What youre struggling with is the counterintuitive nature of applied statistics vs pure math, and this is the point TFA was trying to make.
> You aren’t getting 80 more signups as suggested
TFA isnt saying you "get" more, but just illustrating how different 95 and 99% actually are. Its restating the potato paradox, linked elsewhere in the thread
But "TFA", although it derives from "RTFA", never seem to had the same negative connotations. It's just that sometimes you want to refer to the original article in question, but "original article" is long to type and/or ambigious. (Do you mean the news article from the NYT, or the scientific paper the NYT article is reporting on?) And "TA" is too short for people to clearly know what you're talking about (And did you mean "teaching assistant"?) "TFA" is short and unambigious: it always means the article linked to from the main page.
Long story short: Although etymology would suggest that "TFA mentions this" is as aggressive as "Maybe you should RTFA", in actual developed usage, they're very much not the same.
That was my understanding and my intended usage.
I wasnt aware "TFA" could be interpreted with a negative connotation, although that seems obvious in retrospect. Just trying to participate in the HN community, and also because its less typing : )
As a matter of writing style, repeating acronyms are invisible to the reader, whereas repeating words are annoying and remove value. This may be an opinion I gained from my military service, which was acronym-heavy.
I appreciate the question and its perspective.
An 80% decrease in missed signups only causes about a ~5% increase in revenue. That’s an important point if the team that produced that 5% revenue increase costs a large amount of money to run. At close to a million a year for the team, that’s only going to be worth it for some.
And that was the whole point of the article: this optimization usually isn’t worth the cost.