skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I have yet to meet a retailer that we can't hit at least 15 - 25% improvement in sales by testing and fixing their checkout.

>make a major impact on the GDP

I agree on the percentages (I'm myself a big advocate for A/B testing), but I do think that a lot of those gains are made because a certain company becomes a lot "better" than their competitors by employing these kinds of techniques.

Example from my personal life today: I looked at gyms in London. After about looking at 5 I got slightly annoyed: They tried to hide their prices, generally broken UI and I felt they were trying to trick me into a high-paying contract. I then stumbled over site 6: Clear value proposition, not afraid to ask their prices and super easy to do a first training. Sold.

If every single gym out there had a great website, I still would only get 1 gym membership. Though it would probably help if it didn't cause me so much time & pain to do it. But most of the pain is not in the checkout process (punch in credit card numbers). In fact I don't think I've ever not made a purchase because the credit card form wasn't to my liking, the buy/no buy decision generally gets made much earlier and that's an issue that I don't think is for Stripe to fix, but rather for individual companies learning about & implementing great sales channels.
A white-hot knife to the finger?
More that it was the price to get his anti-terrorism agenda through the Democratic Senate: A new Federal agency with unionized employees. Now that's my perspective. They argued it was because real Federal employees could do a better job than contractors.

javajosh's political worldview is simple, comprehensive and wrong. But it does provide an easy, conforting answer whenever something bad happens!
Cassandra is ugly, hardcore and performant as hell. It's not meant for the casual user, it's really meant to be there for you at scales where MongoDB craps its pants. If you wrap your head around ColumnFamilies, tunable consistency and NetworkTopologySnitch strategies, you get rewarded by a database that can scale on a global level to millions of I/O operations per second. We at Trademob have chosen Cassy as the backbone of our tracking platform and couldn't be happier. It's pretty serious stuff though and nothing for a quick prototype or the first few iterations of a product IMHO.
Yes, I'm sure you're glad to show everyone your nakedness unprompted, but expecting all others to do the same regardless of comfort level is a jerk move.

I didn't mind skinnydipping with friends, but I don't want to walk around my office or around people I don't know looking at me naked and storing images, as these are programmed to do.
Interpreting 'Access' and 'Authorization' in Computer Misuse Statutes
Ill-founded arguments about grammar
Here:

http://gawker.com/5216918/martin-luther-king-jrs-children-ar...
In addition to, and IMO more important than, the technical efforts that banks dedicate to online security, there are the business practices that they dedicate to security. These include tracking and predicting loss, budgeting to cover and recover from those losses, purchasing adequate insurance to cover their risk, detailed record-keeping internally, and detailed communication with their customers.

Let's say your online banking browser session was hijacked and the bad guys transfered $100,000 out of your account. First of all the bank is likely to flag that transaction for closer review since it is probably a big departure from your usual behavior. Second, they are going to confirm its accuracy with you, at the very least in a printed or emailed statement to you that it occurred. If they are good, they will call to make sure you meant to do it. Third, they are going to keep records of what happened--the IP address that was connected when the transfer was requested, the time of day, where the money was transferred to, etc.

If it becomes clear that the transfer was a theft, then the bank will cover it as loss and you will get your money back. This is why online banking is not security-critical. Because there are numerous online and offline processes that mitigate the risks associated with online banking.

Now compare to managing your own webserver. The webserver is a dumb machine, not an intelligent counterparty like a bank. If your access to your webserver is hijacked, the webserver will not do a thing to detect, protect, or recover from whatever the bad guys do. Or more specifically, it will do only what you have specifically set it up to do.

By analogy, the lock on the front door of your house is "more important" than the lock on the front door of the police station--because there's no one behind your front door but you, while the police station has dozens of armed and trained officers behind their front door.
"Readability" has virtually nothing to do with why people are more productive in higher level languages. Pointer declarations address a problem most high level languages don't even allow developers to engage.
I'm using the difference in edge case behavior to illustrate why I think the analogy is flawed. I don't think saving in a bank is just an abstraction for putting away non-perishable food. Not just that it's a leaky abstraction, but that it's the wrong abstraction. I think that distinction illustrates a deep difference between the two scenarios. "Saving" in the sense of storing away pork and beans is retrospective. How well you eat depends on how much you saved, but not on what else is going on. "Saving" in the financial sense is prospective. How well you eat depends heavily on what the future looks like.

That isn't to say that savings isn't an abstraction for something. Saving money in financial instruments isn't a "savings" game. It's a growth game. By saving, you make available capital. That capital goes towards growing the economy. Ideally, the growth in future production resulting from your capital offsets the share of production you take out in retirement. It's this element of growth that distinguishes financial savings from "savings" in the pork and beans sense.
> Funding should by no means make you take success for granted

Nice strawman. You are obviously the troll here.
Make users turn on javascript or just use a regular form.
This link works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smEqnnklfYs
This is the Columbia Journalism Review. It's not saying science is stupid, it's saying that reporters are too quick to publish study results, when not enough research has been done on the subject topic.
I strongly believe it to be more than a difference in degree. It is a signal that something is extremely broken wrt to how the system actually works and how it should be working. It says that the foxes no longer care about the farmer when they're raiding the hen-house because they know he's trussed up and unable to retaliate.
What, this makes no sense. In the second case your bad driving directly caused injury to someone (I'm assuming in the first case you do something stupid like drive into a tree).
Collecting addresses is as simple as adding a parameter: https://stripe.com/docs/checkout
Hi - I apologize for taking a while to circle back to this as I think you guys are raising some very important points. But I still contend that your interpretation is incorrect and I certainly content that I did not post "factual inaccuracies" in my piece. Listen, I'm not a consitutional or tax lawyer, I'm a business owner who's upset at what's happened here. That said, I spoke to professionals (legal and tax) with a lot more knowledge and experience than I have who advised me on the facts and implications of the underlying case before I wrote that essay. I'd like to direct you to a piece by Deloitte that was issued after the Appelate case was handed down (link below) - and well before the FTB action. The section toward the end titled Undecided Issues makes clear what the court ruling definitely said, what it definitely did not say, and what was handed back to the lower court to decide. It's certainly possible that the action taken by the FTB was their only possible course of action, but the legal and tax professionals I've spoken to or read online don't agree with your position on that.

Thanks for your interest in this matter,
-Brian

Here's that link:
http://www.deloitte.com/assets/Dcom-UnitedStates/Local%20Ass...

And here's the specific section I'm referring to:

Undecided Issues
As noted previously,16 the same definitional provisions upon which the property and payroll requirement is
derived for purposes of gain deferral under Section 18038.5 apply also with respect to qualification for gain
exclusion under Section 18152.5(a). However, the Court of Appeal’s decision addressed the
constitutionality of the gain deferral provision under Section 18038.5 only, and the facts before the court did
not involve the gain exclusion provision under Section 18152.5(a). Thus, the court’s decision did not
address whether the property and payroll requirement would cause the gain exclusion provision under
Section 18152.5(a) to also be deemed unconstitutional. The court’s decision in Cutler also did not address
whether the unconstitutional definitional language in Section 18152.5 (and the Section 18038.5(b)(1) crossreference
to that language), upon which the property and payroll requirement is based, could be excised
from the statutes or whether the decision would operate to invalidate both statutes in their entirety.
Finally, as discussed above, the Court of Appeal declined to decide whether the taxpayer should be afforded
the refund requested or whether some other appropriate remedy, if any, should apply and instead remanded
the case to the trial court for further proceedings to address the remaining factual dispute and, if appropriate,
the remedy.
I'm not a fan of Dart, however Lars Bak was a guest on Javascript Jabber some time back:

http://javascriptjabber.com/008-jsj-v8-and-dart-with-lars-ba...

Interesting listen.
Yes, I could use my personal bank account. I guess the real blocker is the business number.
Well, that was fast. It's already taken down from the vimeo link in the article. I doubt anyone here hasn't already seen it, but here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smEqnnklfYs
In my dreams, I get to use Ruby with curly braces. Ahhhhh, the saved keystrokes.
Maybe not directly, but if in general women are paired with men older than themselves, then the age for men might skew upwards also.
I recently read a quote about Julian Assange:

> Sometimes he would stand up from his computer and perform a set of twenty or so jumping jacks, explaining to anyone present that short bouts of physical activity served a certain neurobiological function that made stimulant drugs unnecessary.

I would also contend the fact we are now a "knowledge economy" is the reason why its become prevalent.

We have to sit at desks longer and focus on singular tasks. Which is the bane of ADD.
Checkout simply creates a token, that you can use to set up a one-time payment, recurring payment, or even to just create a new customer object in Stripe.
Math may very well be a huge exception to this because all mathematicians can test their proofs in an objective way rather than as partial opinions or bits of understanding of a greater whole. It's a discovery process with 'true' or 'false' embedded right into the core of the science.
In any sort of industrial setting, even with just two or three people, generally it is not possible to conflate errors and warnings, because there is no such thing as a warning. Either it breaks the compile, or it is simply ignored.

To which your response will inevitably be something like "Don't do that", which is a fine sentiment, but it doesn't work. I also feel "Don't do that", but I need to do something that will work, and making the compile break more often, before you have several tens of thousands of instances of this problem, is actually a great idea.

Any other apparent attempt to find middle ground is just a matter of moving around when the compile breaks. Either you break the build somewhere, or the warnings aren't fixed.
On Crimes and Punishments: The Cruel and Unusual Threat against Aaron Swartz
Who's knocking anything or looking to abolish anything?

Being aware of the limitations and biases of one's own paradigm and cognizant of the fact that it's an artificial construction is different from declaring that it has no value.
Does anyone who follows Dart development have any hard benchmark figures? The only mention of performance in the article is distressingly light on numbers:

"Bak now reckons Dart runs 30 per cent faster on Google's V8 than JavaScript under the Richards operating system kernel simulation benchmark and under the DeltaBlue benchmark – two standards used at Google."

What's perhaps most important for Dart at this stage isn't how much faster its VM is than Javascript; what matters is how its generated Javascript performs relative to hand-written Javascript in browsers without a Dart VM.
You are thinking of Megabox which is supposedly[1] going to launch later this year.

[1] http://torrentfreak.com/dotcoms-megabox-to-launch-a-few-mont...
Sounds like you became politically aware right around the time Bush got elected.

A quick run through American history would show that the executive branch has pulled off some crazy stuff in the past. Executive order 9066 comes to mind. This did not start with Bush, it continued through his administration and, yes, to the current administration.
hey if you don't drown you're definitely a witch
Regarding highway typefaces, this article appeared on HN last year:

http://ilovetypography.com/2012/04/19/the-design-of-a-signag...

Excerpt from above link:

> That’s when I came up with the idea of the Legibility Test Tool, an OSX application I built that offers real-time simulations of different viewing conditions (distance, fog, halation, and positive/negative contrast) during the design stage.

HN discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3870237
I assumed that something similar to the RightHaven copyright case might stick... since the troll company doesn't/wouldn't own the IP then they wouldn't have standing to sue...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/judge-orders-fail...

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/righthaven-sham/
Hell, I'll invent an app just so I can use Stripe and reassure myself that it's all going to be OK and I'll never have subject myself to the existing solutions again.
Fair use is determined by courts. Unfortunately there is in fact no way to know whether a use is fair without having a judge decide.
Ironically the concept of a "middlebrow dismissal" seems to me to enable what it condemns--e.g. HN'ers can now just post "hey that's a middlebrow dismissal" instead of a detailed statement of why a particular response falls short.

Basically I think pg made it worse by giving it a catchy name.
Ironically written by a deluded narcissist.
What I Learned as 500 Startups’ Growth Hacker In Residence
Close. Just signing the song doesn't violate copyright any more than reading a book out loud to yourself would. Singing it in a public place or making a public performance on YouTube for instance though, that's where this is more likely to come into play.

Still, your point on the absurdity of this is well taken.
Could this not be solved by switching between different stimulants to offset tolerance?
I know at least one person who doesn't lie on his LinkedIn--in fact, I'm not sure I know anyone who does, though it's statistically likely--and never considered this especially remarkable before.
There is a word that describes perfectly these kind of people - snobs.

I could understand someone that tells me his 5$ coffee tastes "better". But if you drink your 5$ coffee just because you are feeling stylish ...
I don't think agle/lean/scrum is the underlying problem. These methods, like any other, have their place.

But in my painful experience, large corporations seem to:

1. Apply all the micromanagement bits they like (daily standups, sprints) and ignore the rest of the methodology. This then creates a horrible Lovecraftian mutant methodology about which others have written, but IMO sucks.

2. Insist on a one-size-fits-all approach and broadly speaking, agile is fine for incremental development of software with solid and understood requirements, but it goes off the deep-end when there's any level of open-ended research required to get a satisfactory result. Ironically, this part is inextricably intertwined with the first point wherein fixed schedules and requirements are hybridized with daily standups and 2-week sprints.
Yes, you can use your own submit button with the JS API: https://stripe.com/docs/checkout
Anyone use one of these tools? First I've heard of them, and would seem to make my inner control-freak happy.

pg_reorg can re-organize tables without any locks, and can be a better
alternative of CLUSTER and VACUUM FULL. This project is not active now,
and fork project "pg_repack" takes over its role. See
https://github.com/reorg/pg_repack for details.
For what it's worth, I am annoyed by my own self-righteous tone. I didn't respond with maturity. I've admitted as much elsewhere if you read the thread. Thank you for clarifying many of the issues here.

I don't agree that challenging negative language and asserting neutral language is "whitewashing". I believe that it helps matters relative to the negative language. If you wouldn't use language to somebody's face, it's still abusive to use it behind their back, because it doesn't encourage kindness towards them. Would you call a homeless person with a crack addiction that you knew by name a crackhead to his face? If I take a moment to imagine going outside and doing this, it makes me want to cry. Whitewashing is what I associate with taking something bad and making it look good by changing the language. I don't want to do that.

But then there's even the more generic argument for not talking badly about people behind their backs: if person A says something mean to person B about person C behind their back, it actually hurts A because person B will start operating on the basis that when their back is turned, person A will talk about them in a similarly bad way to persons D, E, and F.

By the way, this page says 1/3 of the homeless population has severe mental illness (not just schizophrenia):

http://www.schizophrenia.com/szfacts.htm

I don't think that page includes simple alcoholism and drug addiction, which are legitimately disabling physical and mental illnesses on their own. After that, I'm not sure there are any homeless that are unaccounted for. None of them are there because they are "lazy bums".
I did this the first time I used Stripe, in a little project where I was mainly gauging interest for whether I'd persue it further. Just opened up a second checking account and linked Stripe to that. No cost or pain for me.
> Critical analysis of research is science

You missed the point in the name of semantics, but I'll bite. Finding flaws in a scientific paper my be taking part in the scientific process, but it is by no means a science in itself - e.g. as a stats person, I can point out when a p value is misapplied, but I would never claim I just 'used science'.

>I'm perpetually frustrated with articles like this that seem to portray science as a failure by citing faulty studies

It's worth separating the philosophy of science from its application. This article is purely about the application and what has gone wrong. This is why I think this article is important for the STEM crowd: we are taught that science is an infallible philosophy (which I agree with), but it's easy to forget the garbage-in garbage-out nature of experimentation.
Who is getting the 1.6 million vs the 10 thousand? If you could steal revenue from a rival it might be worth it. Also as the patents on your 40K a year income steam expire this 10K a head solution comes on line to double dip and make the generics worthless.
I was diagnosed with ADD in the third grade. I think i was probably one of the last to be properly diagnosed as A.D.D before it became the catch all diagnosis. I spent a day worth of testing at my doctors office, and probably a week worth of testing over the next month at school taking different tests.

I took Ritalin or Concerta (a long release form of Ritalin) from 3rd grade to most of the way through college. And i can say for a fact that i would not have made it through high school with out it.

When i got to college im not sure what happened, i either outgrew the ADD, or adapted, i stopped taking it around the end of my 2nd year.
Ah, thanks! I wasn't aware of the difference.
I tried to trick myself once I started making more than 60K by splitting my direct deposit into checking and savings. Now every raise I get goes directly into savings and I try to live thinking that financially i've been in the same place as I have been for a while. It works fairly well but once you get married, buy a house, and have kids things change quite a bit.

That all being said if you think that your salary correlates to your happiness then you're chasing the dragon.
It certainly might be enough, but I'd imagine that you are delaying the worrying and stress for your retirement when you realize you saved $100k over 30 years.
I work with a group of coworkers that are a little less than half my age, 1 or 2 years out of college. They are all excellent.

Of course they goof off and sometimes make inexperienced decisions like every kid their age (ex. thinking that sharing a 1 bedroom apt with a stranger is a good idea, even though the bathroom is in the only bedroom). But I did the same things at their age, but they are surprisingly professional and make mature decisions at work. If I didn't spend a lot of time with them and only spent time with people my age, I probably would think the same thing, like my parents probably thought of me and my friends. It's the fallacy of age, and it happens every generation.

My wife, on the other hand, works with someone who is is the epitome of the article. Self-entitled, bratty, arrogant, etc. But I think this is more the case of the upbringing and not necessarily to do with the generation.

I think they're going to be just fine.
I guess it's more disappointment than anything else. I find:

- syntax to be a step backwards. Useless tokens everywhere, distinction between expressions and statements, no macros or some other extension mechanism. Docstrings-in-comments. Silly operators like &&. Increment operators, even with post/pre distinction! The switch, with yet another form of fall-through. "new" keyword for creating objects. I thought we'd all learned that C/Java syntax is stupid.

- the distinction between production and development mode to be dangerous (no asserts in production). Behaviour differs enough to be confusing

- anything can be thrown. Why even bother with an exception type then?

- I see no value in specifying types if they aren't actually checked all the time. Generics are equally optional. We'll see if this experiment proves me wrong, but I doubt it.

- constructors are complex and confusing. For some reason they don't get inherited

- static methods. They aren't class methods, so why even bother? The docs even recommend not using them

- peculiar boolean context. For some reason, everything is falsy except for true

- no ADTs or at least non-nullable types

On the other hand, it gets many other things right (module system, less crazy semantics than JavaScript, properties, operator methods, libraries are saner, etc.). It's just sad that it could've actually been a nice language.
It is only a step in the right direction if it's not thought to have solved the problem. If it is thought to have solved the problem, then it's a step in the wrong direction, even if it means that justice has been partly served.

I.e., the real problem here is cultural. We live in a culture that creates opportunities for people like these prosecutors, and merely firing these people sweeps that under the rug so it can flourish in the future.
Right. Consequences (of your bad actions) have consequences (for you). We're in agreement.

I'm saying this to contradict ditonal's claim that bullies shouldn't be treated differently when their bullying contributes to suicide.