skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What self-hosted shopping cart should I buy to do easy A/B testing?
My store uses Prestashop which has worked well for an open source shopping cart but we've always had wonky Google Analytics conversion tracking issues.

We need a shopping cart that allows for quick and painless A/B testing. It seems like Shopify has this feature ( http://blog.shopify.com/2010/3/22/test-test-test-more ) but I'd much prefer to host the website myself without paying a % of revenue.

What's the best shopping cart I can buy and host myself? Or, are the 3rd party hosted solutions vastly (or somewhat) superior?
remember what James Gosling has been through with the Java/Microsoft scandal

Yes, I remember Microsoft releasing the first JVM that did JIT compilation. I also remember them having the only usable IDE for Java at the time.

I also remember them wanting to add "delegates" to the standard, with Sun responding with an idiotic reply for all to view here: http://java.sun.com/docs/white/delegates.html

Delegates which are now being added through the back-door in the InvokeDynamic JSR ... oh, the irony.

If Java is a standard, then Sun should have let others participate. Imagine if the Javascript standard / trademark was controlled by Microsoft, and they would sue Apple / Mozilla for adding "proprietary" extensions to it.

Want to avoid fragmentation ... then don't build cripple-ware.
Ultimately you should be looking at selling your own adverts anyway (or at least using a genuine advertising agency who can pull in decent targetted adverts), then you won't have problems with Analytics, and you'll also make a hell of a lot more money.
How are you running delayed_job or other custom daemons?
The best part of this article is the screenshot of IE6 downloading Firefox.
Given that religion both has been and continues to be one of the bigger driving forces behind just about every major event in human history, I'd say that understanding it is paramount to any serious analysis of, not only history, but any number of current events.
I Buy Dead Magazines (the art of the intro …)
You lack some perspective and tact, you silly goose. It's not very surprising you and your friends think your native language is easier and that you prefer your own writing system. Way to navel-gaze, hello?

As someone whose native language is neither, having studied both, I'd say English is much easier.

The tones in Chinese really fuck with someone whose native language isn't tonal (and most aren't), and wouldn't you rather become literate by learning 26-30 symbols than by learning thousands of symbols? Makes sense, doesn't it?

Words in Chinese don't get conjugated much (if at all), but you've got a relatively strict word order, whereas in English, you've got particles and a more relaxed word order.

Not having tones and no huge obstacle to becoming literate makes English a hell of a lot easier to learn.
Thanks! This tool is such an easy thing, and still extremely useful. Will use it for my own domain searches in the future.
U-boats were a major factor in WW1 - the United States probably wouldn't have entered the war if it hadn't been for German attacks on transatlantic shipping.
Ah yeah, that's probably more likely than layer 1 routing. There does seem to be an increase in it, though; unless I'm mistaken, I seem to recall that 10 years ago it was a bit easier to get a rough idea of the geographical hops a packet was taking. It seems quite a few large providers these days only do one layer 3 hop, so all you see is the entry and exit at the borders of their network.
And with the economy, perception can become reality. If a player has a large enough bullhorn they can spew forth Messages that, if enough people believe them or act on them, can nudge economic reality in whatever direction they'd like. The WSJ is one such bullhorn.
I do Java consulting (anything Java-related). When I was still an employee, I was freelancing on the side. When I resigned, I continued freelancing. An old client (from my freelancing days) hired me as a full-time consultant during that time and I've been working with them on different projects ever since. The client is aware of and fully supports my startup activities.
I'd like to know more about what other ad networks were appraised, and why they were no good. I'm going to have to rely on ad networks for my own web app, at least for a while, and it would be pretty helpful if there was was decent customer service on the inventory side.
Russia as of today isn't good or bad. For some people, what's happening is inappropriate, others accept it. For everyone here, I guess, Russia seems a nightmare but there are quite a few Russians, many of them, actually, who genuinely support Putin and Medvedev and have no desire of leaving. It's a different mindset, different way of life.

As for me, I left for London when I was 23, 4 years ago, never visited Russia ever since and have no intention of going back. Many (most, almost all?) of my friends who exiled feel the same.
Truly an epic post. Halfway through it, I had to come back and upvote it before returning to the article.
Quran MP3 - القرآن الكريم - koran karem
>the hallmark of any truly socialist government is that it spends too much money on unproductive investments

Care to name one of these hallmark "truly socialist governments"? I think this is a figment of your imagination. Socialism is one point on a slider and laissez-faire capitalism on the other side. If you slide the bar too far in either direction it breaks. Which is why no one does. Sweden has 52% taxes, free health care, free schooling, etc., etc. Are they one of your "hallmarks"? Because they are also very capitalistic.

What you should really be worried, what is really causing world-wide problems is corporatism/fascism.
Why put a date on the copyright at all?
I dimly recall from my youth in Cornwall that it was a particular problem if the aircraft ended up too far west - they would leave the South Wales coast, cross the Bristol Channel - confuse that with the English Channel, and then land, lost, at the first airbase they found in Cornwall -thinking they were at least in France.
"But I think the real damage will be in how the developer community perceives Java, rather than in any lasting impact on the platform itself."

A change (for the worse) how the dev community perceives a platform is (or will lead to) a significant impact on the platform?

Or is he saying usage in big corps (where devs don't decide the platform, mangers do) won't be affected?

Minor nitpicks aside, decent essay!
>Also, I heard from a writer that Microsoft Office is superior to any word processor (a.k.a computer program you use to write a novel) to the point that he writes novels in Microsoft Word under Wine.

published author here[1] who was talked into using OpenOffice to write a book. It was... pretty bad, worse, even than ms office, which (and yes, I tried) is pretty bad when you start passing back and fourth a monstrosity with a bunch of marked changes. But even with the little incompatibilities fixed, god damn, word processors were just not meant to deal with something that big.

You will find few people writing their second book using a word processor. Word processors are pretty great for short documents that need to be made to look nice quickly, and that have limited collaboration. (yes, modern word processors have really basic revision control functionality, but it sucks compared to using a revision control system.) But yeah, next time? some sort of TeX derivative, or I do the book in text and the publisher can do formatting after it's done.

[1]http://nostarch.com/xen.htm
"BFG Tech is in the process of winding down and liquidating its business"
There is a time cost for this though, unless you reach a certain size its not really worth the time organising it when you can just slap adsense or the like on there.
Mongrel2: Aug 31st Target For 1.0
It's a sort of strange argument, because it seems to be making a good-of-society kind of argument, but via free-market investing, in a weird hybrid. The argument is that one kind of free-market investor ought to bow out, because they're hurting the other kind, who, the argument goes, are ultimately required for innovation. But what's this asking for? Government regulation? Angels foregoing profitable deals in order to altruistically keep the VCs in business?
That's what is so crazy about the stock market.

There's a strong self-fulfilling prophecy effect caused by mob decisions. If enough people think the stock market will go up, there's a surge in demand to buy stocks and so stock prices go up. If enough people think it will go down, they sell, and prices go down. Funny that.

So the real money may be in being the minority better, especially if you had some way of predicting what the masses will do next so you can take a position that will be profitable for you once the masses start betting. Thus, there's incentive to do a sort of front-running operation but on a huge scale. And to do it you need a media operation of some sort, and possibly some propaganda organs. Any guesses as to whether these theoretical entities already exist?
Google has historically not been very open about this, but they're very gradually becoming more transparent on ad pricing: their cut is 32% for ads on the content network, so the advertiser is getting charged $1.47 for every $1 you see in your stats.

See: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.ht...

Their customer service is abyssmal. This is intentional. Everyone doing business with Google needs to go into that relationship with eyes wide open in that respect.

reocities.com probably got banned because -- and this is a pretty important concept -- there is no incentive for their Indian quality rater to think "Hmm, although in five seconds that sure sounds like it is a typosquatting spam site which is infringing on the Geocities trademark and built on industrial strength copyright violation, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and investigate this thoroughly."

Typically, AdSense pays much, much more poorly than individually negotiated advertising buys, which is why most major sites use it only for placing remnant inventory. (It isn't called "webmaster welfare" for nothing.) You also get the best results of it if your page is essentially an extension of someone's Google search, which is why eHow gets $2.50 CPMs from just one of the thirteen ads on their bingo-related pages: their traffic is overwhelmingly (60%) direct from Google for queries with demonstrable intent in commercial areas. (This is better than quadruple the performance of most sites I advertise on. sigh I'm giving aid and comfort to the enemy.) Demand Media gets the psychology of advertising. Other people wanting to do it should study and study well.
Thank you for all your replies. I'm learning a lot from them. I think I'd move towards hiring a promising junior dev to help me with my tasks. But I'm not yet sure if I'll have the dev work fully on the consulting side or the startup side. It might depend on the type of consulting work needed.

I guess my problem is also really because I'm a one-man startup. So finding a co-founder or startup team to help me on the startup side could solve my problem. Or it might be another problem too...
Sharism
I've looked at: adbrite, adroll, tribalfusion and a bunch of others after asking HN if I should go and make an inventory of advertising networks and how well they perform relative to each other.

None of them comes close to adsense in terms of performance (and adsense absolutely sucks, if you can get $1.00 ECPM out of adsense for a large volume website then you're very very lucky), so even if they would handle customer service better than google (most of them don't) they would still be pretty bad income wise.
'joe' on *NIX is the tool you want if you like the wordstar keybindings. It was my $EDITOR for a long time because I was used to the wordstar key bindings as used in turbo pascal 3.0. I talk a lot of shit about how useless school was... but I learned a lot in that pascal class in high school.
Couple of things I've noticed about adsense - have no idea if they apply here, but maybe it hasn't been considered.

If the colour of the links and whatnot are two similar to what you are using on the site (particularly if they are positioned to look much like links) the ads can fail to appear. This has happened to me a few times and I've changed the colour to have them up and working again within a few minutes.

Another thing - I've also had pages fail to display adsense where the content is exactly the same as another page serving adsense (botched url structure in my case).

I assume you've tested these things - but figured it may be worth mentioning anyway. You never know.
Know How Green Tea Is Processed: Why is ‘Green' Tea Green?
A few minutes of Googling:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=48127#post53...
Twitter’s “Followed By” And “You Both Follow” More Useful Than “Mutual Friends”
I'm looking at selling my own adverts and I have advertisers wanting to give me their money and copy.

Does anyone know of a system to automate that stuff?

What I'm looking for needs to have:

* Allow advertisers to upload copy and request an advert slot.

* Allow an advert slot to be time-based regardless of number of impressions (1 month in a slot that rotates 10 adverts).

* Send me an email when a slot has been booked so that I review the advert against the end user agreement (that it's not abusive, totally inappropriate).

* That I can approve an advert and then it sends a message to the advertiser with an invoice and requesting payment.

* That the advertiser then pays via Google Checkout, PayPal, etc.

* That after all of that the advert goes live for a scheduled period of time.

* That the advertiser can see impressions, stats and reports letting them know the success of their campaign.

* It should look professional and ideally be themeable/skinnable or self-hosted so that I can make it seamless (the advertisers want to deal with me... I want to reduce my work).

Basically... aside from me approving the content I want a system that hand-holds the advertiser through the whole process and shoves the advert on the site and just gives me the money at the end.

I have 4.5 million page views per month, on a very strong community website.

What I've seen out there that does part of the above doesn't do the whole story... I'm quite willing to pay to get the above.

I'm probably just not googling for the right terms, what should I be looking for?

At the moment I'm leaving money on the table because my time and sanity is more important to me than the money. I realise that this isn't the best business sense and so either I find some tool to help me, or find the time to build one myself.
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Check out Open X: http://www.openx.org/

I haven't checked it in detail against your requirements, but at the very least if it doesn't do what you want, it'll give you the terminology to search for things you can spend more money on that do what you want...
So many uses for vodka
This article is a misguided gross oversimplificaton of the issue.

I agree that you shouldn't only rely on adsense the rest of your life. But if you are starting with either solid CPM targeted traffic or a lot of traffic or both, then it's a good way to get begin booking some revenue.

Why? If you are a developer you probably don't want to spend your initial days soliciting people for advertising instead of developing your product.

Plus, Adsense can more effectively target customers than the few companies you solicit with your meager resources.
If you don't mind graphical ads instead of text, you may want to look into Advertising.com (AOL). Good experience here (surprisingly high eCPM at times--many times higher than AdSense). Then again, our site performs better than most as far as click-thru rate is concerned, so YMMV.
my understanding is that while Google is following the letter of the GPL and giving back their changes to the GPL'd code, they are not putting fourth the effort to get those changes integrated with the rest of the linux kernel, so practically speaking, you aren't going to be seeing much of the android changes outside of android.

http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/android-kernel-problems.html
You should have gone with Hitler.

You fail to distinguish between a forceful, but proper, analogy and the fact that people tend to use examples appealing to emotion when they aren't really appropriate. We are talking about negative consequences as a result of changing a law and the abolishment of slavery is as good an example as any.

Positive actions yield positive outcomes.

That's hopelessly naive. I have provided an example of why initial negative consequences may be unavoidable to change things. You are just contradicting me, without addressing the point.
Almost forgot, for people who have questions about how Mongrel2 works or criticism of the design, make sure to check out our soon to be released 50 page manual:

http://mongrel2.org/doc/tip/docs/manual/book.wiki

Covering everything that 1.0 will do, including the MVC configuration model using SQLite and Python, full file serving, operations logging, writing handlers (in Ruby, Python, PHP, Haskell, Lisp, C++, and Lua), and how all the promised design ideas work now.

We'll basically be making the features in the manual solid and documenting them more.

Edit: Oh, we don't cover all those languages yet, they're really new.
If there was a word for 'text bukkake' it would likely summarize this post.
Is economic slavery OK if you aren't making people do it? Every first world country relies on people basically working as slaves in some sense or another to function. People feel entitled to a decent well paying job, and don't want do "lower caste" jobs like cleaning.

I did a short stint in Abu Dhabi and it is presented to expats as a wonderful place and is so if you want it to be. Having known someone who worked for Al Jazeera and heard the stories that get supressed involving workers conditions it wiped the sheen right off.
Thanks for taking the time to check, much appreciated.

Incidentally, the odds of getting accepted are much lower for applications after the deadline.

I was working on something else when the application period opened and wasn't considering applying. A few months later, I was free and started working on the idea when the application period was extended, so I applied knowing the chances were low.

Is there any merit in reapplying a late submission (with some improvements in my case) or would you say those applications have already been vetted? I imagine it's the latter since it seems to be more about the team than the idea.
Agreed, nginx+varnish (optionally on top of an existing apache setup) seems to be best practice right now for heavy traffic sites.
EU, as of now, is far less unified than US. 11 of the 27 members have their own currencies. Some of the members are not part of the borderless Schengen Agreement. Sending stuff and money across EU is subject to international taxes and fees. People think of themself as German, French ... and not European.

http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/10/23/when-it-comes-to-e-comme...
Why would Varnish be required in that situation if you're already running nginx which is perfectly capable of caching a simple wordpress site in the same manner.
The self serve ad market has been grossly ignored. A good startup opportunity.

http://buysellads.com does some of it, but is very limited in the options (30 day buy only).

https://www.isocket.com/ promises to do more, and seems like a very promising option. it's in private beta now. So, I haven't tried it.
IE4 is an awesome browser. Persistent client side storage, AJAX, HW 3D animation, dynamic sound generation, dHTML+TIME, etc. You can even create desktop widgets in HTML+JS on Win98.
Agreed, what a stupid thing to put on your site. It was enough to stop
me reading after the first time it came up.

Just out of interest, is there any power saving benefit whatsoever
gained from displaying black on a TFT screen? Surely the power usage
comes from the back-light and that's on regardless?

Presumably it takes some (small amount of) extra power to download and
run the javascript required for the effect so my guess would be that
it actually increases power usage overall (a tiny amount, but still).
I did, but to no avail.
Whoa, nice error:

Server Error in '/' Application.
The process cannot access the file 'C:\Users\www.womble.co.za\cable_map\landing_stations.js' because it is being used by another process.

Line 236: public void PutFileContents(string filename, string txt)
Line 237: {
Line 238: TextWriter tw = new StreamWriter(filename);
Line 239: tw.Write(txt);
Line 240: tw.Close();

It seems that there is a race condition where each web request tries to open this file, and Windows doesn't let you have the file open multiple times (at least with the chosen options).
So read some books about religion from a local public library for free. No need to spend 4 years and $40,000.

When someone gets a college degree in Electrical Engineering I think the goal is not really to learn electrical engineering or electronics -- again you can learn those things faster and cheaper on your own -- the goal really is to get a document whereby an institution declares you are fit to enter the electrical engineering field as a working professional. If you get a degree in Religion, what "field" are you certified to work in? The religion field? The priesthood? Professorship of religion? Do we honestly need more of those and/or to the extent we do could it not be done cheaper and faster, outside a university? Perhaps done by a church-related organization?

Also, though I agree that religion is influencing some things, I don't think religion really "drives" most of anything that's really important anymore, like inventions and innovation, like building things, like creating new products and services, developing new technologies. The vast majority of that activity is totally perpendicular to religion. If anything, one of the biggest areas where I see religion making an impact is as an anti-science, pro-superstition, anti-education, anti-progress force, especially in areas of medicine and biology. But you could easily never take a class or read a book on religion and go on to become an excellent businessman, scientist, engineer, inventor, programmer, musician, etc. And still read or talk or think about religion, in your free time, whenever you felt like it. And again, for free.
Exactly, and once more it puzzles me how people tend to overestimate the value of simple ideas (he was talking about a recruiting-related site, not that 2 years ago there wasn't any) and consider the actual implementation as just grunt work that everyone can execute just following a "plan" already defined by the original "founder".
And all that "making friend with a programmer to have my site built" it's even more sad.

The suggestion to evaluate what you are really bringing to the table in such cases is spot on. Evaluate fairly what your contribution is worth and make a meaningful offer to a tech co-founder you know. If you just need someone to work under your directives just hire someone.
I don't know where you got the idea — that corruption in France is significant — from. Care to elaborate?
Well yes, you could create desktop widgets. I think that even worked in Win95 if you had IE4 installed. But then your whole computer became about as stable as IE4...