skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
<< We divided our customers into cohorts, looking at the new customers who joined each day as a distinct group. Then we could ask, “How did today’s customers compare to yesterday’s?” And, much to our frustration, the conversion rates were almost exactly the same. It was easy to get conspiratorial. It felt like each group had set up a conference call with the previous group. “How many of you bought the product? One out of a hundred? OK, good, we’ll do that, too.” >>

This is so true. I've seen similar user behavior at almost every website I've worked on or built.

The good news is that it's hard to screw up your own website with new features. Also that despite how hard it is, many competing websites will add so many new (bad) features that eventually they will succeed in screwing up their website.

Sometimes I wonder if this is why Craigslist has "won" for so many years. Not in spite of having so many competitors adding new features, but because they have had so many competitors adding so many new (bad) features.
Can someone please summarise the main methods of the Lean Startup Methodology? I keep reading a lot of high level posts like these, which sound like common sense to me, but I guess it's not, otherwise Eric wouldn't be writing a book.

I have pre-ordered his book, but if someone can explain the nuts and bolts of a few methods, that would help me appreciate the whole movement a lot more.

It's probably my ignorance, but right now, my personal Lean philosophy is simply "you make what you measure". For example, this month I really need to get a specific amount of recurring revenue coming in. So I have a nice big chart of revenue on my wall.
I think the problem a lot of lawyers have is failing to acknowledge the realities of a BIG A v small b situation like the one in pud's example. Of course, it is not the lawyer's place to make decisions on behalf of his or her client as to how much risk they accept in return for a big pot of money. Entrepreneurs need to be aware that their lawyer will always see risk as something to be minimised to the lowest possible level, which is not always something that is possible because of market realities. Equally when instructing a lawyer it is easy to set them on an overtly combative route if you give off too many signs of being up for a fight, or don't give clear enough instructions to the contrary: "Hey, I realise this contract is going to be totally in the other side's favour, and to be honest I have no choice in this. I am doing this deal regardless, so just flag up anything that is totally non-standard or is going to get me in a whole heap of trouble".
But you have seen both sides of it (so have I). For everybody else faraway hills are green: "Oh if only I wasn't working for the man, then things would be great". So this guys article just completely ignores what some people discovered thousands of years ago, namely that most people need to get a grip on themselves and "make up their minds to be happy".
citation pls?

ETA:

This?

Averaged over 30 years, the trend is for an annual 7 percent reduction in the dollars per watt of solar photovoltaic cells. While in the earlier part of this decade prices flattened for a few years, the sharp decline in 2009 made up for that and put the price reduction back on track. Data from 2010 (not included above) shows at least a 30 percent further price reduction, putting solar prices ahead of this trend.

An average of seven percent per year for 30 years, then a breakthrough year in 2009 (which is well-documented). Then the author -- whose resume includes Microsoft, a company doing "nanotechnology research," and writing some books about transhumanism -- claims another good year in 2010, and you claim a third in 2011.

In other words, the author wants to extrapolate an exponential trend 10 or 20 years into the future based on (at best) 3 data points, while ignoring another trend that's been operating ten times longer.

And he could be right. Technologies do change growth regimes sometimes. But you don't make that argument by talking about the magic of exponential growth. You make it by talking about why all the rules are changing now.

Instead, he says "manufacturers are learning how to reduce the cost to fabricate solar." He doesn't say how, or how long they can keep it up. Then he throws out a paragraph about increasing efficiency ("in the lab," which could mean anything). Then he goes back to electricity prices in 2030.

Obviously, I hope he's right. But that article doesn't do much to refute my claim that solar power is over-hyped by people people who seem to think hype is OK for a good cause.
In the past, I've complained about articles from mises and reason.org, so it'd only be fair to mention that this is basically politics as well, and likely off topic because of that.
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It's also used in Ocaml and SML, as far as I remember.
The second part is the poisonous way most live their lives. Relatively - i.e. the core determinant of many people's happiness is relative and not absolute income.

If this theory is correct, we should discourage people from discussing income distribution. Whenever a reporter writes an article about rising income inequality, they are contributing to the problem.
80% of People who use statistics make them up
Very, very nice visualization.
It’s Time To Stop Using Downloads As The Key Metric For Apps Success
Pttrns has some examples of welcome screens / walkthroughs for iOS apps... http://pttrns.com/walkthroughs
Get ‘em Hired is a new concept
I have come to the conclusion that following or pursuing goals and dreams is not the key to happiness. Yes, it is something worth doing, but it is not a magic pill.

Running a business, or working on a creative project can also cause a lot of unhappiness and misery. I've been pursuing my goals and dreams for a couple of years now and I don't think it has made me happier at all.

I've found these things to be much more important:

-Maintaining a calm, relaxed state as much as possible. Not suppressing anger but not letting it destroy you either.

-Physical and mental challenges; doesn't mean you have to quit your job and pursue some grand scheme though

-Socializing
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I don't think Dart will beg other browsers to comply to their will of adding a VM.
On the other hand, I find it more likely that, in a whole year's time, the people behind Dart thought about NPAPI. They may very well produce a plugin that everyone will download.

That would make Dart the new Flash, but that's the price to pay for a serious cross-browser Dart.

Of course, that would also make Dart second-class citizen in the web platform, and I guess Dart people don't want that. However, I find it hard to believe that they hoped all browser vendors would bow before the new programming language overlord.

Now, making browsers speak Dart will be the easy part, I think.
The Enterprise will have a hard time accepting a brand-new language blindly when they have just learned that C# is slowly losing Microsoft backing.

Programming languages all make mistakes, and Dart will be no exception; they had a full year and bright engineers, but that rule is sacred. No matter how hard they advocate the niceties of the language (which I assume will be closures (again!), the full funarg, yet another garbage collector, optional typing, type inference, bignums, modules, event-oriented programming, maybe lazy evaluation) but I know many programmers that won't bother learning any programming language that falls too far from the C-like tree, especially if it has odd features, especially if there are mistakes in the way those features work together.

I have seen many bright programming languages that never found any serious adoption. Scheme would have been very interesting in real work environments; Perl6 has many interesting features, but is too late and slow; Haskell still has potential, but I don't see it suddenly go past Objective-C, C# or Java in popularity.

I would love Dart to find success. But this is not a dream world. The platform it seeks to conquer, the competition it must overcome, the tender age it has: Dart is so very late for such a challenge.
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Why aren't there more standard contracts for the situations described in the article? E.g Construction contracts are generally standard documents with very well documented procedures in the UK even with large (say £50M+) contract sums. But this seems to be an exception, not many other industries do this. I wonder why?
Weight of pencil
Humans.txt?
The legal war to control the smartphone platform
The ECB's reluctance to buy debt stems from Germany's (its strongest member) deep fear of inflation.

From http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/09/09/140342690/the-frid... :

It goes back to the years after World War I, when Germany
experienced one of the most catastrophic bouts of
hyperinflation in the history of the world — an economic
disaster that helped lay the groundwork for the rise of the
Nazis.

So when Germany joined the euro, the Germans insisted
that the newly created European Central Bank be bound by
strict rules aimed at preventing inflation.
detail post on http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/09/owning-the-s...
If you accept their version of the contract verbatim, chances are they haven't specified a maximum dollar value of your liabilities to them. Of course, it might still be a losing game for them to sue you into bankruptcy, but that doesn't mean they won't try.
If the USA doesn't have a decent education system, then neither does Australia. At least according to demographically adjusted PISA scores.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...
Why Wikipedia's Policy to Blacklist Blogs is Outdated and Wrong
While I like 'socializing', I'd qualify it more as a distraction - the 'reading Hacker News' type of distraction - that takes your mind off the problems. It usually doesn't solve much, but makes you happier for a while.
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Is this an Easter Egg? Surely it's not one triggered exactly by the phrase "Weight of Pencil" - there must be some sort of analysis going on that gets the system to a state where it says: This is a query of class EE, so we'll give a semantically relevant "humorous" answer.

There's some interesting processing going on there, and I'd love an insight into what it is.
>Prospective employers aren't allowed to effectively discriminate based on intelligence (no, really), so they can use possession of a degree as a proxy for it.

Yep. Amy Wax has an excellent take on it here:

"The combination of well-documented racial differences in cognitive ability and the consistent link between ability and job performance generates a pattern that experts term “the validity-diversity tradeoff”: job selection devices that best predict future job performance generate the smallest number of minority hires in a broad range of positions. Indeed, the evidence indicates that most valid screening devices will have a significant adverse impact on blacks and will also violate the 4/5 rule under the law of disparate impact.

Because legitimately meritocratic (that is, job-related) job selection practices will routinely trigger prima facie violations of the disparate impact rule, employers who adopt such practices run the risk of being required to justify them – a costly and difficult task that encourages undesirable, self-protective behaviors and may result in unwarranted liability."

Source: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1795443
Specifically this page: http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2011/2/7/maze-generation-algorit...
Is this an Easter Egg?

Wolfram Alpha is the mother of all Easter eggs. Occasionally you find a query that isn't.
>> Most product teams don’t know if they are making their product better or worse; that’s why customers feel a twinge of fear every time they have to update or upgrade.

CORRECTION: that's why most PRODUCT TEAMS also feel a twinge of fear when they update or upgrade. We get over that by committing small changes regularly, instead of waiting for major changes to be thrown down all at once and disrupt our users. Also, all new UI or design features we launch in an A/B testing environment, which tells us right away if something is wrong.
This ties in with a question on Quora on why Dropbox is so successful. http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-tha...

Knowing where to draw the line between a basic value proposition and extended features is crucial to success. I have this same dilemma. Users have been requesting features to one of my websites, but I am unsure if adding these features won't detract from the simplicity of the experience. Currently users do 10 pages a visit, which to me, tells me they understand the flow of using the website.

It is an exciting trade-off!
Offering multiple payment options is just fine. Specifically with the "equal preference rule" being rescinded a Merchant can now offer incentives for a specific payment system.

Google Checkout, Paypal and Amazon payments all require the Consumer to sign-up or already have an account with these services. While a number of Users already have an account with Paypal, Google checkout the majority don't. e.g. in case of Paypal (estimates vary ) but only 1 out of 4 online users in the US has a Paypal account. Would you as a Merchant be willing to loose upto 75% of your users ?

As far Stripe: Not live yet but hopefully will be good

Square: is irrelavant since its for Card Present space primarily. Noca is for the CNP Card Not Present space

ACH for $0.25-$0.50 has been around for decades. Its hasn't taken off because nobody has their routing number and account number handy. Take a look at Noca's check offering, it obviated the need to repeatedly input Routing number and Account number. Basically making ACH easier for the Consumer and hence way different than traditional ACH.
Quite surprising to see a columnist/article in Forbes use "b-f-d", at least to me. Isn't language like that ... kind of frowned upon, by typical mainstream media in the US?

Not saying I was offended, at all, just thought it was interesting.
Linux websites(linux.com,kernel.org..) Hacked~security Breach
Oh you're running your site in Google Appengine.
it is intentionally left vague, for the main reason, there is nothing that will work 100% of the time or a one size fits all. What you need to take away is more of make sure you understand your market/product/customers so you know what they want. Through experimentation ( building a product or feature based off of your expertise along with metrics of what your customers demand), you'll need to test, understand, and iterate, to determine what to do next. I don't even know if Eric Ries is/was a successful entrepreneur but he is considered a thought leader in practices made popular by himself and Steve Blank
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Brilliant. How about a nethack style room maze?
Ask HN: Necessities of a Website
What are some things that a website should have. Some examples would be a robots.txt file, and a sitemap.xml. They aren't needed necessarily, but what other files should a website have? (Obviously besides the website itself)
There are no hidden charges. Noca stands for No Other Charges Apply. There is a minimum transaction size of $2.00 i.e. Noca will not accept transactions smaller than $2.00. Since the average transaction size should be closer to industry average Noca should be able to work without a per transaction fee. Check out http://www.noca.com/merchant (last question in FAQ)
I prefer monsters or robots. Those abstract avatars tend to exert strain on my brain. But I think we need more options for this kind of service, so kudos for making it.

If you make such a service, I think you should put some research into what kind of thing the brain is good at recognizing. For example I think brains are almost hardwired for facial recognition (it is sort of a miracle that we can tell people apart so easily - try it with people of other ethnicity to get a feel for the problem). Not so much for abstract art I suspect.
Apple hit with patent infringement suit over iTunes, movie trailers
Well, the "end of the corporation" has been predicted (as a fad) many times post WWII, and I think it's an error to assume that the corporation will be substituted for some form of "wikinomics". Corporations will always be needed to mobilize capital for large projects (think: a steel mill or mining the moon, etc) and the author was right to point that out. Also, there will come a time when these "wikinomics-based" systems will be turned into platforms, much like Facebook is a platform, and platforms inevitably become big corporations too.
Eric has a slide presentation on Lean here... the slides you want start around page 26:
http://www.slideshare.net/startuplessonslearned/2010-02-19-t...

It's hard to summarize all this in just a few bullet points, but I've found that it's helpful to understand the history of Lean when digging into lean startups. The Lean Startup methodology has its roots in Lean Manufacturing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing#Overview

Basically, both lean startups and lean manufacturing focus on eliminating waste. For lean manufacturing, it's usually assumed that you're making something that people want... so the focus is on making that product with a minimum of waste. For lean startups, it's often much less clear what you're supposed to make. So the lean startup methodology focuses on helping you make software that people actually want. Making software that people don't want = "waste" in the Lean verbiage.

"You make what you measure" is a useful first step towards embracing Lean. But as Eric points out, sometimes metrics go up regardless of what you do. How do you know if you're measuring the right metrics, and making software that people want? That's a core focus of the Lean Startup methodology.
Very interesting article although I think it shows a bit of confusion. The person is also rather inexperienced both with his approach to the problem he was solving and the outcome. I would have probably used a commercial DSP looking at the workload.

Looking at Forth, it's a thing of beauty. It's just simple. That is all that can be said. In a lot of circumstances, it will do the job admirably. People tend to forget that the majority of computers out there still aren't desktop PCs, servers, mobile devices etc. Surveying my house quickly, they are tiny things in washing machines, cookers, fire alarms, traffic signals, process controllers, lighting, microwave ovens, calculators, children's toys, televisions, dishwashers, scales, cd players etc. There are literally billions of the things all doing tiny tasks constantly 24/7. Forth fits there nicely if you ask me :)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2883651

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485553
http://www.parti.cl/purge_memcache did i just cleared your memcached?
Thank you for a good article vipivip. It's related to my startup http://metricious.com. Also, take a look at this article about metrics-driven business: http://t.co/vB9tGce.
Make the right decisions based on measuring and talking to people before you start building and waste time. Code is not progress. Decisions (based on facts) are progress.
Are there examples of monopolies which didn't have state support?

What about Microsoft and Facebook? Of course, it depends on your definition of monopoly - if you define it to be 100% market dominance, then almost by definition this is only possible using government intervention - but in the case of Microsoft, few people would seriously doubt that they have (or at least had) monopoly status. I don't see the state support that allowed them to get there.

More generally, a free market greatly favors monopolies whenever there are network effects involved.

Moreover, it is not only monopolies that are bad. Many markets "naturally" end up in the hands of only a few large corporations. This can sometimes (but not always) be as bad as a monopoly, e.g. electricity providers here in Germany. It is not clear to me what it is that makes some oligopolies problematic, while others (e.g. processor manufacturers) appear to be more benign.
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The only problem with your obvious solution - Eurozone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eurozone.svg) is smaller than European Union (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EU_Globe_No_Borders.svg) therefore European Parliament can't take this role.

Yes, Eurozone has problem that they have single currency but no single political institution and your solution is theoretically correct but practically you have two choices:

1) you would need to force Great Britain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and maybe some other countries (e.g. I'm not sure about Czech Republic) to use Euro. A lot of other countries would be happy to accept Euro - especially Eastern Europe countries. I would be happy personally :-) But those countries do not fulfill Euro convergence criteria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_convergence_criteria). Accepting those countries just as is will have big negative impact to Euro.

2) Or let non-Euro countries to decide Euro destiny. That does not sound good either.

Therefore your obvious solution looks more like edge case solution.
A bit of honest feedback:

* That's one of the ugliest sites I've seen in a while. The colours are nauseating and hurt my eyes and the fonts are horrible.

* What's in it for me? Other than the non-tangible reward of potentially helping a stranger getting a job, what other incentive is there?
The greatest delusion of our world is the idea that there is actually a job for everyone. I have an unsubstantiated, but very real gut feeling that the economic crisis was the tipping point in which humanity moves beyond anything resembling full employment.