skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a complicated question.

I know of a direct-response guy who had horribly ugly sales pages that literally included misspellings. He tells this story about how all kinds of marketing consultants and designers would come in and say, "Your sales page is so ugly! You need a redesign." He would laugh and say, "Everyone says that. But I have data from the last 5 years, and this is the single best-performing page of all." He made $25m last year.

Sophisticated direct marketers are not to be trifled with.

However, if you're building a company that depends on other non-direct factors like brand, you can't really A/B test that. You just have to make a decision.

A few years back, I met a guy whose girlfriend worked on the optimization team at Amazon. Now THEY are sophisticated. They knew how A/B tweaks would affect users several months later. But even still, Amazon often makes strategic decisions that can't always be justified with data.

Bottom line: It's important to know the advantages and disadvantages of various types of marketing, including direct/brand/etc. But you will have to make some tough choices.

Personally, on my sites, I've seen lots of interesting results with testing designs...but I finally told my staff to stop micro-testing since we'd optimized the hell out of some of our stuff and were only getting incremental gains (e.g., going from 35% opt-in rate to 39% is prohibitively difficult). The biggest results I've gotten have been from strategic changes like changing the offer, adding a new product, pricing changes, back-end offers, deeper customer research, etc.
So? There is already a lot of software for which Canonical, for example, explicitly states that they do not provide updates. The software is then updated either directly by user or in the next OS release.
My old supervisor, an acm fellow, admonished me: stop thinking about the theory! Look at the data!

Henri Poincaré said, C'est par la logique qu'on démontre, c'est par l'intuition qu'on invente. (It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover) http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Printonly/Poincare.html

Implicit in this idea is that there is some kind of search going on - some way of thinking about the problem - which is not logic, and which is beyond notational reasoning; and indeed, mathematicians create new mathematics and notation at the drop of a hat (even if, or sometimes it seems, especially if, someone else's notation already exists. They are like Lispers - or, perhaps, lispers are like them.)

Now, the truth is that our thoughts and ideas are also constrained by a system - our own minds, by which I mean both the specific development of a particular mind at a given time; and also the biological constraints of our thought.

Obviously, there are thoughts which a specific person cannot yet conceive, because they simply don't have the background: consider great geniuses of the past, born before crucial mathematics had been invented, or before crucial facts about the world were known.

But are there thoughts that are biologically impossible for humans to think? I think so. For example, it is very difficult for humans to understand complex ideas without hierarchy. All our systems are founded on hierarchies, or layers of abstractions, because our short-term memory - even of the best of us - is limited. I'm sure this has been discussed academically, but I'm only aware of a couple of science-fiction writers who have mentioned this: Niven/Pournelle's Motie Engineers, who effortlessly improvised simple solutions that participated in solutions to many problems at once; and Vinge's Rider design (clearly of Transcendental origin, apparently simple, even mechanical operational, but with extraordinary emergent properties.)

As the old joke goes: any problem can be solved by another layer of abstraction, except for the problem of too many layers of abstraction.
Home Machine Shop Hall of Fame
Ok, so you voluntarily agreed to do that, and in that case it makes sense.

But you were under no obligation to do that, and you being the majority shareholder is also a key element here.

The OP is not a majority shareholder, as far as I can see has no obligation to go in to this now and it would be a very bad move indeed to get his name on any paperwork where he privately assumes the debt of the corporation just 'because his name is already on the paperwork'.

It would make it easier, not harder to tie this to him in the future.
Can you comment on why you find it less scannable? In fact, I find the opposite -- just the information I need, with no noise, on a clean white background. But, of course I'm biased.

I did add alternating backgrounds -- I'm not sure I'll leave it like that, but do you find that better for scanning?
What about two-player Duck Hunt or Mario? Excite Bike? Bubble Bobble? These and many other games allowed people in the same room to play with and compete against each other. I remember hours of fun doing that with my parents and friends. When it came to RPGs, we would take turns progressing in the same RPG; one of us might grind the levels up while the other slept. Tabletop games had this same feel.

And on many levels -- just my opinion -- it is more fun to play with people I know than to play with a bunch of strangers, especially groups of people selfishly interested primarily in their own advancement in the game. This is one reason WoW bores me. The social arenas in online gaming are usually annoying, something to tolerate rather than enjoy.
I got my 9 yo hooked on Lemonade Stand through a Apple 2 emulator.
Getting things to build with maven's idea of a build process has traditionally been tough, but it's pretty good for auto-downloading dependencies. Usually I needed a shell script that had maven download some, then wget'd a few more (that, for licensing reasons, couldn't go in an upstream server).

Unless a slightly-customized maven is distributed, you'd have to put a ~/.m2/settings.xml in the new-user template that specified your local repository. Which isn't too bad.
A JavaScript web console
Sentry, Disqus' Django Error Tracker
You saw it, I saw it, some random person who will complain about this comment saw it.

By tomorrow there will be spoof videos of people saying "hot dog" or something....

Brilliant.
> My personal favorite timeless classic is X-COM: UFO Defense

My, this game is so great. It's actually much better now, because you don't need to wait for 20 minutes at each turn in the later levels (yes, up to 20 minutes back when I played it on a 386SX 16Mhz with 2MB RAM).
Good observation about different challenges.

Different people like different things. I like games that allows mastery of complex control scheme, and exercises reflex. It's great feeling, when you have complete control.

Some games are based on logical thinking, story, strategy, etc - in these games difficult controls is just distraction, and it makes experience worse. Control schemes evolved, so older games had worse than new games (also computers evolved, now it's easier to do good ui than 10 years ago).

For me one of the best games was "Icy Tower" - very simple concept, simple graphic, no story to speak of. It aged very well.

Doom - the same - the feeling of nicely timed double shotgun shot is very rewarding, it doesn't matter you are shooting to rectangles.

I've seen in some game design book the distinction between a game and a toy.
Toy is when you are given some cool object to manipulate, and some constraints, and that's it.
Game has rules and objectives, you must solve some problem.

You can make a game without a toy - when there is no pleasure apart from solving problems.

You can also make a toy without making a game - it will be boring after a while, because there will be no objective, no problems to solve.

But great game is when you have cool toy and interesting problem to solve with it - these games plays great even after years.
Why Libraries are better than Frameworks
I gave this a try. I tend to find alternate row colors pretty jarring, so I made it subtle. I might pull it though, so let me know what you think.
o | o | o
---------
x | x | x
---------
o | o | o
Second all of that. It has since come out the person writing this is a minority shareholder of a C-Corp so his liabilities are much smaller than what it seemed to be like initially. It would be nice to know if he was/is a signing officer.
I've heard (second-hand) that Twitter isn't discarding users' tweets after they hit 3,200, they just don't provide API access to them. They're still sitting in a DB somewhere, just inaccessible currently, until Twitter provides access to them.
Here's Why You Should Get an MBA
Yerba Mate: the Wonder Drink for Business & Social Good
Having a C-Corp, Delaware or no, does not remove personal responsibility. Let's say I form a C-corp and accept client's money. The company then just happens to spend all that money on me and not deliver any product or service. I believe that is still called fraud and the individual is still liable.

That may be a harsh example.

Business is still about people. Regardless of whether an individual's credit it tied to the company - and in this case I believe it is - these decisions affect his future ability to conduct business. These decisions affect his relationships with other people.

Telling everyone to take a hike may be a short-term solution. However, I believe finding a win-win solution among all parties is a long-term win.
Yes, and I don't have any children. I still play it sometimes. For me, the SNES era represents the period of "getting it" for 2D games.
Positively amazing! And I'm not even a fiction reader.
Archival of 'cloud' data is an issue I've been thinking a lot about lately. People are putting so much of their lives on the internet these days without generally giving too much thought to permanence and availability. Twitter's only been around a few years and people are already running into retention issues. The tweet from the article will still be valuable 30 years from now - will twitter even be around then? Will all the tweets from the current system have been migrated to whatever tools we're using in the future?

I've been playing around with a project to locally archive a bunch of data sources that interest me (email, instant messaging logs, Twitter, SMS, some blog and social news comments) in a straightforward and open data format. Unfortunately this type of tool might be something that most people don't realize they need until it's too late.
OK, the purpose is noble. However the title really looks like an ugly spam. Find another one, please :)
This was related to the Firefox rendering bug, and should be fixed now.
It's a great game, but I've noticed that after a while I've been bored with battles - I prefered allocating resources, waiting for new discoveries, battles felt a little too long, especially killing the last few aliens on each map.

I wonder if others feel the same?
That's not the right URL.

Go here instead: http://codelesson.com/courses/view/introduction-to-programmi...
New iPhone App allows frustrated workers to bash the boss
> Allocate 50% of your time to debt service

That may not even be needed.
Argh, I already voted, and now I see the email field isn't public. So there's my reason. It is in my profile; you just can't see it. I do include other methods of contact that are more immediate, though. If someone was interested enough in contacting me, I'm easy to find.
What I find odd about this is the ranking of mathematician. I would have thought they'd be on par with engineers. Anyone have an explanation why they'd rank so high?
I like how our eye doctors (4%) adhere to the sanctity of marriage better than our religious leaders (5.6%).
The biggest thing that irritates me is no thread collapsing ala reddit's.
These are true hardcore hardware geeks :) Reminds me of this video of a guy making radio tubes by hand... Crap, can't find it...
But then the tested binaries + libraries is a big directory which doesn't respect any of the unices way of organizing files.

I don't see how this makes it any more convenient on the users than downloading it from upstream makes it.

I compare this to things like installing nginx on ubuntu which comes with files in the places I expect (/etc instead of the configure script default of /usr/local/conf) etc. Packages are actually very convenient for 90% of what I user on my computer.

Ruby and Clojure stuff are the only thing I download and install myself.
What a #FAIL my server died :-/

PDF: http://cl.ly/12dd4e4abff3939fa3c8
I don't know anything about OR but I see constraint solving on there. Has anyone looked at Alice ML or Oz for solving these kinds of problems? Do they apply? Am I confused?
The main problem with the Apple in ears buds is the seal. Fix the seal with some decent buds like
http://www.complyfoam.com/Product/T%7B48%7D400
and the bass comes. Its nearly as good as my westone UM2's that I have. All it took was some cheap foam
So many things in this thread that make no sense to me. The guy is a minority share holder and acting in good faith, this is a completely different situation than a sole proprietorship with outright fraud.

These things are not related.

Thomas' advice may sound harsh but it is absolutely the most realistic approach here, he has to think about #1 for a bit and divorce himself from identifying corporate debt with private debt. He technically doesn't owe anybody anything as far as I can see and by assuming responsibility might actually make matters worse (because he is now at least acting as a signing officer of the company).
Corporate liability does not shield you from fraud, negligence, or other torts.

It most certainly does shield you from personal liability for debts the company incurred in good faith (meaning: virtually all the company's debts).

People on this thread are giving what seems to me to be some spectacularly bad advice. Do not throw your own personal finances down the toilet after your company's.
Could it also have something to do with problem solving? Engineers can be stubborn, but also stubborn in the sense that they don't like throwing the towel in.

Or that engineers are logical? As my father-in-law once said (when he was a guest family lawyer on a reality TV show.) "If you are wondering how much it costs to get divorced, just ask me if I'm still married." (Note: that was in jest, but his wife still gave him a hard time about it.) Divorce sucks all around. Figuring out the problem and trying to fix it is a much better solution that divorce.
No, I think they just shouldn't expect tenure, better pay and better benefits than a high school teacher.
I'd say the big thing that defines a timeless game is the story and atmosphere. Chrono Trigger, for example: fairly mundane RPG gameplay, 16-bit graphics, but the fantastic story has made me replay it several times over the years. Or one of my personal all-time favorite games, Elder Scrolls: Morrowind. It's a deeply flawed game both in terms of gameplay mechanics and technical details (it's shockingly buggy) but the deep, intricate story and well-realized atmosphere make it, in my opinion, much more fun to play than its newer and much more beautiful sibling, Oblivion. I was thinking of re-playing it just yesterday, in fact. Half-Life is another example.

System Shock 2 has a deep, creepy atmosphere and engaging story despite looking worse than Half-Life, and it's one of my favorites. Mass Effect is a more recent example--while it's still near the top of the heap graphics-wise, I thought the gameplay was pretty flawed. Despite that the amazing story and characters pretty much guarantee that I'll come back to it in 5 year's time.

For me, it's all about the story.
This sounds peculiarly like the issue of "DLL Hell" on the Windows platform. Ultimately, you either hope that the shared libraries match, ship with the DLLs you need, or (as a newer option) throw your chips in with WinSxS -- where the cure might actually be worse than the disease.

Maybe the fact that Java grew out of the proprietary world is part of the reason why it doesn't play nicely with open-source/free operating systems.
Make government more transparent

They could have sponsored wikileaks.
When he took over, right from the beginning he said this was temp till they find a suitable replacement. About a week before the v4 went public, it was announced that he would be stepping down as they found someone to replace him. After the v4 was released he stepped down as he promised he will do all these time.
My first implementation (in c++) was exactly like that. A 3x3 array that printed out like that. You had to enter 1,1 for the left upper corner (that's how I learned that arrays start at 0 in almost all languages ;p)
M.U.L.E.

Seriously, one of EA's first game releases from the early/mid 80's and I still play it on an atari800 emu.

Hell, Star Raiders and even Archon/ArhonII are pretty incredible still from that era.
Fear & loathing in the form of a question: my brief reign as Jeopardy champion
There's more to "best layout" than finger travel distance. Capewell's website suggests some of them:

http://www.michaelcapewell.com/projects/keyboard/index.htm#T...

Roughly quoted:

* Minimize finger movements.

* Maximize the use of 'combos,' i.e., multiple keys hit on the same hand with one comfortable movement

* Minimize the use of uncomfortable combos

* If a key in one of the centre columns is used, have the keys typed before and after the key be typed by the other hand

* Minimize use of awkward positions on the keyboard

I'd also add cadence: it's important to have a nice rhythm when typing normally. This plays into the combos and lack of awkward keys. I suspect that in some ways, it's better to sacrifice a little average speed so long as variance is not very large.
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Is there an implication that reading means reading books? Because I'd think that it's harder to raise a child who doesn't read in the internet age.
Hmm, update: apparently it's one of the ideas that won Google 10^100

http://www.project10tothe100.com/ideas.html

Way to go, some people are on it :)
It seems to me that the occupational study results correlate well to income and income stability. It's well known that financial problems are a major cause of divorce.
Yes. I would advise getting the book (Tim's blog article was just an excerpted chapter). The latter part of the book gives the "how". You should definitely not be feeling hungry from this diet, _especially_ if you're not trying to lose weight.
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson.

Alice in Wonderland iff still young enough not to think girls are gross. Otherwise you must sneak up on him with the poetry, then introduce the book. (I've had success with reciting 'Jabberwocky' and 'The Walrus and the Carpenter.')

Learn 'If,' by Kipling, by heart. Then teach it slowly and patiently.

As an aside, quite a lot of Kipling is truly excellently boy friendly.

The Proverbs of Solomon, et al. Found in any Bible or Talmud. Bears repeated reading, as most eastern 'wisdom' literature does (The Book of Five Rings, The Art of War, etc.).

While we're at, why not the Narnia books? I loved them, and I'd no idea the Lion was apparently Jesus until I was nine or so.

But by far do not DO NOT forget Michel Ende's marvelous 'The Neverending Story.'

If you're only familiar with it from a movie, you've missed the best part, when the boy 'Bastian must take up arms and become the adventurer he has read about and loved.
Thanks, that's an important distinction. The punishment idea already existed; Zoroastrianism simply emphasized individual responsibility (and therefore punishment). Thanks for the correction.
Setup Call Recording With Android App Tasker On Nexus One
Some merchant accounts make you sign a personal guarantee even if you are incorporated (or at least they try to, it's all negotiable of course).
I absolutely loved that game, but I lost the disc a long time ago :(
There's always the stupidity corpus that mr. Graham used to talk about...

http://stupidfilter.org/wiki/index.php?n=Main.Status
What makes you an excited programmer?
Forget Facebook This Silicon Valley scandal needs a movie ...
As a former direct mail marketer, I contend you can A/B test anything, if the two aspects of the variable are well-defined.
It's not harsh! Your company paid a premium to ensure that you wouldn't be losing your house over hosting charges.
It's not local, and not in an open data format, and not free, but you might like http://www.backupify.com/, they have a nice list of services that they can back up for you (haven't used it, so wouldn't know how good they are in practice).
On my first day of giving Bing a go (I used it for about two weeks to try to fairly assess) I ran into a problem: It can spellcheck words, but it cant get it right contextually.

Let me give you an example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=how+I+won+the+waer

http://www.bing.com/search?q=how+I+won+the+waer

I meant to type "how I won the war" and only Google picks up on this.

"waer" alone into google instant will bring up water (country), but with the context of my search phrase it gives me something far more accurate.
so... can these kinds of stocks be bought on etrade/ameritrade, etc? Anyone know?
Lots of "high quality" people already using it:-) That's the most important thing.
I had an off-by-one error, for the case of 4n+3 rows in a half-tone picture display. I learned about it when I arrived at the office one afternoon and my boss called me into his office, handed me a copy of TIME, and told me to look at page 57. The only reason I didn't get fired was that that release also had a (lossless) compression algorithm that allowed the magazine to push back their photo deadline by a day. (I've always wondered how good my ~50% compression was for pictures, when you only have enough RAM to look at one scan line at a time). Luckily the customers noticed the problem before printing more than a few copies.
Yeah, that is one of the hardest games ever made. Probably why the high-score is still contested. Side note - Billy Mitchell just lost the title back to his Kind of Kong rival Steve Wiebe.

Excellent film too - for those who missed it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0923752/

I'd place Robotron: 2084 (arcade) in that same category - seriously one of the hardest games ever made, mostly due to the dual control requiring a fair amount of ambidextrous skills.
Graphics like it's 1979: How to get clojure to act like a ZX Spectrum
Well said Ramit. There was a great interview of Jeff Bezos by the now defunct Portfolio Magazine in which they asked him how important A/B testing is to Amazon's success. He said it was important but that still many decisions, such as launching the Kindle, need to "come from the heart".

In this age of analytics, I think a lot of small startups are overlooking the gut decisions they need to make and focusing too much on optimization (e.g. this HN question).
Where's that plane going? This app knows
Incidentally, the limit of 3200 tweets via the API is the same as the 160-page limit on the website. 20 tweets per page * 159 additional pages = 3180.
Does Microsoft have its mojo back? Can it keep it?
I must say, that's a mighty fine idea you have there.
Although it may surprise some folks at first. If HN had ads it would seem to be click fraud. Might work as a bookmarklet or browser extension.
Convertible notes, standard deal docs, valuations - The Super Angel debate
The library of congress has them, if we could get a copy we could index it all somewhere to re-construct a copy of people's early timelines http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acq...

I was thinking recently about getting all the tweets from 2006, it should be about 2 million tweets, so should be possible to fetch by sequentially walking through the ids.
Found it! Googled "biz stone twootball"
http://twitter.com/biz/status/976238704
How is this not also true for things like Ruby (gems), Perl (cpan), etc?
Or maybe you can't support a family with tips and minimum wage.
Networks diss iTunes rentals, embrace Netflix instant streaming
Kind of meta but I thought the stock quotes (which are just text in the article) changing in real time was both distracting and oddly intriguing.
I'd love to see the whole table....