skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your DATA is skewed/screwed And so is mine. Avoid analytics train wreck.
You are probably measuring the final result as a conversion point like me. I measured a new sign-up/paying customer as a conversion point. Well, that was a DISASTER!

Our prospects email, call, or IM our company multiple times before purchasing. So its almost impossible to automatically track what keyword is getting the highest conversion rate for purchasing. Sure, we have rough ideas....but its not precise. We have been using adwords.

Instead we feel its a better idea to measure different conversion points i.e. call, email, or IM. This at-least gets us a lead to follow-up with. Now the problem is we dont know which conversion point should be the benchmark and measuring these conversions can be quite daunting.

At what point do we stop striving to make sure the analytics is 100% accurate? We probably could spend a ton of time and money to get this 100% accurate...but then the question is. Is it actually worth it if we are only spending a few hundred on adwords each month??? I doubt it!!!

I should be able to say that the keyword phrase <EXAMPLE KEYWORD> is getting us the most return for our cost. I should also be able to tell you 2nd, 3rd, and 4th best keywords/keyword phrases for PPC and SEO. But, right now we are fairly blind since we only see the CTR and how long they spend on our site which we can make assumptions...but its not validated.

PLEASE HELP me see the analytics light!?

Any ideas? Thanks so much!

Mark Michuda
Mark@TextHub.com
I have played with Win 8 Metro only a bit, so I can't speak for it's practical usage, but I own a WinPhone8 (Lumia 920) and the UI i think is not at all overdone, and other than tiles having their non-standard images sometimes, it's all very consistent (except for the few apps that are e.g. ports from Android or iOS, which use non-standard UI, but that's the developers' faults, not Metro's).
I tried to like this series. I really did. And it starts out so strong...

The thing is, you can't escape talking about the specific implementation details of monads while talking about monads, otherwise you lose the plot of what we're doing and why. Saying, "Monads are just code patterns" is like saying, "All matter in the universe is just energy patterns," strictly correct but unhelpful for any true insight.

Its okay to skip the monad laws at first, but what's not okay is to talk about why there are so many Monads or what actually constitutes a monad. The best writing I've ever seen on this subject is from Learn You A Haskell for Great Good, where they walk you through a piece of code and then show how using a monad makes it cleaner and less tedious.

By the end of those 2 chapters from LYAH, you end up with the sense that monads are obvious and natural. And they are once you understand the sorts of problems they solve. I wish we had more of that.
I personally dislike the idea of (further) fragmenting things like job boards (or real estate listings, or travel fares, etc.) where breadth is critical. How is this better than a general-purpose job board with an option to filter by remote-friendliness? Unless people are willing to potentially miss out on listings that don't happen to be on this particular board, this is just one more addition to a long list of places the user has to keep track of if they are job-hunting.
As far as I know Vim is single-threaded; you can't run operations asynchronously.
Not to be a negative nancy, but I hate these bullshit statistics.

When you break it down, its only 35 requests a second. Not a big deal at all. Any website that is relatively popular will do above and beyond that.
Its really hard though! The thing I've got to remind myself that when theres a negative backlash, then I've just passively filtered people.

It takes work, I have my insanely self conscious days/months/years. Baby steps!
I think they talked about using a dragon capsule for this. How can I get a sense for what the inside of that is like? Is it actually livable for a year or more?
The 1min story of SEOMoz.org as told by randfish [video]
But you can save 3 bucks a year!
BitPay charges a fee to accept BTC and another fee to convert to USD; these add up to 2.69%. If the customer pays Coinbase 1% to convert USD to BTC then total fees are nearly 4%.
hahah, oops, we'll work on that. Thanks
State of Washington overwhelmed by applications for state pot consultant
Iron Man 3 Looks Amazing
Nginx is primary for SSL termination and static assets. At the time we set up our infrastructure, I don't believe HAProxy supported SSL termination. According to Willy Tarreau's comment to the first answer of this question (http://serverfault.com/questions/426919/should-i-use-an-ssl-...) it was added in the same release as the patch I mentioned, coincidentally.
Your City Is Not The 'Next' Silicon Valley - Get Over It
Your response makes it sound like you just had a simple problem like you get with any language, and followed bad advice on solving it based on the assumption that "cabal is just bad and you have to do this". The big give away is that you didn't need to delete your .cabal directory, advice to do so is coming from someone who doesn't know the basics of how cabal works. It is just storing downloaded sources, all deleting it accomplishes is making you re-download stuff for no reason. The installed packages are in your .ghc directory. Cabal is no more broken than cpan.
HTML5 Audio – Is It Still That Bad?
You can write simple scala, if you use case classes, type inference, wildcards, optional parens/periods, return "this" to make little pointfree method chains etc. You also need to avoid parameterized types and many corners of the type system that go with them. Look in Subramaniam's Pragmatic Press book on scala, you'll see lots of simple code that any ruby/PHP dev can grok, for analytics, sysadmin etc.

Now it's true that a lot of people don't choose to write simple scala. Scala has a lot of features that other language designers know they need. Look how proud Hjelsberg was of co- and contravariance in C# 4.0 (I don't have a video waypoint, it's about 2/3 of way thru

http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/matthijs/C-40-and-beyond-by-A...

(Also look at Learn You Haskell, for pretty straightforward haskell code (straightforward because he didn't have page-space to go into a lot of GHC extensions and advanced stuff)
Brian Eno + "3d Rain" link above = Blade Runner. Now I want to nap.
> I thought it referred more to the logistics of getting hundreds of producers coordinated and hundreds of thousands of chickens vaccinated in so short a time.

I don't think that interpretation is plausible really. The author mentioned nothing about logistics, scale, time-to-results. I don't see how you can claim that the "amazing" is supposed to refer to something the author didn't mention.

> so short a time

Twelve years?

> no need to assume the writer is one of the "crazies"

Indeed.

> no need to have an OT comment thread

I just made the comment, not the thread. No-one's baying for blood. I'm just saying it's very sloppy and potentially dangerous phrasing.
With the current system, you're not even wagering that $50,000...you're throwing it out the window. Unless you believe you'll cause >= $50,000 of car-related damage over your lifetime.
You realize that that's the system of government we have in the United States, right?
Sure they do. Read up on research for chicken food - they are careful to add enough beta carotene to give the yolks a good color, and more expensive eggs add extra.

The research for chicken food is amazingly thorough.

The gas on a tomato really does ripen it, it's not just appearance (although that doesn't necessarily help the taste).

You actually don't want to pick a tomato when it's red (ripe), the best is to pick them just at the start of the ripening process (a hint of red), then put them in sunlight to let them finish, the taste and texture is much better because it doesn't get diluted with extra water if you left it on the plant (and also avoids the risk of the skin splitting).

With some plants they bred the ability to self ripen out of them, so ethylene gas is required. But I'm not sure if that was done to tomatoes.
The point of the article was to focus on the predictability of the HN user base as a whole, not that it would be a plausible outcome.

You obviously misinterpreted the author's intentions and you missed:

* The fact that it wasn't made to make you laugh

* Why do we laugh, what makes things funny?

* What is laughter, really?

(tongue in cheek, of course)
Is there something I'm suppose to be doing?
I am your average person. I'm of average intelligence, I'm average at my job (Software Engineer), I make average money, yadda yadda.

For the last ~3 years, I've never been content for more than a few months. It often manifests it's self in the form of my job situation. I get a new job, a couple months go by and I get tired of it. It's not limited to my job though. I have a constant habit of picking something, completely enveloping my self in it, and then within a few weeks to a month, the thought of it disgusts me.

I'm constantly searching for some type of business to create, but deep down I know I'm not a business person. I'm nervous to the point of physically shaking when put in confrontational situations.

I often feel like I need to channel my impulses into something that doesn't effect my life, like video games, or hobbies, but it never seems to last.

Is there something I'm suppose to be doing that I'm not? Or maybe I just have some horrible habits that have grown into monsters?

It's gotten to the point that I'm mentally exhausted with my erratic notions.
Actually, you're both right, you just had different experiences. With 2-6 hens, the flock is more centered around the human, allow themselves to be touched and hand fed, and exhibit recognizable personalities. With 10-20 hens, the flock is more "wild" and establish their own pecking order by being aggressive to each other (and grabbing all the food they can grab before the others). I had a flock of 12 and saw both kinds of behavior, though because we kept the roosters for a while, it tended towards the wild side.

Of course, chicken breeds, coop environment, and owner personality are huge factors in chicken behavior as well.

BTW, this is a great article in that it reveals a little about our industrial food chain. I suppose it's popular here on HN because it has a bit of the "How things work" vibe. There should be articles like this for every type of food sold in stores.
CSS-driven scrolling for a better marquee
Samsung's Galaxy S4 Tracks Your Eyes
Agreed - we've built extensions for Chrome, Firefox, IE & Safari ; Firefox and IE are on the same level with regards to debugging, that is : not pleasant. It's a shame because browser extensions have great potential : I'm increasingly turning towards them for a variety of use-cases, however currently limiting efforts to Chrome due to availability of tools.
Is Bitcoin a realistic option for those people?
I know monads are supposed to be simple, but I've been playing with Haskell on and off for years now and I still can't figure out how do-notation desugars into >>= operations.
Wouldn't it be incredibly difficult for a human mounted camera to do this? Any shift in the camera itself would throw off the results.
http://soundtracker.com/ is what I use for this. He makes binaural nature recordings. They are as effective as white noise at blocking out my surroundings, but because of the feeling of space and the variety of sound, I don't get tired of listening to them the way I do listening to noise.

Here's an article on his search for quiet places and the movement to preserve them. http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3627
> ... there are cases where in the transactions both parties really need to know who are we talking to.

This coming from a search company? What else do they have. A free email. You need two parties verifying each other via free email? What else. Ads. There's only a single party in Ads.

What am I missing here?
Transparency Report: Shedding more light on National Security Letters
The best music for me when trying to be productive is music that I least pay attention to and concentrate on enjoying. If the music is too interesting then I get distracted. So for me: techno.
Opera's html5test.com score went up by 44 points with the switch to WebKit.

https://plus.google.com/114233674199568482864/posts/fE1jaycp...
Dude, this is impressively MVP. Google forms for submitting, and just linking to a 3rd party webpage for actual job details. Awesome.

Are you just manually updating the page by hand when people add jobs? Kinda concierge style. I would actually respect that all the more.

People talk a big game on MVP, but it's cool to come across where someone actually gets it.

How did you get your initial inventory? Just manually sifting through HN posts? I think getting new and quality inventory will be the biggest challenge, that's harder than getting job seekers.

You've basically created a less crappy and niche focused indeed.com:

http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=&l=Remote

I'm not sure if indeed.com spiders automatically or what, but I'm guessing you could emulate their approach to getting job openings.

Another option is to try to actively partner with headhunters who often have a source of inventory you wouldn't normally see on job boards.

As for the UI, ignore the haters. The simplicity reminds me of Startupers (http://www.startupers.com/) which is doing just fine.
There is a bigger trend that the article omits: the internet has become mainstream enough for "anyone" to open an online store, and best thing is, this is great for consumers.

Not every internet business needs to have an "innovative business model", but these businesses can still be highly profitable just by selling a product/service that people want.

Take German bicycle manufacturer Canyon (www.canyon.com). They are a direct-to-consumer business, they sell bicycles which have been around for over 100 years, and they are wildly profitable. Still, their business model is not innovative.

This article comes across as very negative towards people who want to start an online business, but the reality is that the internet is what electricity was to the second industrial revolution.
The 10 Greatest Heists in History
I really hope Mozilla does it!
My thought is that this is really most useful for CSS and the transformations that SASS/LESS are capable of are relatively mundane in comparison to CS -> JS. In addition I only see this as a tool for development, not something that I would want running in production so you don't have the concerns over increased file size or still supporting minification that you do with source maps, assuming you want source maps in production for error reporting.

I can envision simply using structured CSS comments to pass the needed information to the browser. The browser only needs a structured pushing protocol, baseline comment format, probably handling of comments that indicate file boundaries (used for pushing to the correct resource) and a 'plugin api' to allow plugins to parse other comments in a meaningful way, SASS/LESS could provide a 'Dev tools' plugin to parse the comments and support whatever editing features they wanted. They would also have to support generation of the comments in the preprocessor.

The important bit is a standardized pushing protocol, a standardized way to provide additional mapping information and a standardized 'plugin' style system to allow things like SASS to add to dev tools additional editing support.

Just one theoretical approach, still a ton of work, but I really think there is a lot of developer time spent dealing with this issue so it may well be worth it.
> For older Python versions please see http://blog.ianbicking.org/2007/09/12/re-raising-exceptions/

This is super important, I recently rediscovered this with a colleague (the company's tool was fucking up exceptions everywhere, either over-logging things or throwing stacktraces out in an attempt to rewrap them and we decided to fix this).

Although the second-to-last example:

new_exc = Exception("Error in line %s: %s"
% (lineno, exc or exc_class))
raise new_exc.__class__, new_exc, tb

would be much better written as:

raise Exception, "Error in line %s: %s" % (lineno, exc or exc_class), tb
Inline editing of Stylus and CoffeeScript when using the inspector. That's about the only thing that could get me to switch from Chrome.

Also, please finish implementing the gamepad api!
Awesome work! Cheers airblade. One nitpicky thing though, why do you use "_" and not "-" for removed lines? Can't see why you wouldn't want it vertically centered!
What is Placety?
Why not let ELB handle SSL termination and load balancing (ignoring the fact that HAproxy can delay connections by 15 seconds)?
This was a few years ago so things may have changed, but I played with pricing a lot. Eventually I found that sales were lower at .99 than $2.99. Above $2.99 they quickly fell off again. I assumed that a slightly higher price up to a point caused people to assign a higher perceived value.

As for a higher standard, I want to deliver value regardless of price. At the end of the day people are giving me something way more valuable than a couple dollars - their time.
Try

hi SignColumn ctermbg=232 guibg=#080808
If you want to know more about laughter here is the wikipedia article[1]. Also HowStuffWorks explains how laughter works[2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter

[2]: http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/laughter.htm
"I find productive music to almost always lack vocals."

Languages you don't speak also work.
I think this is just fantastic. Does it gather job listings automatically, or do people have to post them?
Reminds me of body temperature. In the US we're taught that the standard body temperature for a human is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. I don't know about anyone else, but when I was young I thought this was very specific and must mean that a temperature variation of a few tenths of a degree is worth noting. Turns out 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is just a direct conversion from 37 degrees Celsius.
How about a low paying job?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=65.0

You can short BTC on Bitcoinica... oh wait.
You have to scroll back to see the actual error. That could be anything from missing C libraries to a permission problem.
How Balanced does Database Migrations with Zero-Downtime
"Rats, top comments will be impossible to beat. I can probably piggy-back off a top comment, though, those comment threads aren't long yet..."

actually, this text in the reply box highlights a huge problem with threaded (and voted) discussions in general: there is little incentive to reply to any already-huge thread, even with valuable content.

i've been thinking of how to solve this issue for the past week and have some ideas, working on a prototype.
https://github.com/jisaacks/GitGutter
> > An intelligent debugger that would automatically step over certain files

> That's interesting. I never thought about this. I like that.

You haven't been reading your mail, paul!

We discussed this briefly in https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.developer-tool... and are planning to work it in to our schedule.
I'm always saddened when the "guru3" type post is found in the middle of the pack.
An aside question; what's the deal with "pathogen"?

I've been using the "/bin/cp" command for years installing vim plugins and it's worked remarkably well; requiring just about 1 invocation on average...

What problem does that thing solve?
my thoughts too :D
Not yet. Five years I'd guess.
I have received verification from someone in Great Britain, that they also see the butt background.
Urban Planners Battle Using The New Sim City
I gave a presentation on zero downtime database migrations at a devops conference in Boston in November 2012. Slides are here: http://www.completefusion.com/zero-downtime-deployments-with...

I also wrote a more detailed post about it for SysAdvent 2012 - http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2012/12/day-3-zero-downtime-my...
I'm currently running coffitivity and the idling engine noise at the same time. Feels like I'm in the cafeteria aboard the enterprise.
I disagree with the author. This isn't exactly a parody thread. A parody is "an imitative work created to mock, comment on or trivialise an original work" [1]. For one thing, I would hardly call Hacker News comments "original work", and a simple creation like this hardly captures the full scope and breadth of comments on here.

Furthermore, I'm not really sure why this belongs on HN, because it's not very technical, and frankly, not very intellectually stimulating. People on here don't appreciate humor, so those who upvoted this should have known better. I've flagged the article.

Also, I've never even heard of Brad Conte.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parody
Removed lines happen between existing lines, so using an underscore makes it look like that.

Compare:

25 - def foo():
26 baz()

With:

25 _ def foo():
26 baz()

(Where there used to be a bar() call before baz().) The first version makes it look like the `def foo():` was somehow removed.
Nice - thanks for sharing!

There's surprising amount of hidden jokes in there too - feel free to read the OP's blog post [1] for many of the details (assuming you like spoilers)!

[1] http://bradconte.com/hacker-news-parody-thread.html
There's not much value in learning programming languages that are similar. If you learn Ruby, you already know pretty much everything there is to know about Python. If you learn Java, you already know much about C#. The only real value you can get out of learning new mainstream languages is from learning the architecture of popular libraries. Like when I was inspired a few years ago to do database migrations after I played around with Rails.

So you end up learning from the libraries written in those languages, not the languages themselves. It isn't a bad outcome, especially since learning a new language that's similar to something you already know becomes second nature and doesn't take too long. It takes me something like 2 weeks to learn a new language.

Haskell is on a whole new level though. I don't know Haskell, but in the last couple of months I've been building stuff with Scala and lots of functional programming related idioms, both for personal stuff and for our startup and I've learned more than I learned in the last 5 years. There's lots of good stuff to learn in the Scala ecosystem, like how to build rock solid pieces of functionality with referential transparency, how to work with Futures/Promise, how to do concurrency with shared-transactional memory, how to do non-blocking and safe I/O using Iteratees, how functional data-structures are designed and so on.

Of course, Scala is tainted by its hybrid and JVM-related nature. It's much too easy to cheat if it's easier than alternatives that are referentially transparent and even if your interface is pure, that interface is probably wrapping something which isn't pure. In practice it works great for building stuff, but unfortunately I'll have to take the plunge and learn Haskell to be able to take my knowledge to the next level.

One example where Scala falls short is in its implementation of lazy data structures. You see, even though Scala does have really good lazy data structures, it cheats here and there because it makes sense to do so ... like for instance a Stream is a lazy list and it does behave lazily, except when it doesn't. sort() on a lazy stream is actually implemented eagerly, which means algorithms using sort() will not have the complexity characteristics of lazy algorithms. There's nothing stopping one from implementing a lazy sort() in Scala, but it's probably not going to have any benefits so people don't do that. That's actually the reason why I want to learn Haskell, because the best implementations for lazy data-structures and algorithms are written in Haskell.

Many idioms that people use now in Scala or in other languages have been used in Haskell since years ago. Like Iteratees or type-classes.
Did nobody else notice it's a link to JSTOR? Aren't they evil or something?