epe

Sadly this isn't entirely new news:

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_fra... http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html

I find this: http://martin.kleppmann.com/2014/11/25/hermitage-testing-the... a more informative read on essentially the same topic.

Seems like classic Hawthorne effect...

I'd assumed it was a reference to jwz's "how will this software get my users laid":

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

Maybe I'm giving them too much credit...

I don't know if it's any simpler, but I tend to do:

    git init .
    git remote add origin git://github.com/eentzel/dotfiles.git
    git checkout -t origin master

Go has a great solution for this in the binary package:

http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/binary/#Read

I've been working on some code to parse the shapefile format, which specifies some fields in big-endian and some in little (I have no idea why), but the binary package has made it really easy to deal with.

I'll just leave this here in case anyone still cares...

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch...

Apparently it's managed to destroy even the minimal level of talent needed to construct a readable PNG.

Agreed that the web doesn't have any "magical properties", but it has the "Worse is Better" survival characteristic; or at least it did in its early days. I think the web's continued dominance depends on the extent to which it retains those characteristics.

I think the snake-oil nature of (much of) SEO stems from the fact that it's difficult or impossible to measure in an accurate, unambiguous way. Since A/B testing includes measurement by its very nature, I suspect it will be more resistant to snake oil.

The clearest explanation I've ever seen of this method is here:

http://www.evanmiller.org/rank-hotness-with-newtons-law-of-c...

Wouldn't simply excluding any http request whose user agent contains "googlebot" from the displayed count make it dramatically more accurate without needing a switch to JS-based analytics?

This is my November Startup Sprint[0] project, inspired by a StackExchange question[1] from this HN thread[2]. The idea is that the app creates a unique email address for you, and any emails of the form "Lunch with Bill Tuesday at 12:30" that you send to that address will be added to your Google Calendar. I'd love to hear what HN thinks of it. Much thanks to HN user riskish for his design help.

[0] http://hn.21times.org/

[1] http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/7139/add-an-event...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1861283

It appears to be down at the moment, but there's a site called Wrong Tomorrow (http://wrongtomorrow.com/) that seems to me like a good start in this direction. Here's the blog post announcing it:

http://www.idlewords.com/2009/04/wrong_tomorrow.htm

Even better review of an earlier book of Friedman's by the same reviewer: http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html

I don't believe it's any Javascript overhead for non-IE browsers. It's just a single line of CSS:

behavior: url(path/to/PIE.htc);

that non-IE browsers will simply ignore.

There is certainly a case to be made that the U.S. school system was designed to make "drones or conformists":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

Or for a more detailed argument:

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm

Care to share the name of the bank?

On http://www.sticket.net/request/ if I type "denver, co" in the first field and hit tab, the field gets blanked out. Safari 4 on OSX 10.5.

You might be interested in this article that made it to HN about a year ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481392

I found it fascinating even though my interest in the NBA is lukewarm at best.

Good question -- I am. I created a poll here to see if other are as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1101191