No, this isn't true at all. First, the current "devaluation"--by which I assume you mean recession, because it's not obvious what else it could be--was caused by a number of things. Second, there is no "clear consensus". Third, in general, banks were brought down by on-balance-sheet liabilities. In particular, I recall reading dozens of news items on write-off after write-off of subprime debt, which must be on the balance sheet to count as a loss, else the financial statements don't add up. Fourth, you seem to be confusing the technical accounting meaning of liability with the general meaning, but let's not get into that.

One more thing--the role of capitalism is not to provide capital owners with free money; people who expect returns must put in the time and effort ensuring the capital is going to good use, market economics dictates that this will in general be hard, and it is utterly bizarre that you compare not getting free money to rape. I find it befuddling and sickening that you would dare to say such a thing. Put aside your e-rage and think about it for a second.
Every day I regret buying my mytouch 3g instead of waiting for the nexus one on the same network at the same price.
I use roboform (on iphone and desktop)
Good point there... edit time.
NSubstitue - a friendly substitute for .NET mocking frameworks
Perhaps. But sometimes telling an industry not to fuck consumers or face regulation keeps them better behaved than telling them exactly how they are allowed to fuck consumers.
Apple's Mistake?
Nowhere did I say that I didn't consider the content omitted, but by going in with a bias against the article, you're setting yourself up to already have an opinion without knowing the material.
b4gtweet

Enjoy :)
How To Use Basic jQuery Filters With HTML List
jQuery basic selectors and filters explained in a simple way with examples.
I guess it depends what you mean by interesting. I'm not convinced that anyone targeting the enterprise is ever going to be able to reproduce the quality of UI that apple has achieved over the past few years.

Android has proved a huge disappointment to me because their customers have actually turned out to be enterprises (telcos customising and bundling crappy out of date versions) rather than selling direct to end users. I guess Cisco might do well in some verticals, but I'm not getting excited about it just yet.

(agreed that Windows 7 is a dead end for pads)
Cool, but what about code maintainability? Why add microlanguages? I'm sure your microlanguage is superintuitive to you, because you wrote it, but I, as a new coder on your code, don't want to learn it.
Lung Cancer Symptoms, Risk Factors and Treatment
The "spirit of compromise" is the core principle of democracy. If you're against compromise, you're against democracy.
What do you mean by autonomy? The big drawback of the ipad is that you do still need a mac/pc to sync and backup — mobileme is nice as far as it goes, but the ipad isn't standalone just yet.
Don't worry about them. Worry about you. Don't get caught up with where you are now, or what you haven't accomplished in the past. Focus on what you're going to do in the future. Build something you're passionate about, and let that project soak up all your attention.

Whenever I notice my mind getting caught in a similar trap, this always puts me back on track:

http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
There's are a number of reasons I don't use online banking. This is one of them.
schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/

The only fees I pay are a 75c/month fee for having on-line banking, a $1.50 fee for having a Visa Debit card, fees for using someone else's ATM (which is why I don't use someone ...
schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/09

I don't use online banking, period, and disrecommend it to family and friends. Call me old-fashioned, but like Mr. James, I know what goes into the sausages.
schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/10/
> "Write a blog you believe in"

This sounds like the "How to Get Rich Quick" book that instructs its readers to write and promote a "How to Get Rich Quick" book.

Where exactly is the common ground between writing something you believe in and writing and developing a blog with the explicit goal of an optimal quick cash exit?
What does Garamond look like on an iphone 4?
I didn't limit anything to exercise. There's more to being physically healthy than going to the gym. An acne breakout affects your mind, for example. Apart from the obvious issues like self-consciousness in social situations, pain and itching can interrupt your thoughts.

Although I suppose "physical condition" would have been more accurate than "physical health."
I have a 4yo girl, abandoned my very good paying job 4 months ago, founded a startup, worked 24/7 on it, got angel money, currently negotiating with the VC fund and never had ANY regrets, neither had my family. DO IT NOW. After all we're doing all this for them, for the kids :)
They ceded the wireless world to the control of the carriers so it wouldn't be a stall so much as playing dead.

And a full reversal is certainly possible, it would imply a short-sightedness which is hard to reconcile with Google's policy history which tells us that it would take some major event (think the Chinese hacking incident) for them to reverse themselves entirely.

There is simply no way this agreement was undertaken lightly or without extensive analysis. Doubly so because it pisses off the technical elite (and they surely knew it would) both inside and outside Google.
As soon as you start using "MYTH" in regards to opinions or analysis, you've lost me.
Sites only accessible to people on a network which is linked to the internet are not part of the public internet (for instance, my router's configuration page is most definitely not part of the public internet). A proprietary browser-based application running inside of a corporate network would not be part of the public internet, unless it is specifically designed to be accessible to anyone with a browser. The basic rule of thumb I would use is that something is on the public internet if anyone with a browser in a country with no filtering of the internet can reach it, given the proper passwords and so forth (and without using a VPN or similar tunneling to make it appear that they're elsewhere).
> While describing the player, Jobs constantly referred to Apple's digital hub strategy: The Mac is a hub, or central connection point, for a host of gadgets.

I wonder if this will ultimately be downfall of the whole iPod/iPad/iPhone experience. Apple is still working around the idea of the computer as the central hub (requiring you to sync with iTunes before you can use an iPad, for example) rather than the hub now being entirely in the cloud.

So far, Apple has failed miserably at cloud computing experiences.
>> Rule number two is that there’s no recycling. Once they cash out of a deal, the money goes away -- never to be invested, for the rest of the decade.

What is the rationale behind this? This sounds insane, and results in some more insanity that the author is trying to explain with this one!
Google and other folks mention "political reality" as the reason for compromise. Folks, that just means we dont want to work hard at it, or make waves. If this country is truly democratic, then we, the people, have the power. We have the power to make not only Verizon and Google kneel to uus, but the FCC and the knuckleheads in DC.
Yeah, it was Verizon pushing Android in exchange for a cop-out on net neutrality.
Very valid point, most petitions are in fact a sham.

But given that exercises like these are incredibly important to the viability of organizations -- organizations whose mission/cause/work you presumably agree with -- wouldn't it be pretty bad if everyone just stopped taking part in these?

The bottom line is that these petitions work and allow organizations to carry out a mission that their members do in fact support, whether or not the petition is a sham. It's definitely a problem that they have to resort to doing crap like this, but until there is a better way, I don't see what else they can do.
Reading this thread made me a little paranoid. So I logged into my high school reunion account (I'm the organizer) to withdraw the funds into our bank account, and lo!, of course there's a hold on one classmate's payment. That's $75 we may never see... at least not in time to pay our caterers and such.
In the US political process, sticking to your principles seemingly leads only to failure. Net neutrality martyrdom doesn't benefit anyone.
It is a standard operating procedure for republicans after they fuck up to get philosophical and start talking about overall trends in the economy and generally treat the whole economy like some kind of force of nature that ebbs and flows on its own and that we cannot do anything about.

While there is an economic cycle its effects can be rather mild if properly managed.

The fact of the matter is that the dismal performance of the stock market in the last 10 years just matches the dismal performance of the overall economy in the last 10 years and is simply the result of terrible leadership.

Yes, it is mostly the fault of George Bush, and Alan Greenspan and Bernake and the new brand of "conservatism" that got popular in America in the later Clinton years (and that includes a lot of conservative democrats). I put conservatism in quotes because this is a type of conservatism that is foreign to many actual honest conservatives.

I do not have the time to list all the fuckups, but let me just list the important ones: rampant financial deregulation while still ensuring that the government will guarantee the banks, incredibly expensive wars all over the world without honestly taking the expense into account, a policy ensuring high oil prices for a country that is the greatest importer of oil in the world, trying to fix the effects of wars and high gas prices with low interest rates, when any economist will tell you that these are not things you can fix with low interest rates, support of outsourcing and all kinds of policies that destroy the earning potential of the middle class, refusal to invest in infrastructure, etc. etc.

So the stock market is doing badly because the economic policies we had in the last 10 years failed. That is pretty much it.
There's a problem for a newbie or budding entrepreneur, though.

How do you know you're any good at hiring if you've never done it before? By English's admission (and many other wizened ones), that first hire is very, very crucial to your startup's success.
Then color me against democracy, but I don't care if the democratic majority wants slavery: it's bad and should not be compromised on, the majority will just have to suck up.
Hello (Distributed) World: Designing Software that Spreads P2P
That was a great interview, I learned a lot about hiring from that.
Paypal is not a scam which achieves profitability by freezing accounts. That is crazy talk.

I don't know that Paypal ever achieved profitability. They raised a whole lot of capital, and then when it looked like they might fold, eBay stepped in to make sure they didn't. Paypal's lack of profitability was legendary when I was in online payments, since they were the Microsoft of the industry.
I've interviewed political consultants on Mixergy.com who told me that they use petitions to collect email addresses and get new donors and activists.

It's a pretty open secret.
Apparel at Wholesale Closeouts
>Babies get cranky for a variety of reasons you will never know. Your inner geek is going to want to find reasons for things and understand "the system". Resist this, it's futile 50% of the time.

One of the reasons babies get cranky is that they can't properly digest baby formula - breastfeed babies are healthier, smell better, have better immunity to disease, have on average higher IQs, etc.. Bottlefeeding correlates with higher incidences of cancer for both mother and child.

Also once baby is 6months I highly recommend both starting potty training and "baby sign".

The first 5/6 months for our two before we started putting them on the potty did wear a bit thin, I don't like changing crappy nappies ("doody diapers"?). When "proper food" comes in alongside breast milk then the stench of crap is really horrible. It's only really now (16mo) that our second is signing to use the potty and doing most of his crap in it.

Babies don't just like to be with you, they like it when you communicate with them, they like to share body warmth, they respond well to skin contact.

Get a sling. You don't need an expensive pushchair and you can carry the baby around and use both your hands. Babies sleep well in a sling when you're walking around the cadence of the motion is familiar from being in the uterus I think and they also share close contact and communication with you.

"Pacifiers" to me are one of the worst commonly accepted things to do to a child but I'll withhold most of my rant and just say that watch out for retarded speech and the potential side effects of plasticisers like BPA/pthalates which are endocrine disrupters and pretty nasty - I wouldn't want my kid sucking on a stick of that stuff.
In addition, in my experience, null pointer exception related bugs are typically the most easily debuggable bugs as they typically arise from some trivial programming error and not some kind of architectural mistake.