skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google Website Optimizer is the costliest version of "free" you'll ever experience. I'd recommend it over not doing A/B testing at all (well, probably), or for someone who wanted to dip their toe in the water with a personal blog or something and didn't want to write code.

But for business owners here? Who are generally fairly proficient with coding? No, no, just no. Friends don't let friends use Google Website Optimizer. There is almost certainly a better option available for your platform of choice. Use it. If not, write it, it will pay for itself at any sort of scale. (I should know, I had to do it myself.)

GWO is optimized to ease deployment by non-technical marketing folks. It makes significant compromises in user experience to make that possible. In particular, using Javascript for the basic two-alternatives-on-two-urls A/B testing will cost you an extra page load. If its on your personal blog, OK. If not, that just isn't acceptable. Everybody who looks into the effect of page load times on dollars-in-your-bank-account finds the effect to be staggering. Google and Amazon famously have published studies showing measurable sensitivity to differences of 100ms. Causing an extra page load is just about the worst thing you can do for page load speed. It is so bad that Google would swallow broken glass before ever using Website Optimizer, or any technology which required an extra page load, on any of their public sites.

Then there is the 2 URL requirement. This has a lot to anti-recommend it: from a SEO perspective, putting the same content on 2 URLs visible to users encourages them to link to both, splitting your link equity and exponentially decreasing the amount of earned organic traffic. (This is because having 2x the links results in far more than 2x the traffic, because of the steep drop in click-through rates on SERPs.)

Users also might bookmark or link to the alternative you deactivate at the end of the test, which means you get to maintain it for forever. I still have 3 URLs on my site from using GWO years ago which I have to remember to support every time I rewrite my URLs or, whoops, Mrs. Smith's English Resources page breaks. (Good thing I didn't have a web app at the time -- can you imagine having some users bookmarked to a signin page which 404ed? Not fun!)

It also plays very, very poorly with dynamic content. You end up essentially having to rewrite any variant to be displayable in Javascript.

And testing behavioral differences rather than display differences is just downright frightening. Really: you don't want to do it. Flee. FLEE. Save yourself while you still can.

Disclaimer: I wrote Rails plugin which competes with them, well, to the extent that two free things that solve similar problems for different people can be said to compete. Treat everything I say with a grain of salt. You can find these thoughts at more detail and length at my site:

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo/compare
The thing that really gets me with all this real-time hype is people attribute the rise of Twitter to all the awesome desktop clients built for it so you can receive your tweets in real-time, the problem is they aren't actually real-time, all those desktop clients use polling, just with a really short interval.

If you really wanted your desktop RSS reader to be just as awesome and real-time as Twhirl then just set all the feed refresh intervals to 5 minutes, no RSSCloud needed.
Their return policy is so lenient and customer service so good that you can order 5 pairs of shoes to try on and return four with no problem. And, they all get there within a couple days max.

I've never ordered from Zappos, but I've heard this story from many unrelated people now.
>So there was no industrial revolution in the Soviet Union?

Sigh, it is a bit easier to copy things that already is invented...

My next comment was: "But sure, the technology and the scientific method has been invented. Inefficient systems can grind along for a bit, until we in the open world outcompete them."

(My original point was that everything was going better since about 100-200 years ago, for the whole world. You claimed it was just technology, which is obvious -- everyone was poor before! Then I noted that without capitalism, there would probably never have been a fast industrial revolution. Now you answered with something irrelevant.)

But you knew that, you just didn't have an answer.

>Any jerk can edit Wikipedia.

That was a small point, but you can prefer the propaganda material -- and ignore the publication with references... :-)

It does make you look even more like a troll.

>The current system kills people in massive numbers.

>Did you just suggest to go to war to solve the hunger problem?

You claimed the starvation problem motivated a change of the economic organization of the whole planet.

I went over the statistics by country for hunger and noted that either:

(a) The majority will be fixed by their local countries the coming decades.

(b) Changing the situation for most of the rest of the hungry would demand a military intervention (with many more dead than die from lack of food for many years).

But you knew that, you just didn't have an answer.

>>Have you actually been to East Germany? You can't see any difference to Western Germany now

Not relevant to my argument (about the size of a problem a thousand times smaller than what you want to solve). Either.

But you knew that, you just didn't have an answer.

You failed to adress a single one of my points!

But I knew that I wasted time, before you answered.

I sincerely hope you are a troll and not this intellectually dishonest.
You might be interested in Tony's startup2startup talk:
http://startup2startup.com/2009/03/27/tony-hsieh-zappos-in-t...
I think you have missed "quite" from the title, and this bit from the article:

I hear two complaints most often when this talk comes up. The first is that eval() is dangerous. That usually means that we could take in some malicious code from a user and pass it into eval() where it would destroy our hard drive, or worse. Only, I'm not doing that. I made the variables here and user input is not involved. I think we're safe this time.
Have you tried running it in 64 bit mode? It'll probably use about twice as much memory, but my app is about 20% faster compared to 32 bit mode.
Think Drupal was FLOSS and non-profit? Think again.
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The difference is that in this case, we are talking about a company/product that is associating itself with insecure software, before that company has become hugely successful. Bill Gates can't be hurt by the associations anymore; this product still can be hurt by association with Wordpress. Being acquired by Automattic may mean you have just limited your clients to Wordpress, because no-one else dares use a plugin by Automattic.
heh. Yeah. well, my billing system is in no shape to do any sort of 'pull' based billing. using paypal helps keeps me out of a dreamhost-style billing disaster where I bill everyone for the next year all at once.

I will set something up with paypal recurring payments, though, for those who want it. But I like to think that the people using my service are getting something out of it, you know?
This redesign is what happens when a designer dabbles in sales without understanding what he is doing. The original zappos site does not have massive and obvious sales pitches, and the redesign brings in two huge and annoying sales pitches.

Just because you know how to style html and use photoshop does not mean you are an expert in selling goods to customers. This designer just added two huge banners that will likely lose the company a large amount of money.

Testimonials are turn-offs. Don't put two huge testimonials at the top of the page, your website looks then like an advert. And people don't love companies that are trying to force a product down their throat.

This redesign actually makes me angry - it's rare that a redesign has this ability to do that. So, designer, if the aim of your redesign was to create customer rage, then feel free to touch your nipples in ecstasy, because you succeeded.
The wealthy take care of their friends and families? And this is a problem?

It's understandable, sure, but it's also a problem. I understand why the Saudi Royal family wants to keep all the oil money to themselves. I'm saying it's not healthy for Saudi Arabia as a whole.

Certainly, an even distribution doesn't fare to well either

Of course. I'm arguing that the other extreme is also bad -- that strong Capitalism eventually leans towards Feudalism. The trick is to find a balance: to reward achievers but provide sufficient safety nets.

Um, what? There are as many homeless and poor to "trip over" in Europe

Have you been to Europe? Really? I lived in SF and Berkeley, and I live in Europe now. It's quite simply, empirically, not comparable.

And those "crazy" folk aren't on the street because they are locked away in institutions that the US - for better or worse - long ago decided weren't good for them.

No, the US didn't decide that; it's a state issue. In Idaho it's quite good, for example. In California, Reagan, when he was governor, shut down a lot of the asylums and clinics to save money. Now, in California, you have lot of McMansions and lots of people who need serious medical help rummaging in the garbage.
There has to be scope for a different approach. Move beyond upvote/downvote to using I-found-this-interesting/I-found-this-boring to work out which links I will find interesting. Or something. Because when you try to work out what the community finds interesting by summing votes, the cat photos rise to the top.
Clearly, having hundreds of perfectly aligned, glossy and drop-shadowed images makes for a much better user experience.

Will this be done in Flash or HTML 7? Giant image maps?

Props for putting a gradient on absolutely everything.
is it not the same as up or down vote, but diff words
>- there can be spooky 'action at a distance' effects.

Yeah, those are unique to Perl... :-)

>- not everyone has read the best practices book

True, it is unique that Perl has programmers which doesn't follow the coding standards of the group... :-)

>- Chasing up and down inheritance chains can be very unpleasant.

True, it is only Perl which have over complex OO libs. :-)

>> For another example, using unicode in a regex somewhere can cause files to be pulled from disk, suddenly slowing your app by three orders of magnitude.

I don't know much about Unicode. You mean that using Unicode characters would require loading a library? Can you give a reference to that "three orders of magnitude"?! If you count the startup time of the lib as run time, I am disappointed.

>- there is poor IDE support for perl

Huh? Afaik that IDE from Activestate gets good reviews, but Perl programmers use Emacs (or Vim) anyway. Than we have Padre on the way.

>- sigils make it difficult to scan code

>- it can be very hard to figure out what arguments are being passed, or what arguments a subroutine or method expects.

(More or less the same point.)

At least partly correct, I guess. I generally check the synopsis, first. Their existence probably comes from this.

>- it's common to pass around a hashref (a.k.a. magic blob of data) ...

Create an object, if it is complex.

Edit: Moved answers to strange claims to top.
Windows 7 Reintroduces Remote BSoD
Perhaps I am some ogre of a curmudgeon but 'falls under the author's definition which we have no way of vaguely qualitatively evaluating' is not good enough for me. What if his definition was 'I was acquired by my mom who let me move back into her basement'? I'm not suggesting that it is or that there's anything wrong with an early exit that pays your debts and legal bills (or more or much more). But we know essentially bupkis about this - it's a good story because... it has an inspiring ring about it? Having a hard time throwing my critical faculties to the wind just because it undoubtedly does.
yes
when you are a reg user, you subscribe to what they call sub-reddits, or in layman terms categories.
Nokia E72 Themes : Macintosh
People really look at iconography? When I look for something, I never look for the icon, I look for the word.

The shape of the word IS the icon.

I would find "Search" as a word many times faster than I would find an hourglass.
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Clever job/contract application/proposal OP, well played.
Sure, but the 'sub-reddits' still show the same content to all viewers of the sub-reddits.

There is no 'smart' filtering of the content to sort or discard based on your previous viewing history.
I think others may have done the design per article pre- http://www.jasonsantamaria.com/
I used to play. I've got some good memories of playing on Monday nights after school, at the pub I shouldn't have been allowed into!
This exact same argument was being shouted from the rooftops by the people who claimed MySpace would always be better than Facebook, and clean design didn't matter. Everyone thought they could get away with lack of structure and threw their hands up in the air when it came to things like "usability" and "aesthetics." I wrote about this on Go BIG Network before Facebook traffic surpassed MySpace's, and I see the same thing going on here.

I understand most of you out there are programmers, some of you may not share the level of appreciation that i do for things that can look nice and are usable--but this guy's design is vastly better than what they've got now. Kudos for his work.
Torn between voting you down for overreacting with claims of anger and rage, and voting you up for "feel free to touch your nipples in ecstasy". What to do?!
WordPress Trac, diff giving some insight in what caused the problem
We got spotted by the Google Street View Car
We're all related, you know...
Filtering as in, I want to see this content or, I don't want to see the content I saw the last hour?
All these re-designs (for the sake of self promotion) are getting a bit much. Lack of good design can communicate as much to the user as good design itself can.

In the instance of 'bargain' sites (Zappos, Craigslist etc.) a deliberate un-design communicates the affordability of the product far more than a slickly designed site would.
supporting legacy systems can be a huge amount of work. If you use whatever all the kids are using, setting up a LAMP system is trivial... seriously, apt-get install php5 should get you something that works in 90% of the cases, and it will be done before you have time to get a cup of coffee.

But yeah. once you want something weird, well, then you've spent the afternoon recompiling source packages and tracking down security patches for obsolete libraries, or dicking around with some half-broken poorly-maintained third party repos. I mean, it's not that hard, if you have experience with autoconf and compiling stuff, but even so it's a few hours of dicking around, and after you are done, you feel like a moron 'cause you just spent three hours installing php. (granted, there may be a good repo with a well-maintained php4 package out there somewhere, but I'm paranoid, and generally am slow to trust 3rd party repos.)

but then, php4 doesn't seem like it should be that weird. In fact, it should be just like apt-get install php4, but I just tried it and it doesn't work.

E: Package php4 has no installation candidate

so yeah. this is part of why I hate languages like python that aggressively break things that used to work when you upgrade. From what I remember of janitoring php, running php4 code on php5 usually worked just fine, though.
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Microsoft rivals near patent deal
Filtering as in: "you don't seem to be interested in stuff about Microsoft Windows so we'll leave that out"

Condensing the news to a more manageable stream.
Please answer this before I do recommendations... :-)

>- there is poor IDE support for perl

Komodo, the ActivesState IDE, is bad? I've only heard good things.

I think there are some other products out there. Are they bad, too?
Hey Max,

I'm Andrew, the guy who did it. The key thing that I want to drive home is that their execution stinks. I figure they know how to sell their product - they did $1 billion in sales last year - but the site itself is incredibly sloppy.

-Andrew
The proposed design does not have a single full image of a shoe above the fold.
true, thats a point
Plus - GWO won't let you play around with the data. In the end, what you would just know is that one variation performed better than other one. You wouldn't know if one variation resulted in more time spent, less advert clicks, more user interaction (in terms of comments), more purchases. And you won't know how it affected your overall funnel behavior. GWO would give you just one goal tracking, that too a simple convert/no convert.

In short, as Patrick pointed, GWO is developed from a perspective of ease-of-use and simplicity. You cannot do advanced stuff with it.

Even though I agree with Patrick with the impact of load time with site performance, the case against using JavaScript must be seen from a broader perspective. Google, Amazon and other companies stress for millisecond-level optimization because their site time is already hyper optimized. But if you see an average e-commerce (or some other) website, a couple of 100 milliseconds due to JavaScript look like a good bargain when it comes to keeping view layer separate from code layer.

But, overall, I think it should be seen from business objectives. If one cares about milliseconds, best to do testing at code level. If you care more about doing tests quickly and not touching your code every now and then, JavaScript based testing is the way to go.
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This wasn't a problem in the exercise section. This was simply a problem solved to explain a concept. So I didn't really peek at any solution. I was supposed to see this solution as an example to understand one of the methods of problem solving using recursion. (not denying that I could have tried to figure it out on my own instead of reading further in the main text)

But I agree with your last two sentences.
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I'm basically saying that the votes should be counted differently.

Current approach:

* cat photo gets upvoted by 70 people

* article about using Haskell to frob whirnicators gets upvoted by 50 die-hard functional programming enthusiasts and downvoted by 100 Java/C#/Ruby fans

Current result:

* cat photo appears at the top of the front page

* Haskell article gets buried

Better approach:

* cat photo gets upvoted by 70 people, but their voting habits mostly don't correlate with mine

* Haskell article gets upvoted by 50 people who mostly vote the same way as me, and downvoted by 100 people who mostly vote differently

Better result:

* Haskell article appears at the top of the front page when I look at it

* cat photo still gets front-paged, but not so prominently
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"I understand most of you out there are programmers, so you share very little appreciation for things that can look nice and clean"

Hey now, careful with the blanket statements. Some of us hackers actually do care deeply about usability and aesthetics, but "clean" doesn't always mean "better" - despite many UX people's unfounded insistence.

I work for a company that shall remain unnamed, but we do a ridiculous amount of testing for every little UI change. Conversions, sales, and a whole ridiculous slew of variables are tracked in extensive A/B testing for every UI design.

Our app doesn't look like much, but it's also the proven design - and we have the numbers to back it up.

I'm all for usability and aesthetics, but when you're arguing that your clean-looking design, which follows all the usability theories in the book, is better than one with a long track record of successful metrics, you better have some numbers of your own.

In the end Zappos' business is not clean, pretty UI. It's generating sales. If clean, responsive, usable UI leads to that (and it most certainly does - within reason), then they ought to do that. If it doesn't, then it'd be a dogmatic waste of resources that can be very damaging to the company.
Clear case of effective design versus simply aesthetic design--most people prefer to make more money and follow effective design.

Gradients and gloss are not required elements in the web 2.0 era, it's all just fluff at the end of the day--Zappos cares about its bottom line, that's how you start to make a billion dollar company =)
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Yay, someone gets it :)

Personalized news scoring and filtering.
effective vs aesthetic design

One makes money the other just looks pretty, you choose.
No, you're right. We shouldn't push the boundaries of what we can do on the web, we should always stick to the browser defaults.

Any competent front-end designer could easily figure out how to code this.
One day - just one day - I'd like to see a discussion about patents where someone doesn't suggest patenting something 'amusing' that already exists and has years of prior art.
Can you explain a bit more what you mean about drawing white shapes? I've never had a problem:

graphics.beginFill(0xFFFFFF);
graphics.drawRect(10, 10, 100, 100);
graphics.endFill();
Would not that fail, if you are just a reader and a submitter only and probably just a vote here or there a day for something you really like
email me at alshaikhREMOVETHISFORSPAM@gmail.com