skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There isn't "an" answer. You need to test and explore. I've seen nice online demos make significant differences to final revenue. I've also seen them make zero difference. Depends on the product and the market and the quality of the demo.

One issue with a/b testing something like this is that the cost to do a good online demo can be non-trivial - and judging whether it can be a success can be non-obvious without doing a good online demo first. Egg. Chicken. Chicken. Egg.

If I were me I might go about it something like this (assuming that building the demo feature isn't trivial - in which case just a/b test it :-)

0) I'd already be doing quick'n'dirty usability testing and talking with users regularly. This is even faster at showing up low-hanging fruit than a/b testing in many situations. I'd want some hint that the kinds of problems demos solve (e.g. not understanding what the product did) were showing up and there were no bigger fish to fry.

1) I'd guesstimate how much time/money it would take to build a good online demo.

2) I'd guesstimate how much of an increase in final conversion it would take for it to be worth while taking that time (considering that I could be building other features).

3) I'd add a "demo" button. I'd have it link to a "demo coming soon" page with an email signup so I could grab some "demo wanting" users for future quizzing. I'd split test that to see if anybody clicked on the demo button.

4) I now know what percentage of people are even vaguely interested in an online demo. So I have an upper bound for how much of an increase in conversions it could make. If it's worse than the number I came up with that would make it worthwhile - I can stop now.

5) I also now know whether "demo seeking" potential customers convert better/worse/same than non-demo-seeking potential customers.

6) I'd probably go talk to the demo-seeking users I gather on the e-mail list no matter what - to find out more about why they wanted the demo. Did they not understand the product? Were they looking for a particular feature? Did they want to play to figure out whether it was worth the money? Something else? Maybe you can fix their problem without building the demo. Maybe everybody wants to know whether it has FooFeature and you just need to add a bullet point to the home page.

7) From the previous step I now know more about why folk want an online demo. I'd try and build as little as possible to fix that particular problem. Stick that on the demo page - and see if we got any more conversions in the next round of testing.

Repeat until no longer improving :-)
KBtalKing Pro: Multi-pairing Bluetooth mechanical keyboard
Seems arbitrary as hell to be honest.
I would argue that 10 million+ people have gotten jobs through LinkedIn [1]. And getting a job equates to at least $40,000 a year in income, and a direct improvement to people's lives. The existence of LinkedIn has been a part of ~$400 billion a year to the world's economy. I think Github is a tiny tiny tiny fraction of that in terms of its real-world effect on peoples lives.

[1] LinkedIn has 161 million user accounts, and assuming 5% of them have gotten jobs through the services which could be low. Around 4 billion candidate searches a month are done there.
http://press.linkedin.com/about
AlgoViz: Algorithm Visualization Portal
Ask HN: Best resources to get informed about starting a tech company?
I just graduated from college as a software engineer. Instead of finding a job, I decided to start making social Android games with a friend after having some relative success with mobile games previously. We are nearing our first product release in the next few months, however I am still uncertain about how to publish it. We have not registered a company yet, and I am still not sure what the best way to go about it all is. I am young, have no experience starting a company, but believe that it is time to inform myself about it now. All of this is a bit overwhelming right now, but I think I just need some guidance right now to get me started. I am mainly looking to learn about the best way to go about registering the company, first things I should do once it is registered, how to go about hiring employees, and other legal things I need to deal with. So, I would appreciate if anyone can suggest me resources to help me get started :)
Why Do We Wear Pants? Horses.
This is disappointing.

I enjoy some of the articles in the Economist, but this is advocacy writing at its worst. It strings together a few examples as claims, each presented uncritically, then generalizes from this bullet list to make sweeping claims with emotional characterizations.

It never shows you if each of these examples is actually net positive for our society and economy. It never shows you the scale or impact they're having.

It's like saying "Kevin Durant's shooting percentage was up this year, so the Thunder are going to win the next 10 NBA Championships!"

It's cheerleading.

No surprise there's no author's name on it.
EJS fork that preserves newlines in compiled template
really loved spool, sad to see something that nice vanish :(
Don't judge them too harshly. Fracking isn't clearly bad or good. As the article pointed out: coal is worse.
HostingCon 2012 Get a chance to win a Nexus
The materials described sound nothing at all like auxetics.

Auxetics expand perpendicular to the line of force when stretched. The materials described in the article compress parallel to the line of force when stretched.
I'm not sure that helps much when it comes to recruitment, though.

When someone starting out in the industry asks for advice on how to get recruited, it's very trendy for wisened old souls on places like HN and Slashdot to mumble something about making sure you contribute to Open Source projects and have a GitHub account.

But on the big OSS projects, where making a contribution wins you significant geek cred, is anyone involved in a hire/no-hire decision really going to take a load of time to look through a bunch of commits you made and figure out whether they were any good and what sort of impression they give of you? IME, you're lucky if everyone making that decision even read your whole CV before the interview.

And on smaller projects, no-one recruiting you knows what they are unless they've shipped and have an obvious presence to see, in which case that is probably a far more effective advertisement than the underlying code anyway.

If you've got your own personal project, which is complete and something a potential recruiter can immediately run for themselves, then sure, include a link to it. Likewise if you've got a blog that's going to give an immediate positive impression and is clearly down to you personally, go ahead and include that. But those are things where you can immediately see the whole picture as a recruiter, with minimal time and effort.

I remain to be convinced that there is much value in linking to things like GitHub accounts or major OSS repositories, because they don't offer the same instant gratification. They do demonstrate that you're a keen programmer generally and not just in it for the money, but that's going to be all they do for most potential employers.
Could be a tech acquisition in addition to a talent acquisition - entire possibly that the services will magically reappear on Facebook someday. (Yes, Facebook could easily build this, but sometimes it's cheaper to buy.)
The Economist typically omits bylines for all its writing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist#Editorial_anonym...
If the point of this article is to say that you should not be spending time worrying about and evangelizing your tools and more time using them to create awesome stuff then I agree. However if its to say that there is a large crowd of exceptional programmers and engineers that no one hears about because they spend _too_ much time creating great projects then this is baloney.

There are some people out there who are truly exceptional and might never be heard from. However in general the real exceptional people are the ones pushing the envelope of whats possible forward. Their work _always_ finds the limelight. The author uses an example of a rigid body physics implementation in a game, and while that's great work and the team should congratulate themselves its not that big of a deal BLAS had been around for decades by that point. That does not describe experts doing amazing things. It describes software developers doing a good job and not being cocky about it.

I think why this has received such a warm welcome here is so many of us software developers want to think we are part of that silent majority. That we are doing amazing things too and if we cared to we could write articles and become famous. The truth is we are not experts we are people who have jobs to feed our families and we may be just as skilled and talanted as the vocal minority, but we would never be able to reproduce their success. That's not a bad thing. I have no problem being an unknown developer working on a piece of corporate software and providing a good living for my family. Its ok if others get press time for their contributions I might take from them and learn, but it doesn't change the fact that they at the end of the day have moved our profession further and I haven't.
While I'm sure Andreessen Horowitz feels some tech-world pride in this investment, they are still a venture capital firm. This article is a bit too sensational, self-loving to really portray the importance of the investment.

I think TechCrunch nailed it in their article today, where they wrote, "Think of it as a filing system for every draft of a document." Github right now is limited to code-sharing. But it's potential is so incredibly huge. Like the article stated, imagine applying it to PSDs, Word Docs, Excel sheets, any document imaginable. IMO that would be THE killer enterprise prodcut.
So you agree with my original point then.

Consumers feel choice to be a burden and want to be told what to do, think, like, and buy. Control is felt as a burden.
You can simulate this with an op-amp. It needs energy input though.
Concurrent Maps
I see a lot of derision aimed at C++ devs -- from both higher and lower level language advocates.

On the one side you have the "C was created by God himself, and undefined behavior is expected", and then you have the "languages should be as restrictive as possible because this one time I worked with a developer who was very bad."

It's all very tiring. I do mostly Ruby now, and I love how expressive it is. It reminds me a bit of C++ in that regard. It's just funny how the mindset has shifted.
I think that idea might be a wee bit insulting of the troops' intelligence.
Yes, in some instances you are right and Instagram replaces a more personal way of sharing a photo. However, in other cases, in empowers and encourages people to share more and in some cases to share when it wasn't before possible.

My baby daughter's grandparents and great grandmother live in another country. Her great grandmother is too old to travel, and so doesn't get to see us as often as we'd all like, so a very simple system that enables her to see regular photos of her great granddaughter is a wonderful thing. Sure, we could snap a polaroid and mail it, or try to educate her more so she could manage Facebook, but in reality these are less likely to happen and more difficult to make happen.

I'm aware in the grand scheme of things Instagram isn't important, and I'm aware it's primary motivator wasn't the situation above. However, I'd suggest being less quick to say it doesn't better us in any way, or even to say it isn't innovation.

Not all innovation needs to change the world.

[1] Was it really?
> That's still pretty cool – but again, I think it means that the term "social network" is losing its distinctiveness.

Good. The term should lose its distinctiveness. Currently, ``social'' closely relates to friendliness or geniality, but its Lockean definition pertains to ``society as a natural condition of human life.'' Although ``societal networking'' may be the more appropriate term in certain contexts (e.g., those outside the scope of friendly or genial conversation), ``social networking'' nevertheless remains correct. The exceptionally broad definition of the word ``social'' effectively portends ambiguity when discussing social networking, so a presumption of distinctiveness isn't warranted.
The World Breaking News For Oral  Cancer
Given how important computers are these days, the same could be said of FizzBuzz.
Looks like gameloft corporate website has code exposed
http://www14.zippyshare.com/v/29610489/file.html
http://www14.zippyshare.com/v/32849740/file.html
http://www14.zippyshare.com/v/53520350/file.html
http://www14.zippyshare.com/v/67798142/file.html
Yes, lack of traffic is hard. In that situation you should try to find companies that you believe run a lot of tests and copy what they do until you have sufficient volume to run tests for yourself.

Hmmm.... I'd caveat that advice a bit. I'd have to be pretty sure that the company I'm copying is facing the same sort of problems I am. Especially since, after N instances of being wrong, I've learned that I'm often quite bad at figuring out whether company Foo is facing the same problem as company Bar!

Especially when you have limited resources and solving one problem means that you're not solving another.

I've seen far too many instances of people coping what Amazon or Facebook do and it not helping in any way because - well - they're not Amazon or Facebook.

Personally I'd try and spend a more time talking to / observing actual users if I don't have the numbers for more quantitative techniques. Something, sadly, most companies seem to do just about as much as they a/b test :-/ That'll give me some strong hints on what the most significant problems are.
Just a point of feedback: I was scanning up and down the page looking for a full-size screenshot or tour before I randomly hovered over the thumbnails and saw that they're clickable. Looks cool though. Would this function as light weight customer service tool, i.e. replacing ZenDesk or Desk.com?
I think you're reading intent into my comment that simply wasn't there. I was asking where Nielsen gets smartphone data, since the article didn't give any information whatsoever on that. The text you copied here is pretty much exactly what I wanted.
This is what drives me crazy about the dieting issue. People will cite a study that involves 21 people. 21! Think of all the pain caused by people being overweight, and the insane costs imposed on our healthcare systems. With all that pain and cost, we can't come up with studies with larger sample sizes? Show me a double-blind study with 10,000 people and I'll start to take it seriously.
Reddit is minimalist because it doesn't have a feature that resizes the link to a suitable size for your screen. That's the essence of minimalism, technologically.

Perhaps you could argue it doesn't fit the "minimalist" design aesthetic. Which as popularly understood is not itself the embodiment of the philosophical concept of minimalism.
Household debt 114% of income is nothing to brag about. Apalling.
Thank you! I did not know the full details of this.
It's not about size. Human brains produce consciousness. Can't argue with that.
Is it completely ridiculous to imagine that ocean acidification could be countered? I'm imagining something like having cargo ships sprinkle sodium hydroxide in their wakes. Could any such plan be workable?
Microsoft Throws Parade to Announce Birth of Windows Phone, Death of Iphone
The troops probably have the same range of intelligence as everybody else. And the PR problem is mainly with those on one end of the continuum, not the other.
Blogs are dead, and Github killed them.
Yes it is to assure that they get their commission and that you do not go either directly to the employer or another staffing firm.
Why would you need to run a dev environment on Windows? Keep running your dev environment on Linux and SSH to it using Putty/Chrome secure Shell. Works like a charm :)
And did your three days of work creating a demo (when you could have been spending three days building features :-) result in better conversions?
Aren't Stack Exchange staff intentionally posting this to Ars to drive traffic back to their site?
Young entrepreneurs turn a Tweet from Richard Branson into $1 Million
Flummoxed by Failure—or Focused?
Microsoft keeps (us Windows) developers in business; it may not be great for the businesses who retain our services, but it sure is great for developers. And actually, I'm not entirely convinced that MS reinvents all that much more than, say, the OSS web developer community do.
XPath functionality's gone? Hmm.. pretty massive oversight. Microsoft's not one to rest on their laurels when it concerns their cash cow though. I expect this'll all make a reappearance very soon enough.

Also, C# (and .NET) were lacking quite a bit in the early days as well.. now C# is pretty much a kitchen sink language.
i would argue that by joining facebook, they are maximizing the chances of improving the lives of millions of users
they will never be able to kill Iphone :)
How Rock Climbing Saved My Life, and Made Me a Better Software Developer
Do you really think that the American troops were that much smarter than the average American?
Am I correct in saying the proposals are not yet available to look at? I think I would understand the reason, but still wondered.

In any event I'm happy that python.org renews. When I wanted to learn Python and Ruby, I checked out Ruby first because the materials seemed more up to date (at the time there was no other way to prioritize and it wasn't important either.)

Can't wait to see the winner!
Brynjolfsson and McAfee deal with the stresses on societies to keep up with technology:

http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-ebook/dp/B005...

Unfortunately, the rate of technological acceleration is increasing, and society is not able to keep up with even the current rate, viz. the huge numbers of unemployed workers with outdated skills. They suggest that the disruptions we have experienced over the last ten years are just a hint of the disruptions coming over the next ten years, with increasing rates of change. It is the elephant in the room for the presidential campaign, but is pretty much being ignored by both sides. They even suggest that in ten years or so, all that manufacturing in China could move back to US soil as factories become completely robotic.
Explained here: http://pythonorg-redesign.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
This article seems to miss a very important point: Craigslist basically operates like a nonprofit. Anyone who wants to compete with Craigslist has to have a compelling answer to the question "how do I compete with a company that does not care about profit?" in addition to the normal questions a startup has to answer.

(for the record, I think that the way Craigslist runs things is both admirable and idiosyncratic: it works very well for them, it wouldn't necessarily work well for others)
Anyone who knows me knows that rock climbing is a big part of my life. I hope this post gives some insight into why it's such a passion of mine.
How Money Makes People Act Less Human
"Mainstream" is often content that is polished enough, well done enough, and original enough that it can stand on its own without referring to fringe cultural appeal. "Alternative" content often relies on the fact that its fans like its particular style of "alternativeness" to compensate for the fact that its execution is lacking.
America doesn't have a tax base problem, it has a spending priority problem. The total government system in the US collects more in taxes than the entire German economy is worth. You'd think we could have nice roads given that. The problem is what that money is being spent on.

Our tax system is also extraordinarily complex, with thousands of taxes, and a tax code that the IRS doesn't even fully understand. Individual Americans spend $300+ billion (last I recall reading) just preparing their taxes each year.
What's "Windows Phone" and why should anyone care?
I painfully disagree with this article.
These will make you smarter: Non-software books for better software thinking
DOE approves $511M plan to dispose of U-233
I'm intrigued to learn that some people have the convention that "-3" is not a whole number.
I would say that failing to solve fizzbuzz demonstrates incompetence (excepting perhaps people new to the interviewing process). In other words, it weeds out but doesn't indicate competence.
Whenever I'm in a traffic jam (expressway), it is usually caused by a lane closure. There are almost always signs posted alerting everyone of the closure, usually with more than enough distance from the problem area that no one should have difficulty getting over to an open lane.

What seems to me to be the problem is people follow a greedy algorithm. They cut into the closing lane because it's empty (or sparsely populated), then attempt to jet to the forced merge point then merge. At some point too many people do this, then you get two lines, one in the closing lane, one in the open lane that have to come to a complete stop and take turns.

Remove people's ability to follow a greedy algorithm and I predict you'll see a dramatic decrease in traffic jams due to lane closure.
Your criticism of the title would be more credible if you also acknowledged the point he was making. As it stands you came across as dismissing the entire article as stupid.

And I wonder if the hyperbole in the title is really link bait, or just the opposite, troll bait. I'm not sure the title helped the article's ranking on HN.
Natural gas is also much easier to store than coal and gas turbines have much shorter startup times. Thus Natural gas provides an excellent base power to complement renewable energy.

So while I am sure many would prefer a direct to renewable energy situation, natural gas is fine too.
Hold the phone. Groklaw just reproduced a published academic paper in its entirity?! And no mention of "by permission". What is their basis, and can I do the same? I can think of many contexts where I might want to include a paper in whole as an exhibit, not just a reference.
That's a terrible solution; while they're clever, and some are even nice, the inconsistency in interface for different subreddits is jarring, and the vast majority of users will not customize their interface at all. Pick a nice default interface, standardize it across the board, and maybe then let users pick a clever fun one that might be actually pretty good if they want. Having completely different interface widgets and navigation by default on different sections of the same site is probably a bad idea.
I'm hoping, with the expectation of ultimate disappointment, that someone will soon reign in this Do What The Frak We Want Because We Can attitude of officials within the U.S. government. At the least it's despicable. I'd venture a guess to say this behavior by the FDA management is illegal. However, I'm sure they'll prove to be untouchable.
I enjoy some of the articles in the Economist, but this is advocacy writing at its worst.

Your clue that this submitted article here comes from the "leader" section of editorials by the Economist editors comes from the "(see article)" link in the submission here. You're reading an editorial, and it is written like an editorial, with a point of view. The actual underlying article

http://www.economist.com/node/21558591

to be found by following that link is longer, more detailed, more in the style of objective journalistic reporting, and full of food for thought.
You seriously cant tell iOS and Android apart?

Your statement feels like a work of fiction.
Brewster’s Address Book App Briefly Exposes Famous Users’ Private Data
Ugh, who cares? If Marco wants to criticize inconsequential minutiae on his microblog that's his business but there is certainly nothing more that could be discussed here.
Employment search engine
This was what I loved about them too. Does anyone know of any alternatives?