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binomialon Back to the future: two years of Google Chrome

I have to agree about Chromium, but Opera has one of the smallest memory footprints of all the browsers I have. I don't use it much because of the UI, but it sure as hell doesn't take up as much memory as Chromium.

binomialon [dead]

such comments were "upvoted furiously" because people agreed with it despite its caustic wording

I'm well aware that people upvoted it because they agreed with the sentiment. I was trying to say that this is not a good thing, and that the name-calling (not just "caustic wording" mind you, name-calling is a different beast) should have stopped any upvoting in spite of any agreement. I'm sure many on HN would disagree, since people mostly voted those comments up.

binomialon [dead]

The biggest issue I see in the examples the author showed is the fact that ad-hominem attacks against the author were upvoted furiously. The "indirect venting" by pwn0cakes did seem indirect to me at first, because my frame of reference was the same as yours seems to be (that of a fellow HNer).

But now put yourself in the author's shoes. Then suddenly you can see how direct the comment really was, calling you a "fucking asshole". Not exactly the height of discourse here on HN. Calling names is a far cry from writing a one-sided article. It was only inflammatory in that he disagreed with most people, and said people are horribly sensitive about this topic.

binomialon Ruby's Date/DateTime classes rewritten in C.. 20-200x perf improvement

I've been using Ryan Tomayko's date/performance library, which is pretty fast, especially if you use it along with his date/memoize module.

http://github.com/rtomayko/date-performance

binomialon The Programmer Hierarchy

I'd expect it to be more of a cyclic graph in reality.

binomialon Ask HN: Comparing beta sign-ups to paying customers

Have to agree with fezzi's post here. Try to find a way to talk to customers. You should be talking to them anyways to get their feedback on the idea behind your product.

If you must use beta users as a metric, be very conservative and realize that most of those signed up will probably not even use the beta, let alone buy the product (this varies by industry and product of course, among many other factors). In your case, you might think 1 in 100 signups will become customers, or 1 in 1000, or 1 in 10. Since we don't know what the product/market/marketing methods etc are, you're the best one to make the guess.

But yeah, you should talk to real potential customers.

binomialon This is the best "we're hiring" image ever drawn

It would seem that it was subconscious inspiration. Things you see around you can easily get into your creative work without you realizing it (I know, [citation needed]). I did see a show where someone anticipated the nature a creative drawing, just by showing them similar imagery a while before. But that doesn't count as a citation.

binomialon Do you know of anyone that is making money with a google extension

Yes, absolutely, but do make addons for Firefox/IE too. See videos of the Add-on-Con conference, lots of people talk about their experiences building business on top of browser extensions. http://addoncon.com/