skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A crucial element left out of the discussion with A/B testing is the importance of user segmenting.

You'll see drastic swings by the day of the week, male / female users, traffic sources, entrance paths, browser, region, etc.

A/B tests can be terribly misleading without awareness of such factors.

A simple illustration of this is eMail response rates which show that Sunday's are far and away the best day to get people's attention (highest aggregate open / click rate by 20% over worst day of week).

But inversly we've found through the experience of managing thousands of tests that while opens & clicks are high, purchase conversion rates are on the low end of the scale.

Just food for thought - it's absolutely positively rolling up your sleeves and deep diving into the data and segmenting tests or at least being aware of external influences before you take your results to the bank.

http://www.mailermailer.com/resources/metrics/daily-rates.rw...

http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/personalizing-your-...
I forgot the positive part of my feedback - It does look good, and you've certainly hit the 80% solution. nice work.
Pink OTC Markets, a small information technology company located in SoHo is hiring. We operates an electronic quotation and trading system in the over-the-counter (OTC) securities market and are the third-largest U.S. trading venue after the NYSE and NASDAQ for equity shares.

We are looking for a mid-to-senior level Java developer to work on our back-end transactional systems, which we are in the midst of re-architecting to achieve lower messaging latencies and higher availability. You will get a great deal of autonomy as well as responsibility. The position requires strong technical skills, superior knowledge of Java and related technologies, and excellent systems architecture skills. Experience with architecting trading solutions and designing trading systems components is a huge plus.

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This cuts both ways. In the States, many people have lost their trust in the integrity of scientific research and the integrity of regulatory bodies. So the CDC might recommend something, or the FDA might approve some drug, and to people that trust these organizations, that's the golden stamp of approval. For others, any such recommendations are inherently suspect.

This goes deeper than education, intelligence, etc, and you can't solve it though more education per se, unless that education addresses the source of the distrust.

In areas where scientific research has been compromised by non-scientific interests, what can you do? Education is no longer education but propaganda, further deepening people's distrust.
(sorry, gut reaction). This feels like a company who wants to seem like a company I want to work for.
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Are you one of those entrepreneurs who wakes each morning worrying about if your project will succeed?
Best way to shake off negative thoughts - take a shower. It's fast, takes 5-10 minutes and really clears up your head. Who's with me?
If he clones, that's one thing. If he competes, that's another.
Timing Lessons
Because we all like the same music.....
Do you really want me to write the full six page analysis? No, I didn't think so. Unfortunately, concise replies such as the one I gave and which require the reader to think a little often result in replies such as yours where it is difficult to discern whether you are being deliberately clever, deliberately trollish, or genuinely confused.

Let me expand.

I only assumed the weights were unsupported, not the man. I did that to assist the reader in understanding the analysis. I did not assume the man was unsupported - I had hoped my initial description of what happens implied that. Possibly it didn't.

I would expect that the problem is intended to include the floor - that's not my point. Having made the analysis for the unsupported weights, the evolution of the situation when there is a floor becomes obvious.

So I hope you were joking, and not a troll.
You might be surprised; I am not exactly the best of the best, but I personally have zero interest in applying to Google because of their ridicules process.

Of the best programmers I know, one owns his own consulting company and the other has been actively recruited through his last several jobs. He literally has not put together a resume in 20 years.

PS: The best example of the gap between these guys and the average programmer: He once released a bug into production and asked the testers what happened. They said, "We stopped testing your code last year. It seemed like a waste of time." They also requested he spent the night of Y2K in AT&T's bunker, just in case.
I was still thinking of giving some credit to Ping when I saw, after being disappointed with all the other features, that you could post a music to your profile. That's something that I quite regularly do on my Facebook profile, simply post a youtube video of some music I like so I can share it with my friends.

I quickly went back to my library, right clicked on a song and searched for some Post button. Unfortunately, as I was soon able to find out, you can only do that inside the ITMS. Of course, some of the songs I have on my library are not in the ITMS, but they could still figure out an automatic way of matching the artist and track name, ask me if one of the matched songs is the one I'm talking about and post it.

As a result, Ping, instead of being that brilliant last.fm killer idea we all envisioned when we heard about it of bringing a music social network to the actual music player people use, is just a webpage poorly stamped to my music player, with absolutely no integration with my library.

Even Last.fm, a 3rd party social network has more integration with my library then a social network inside my music player. If this makes sense...

P.S.: what I said about Posting is equally applicable for Liking a song. You can't do that in your library and there is also no relation between your 5-star rated songs and the music you actually like according to ping.
I would love to see a video demonstration of the answer (my intuition was apparently wrong which would make a video that much more entertaining).
Just found out we're hiring a Senior Front End Engineer too :)

cheers
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Full Stack Rails Engineer - Cambridge, MA USA

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Blueleaf is an angel-funded (Alexis Ohanian - kn0thing - is our most prominent investor amongst this community) startup working on next-generation personal financial planning solutions. We're a world-class team of six people: three engineers, one designer, one CEO, and one marketer (me). People in the Boston area or who can move themselves to the Boston area strongly preferred (sorry!). Instead of copy/pasting, I'll assume you can click the link above since HNers can actually read.
Angry Birds Lite Beta on Android Market as we speak
Yes, the GHC design has certainly been influenced by Manticore (that was one of the "other designs" I referred to). Though in GHC we do have some different problems to solve, the worst of which is that we have to support a bunch of programming abstractions that use mutation.
Regardless the merits of the language itself, the culture of Forth has some serious issues that cause me to doubt that a skilled Forth programmer truly has a development speed that is a multiple of that of a skilled C programmer. Cf. this advice from Thinking Forth:

"Some Forth practitioners advocate storing source code in variable-length, named text files, deliberately emulating the approach used in traditional compilers and text editors. This approach may become more and more common, but its usefulness is still controversial.

Sure it's nice not to have to worry about running out of room in a screen, but the hassle of writing in a restricted area is compensated for by retaining control of discrete chunks of code. In developing an application, you spend a lot more time loading and reloading screens than rearranging their contents.

"Infinite length" files allow sloppy, disorganized thinking and bad factoring. Definitions become longer without the discipline imposed by the 1K block boundaries. The tendency becomes to write a 20K file, or worse: a 20K definition."

(from page 144 of the 2004 edition)
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Must work on-site in central London (no telecommute, sorry).
To blindly give your faith to someone because of who they are?

Which well known products is he credited with helping designing? There's none listed on his wiki page. Wiki does say 'The Norman Group's list of clients spans from Hertz all the way to Microsoft'.

Microsoft? Those well know UX masters? Oh dear. They are a damn sight better than some, but still way behind in true usability.

And of course there's the elephant in the room, the iPod. Which does exactly the opposite of what he claims.

And there are some howlers in the article. Like when he 'bets' the $250 toaster sells well.

Bets? Does he not know marketing 101? It's there to make the overpriced medium range toasters look cheap. It's not there to sell.

The sad fact is that UX design is still a new field and as such it's in its quackery stage. That means there's a lot of people saying things they think is true because of raindance/cargocult effects. And people will say they are amazing when they're not because they occasionally hit home runs.

Consider what the real reasons the expensive ones are more desirable than the cheap ones may be. Maybe it's because they look cheap and shit in the first place.

It's very easy to mix everything up. The iPod and iPhone have very few buttons but they look expensive. They exude status. And they sell well with simplicity. And unfortuantely for our stress levels the Apples and 37signals of this world are few and far between.

Now Don Norman, I don't know. He may be amazing, he may be not. But I can't agree with this article, but mainly because I'm now tired of badly designed tech gear. Perhaps when he was writing this in 2006 that overcomplication fatigue hadn't started sinking into society.

But note the legions of adoring fans the Apples and 37signals have created. That's worth its weight in gold.
Yep, the fact that it's only interested in my iTunes Store-bought music makes it utterly useless to me. I still like CDs, and when I go for MP3s instead iTunes is rarely the best deal.

Do they think Ping's going to persuade me to pay over the odds for digital music and give up on CDs??
Thank you very much for your detailed explanation. I'll read the links you've provided, and more on the subject.

> A variation that happens through a mutation doesn't need to be present in both breeding partners for it to survive.

Indeed I didn't think about dominant genes... Thanks for pointing that out. However, I was more along a way of thinking which seems to have been disproved recently, as Wikipedia suggests: "Until recently, there has a been a dearth of hard evidence that supports this form of speciation, _with a general feeling that interbreeding would soon eliminate any genetic differences that might appear._ [example follows]" [1]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation

> 2) The notion that each species has an ecological niche is false.

Exactly. I wonder why we have missing links among species. That is: why we don't have more half-bird-half-reptile around? They should have got along quite well with each other. IMO, if evolution were to bring speciation, I would have expected more of "a mess" of species around us.

> 3) There's a lot of things that species could do but aren't doing.

I was arguing that since - AFAIK - scientists think that life originated in water, why would animal lose the ability to get oxygen from water? Thas looks like losing an evolutionary advantage to me, and out of line with my understanding of evolution, which is deemed to be gradual: it would have had more sense becoming able to breath air while still being able to breath water. Were are species able to do both (the missing links)?

Thank you very much again for having spent your time in making me more knowdlegeable.
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Well, I think it's obvious it's just scaling the image, I just expected a better technical implementation out of Apple. I'm actually surprised that got past Job's filter, as it looks horrible.

I don't know what the proper solution would be as I don't know how visual layout if handled in iOS development. There may have been no automated method for handling it other than simple image scaling. If that is the case, I would have expected Apple to push supporting higher resolution screens a lot sooner than they did.
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"Completely coincidentally, I'm sure, he has also taken significant payments from Phillip Morris and other tobacco corporate interests."

Did you just make that up, or do you have information to backup that claim?
Hindsight is great. However the real question, is what could you have done in that time to attain a better epistemic position than the scientific consensus, and if you apply that algorithm today, what will it give you as responses.

In other words, if trusting scientists is a historically unreliable method, what's your less unreliable alternative?
Why did Singh have to pay $200,000 of his own money to defend himself? Where was The Guardian in all of this?

Edit: typos.
What Music Do You Listen to When Writing? (SEO Music)
Is it possible that smoking is bad for you, yet it most of the time doesn't cause cancer and that second-hand smoke risks are highly overrated? Also, if whenever you take money from an outside source, the research is discredited, shouldn't we just stop taking any money from outside interest groups? It seems really silly to spend money researching X, if when you publish everybody comes out and says your research doesn't count because it was paid for by interest groups. And now it seems this is even enough to discredit the researcher himself.

I say that because it seems almost like an article of faith that smoking always causes cancer or that anything to do with smoking must be bad -- even being close to somebody that smokes. On the face of it, that seems a bit much. Or, put another way, it seems like popular opinion has gotten way ahead of reasonable discussion when it comes to smoking.

I drive through the city and see these huge multi-million-dollar office buildings. There's guys out back wearing thousand dollar suits, smoking cigarettes, in the rain, huddling next to the dumpster. Just seems like we've overreacted a bit. (Admittedly a gut feeling. And no, I am not a smoker and I do not like to be around people who do smoke, but that's a different topic)
>2. One of the aims is to have the candidate as calm as possible. Seeing that 90% of people can't write a C program that reverses a linked list makes me nervous about the strictness of the test.

really? that's about what I'd expect. Consider that the incompetent are over-represented amongst the job hunters, and it doesn't surprise me one bit that 90% of the candidates can't reverse a linked list in C.

Also, nearly all programmers are at least a little bit arrogant about their ability. I think a hard programming test, even a actual hard programming test, would scare fewer candidates than an actual face to face interview.
Yep!

Even Java is used in the embedded world today (luckily not my world).

Simply, C and Forth can scale down to really small MCU with few hundreds bytes of code space and some bytes of RAM (with Forth, on such small target you will probably loose REPL).

A readily available OSS Forth I really like can be used on small MSP430 where no lisp or scheme can go! (www.camelforth.com)

Currently most embbeddable scheme I know is the Armpit http://armpit.sourceforge.net/
We still have lots of tuning to do, I'll be looking in detail at what is going on during those pauses. This program is slightly atypical in doing quite a lot of old-generation collections though (you can see two in the graph), it has a low infant mortality and might benefit from a larger nursery size. (don't you love GC analogies? :)
* Then Weight B, and finally Weight A.*

I believe you meant C, correct?
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It's discussed in nearly every article about his research. He also (obliquely) commented on taking funding from dubious sources on SourceWatch:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=James_E._Enstrom_...
Actually, if you're into cool, trendier, up-and-coming, non-mainstream music, Ping is pretty fantastic. The first recommended follow for me was Alexandra Patsavas who is the christener of cool when it comes to indie music. Ping got it spot on. I have no more need for using MySpace. I hate to brand all the naysayers wrong, but frankly they don't seem to share the same musical tastes as I do. I'd like to think I have pretty damn good taste, better than the naysayers :)

The naysayers seem to have wanted a Facebook replacement. I hate FB. Ping is a nice domain-specific social network. It serves a purpose, like LinkedIn. And I quite like it.
10gen, the company that started the MongoDB project and provides commercial support for Mongo, is hiring in both NYC and Bay Area offices.

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One of the aims is to have the candidate as calm as possible.

Why? As a potential customer of this product, I don't care how calm the candidate is. They'll have plenty of stress to manage on the job anyway. I just care if they can code. Weed out the posers and send me the rest. We can worry about the touchy/feely stuff later.

Seeing that 90% of people can't write a C program that reverses a linked list makes me nervous about the strictness of the test.

That's OP's main value proposition! A few bucks instead of a few hours to weed out the posers is an excellent selling point. Best wishes, OP.
But it's you who should motivate them and provide structure for the learning, no?
Suppose there were facilities to rent lab space by the hour?

You'd need some formal training on safety issues but maybe you could get educated a lot more cheaply then with the full university system.
Interesting - so you think he is being fired for doing politically incorrect research rather than for exposing his colleagues as frauds?
"Blindly trusting scientists because they're perceived experts, have advanced degrees or are in agreement in large numbers has historically been an unreliable way to judge whether or not something is in fact true."

I don't think he is advocating that. Trusting scientists because they use controlled experiment, peer review and other similar tools is quite a different thing than trusting them based on authority.
In physics problems things are assumed idealized unless they aren't. Also, velocity doesn't matter here, and no math is required to solve the problem.
That's just a convenient way of laying out the terms. Come stop in and give it a try for a day.
Startups and Libertarian Populism
For the record, I was in no way attempting to discredit this particular researcher (I'd be talking way above my level of knowledge in so attempting); I was just saying that the editorial seemed to be missing relevant information that seems like it might be significant for his colleagues and superiors.
There's an elephant in the way?
The fact that people like him aren't on this social network is why I think it will take off. A music-based social network needs people who, you know, are kind of into music.
The length of the rope is constant. For every weigh with a pulley the weigh moves 1/2 length unit for every length unit it's being pulled. Weights don't matter; C will go up first, then B then A (at a relative 1/2 length ratio).
Got it on my domain apps account this morning.
There are some developers that prefer the block-oriented approach of creating Forth code. Remember that Forth is a dynamic language, so there is a tradition of viewing the system as an image (similar to Smalltalk), instead of a bunch of static files saved on a file system. They achieve this by creating small blocks of code that are dynamically loaded as necessary.

This doesn't mean you can't create Forth programs from standard text files. All modern Forths work this way, providing blocks only as an additional feature.
No problem.

I think this story is very interesting. Just wish we had a better source to use for the discussion.
I don't like Jack Johnson but I know who he is. You'd have to be a pretty lazy music consumer to not know who he is, the kind that doesn't buy music but just listens to ClearChannel stations. Otherwise known as the kind of people that Apple doesn't want on the social network because they won't buy music and aren't much interested in it either.
Was google a clone of altavista? Was facebook a clone of friendster? Was the ipod a clone of all other mp3 players?
Is Mockingbird a clone of Balsamiq?

Just copying an idea is fine. And if you do any kind of market research, your essentially figuring out which idea is the most profitable to copy.

Its finally all about execution.
I don't know what you're doing, but consulting is not the only way to have limited growth prospects. A company could also be making a product for a niche market (and not be doing it merely as a way to get started engaging with users). I believe some people call these niche software companies MicroISVs.
"I think Simon needs a little more years under his belt (wisdom) and maybe another PhD in history to make him aware of this historically painful fact."

Just out of curiosity (really!), are you older than him / have a degree in history?

I actually agree with most of what you said, it just seems odd to assume he is wrong because he does't have some prerequisites, not just that he might disagree with you (and possibly be right).

Also, I think Simon Singh is actually a pretty good communicator. He's written several books, for laypeople, which talk about advanced science / mathematics. These have been pretty popular, so I think he's actually a counter-example to most scientists who don't do more. I think the article just gives the wrong impression.
IIRC the 2004 is simply a retyping of the 1984 edition, so all the content is nearly thirty years old (Thinking Forth Project http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/).

So this kind of information is a bit dated.

If you look at current forth implementations (gforth, Forth inc and MPE comes to mind) none of them is screen based; you can decide if is good or bad ;-)