skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would you get better conversions if you moved the sign-up requirement to after creating, but before being able to save a card?

Possibly, but I don't know if that would help the bottom line at all. I may test it at some point but that would require more code and more risk than most A/B tests.

You may have noticed I have a guest login option. You can play around with it to see what it does, but among other opportunities it asks people to sign up while waiting for their cards to print, etc.

I don't count guest signups as conversions for the purposes of e.g. AdWords, and it is a good thing, too. For targeted AdWords traffic I get a fairly high signup to the trial -- 28% or so. (That number still amazes me, since it is due to a change I made in this last week. Landing pages -- they work.) I also get another ~20% of people signing up as guests.

About 1.5% of trials go on to pay me money. And about 0% of guests go on to pay me money... or even upgrade to the trial.

This suggests to me that time spent making my service more attractive to people not really interested in it is unlikely to be time spent wisely.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/886221/does-django-scale

Look at the first answer. It seems like there are bigger django websites out there.
So, when I go into a coffee shop, don't use the bathroom, order a black coffee (no sugar), don't use the wifi and quicky leave -- do I get a discount?
I thought it was an interesting point also...and then I thought about it more. Michael talked about how a lot the companies they are investing in aren't based in the United States. Are iPhones as popular among hackers in other countries?
True, but we're comparing made it big software guys here, and there are not that many of those.

Steve Wozniak is a genuinely nice person from just about every story that is told about him. Gates, Jobs and plenty of others from his generation that made it big had just the same opportunities to give as much as they took. And they let those opportunities slide, that's why I think the comparison is a meaningful one.

To compare Steve Wozniak to the cornerstore grocer is not very productive. That's comparing apples (pun intended, twice) with organges.
Not sure who came first... I've been using http://bset.royans.net/ for the past few weeks.
Startup is Global Hostname: http://www.globalhostname.com/

DNS server is implemented in Twisted (but is not derived from twisted.names) and web site is Django+nginx. Database is Postgres.
Is this really true? IANAL but debt collection in the UK is particularly difficult even if you've received a legal judgment. Perhaps it's different for non-nationals, but even if you win a judgment at court against someone, you have to then get warrants and all sorts to pull it off.
Django at Fluther.
Second that. If Jobs would have had the opportunity to create a lock in like microsoft had/has on the desktop market he would have done it in a heartbeat.

The guy is an amazing business man and an inspiration to many but I doubt they're ever going to name some ethics prize after him.
ASP.NET MVC, sql server 08
No. Anyone who uses the 'R' word in a job ad can fuck off.

I do get shit done, and make tons of money for companies I work for. And play well with others. That should be more than enough.
This would actually appeal to me a lot, since it would remove all ambiguity from the relationship between me (the customer), the proprieter, and my use of the table. I'm always very nervous when I work in a coffee shop, so I'm always looking around to see how long other people staying so I can stay within the norm. This would remove that entirely.

Potential enhancement: the staff will babysit your table for you while you go to the bathroom. That would be a big win.
I have to disagree with the statement that Gates has done so much to hold back software. Some of the best minds in computing still are @ Microsoft Research. MSFT pours billions into basic and applied computer science research. If you say that Gates is very much responsible for the stagnation of software development, than you could blame Jobs just as much if not more b/c Jobs was the one who led the charge in making computing a pop culture when he saw the Xerox PC, decided to build the Mac, but missed some of the really cool ideas behind it.
I've seen this link a couple of times a while ago when Bing launched. Most commenters said: "Hey, look! In a blind test Yahoo and Bing are just as good as Google!". What they forgot, though, was that being just as good is not good enough for most of us to switch. Google didn't gain its market share by being just as good as HotBot and AltaVista. It did it by being much, much better.
Huh. By doing this, you are making an enviroment which is exactly the opposite of what people expect from a coffee shop. Would you like to sit by a table with display counting remaining time to stay? I wouldn't stay there any longer than I would have to, and never come back then.

Most people (attractive coffee shop customers) accept that they should buy something and stay for a reasonably long time, but if they were forced to do that by such a technical and precise system, they would hate it.
Dude, chill out, will ya? Do note that:

1) I am not affiliated with Plentyoffish.com.

2) The author of the post is looking for "someone with a PHD in statistics, mathematics or a related field." Do you read developer there? I don't. That's because developers are qualified to write code, not to design systems that are provably correct. That's what mathematicians are for.
There's a lot of confusion about how US anti-trust law works. Leveraging a monopoly, or being a monopoly, is not illegal. The legality part is how you choose to leverage it.

It would be illegal if Apple bought Creative and ceased production of Creative's MP3 players

It would be illegal if Apple refused to reach an agreement with a record label to sell music via iTunes because the record label also sold music on a competing service.

It would be illegal for Apple to code iTunes to look for its competitors software and uninstall them.

It would be illegal if Apple reached a deal with Microsoft and Creative to not price any MP3 player under $100.

From a legal standpoint the illegal behavior has to be provable. What really got Microsoft in trouble was the assortment of documents & memos outlining their anti-competitive strategies more so than the acts themselves.
But the thing is, functional game development techniques are nowhere near as developed or established as those of OO game development. The solutions to the problems at hand aren't as immediately obvious.

This comes to mind:
http://prog21.dadgum.com/23.html
Pylons [ http://pylonshq.com/ ] -- a lightweight (Python) web framework emphasizing flexibility and rapid development.
Since you wishes so: http://libregamewiki.org
Starbucks Langsuan is the logical choice. Provided not university exam time or Sunday afternoons, it's reasonably quiet and possible to get seats. Londoner Pub is OK too at non-peak times, although discerning people prefer Bull's Head in 33/1. One thing to be said for the Suk 33 area is that there's lots of good stuff to eat (ramen, no less) in 33/1.

Of course there's always Cafe Ubuntu in Soi Saladaeng :).
We get a lot less traffic during the summer months (school isn't in session) and towards the end of the year for the holidays... but we do get quite more traffic than our quantcast page suggests.

It does look like I was totally full of my own shit though, we're clearly not that big when it comes to the other Django sites out there.
So what are we, us early-adopting power users, saying here? That Apple has suddenly morphed into an entity that ignores our demands?

Please! I switched over to the Mac platform about 4 years ago but I knew what I was getting. I was buying a product from a company that for years shipped a one-button mouse, that killed off its clone line to control the hardware, and that deprecates its platforms so it could advance in the directions it wanted without the baggage of legacy support.

I knew iTunes would only synch with iPods, for me that was part of the cost of switching. Yes I think Apple should get on with it but I don't expect they will and I can see their point. Apple is fanatical about controlling the user experience, it knows how iTunes will work its hardware but cannot know about hundreds of Taiwanese models. Can the white box mp3 player phone play video? Yes? Great. Can it decode h.264? Pictures? Great. Does it understand "Synch most recent (iPhoto) Events?" What does it expect for Calendars? Contacts? Notes?

Jason is forgetting that the reason he moved to OS X is that he was sick of the "incompatibilities and other assorted quirks of Microsoft’s wildly open ecosystem." You joined the wrong church my friend.
If you're programming Perl, then it's going to be "kill a random block of text that has no structure."

Sorry, couldn't resist. :)
I consistently picked Yahoo results. But with Google I don't have to deal with all the garbage that surrounds Yahoo.
werkzeug
You don't need to do anything non-trivial for imperative/OO game programming.

If something non-trivial is required for functional programming, then it is more difficult.
Me too, if you have the energy to put more detail of your experience into a blogpost, I would love to hear it...
Thanks for the heads up, just updated the servers.
PHP is a language, not a web framework. Perhaps you meant CakePHP, the most common web framework for PHP?
Sinatra, Rack, Merb
Bing and Yahoo's pages are either bloated with images and effects or overwhelmingly busy. I search with Google because of its fast and minimal interface. I'm not distracted by eye-catching advertisements or anything, and I get my results immediately. I could care less about slightly more accurate results.
So should we come up with our own openssl libraries while we're at it?

Not saying I disagree or agree with you, but it's more complicated than 'diverse = good'.
"The Displaced and the American" and "The Dwellers Behind, On, and Beyond the Threshold"

Even just looking at the synopsis of the first:

"This essay presents a brief consolidation of the argument of my class Race and the New Republic – that the American culture, notably of the antebellum period, rests on the trauma of displacement and that Americans have coped with it in a divisive, self-destructive way. My essay explores the use of this concept in Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick, classic American novels that attempt to symbolically depict, if not reconcile, this division of the American social landscape."

This is barely even coherent.
Perhaps, but there's much more heterogeneity amongst PHP frameworks than Python or Ruby frameworks. For better or worse, Django and Rails are dominant in a way that Cake isn't. (Besides, all the cool kids moved to Kohana. We're not cool, as Dawdle is on this niche (read: dead) framework called Qcodo.)
Always feel sad for QNX - it was (and still is) a very lightweight Unix-like OS with a sense of actual design, particularly around the package management tools and graphical interfaces. If they Open Sourced it, it would have been the next Linux, if they had found a good partner (like Apple after Be wanted more money) it could have been OS X. Alas, hardly anyone's using it.
Seconded - great piece. It speaks of the dangers of loving the product or service while neglecting the business side of things.

"The dream of running a small cafe has nothing to do with the excitement of entrepreneurship or the joys of being one's own boss—none of us would ever consider opening a Laundromat or a stationery store, and even the most delusional can see that an independent bookshop is a bad idea these days. The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeper—all the way to Barbie tea sets—than any other capitalist urge. To a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. Which is good, because they're going to lose a lot of it."

That happens to a lot of good people, sadly. Michael Gerber covers it pretty well in "The E-Myth Revisited", which I consider the Bible for small business owners. I make anyone I work with read it before we work together. Any entrepreneurial-minded person who hasn't read it would do well to check it out. Amazon, no affiliate link:

http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...
It looks like an average of 50,000 monthly uniques when school is in session. Do you mind sharing your actual numbers?

And can you hazard a guess why Quantcast is so inaccurate? It seems curious, considering you have their javascript tracking code on every page of your site. If their tracker is so broken, why use them and not Google Analytics?
First he lists that he has "collected" Seven iPods, four Mac laptops, two iMacs and three iPhones.... and then he complains about how much he has spent on it, but it never seemed to have occurred to him that:

A) If he still has four laptops they must still be good and usable and if that is the case why did he buy the new one?

B) Apple hardware has some of the best resale value out there, why has he not bothered to even try to sell off any of the hardware? He could easily recoup half of his money or more. (Unless he is one of those idiots who list their two year old macbook for the same price they paid thinking they will get full retail price from 2007 for a used two year old used laptop)
I was disappointed not to see a robot option.
It may have something to do with where the mailpiece originated. I get machine tools through the mail without any problem -- just got a 25lb vise two weeks ago, but it was sent from a clearly commercial address with the words "machine shop" in the title.
by "these day" I assume you mean for at least the last 30 or 40 years?

I suppose so. But, despite the great difficulty in proving this scientifically and the great risks of this being a mere effect of nostalgia, I strongly believe that the intervals of attention are getting shorter.
Your account is nearly 400 days old.
Comparing Quantcast's estimates to the actual stats for a few sites I run (and have access to full logs/anayltics for) shows that Quantcast is severely (read: at least one order of magnitude in a couple cases) lowballing.
I like it.

Using '=' for assignment makes less sense than using <- or := or : because traditionally (i.e. mathematically) '=' work like a declaration or a constraint. Then there is the confusion between = and == that has always resulted in countless bugs.

Of course, assignment is a very common operation and I would rather use 1 char (:) for it rather than two (<-, :=).
The person asking the questions helps drive the direction of the conversation. With these two guys, you would hope the they are asked good questions in order to help discover key points that otherwise would not be found.

(Not saying that Guy did a bad job...still watching it.)
Uniques monthly is totally meaningless.

This comes up with some frequency. Uniques daily * 30 != uniques monthly, after all, if you undouble on a monthly basis and you get 30K visitors each day and they're all different it looks like you have a cool 900K uniques monthly. But at the same time it means you are completely not sticky! All your users are replaced by new ones every single day.

A better measure is uniques daily, daily growth in uniques and compare that with your uniques monthly. If you're doing it right you should see (30average repeats) + (30average growth)

Those are figures that you can do some planning on. Monthly uniques does not do anything other than look good on paper. Bad websites look even better :)
I would suspect most typical systems do not have ssh authenticated users users who can not get to a login shell. If you are making accounts like this I think you should have a firm enough grasp on systems administration to avoid this problem.
I"m sure the attention intervals are getting shorter. Mainstream media is painful to watch. I only picked the period 30-40 years as I'm 40 years old and it seems our political system has been "passing the buck" through my life.
The site seems interesting, and from the brief glance I got I think that the design is clean and works well. But I noticed that the font for most of the subsections is really small and basically illegible. For example, the text for http://uberessay.com/about/about-uberessay/ is a whole lot smaller than the About Us text above the search bar. It seems like you have a good selection of articles though for being up such a short period.
I agree - actually, the most insightful thing on that page is the comment by "Tom".
valid point, not sure about the example though.

Palin's speeches won't make much sense, even if they are grammatically correct and presented elegantly.
9 Dead After Copter and Plane Collide, both Plunge Into Hudson River
This is kind of absurd in its lack of even-handedness. I'm no expert on the history of these two men and the histories of their companies, but to say that Gates and MS have actively tried to hurt others whereas Jobs and Apple haven't would appear to reveal a serious pro-Apple bias.

First, lack of a conviction for anti-competitive behavior doesn't imply that Apple's not actively trying to hurt competitors or consumers. It just means they haven't done anything bad enough to warrant the government getting involved yet. But more than that, I'm not sure we should even care about convictions. I think every major company tries to create an environment in which they have the best chance of success. A lot of times they do things that are anti-competitive and harm consumers in order to create that environment. And a lot of times those things slip under the radar. I think this article does a great job of describing some of what Apple has been doing in that regard with iTunes and the App Store. And to pretend that Apple's recent actions haven't actively hurt other companies and even its own customers is ridiculous.

Finally, the statement that "Steve just makes his products and if someone wants to play in his sandbox they play by his rules" could just as well be applied to Gates. But if I were to make such a statement most people Apple fans would flip out. So Steve "just makes" this personal music management software that everyone loves which is great, and then says oh wait, if you want to use it to sync with a portable music device you can only do it with our product. Way back Gates "just made" this operating system that everyone loved which was great, and then said oh wait, if you want to surf the web you'll have to do it with our product (that wasn't even the restriction, which is yet another absurdity of this comparison). Somehow otherwise intelligent people magically dismiss the former as Jobs just exerting his right to dictate the terms on which you can use his products, while considering the latter massively anti-competitive behavior. Someone please explain what's going on.
I’m starting to look past [Apple] and back to Microsoft

It seems to me like he's missing a third option.
The Byzantine Generals Problem (1982)
The Londoner is larger and doesn't get as packed as quickly (avoiding peak times, of course). Bull's head is a superior pub no doubt, but is not great for a largish meeting.

At any rate, anywhere will do. When is this scheduled for? I'm figuring on heading to the islands later this week.
Yes, agreed. I've got very good eyes, but the text on the sub-pages (like the about one) was too tiny for me to read. Screenshot in Firefox 3.5: http://i27.tinypic.com/ws7eip.png

Edit: they've fixed the text size now (see below) -- good work.

Also, on the about->reading page, you say, "All essays accepted and posted on this website are protected by a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License. This means that they are not yours to copy."

But isn't the whole point of CC that you are free to "copy, distribute, and transmit the work" as long as you attribute (and don't use it for business or alter it, in this case). See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

The home page/logo/etc looks really nice, but the other thing was that it took me (a computer-savvy user) ages to figure out where to actually read an essay. This is partly because the text was too small and I physically couldn't read the download link. The PDF image should definitely be clickable and link to the PDF. And perhaps even better: a big "Click here to Read PDF" at the top of each essay page.
Nearly always Google but sometimes Bing. Never Yahoo.

I was pretty shocked how hideous Yahoo's results are by this.. often "scraper" sites were appearing in the top 10, and eventually spam sites became a dead giveaway to which one was Yahoo. Eugh.
Django seems to be getting momentum and yet there aren't(afaik) hosting companies dedicated exclusively for it.
HeavyMetal http://getheavy.info/ ;)
Concept Review Request:  Stop Arguing Now
If Apple wants to censor apps in the App Store, that's their prerogative.

Then why is it not OK for Microsoft to try to force you to use a particular web-browser by pre-installing it with Windows and making it difficult to install others?
sigh If only I could read this article without creating an account.
A Nuclear Fusion Startup
Agree completely. To my knowledge, Apple hasn't supported SCO-like efforts to destroy Linux, funded studies claiming Linux was plagiarized, consistently shipped buggy and insecure code, and wielded the patent and lobbying swords against its enemies and tried to destroy other businesses and open source in general by illegal means and lobbying (slightly off topic, but see also http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0907.longman....). Apple may be controlling, but they are just selling their products and not destroying others (although Jobs's wife is apparently a big political contributor, so who knows?).

As for the "Jobs vs. Gates" article, comparing the business practices of Microsoft and Apple by pointing out that Gates makes a lot of philanthropic contributions (and in fact also spends lots of money lobbying for the US government to spend more money on Gates Foundation-related projects) is just nonsense. "But great wealth does not make a great man." Neither does making lots of high-profile charitable donations. Frankly, this whole thing of having to be seen doing charitable work is a bit disgusting. Not that charity is bad, but shouldn't being a successful businessman involve shipping a great product rather than in cultivating an image to keep the antitrust crowd off your back?

This said, it's no better when the EU and DoJ go after Microsoft and Opera's CEO cheers them on. Maybe I'd actually try out Opera if they didn't support using bureaucrats to destroy their enemies.

As one hacker once said, "Shut up and show them the code."
Microsoft is becoming IBM. Google/Apple are trying to take Microsoft's spot. Twitter/Facebook/Whatever is trying to become Google.... Nah..this is never going to end.
There's isn't much info there, but from what I can see from the picture, I wouldn't want that spiky little thing crawling around inside my body.
AppJet!
Ah, that's better already -- somebody fixed that text size problem quickly! :-)
I apologize for the small text; while trying to change the slider at the top I accidentally changed the wrong class in the CSS. It should be back up now. I apologize for the inconvenience!