skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Optimizing conversion rates for downloads
Greetings hackers/entrepreneurs,

I'm the Product/UX guy at GameGround (www.gameground.com), a startup aiming to create a lot of new engagement in games across many game platforms. I'd greatly appreciate any advice, tips or sources of information you can offer me for the following.

1) We are currently monitoring the funnel and A/B testing various copy/layouts in our app download and installation process. In general, any best practices or learnings from experience re:communication/UX for optimizing download conversion rates? How would you "couch" a download (albeit a small one) if you knew it was a necessary step in the user funnel? (GameGround is a web app that works in tandem with a desktop app)

2) GameGround's UX involves a desktop app, but the website does live on its own. Any experience or data indicating that the app download should be part of the registration process or after the user enters the site? In one case you might hurt the registration step in the funnel and in another you might hurt the download step.

Some background: Unlike other products I've worked on in the past, the GameGround UX is part website and part lightweight desktop app. The two work hand-in-hand simultaneously. The desktop app automatically saves your scores in games you play on the web, your PC, and console. It also shows you a game summary at the end of any session highlighting your scores, new rank, and what to achieve next. The website displays your scores and accomplishments and allows you to compare and compete with friends. You can also launch games from the website, but you don't have to - the app still saves your scores and rewards your progress.

Sorry for the lengthiness here. I look forward to hearing your comments.

Thanks in advance.
How did you manage to sell it then? Much traffic?
How do I find the number of hair salons in the country?
I have been trying to hunt down some numbers for brainstorming purposes. Basically, I want a drill down of business types where type is definitions which is useful from a market segmentation perspective. Apart from the number of businesses in a category, it would be useful to have each segment broken down by company size, profitability, geography, demography etc. Trends (eg yearly data) would make it perfect.

I've been going through the abs.gov.au (I'm in australia) site and apart from being difficult to find anything, their publications seem to break down the numbers in a way that just isn't specific enough for me (Property and business services, industry, retail). US sources don't seem much better. Surely this information is available somewhere.

Why is this relevant?

Since small businesses represent a potential market for startups, it might be useful to say "there are 1200 home vegetable delivery businesses in the country employing >5 people."
There is an irc channel for project #elementary on freenode. And they confirmed that it's an OS based on Ubuntu Linux.
LibPaxos: Open-source Paxos
A commonly cited factor is the lower status of women in the culturally defined relationship that drives some women to seek partners who do not share that cultural preference. In some cultures, the wife is subservient not only to the husband but also to the husband's family. A desire to escape this, perhaps even a subconscious desire may drive some of the cross cultural mate seeking behavior more directly.

Indeed, look at Dr. Chua's family- she married someone outside of her culture and continues to pursue the "Chinese parent" mindset with vigor.
I read it, I liked it. It has many good ideas one can apply. But it's not the definitive business strategy manual. Looks like an introductory guide for more advanced readings; I'm still not sure what such more advanced works would be, probably Porter.

It's a really short and succint book. I would recommend reading it.
Compiling from source should be just downloading source, unpacking, and typing `make`, at least on most popular Linux distros and OS X.
As a senior hustler myself (in the hard working, making deals way) I would suggest that they look at just hiring a part time bookkeeper and an office assistant. It would cost less, not dilute equity, and they wouldn't have a hustler doing bookkeeping. As someone who has had to fix bad bookkeeping, I can assure you it is something you want to avoid. You could think of bad bookkeeping like bad code - it can be 10x the work to fix it as it was to do in the first place. But with bookkeeping you usually can't just pull it off github and rewrite it. You have to fix live systems that change everyday.
It's a very good read. I liked its style, it's written as a master/tutor discussion a la Socrates. It's also a fairly quick read. Recommended!

After reading it you will be thinking: if a business model can't be explained with four strokes of a pen it's too complex. :)
Are you saying that CreditL0an isn't an infographic creation tool?
By the way, Macs since OS X 10.4 come with a very nice (numerical) Grapher program, which is in Utilities.
Well it's an interresting project, although i fail to see the improvement over a regular bash/zsh shell.

> bash and ssh, we love you, but your era is past.

I'd love for that to be true, but let's see how their first example does compare against bash/ssh:

local = Rush::Box.new('localhost')
remote = Rush::Box.new('my.remote.server.com')
local_dir = local['/Users/adam/myproj/']
remote_dir = remote['/home/myproj/app/']

local_dir.copy_to remote_dir
remote_dir['**/.svn/'].each { |d| d.destroy }

versus

remote=my.remote.server.com
local_dir=/Users/adam/myproj/
remote_dir=/home/myproj/app

scp -r $local_dir $remote:$remote_dir
ssh $remote "find $remote_dir -name .svn | xargs rm"

Okay so, bash/ssh is a tiny bit shorter, but that was to be expected.

Contrary to bash reputation, there is a lot less hard to type line noisy characters in the bash/ssh version than in the rush one, namely all the |[{ etc of the ruby version.

In my opinion, due to the reduced line noise, the bash/ssh version is a lot easier to read too. But it's less self-explanatory, in that scp/ssh commands are replaced by full names.

One might argue that the rush version is more conceptually elegant, because everything is objects, and you can streamline treatments this way, but :

- Even if this isn't true for bash, in practice it's the same thing, because connection strings are treated like hosts by all relevant programs, directory strings like directories by all relevant programs, etc. You lose in typing but not in usability

- This is in a context of a script where the authors considered it was better to actually have variables for everything, so that, i guess, the thing be better configurable, readable, and reusable. That's a good goal, but it's not always necessary.

Let's see how "raw" versions of the two compare :

scp -r /Users/adam/myproj/ my.remote.server.com:/home/myproj/app
ssh my.remote.server.com "find /home/myproj/app/ -name .svn | xargs rm"

versus

root['/Users/adam/myproj/'].copy_to Rush::Box.new('my.remote.server.com')['/home/myproj/app/']
Rush::Box.new('my.remote.server.com')['/home/myproj/app/**/.svn/'].each { |d| d.destroy }

The verboseness is of course worse when you don't declare variables. Let's be honest, i don't often declare variables for one off commands on the shell. I use auto-complete and i'm done with it. And for having typed this rush example by hand, i can assure you i'm not really ready to type that again anytime soon.

So i seriously doubt something like rush can replace something like bash/ssh. The benefits are likely to show up for bigger operations, where lots of people already use perl/python/ruby anyway because bash is a PITA for any serious programming, but bash still seems a lot more usable as a "shell", and i kind of understood this was the purpose of this.
Martin Odersky is a God amongst men. Yes, he has a hoard of people supporting and contributing ideas but... wow, that's all I can say. It's great to hear the why of things rather than just reading the way of things. Thanks for posting this.
I completely disagree with #8. A bad friend can be a cancer in your life, and blaming yourself for their failures is an extremely common way of dragging yourself down. Assuming that it's usually something to do with yourself, or that it's better to forget the past is just asinine.
The Biggest Flaw Of Ayn Rand
The first part of the article actually more highlights the fact that security questions are often blindingly insecure. Often a service which uses security questions will provide a list of available questions, some of which would open an account to easy attack if used (e.g. "What is your car registration number?") and many services do not allow a custom question to be supplied.
This proves that sufficiently advanced spam really is indistinguishable from content:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/28r/is_google_paperclipping_the_web_...
What Is A "Belief"?
Yeah, it gets a reasonable amount of traffic, and ranks fairly well on Google for summaries of some of the books. I was never able to do a good job of translating that into active participants, advertising dollars, or Amazon referral fees either. Part of the reason I sold it and retained some interest in it is to see if someone else could do a better job.
We're talking about the top 90% of earners so it makes sense to enlarge the right side of the graph. They're trying to illustrate the huge changes in income for every percentage point. A linear axis would be basically vertical at the right end.
> compare me with a kid who comes from a privileged background had extra tuitions for SATs and had all the time in the world to spend on his studies and did much better in SATs is probably unfair

It sure is. But life itself is unfair. If you resisted all the pitfalls that society or the environment put in front of you, good for you, but I'm sorry it is not what matters.

What can you produce ? Can you outcompete others who do not have had such obstacles ? If you can, then yes I call that excellence, if you can't that personal growth/karma/name it the way you want.

As you said - "much better than my peers" - that's good, but we are all in a big pond called mankind. The way I see it, some people think they deserve something just for the randomness of their birthplace, or for not screwing up.

Sorry they don't. There are a lot of people on this earth who may have surpassed even greater problems, yet did not make it.

Trying to improve or fix society means making the situation even more complex, with artificial restriction - thus even more unfair in the end.

Bright people come in all shapes and colors. A soprano, a sport pro, a math wiz - bright people in different areas. They all reach for excellence.

I don't believe I'm smart. I just believe I'm doing my best to become excellent in one specific domain, and I don't want to be judged on anything but my performance.
What transporting? What Stocking? Amazon is capable of print on demand. Second the primary cost of books is not the physical it is the human effort(writer, editor, layout). Perhaps people who do E-book layout are more costly than their paper counter parts making those books more expensive.
Just because Photoshop might have set the bar high doesn't mean the GIMP "sucks!!".
Every time I read an article like this, I think of all the people I know who are well off, yet appear to be miserable. Then I want to share with them this old wisdom from "The Ethics of the Fathers":

"Who is wise? One who learns from every man."

"Who is strong? One who overpowers his inclinations."

"Who is honorable? One who honors his fellows."

"Who is rich? One who is satisfied with his lot."
If you are using Wordpress, it has a "text" box. You can put your dirty html in there. That's what I did on several sites recently. If you want to mung the address, feel free to borrow the javascript from any of my sites (assuming you dont already know how -- you might know lots more than me, if so: nevermind).
I honestly don't see what the big deal is. Comparing GIMP usability to Photoshop usability only makes sense if you have no experience with either. Many people say GIMP is difficult yet forget they had a hard time learning Photoshop to begin with.

I personally find Photoshop daunting and GIMP pretty easy to use for most of what I need.
The folks on xda-developers.com are incredibly resourceful. From the information there, I'm now able to run FroYo on my HD2 (which shipped with WM6.5).
While I agree with the sentiment, I find it surprising how much longer these questions/answers last than the facts I used to answer them.

Even "what is your phone number," I have to think back to the 10 phone numbers it COULD be.

"What is your favorite car?" Well, usually my current one, so WHEN did I create this account?
Based on the way the info box follows the mouse, I think it's because their graphing tool puts an equal amount of space between data points.

Most likely, the data points they fed into it have x-values of [5%, 10%, ..., 75%, 80%, 81%, ...]. This is a useful way of tabulating percentile data, though not such a useful way of graphing it.
> You could purchase a copy of photoshop for much cheaper than the cost of hiring a good developer for a week.

True. That's why pooling resources is such a good idea. If you need a feature that's missing from Photoshop, you can find other people who need that feature (or would like to have it) and pool resources to hire someone to do it in GIMP. If you have a company with 10 seats using Photoshop, it may start to become cheaper to hire a GIMP developer than providing all employees with a Photoshop license (and Adobe must have corporate licenses exactly to counter that reasoning)
Ask HN: generic incoming email forwarding app on appengine?
Since appengine makes handling incoming email easy (http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/receivingmail.html), I was wondering if there's a generic appengine script that receives incoming email, and then POSTs it to your url (which may be a script on some other website). That would be handy :)
Eclipse Orion: tools for creating Web-based IDE
It's simple.

Make $100K, live near people making $90K = rich.

Make $100K, live near people making $110K = poor.
Firefox & Chrome Cache on RAM Drive -Fedora / Ubuntu
Was this your first purchase? If yes this is standard change they make to assert your account is valid before you can continue. Same thing happened to me when I registered but did not even buy an app! (Same thing paypal does when you update/add a credit card.)
Eight great infographics
what possible justification could there be for this article to be posted to Hacker News?
All chips of that generation ran hot. The clock speed arms race assured it. The AMD chips of similar generations generally ran cooler than the Pentium chips because AMD was squeezing more power out of fewer clock cycles, and therefore lower clock rates/power/heat dissipation/etc.
Ahh, sorry, I do apologise. I thought you were referring to whoever I quoted that said good sites.

But thanks for the link, very informative. I suppose if 40% of internet users are low-literacy then such sites as about.com sort of make sense.

I think we need to differentiate between content mills and spam sites though. Although many do not like content mills, I would not consider them spam but low quality content.

Spam sites seem to be more reliant on affiliate marketing, especially in the review of products niche, as well as monetised by adsense.

I do however think that it would help the discussion immensely if adword users can provide some data as to how does the quality of the site compare with conversion. I would assume that the higher the quality of the site content, the better the conversion, but, assumptions can be wrong.
Yelp Business Model
No, I think you are right. My mom is German. I have a bad habit of imposing German grammar on English and don't always notice when I run two words together which shouldn't be (something far more common in German than English). This gets worse when I am tired.

Thanks for noticing.
SMBs - You Don’t Know Jack (About the Cloud)
The Daily Crowdsource - #1 site for crowdsourcing news
Yes, this sort of thing makes it interesting (and tricky). For 'common features', buying commercial products is a good, and really simple way of pooling resources. You buy the product that has invested in the features you want. When you start talking about one-off types of things, or special, advanced features, open source can start to look a whole lot more competitive, especially since there is no monopoly on who is going to do the work.
For those just curious what they'll be renaming to (as I was), it's Jenkins.
Brilliant post there. Jotting down what you have learnt is not only important for others, but also for you. Writing stuff down means putting your thoughts to order, means better view on your product or company.
What surprises me is that there seems to be no upper limit for lifestyle expenses. To me it seems certain lifestyle choices are more of a liability than a bonus. A bigger house needs more cleaning, a cleaning lady, probably also a gardener. More cars require more maintenance, parking space, taxes. Yachts, OK, I don't know - they require personnel, but maybe they are nice to have. Then again, probably it is possible to rent them for the odd occasion?

I think from a certain comparatively low threshold, my worry would be how to use my money to make the world a better place, not how to get a even more luxurious lifestyle.
Secure hash competition down to the final 5
I never mentioned PS in my response, for me they are different and both of them are necessary.

In fact, from a year now, I always use Gimp as my image editing program after 4 years of PS, and I hope it doesnt die because it would leave me without choices...

This said, we cannot ignore the flaws on the UI, not comparing them to photoshop, but on their own. User life could be eased a lot fixing lots of little quirks the UI has.

Saying Gimp is pretty easy to use doesnt mean its UI could be improved a lot
No offense, but that's about the worst thing you can do to a modern processor. The only reason the Intel didn't go up in smoke was because of proper on-die thermal protection. You still should never boot a modern processor without the heat sink in place. The temperature will almost instantly exceed the thermal design limits of the materials. AMD's only poor decision was not to provide good thermal protection in their CPUs. Running the processor without a heat sink was your own poor decision.
it least this is the case for what I am working on ;)
Ugh, there's a tide of spam that slowly erodes HN usability. It pains me to say it, but it's almost on every site.

I am not sure if an idea of a power user simply deleting this type of content, banning/warning the submitter helps. Mods on Reddit cause as much havoc as they fix.

I would gladly pay a small fee for a clean non-spammy HN. Let that fund be used for a couple part time mods.
Or, to widen the perspective, why doesn't an American making $30,000 feel rich when he is above the 90% percentile for the world?
(And he feels wretchedly poor because he has to have a roommate and use public transportation.)
Pinker puts the number around 10% as I remember. And, yes, he's aware of all the qualifications that attend such a crude number.

The ability to talk is obviously a significant trait. But it is not an extraordinary one. Everybody uses language in some form (a subject in which Pinker is strongly versed.) What language you speak is decidedly less significant and something most parents don't get to choose. I'd be surprised if the differential impact among parents on this point was even 1%. Most kids don't end up speaking like their parents. They end up speaking like their peers.

Dropping a kid on her head or locking her in a closet for her teenage years (with or without a violin) are obvious ways a parent could have a more extraordinary impact on her child's development, but, happily, they are not very typical.

Harris and Pinker's point is that parents have a pretty perfunctory role in a child's development (feed, protect, provide the rudiments of cognitive development) and much less influence than most people generally suppose (probably, most of all, parents that think they are having an impact). What influence they do have is regularly mixed up with genetic characteristics that the child has inherited.

Chua's argument seems to reinforce the point: to move the needle requires draconian measures.
I wouldn't call it "related" or even "similar"… it's similar in that they're both key value stores, but there's no durability and Ramcloud stores both keys & values in memory; whereas bitcask only stores keys in memory as an "index" to the value on disk.
An interesting example. In a job I wouldn't necessarily wish on anyone - but she ran her own website and was to some extent her own producer. This was before porn became socially acceptable.

I am not sure why you cite her example. Is it "see - if you push too hard they will run off and become porn stars!!!" ?

Or - is this the case:
Here is someone who had the native intelligence and creativity and entrepreneurial wherewithal to take a basically crappy, exploitive situation and shape it to some extent.

Not to say it is a utopian existence but she did this before there was a culture industry that produces Jenna Jameson (sp?) type of success with all of the open merchandising and acceptance.

The 'Chinese Mom' (in this case German and Japanese - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia_Carrera) quite possible helped in this case. And according to the wikipedia entry she herself is raising her kids in a 'conservative' manner.
Thanks! Why they don't tell you this is very frustrating. I couldn't find anything about this anywhere and was going to contact the App developer.
Haha, I know, that was just a bit of artistic prose. Still, I think unposed photos would have been more interesting.
I disagree with this. While I'm not saying I was ever "poor" (as I never felt poor), I started out working for $5.15/hour, and sleeping on a friend's couch while I tried to find an apartment I could afford. Then I moved into a boston apartment that was $1000/month for three of us. It was falling over, and I ate homemade burritos every single day because beans and tortillas were cheap.

Now I own a big house, drive nice cars, and earn a lot more than back then, but I still don't feel rich. The rise in income over 12 years, was more or less matched by a rise in lifestyle and spending. Don't get me wrong, life is more comfortable, and I'm able to do lots of things I want to do that weren't possible before, but I still don't feel "rich" (I do feel lucky and blessed, etc...). I hate my 1/2 working 30 year old electric cooktop. I want a new gas cooktop, but that means new counter tops, and running a gas line, and if I'm doing new counter tops I should probably re-do the cabinets at the same time, and if I'm doing those, I should do the floors, and if I'm doing cabinets I should really replace the wall oven and fridge while I'm at it. But I don't have that kind of money! And I still have to bust my ass every day at work. So until you're really "RICH", and you still have to set the alarm and work every day, and you have things you want, but can't afford, you don't "feel" "rich".

Is this a healthy well adjusted mindset, probably not. Just pointing out that slow acclimation can make you feel like you really haven't moved much, regardless how far you've travelled. I've lost 35+ lbs in the last 3 years, but I don't feel "thin".
I think what people are really searching for is satisfaction.

If they define satisfaction as being top 5% in wealth, then they'll probably have a long road to satisfaction.

As for me, and I suspect others here, I'm satisfied when creating value. Dollars made is just a fallible measure of how much value has been created.