skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just trying to say that this comparison might be comparing apples to oranges.

It doesn't even say what goes into those numbers, or where they come from.

For example, in Germany nuclear garbage is stored in old salt mines. Did they include the people who died creating the salt mines in the statistics?
Can you please elaborate how is it snake oil? I am genuinely curious since I run an A/B testing company.
You're missing the point which is that all forms of energy production are unsafe, and all forms of energy production can be made safer, but the public perception of the relative dangers between the different forms is completely wrong, and people are focusing their energy and fears on what feels the most dangerous instead of what actually kills most people.

The events at Fukushima will lead to a global backlash against nuclear power, and some countries will most probably shut down some plants or postpone the building of new ones in response to public fears, and since the same public is unwilling to cut back on their power consumption, some other form has to increase, which means that more people will die.

And to anyone with a rational mindset, this is just infuriating.
Did you buy two years ago? Because the Nikkei was lower at various points in 2009 than it is now. If not, why is this valuation better?

It's almost certain that Buffet would be actually analyzing these stocks rather than just jumping in because people may be being fearful.
This is insane and a not widely known fact, this question should be upvoted.
Great idea and nicely presented... but can't help but think that I could whip this up with jquery in under an hour?
Ask HN: Javascript Framework for Basic Game
I am planning to write a simulation/strategy game. Ultimately I'd like to have Facebook, iOS, and Android versions, but am initially starting with iOS. After some consideration, I've come to the conclusion that trying to learn Objective C and Cocoa Touch would not be worth my time. Instead, I'd like to use PhoneGap or something similar.

It seems like some sort of "single page" javascript framework would be ideal for this. My controls would mostly be sliders, text inputs, and buttons. I was hoping I could get some recommendations on what might be easiest to pick up and learn. I have all the preliminary game design work done, graphics mostly done, formulas written, etc. I just need to code everything.

I've looked into Cappuccino and, while very impressive, it seems like overkill for what I need.

I use MVC for most of my web projects, so something following that pattern would be ideal.
The batteries do not power the pumps, and were not designed to. The pumps draw far too much power for that - the batteries are to power the control systems and valves only.
And also one for Linux that actually works. :(
We converted ShrinkingApp.com to modal signup forms 6 months ago or so and saw a slight increase in conversions, nothing too dramatic. I can see how it would work from a simplicity standpoint (less page loads, quicker, etc.).
Wordtracker are looking: http://www.wordtracker.com/blog/rails-developer-position - would suit a Rails dev with decent experience, or maybe a PHP guy looking to move across to Ruby.
That's cool, I wasn't sure if I'd get HTML or an image, I guess HTML makes sense, but could get big for large app with scripts (although I'm guessing you strip those out.)

Did you consider using canvas, which I think can get image data from the current page? Obviously less supported, but might help people with browser bugs that are harder to reproduce, even with the HTML.
Thanks for the feedback. Exactly what I was looking for.
Ommwriter for Windows is now available
Richard Stallman: Cell phones are 'Stalin's dream'
Thanks for the links.

One could obviously argue about the term "much impact". Having cancer ia a pretty bad experience even if you survive. Same with abandoning your hometown etc.

Nevertheless the outcome of Chernobyl seems to be far less dramatic than most people believe. At least if this study by Greenpeace is wrong (estimating almost 100,000 deaths): http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/che...
There are probably some things that work (naturally, most products can be improved upon), but I doubt that it is a solution for everything. Already there was a comment in this thread from someone who claimed the popup forms did not work in his case.

Everybody is using the "you should follow me on Twitter" line on their blog, just because one guy made a successful A/B Test with that line.

It just seems that the A/B-Testing companies seem to promise a lot. Will everybody who uses visualwebsiteoptimizer see a 50% increase in signups (when they test the popup forms)? Apparently not... So it is a false promise of sorts.
Reasons not to use an SEO firm:

1) They don't want to understand your business, they just want to apply their cookie cutter approach and hope it works for your situation.

2) They make blanket statements like "you should only have 50 links per page!!" when you are an ecommerce company. The nature of your business means you will likely have more in order to deliver good usability to the customer.

3) They recommend no following a ton of your internal links to "sculpt page rank," even though Google changed the way page rank flows a year and a half ago so that doesn't work. Further, Matt Cutts has repeatedly said it doesn't make sense to nofollow internal links.

4) They write spammy articles created just for ezine and other article aggregators and tell you not to worry when the articles a) look spammy, b) aren't valuable content, and c) aren't 100% relevant.

5) They give you new h1, meta, and alt tags that have keywords for products you don't sell just because people search for them a lot.

6) I could go on. There are some real idiots in SEO. Maybe there are some good ones, but wow @ some of the firms we've worked with/are working with.
List of Companies by Seed Program
Let Kids Rule the School
We are hiring a senior web developer for a well-funded Munich startup with interests in mobile applications and high quality standards. We develop code mostly in C, C++, ObjC, Python and Java. Our yet-to-launch product is a Spotify for ebooks. Get in touch with me for more details: henning.peters@skoobe.de or +49 89 / 2429267-13
And yet, Japanese stocks had 0 or negative returns for more than 20 years. In addition, even with the current drop in the Nikkei, the Nikkei was lower two years ago. What makes the Nikkei more attractive at 8600 following this major disaster than at 8000 in May of 2009 when there had been no major disaster? Did you buy then? Why or why not? Are you applying any rational financial analysis of the market, or just emotionally jumping at "oh a disaster, people must be overreacting, therefore I should buy"?
Interesting he's also a Googler:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/g2y8n/googler_p...
Crashing on Chrome 9, Windows XP
I wrote a LaTeX macro package for my university's PhD thesis format, and like a lot of such packages, the bulk of the work was in TeX rather than LaTeX. It's...well, I'm struggling to find the appropriate word that means "awful, but sort of comfortably awful."

Like a lot of things, if you're handed a finished product, it looks like random noise. If you could watch it being written, it pretty much makes perfect sense. It's a hideous syntax, and sometimes I still wake up in a cold sweat with long strings of '#' signs running taunting me from the corner of my eyes. But I can't say it was all that daunting to write, although I suspect my TeX code was highly non-idiomatic.
Even Gruber, who previously dismissed every Android phone with line based logic:

"There will never be an Android phone that people line up for like they did for Windows 95 — or like they do today, once or twice a year, for major new products from Apple." [1]

and hyped the Verizon iPhone, not on sales, but on its ability to generate lines:

"Is it going to be a lines-around-the-block situation, like the last four summer iPhone debuts on AT&T? Or is it going to be un-sensational — on the grounds that the sort of people who’d wait for hours in line to get an iPhone as soon as possible already have one on AT&T?

I’m going to say it’d be an event. I don’t think the lines would be as long as they were this summer for the iPhone 4 on AT&T, but I think there are going to be lines — especially in places where AT&T service is poor, like New York and San Francisco." [2]

seems to have twigged that Apple manufactures these as part of its symbiotic relationship with the media:

"Can’t help but think that pre-orders (such that they’d arrive in customers’ hands tomorrow) weren’t available because Apple wants to see lines outside Apple Stores around the country." [3]

[1] http://daringfireball.net/2010/12/emotional_rescue

[2] http://daringfireball.net/2010/08/n92

[3] http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/10/ipad-2
I'm trying to keep things simple for this initial version and iterate based on feedback.
Jooplicate is doing some tricky stuff in the background. For example, it's working cross-domain and sanitizing the HTML.
I know that many photographers use it to share their works, and it's better than most other photo sharing sites out there. When Facebook got better with photo handling(more than 60 per album, tagging, and God help us, face recognition), I imagine a large number of people stopped using Flickr and just stuck with Facebook instead.

I think stagnation is definitely a big part of their problem-not many improvements in usability(or maybe I just haven't been paying attention). I also believe there was a story sometime in the last few months where Flickr mistakenly wiped out several people's albums and had no way to recover them. They lost major points for that.

That aside, I thought the author's post was pretty touching and I wish him the best.
If you run out of storage on Slicehost, though, you have to get a bigger machine, with more RAM and bandwidth. Run out on EC2 and you just add a new EBS store. There are major advantages to the completeness of the group of tools AWS includes.
I'm a bit troubled with my results being used to support that conclusion, in the matter of a pharmaceutical researcher who published "Penicillin is not an effective treatment for brain cancer" would be troubled to be cited in support of "Well, that tears it, medical research is a sham."

It seems to me that the issue isn't A/B testing, it is blind adoption of other people's recommendations. You certainly don't need A/B testing to give people suboptimal advice -- designers, developers, and marketers do it every day without any evidence whatsoever! ("Eat more bananas, they're good for brain cancer!" <-- the state of web design best practices and, ahem, not far off from the state of nutrition research)
> You're disappointed that you didn't get BS marketing speak that it would defeat Apple and Google in 2 weeks

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/10/microsoft-celebrates-wind...

I'll just leave that there ;)
I don't understand why a web developer would have to go and develop applications for mobile platform when (s)he doesn't enjoy it. If I had to work with in an OS that I hate, with developer tools that I hate in a programing language that I hate I would rather change jobs.
Merge Xml Files in PDF Document & Reduce Code Duplication 
This technical tip shows how to merge Xml Files in PDF Document. Sometimes different PDF documents share some same content. For example, a number of PDF documents may have the same header or footer. In such cases, a lot of code duplication might be experienced by developers. To reduce this code duplication, it's a good practice to save the content (shared by multiple PDF documents) into different XML files and then merge the XML files together before generating PDF documents.
I got as far as the second paragraph before I knew that this was article was of dubious accuracy:

"As the hot cores ceased to be cooled by the water which is used to extract power from them, control rods would have remained withdrawn and a runaway chain reaction could have ensued"

This is rubbish. The control rods in every nuclear reactor, going right back to the Chicago Pile, are fail-safe: if the power fails, they drop into the core, stopping fission. (In the case of a BWR like the Fukushima reactors, stored hydraulic pressure forces the control rods upward into the core).

Even without fission occuring though, the fuel rods continue to produce a great deal of heat through beta decay of the fission products (immediately after shutdown, heat is produced at around 7% of the operating power). This is why a meltdown can still occur, if this prodigious quantity of heat cannot be removed quickly enough.
This is really a good thing. Especially for Europeans like me who are seeking for Silicon Valley investment the limited H-1B visa and the high demands for initial funding have been kind of a barrier hardly to be overcome. The ranges now really encourage also foreign entrepreneurs to work on their ideas and that should add some value to both parties, the entrepreneur and the US.
I've used similar functionality on a real estate website, allowing people to see that the information they want is behind the registration form. Previously, the client averaged 1-2 signups a day. After the change, they started seeing 6-7 per day. So this definitely can work - but as with every other user interface component you should use A/B testing and see if it works for you before committing to it 100%.
Ask HN: How do you write your own framework with user authentication?
Every time I start a project I am faced with the dilemma of "just doing it" or "doing it right" with an infinite amount of positions between. Most times I’m just looking to integrate with a sturdy user authentication system, there aren’t many other things I find myself really needing as I am developing an idea. What should I account for when building a lightweight framework for personal projects? What am I missing? Sometimes I feel frameworks are so robust I couldn’t possibly justify the need for it with a meager project, even though I would like most of these projects to flourish into an eventual revenue producing product. I would say my biggest stumbling block would be wanting to focus on building my idea in code and not focusing on the user authentication / security. I’ve often integrated custom code within a CMS, but if feels very clunky and restricting. What are some best practices for implementing your own user authentication system? I mostly code in straight PHP, but I’m not against moving to another language or a light non-obtrusive framework.
This is such BS and makes me sigh every time I hear it.

It's not being an ass that gets them laid, it's the other characteristics that an asshole typically has that gets them laid. Things like confidence, not coming off desperate and having experience not just approaching a girl but being able to hold a conversation... and the many more things that increase attraction but these are the basics.

These characteristics in a nice guy will get him laid more than the asshole and he'll have opportunities with girls that see right through the asshole (and some would say these are the more desirable women).
chaRLie sHeen
Honestly, if I could only follow one person, I doubt I'd bother. But @OmarKelly, a reporter for the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel is one of my top choices, because he tweets a lot of interesting Miami Dolphins news.

Outside of him, I'd put @NikkiSixx up there pretty high, as well as @kidehen, @guykawasaki, @metadaddy and a handful of others.

Oh, yeah, and, uh, what's his name... erm, @paulg. That guy... he has something interesting to say every once in a while. :-)
Clearly. It's just small.
Totally agree. A/B testing is not a panacea and certainly not every one who uses VWO sees improvements. In fact, last to last week, we prominently featured an article on our blog by Noah of AppSumo who said only 1 out of 8 A/B tests produce results of any sort. Here is that article: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/a-b-tes...

1 out of 8 A/B tests produce results and that's a reality. And only the positive results get published so you may get an impression that A/B testing is snake oil.

Reasons why such case studies are important is not because these will work for everyone, but may work. In fact, if I knew modal boxes work every time why would I even A/B test them?

Naturally, A/B testing is just one part of puzzle but discounting it is snake oil is not justified.
Parsing: the solved problem that isn't
Let's wait how Fukushima plays out. If all is fine in the end, maybe the public opinion will also turn.

I don't think this "killing most people" comparison is very useful, there some to be a lot of aspects and details missing from the picture.
We can all agree that $75T is a ridiculous number, so what's the legal strategy? The music industry may be in technology denial, but surely, they're not detached from reality.

Is there a good legal precedent for asking for so much? Is it just a bartering tactic?
Using the preprocessor

http://pastebin.com/Gxia1aBV
The Huffington Post hires Twitter co-founder Biz Stone
Germany shuts down seven reactors‎ because of Fokushima
It sounds like you think that the reported results of these A/B tests are snake oil, not A/B testing itself. I think most authors of A/B-testing-report articles would recommend testing such changes yourself, as opposed to accepting their findings as fact for every site in existence. Those who said the popup forms did not work for them only know that because they A/B tested them.

I think a healthy conclusion is "this worked for us, so it might be a good idea, but you should test it for your site". Wouldn't you agree?
Exhibit #123456789 of why the current copyright regime needs to be overhauled.
Venture Capital Deal Buzz: Zendesk
> About when I stopped paying attention to TeX and LaTeX many years ago (2002-ish?), there was some effort under way to rewrite all of TeX in Java. Did that go anywhere?

I'd say no. See http://extex.org/
WebM for IE9
> it leads to not being able to see the forest for the trees

And it's entirely possible the forest will end up being a beautiful one.
As Kindles Take Over, What Happens to Margin Notes?
http://buddycloud.com/ are doing pretty much just that, with added geolocation and stuff. But basically you can use their channel server as a distributed federated Twitter replacement.
Do I need an iPad?
Memory Olympics in Manhattan
"The first step to writing an operating system is getting to ring 0"

Right; just as the first step to building a web site is to write your own web server, and your first line of code is: int main()

Most "how to write an OS" tutorials make me sad because they're just "how to write a boot loader". If you're serious about writing an OS, you'll use GRUB, and concentrate on the actual OS.

Edit: Years ago, I did this as a hobby, and I wrote some tutorials that go beyond the boot loader:

http://www.osdever.net/tutorials/view/memory-management-1

http://www.osdever.net/tutorials/view/memory-management-2
well, we all live on planet Earth, so the question about geothermal is just about how deep you're willing to dig. Geothermal is pretty nice IMHO.
jeffrey kingston seems to be having fun building nonpareil

[http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~jeff/nonpareil/]
They are inefficient - that's the entire basis of George Soros' investment strategy.
Things that Irritate me About Android OS - 4 weeks in
Who Cares? You are There. 3 Abilities to Master as a Woman at a Tech Company.
HyperCard influence on the internet
A complete Internet web server built into an Ethernet (RJ-45) jack
What You Have Learned From the Women Around You
I'm thinking about a music application that lets you place tones in arbitrary locations on a continuous line (representing the tone space) and assign them keys on the keyboard.
Whatever WHOIS server your network resolves is not necessarily on the up and up either.
I also want to echo this, they took 2 months to move my broadband because their engineers kept cancelling tickets because the operators hadn't entered them correctly.

They then consistently billed me incorrectly, their bills are fubar in terms of trying to decipher them and calling them is a massive pain, they usually transfer you to call centres in India full of people who do not have a clue about anything more complicated than how much your last bill was and have no power to do anything at all.

I also randomly get 1 kbps (yes, 1) on SVN and FTP at weekend peak times as I'm guessing it's incorrectly flagged as p2p, at the best of times get only 2 meg even though I was consistently told I'd get 4 meg and youtube/bbc iPlayer often lags at peak time even at low quality.

They traffic shape like crazy, so never expect that 300 gig.

Avoid these guys at all cost.
Everything Everywhere Ltd. Two permanent "Senior Designer" positions based in Hatfield, UK. Looking for solid Erlang programming skills. Knowledge of IN/SS7 a bonus.

http://www.orangejobs.co.uk/fe/tpl_orange01.asp?newms=jj&...

Please ignore the C++/Java in the description. I'm looking for people who are currently programming in Erlang.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...

Energy Source Death Rate (deaths per TWh)

Coal – world average 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – China 278
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36 (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind 0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro - world including Banqiao) 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)
قبل ما تشتري
نصائح قبل الشراء تعرف علي راي الزبائن ومن جرب المنتج والخبراء العديد من المقالات التي تساعدك علي اتخاذ قرار الشراء مثلا سيارات عطور ملابس حيوانات اجهزة كهربائية
No radiation peril foreseen for California
PepsiCo develops recyclable, plant-based bottle
I think we blew up "Flurry Analytics"; attempting to register just keeps returning the registration page, with no error messages...
It was more a general complaint about these kinds of popups. However, even in the click-action case it's still annoying to require signup to move on.
قبل ما تشتري
معلومات قبل شاء منتجات او خدمات مثل السيارات والتليفونات والجوالات والحيوانات والعطور
Link doesn't work. "appdevmag.com" doesn't work. Googled "site:appdevmag.com" and got zero hits.

WTF?
This is only slightly related so I ask forgiveness in advance. But historical accuracy is a pet peeve of mine.

That said Steve Jobs bought Pixar after seeing the Luxo Jr video (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxo_Jr.). The true genius behind Pixar is John Lasseter and always has been. Steve Jobs just provided funding.

Don't get the wrong impression. I think it says even more of Jobs in that he recognized a visionary in Lasseter and was smart enough to just get out of his way. And Jobs did make some smart business decisions like selling off Pixar's hardware business. But he was not the visionary behind Pixar.
Not really weird. There's a boundary there between the air in the glass and the glass itself. So you've got a dielectric boundary and you'll get some reflection going on inside the glass. Lots and lots of things reflect radio waves to a certain extent. I'd guess that's what's happening here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-line-of-sight_propagation#R...