drp

Gladwell is a journalist, not a scientist.

I don't see a single mention of long term memory in this article. Cognitive psychology is not a grab bag to use for marketing.

Serializing articles and novels is a common practice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_(literature) It works the same as TV shows: you can release an installment before the next one is even written.

Congatulations on the improvements. You're definitely headed down the right path, but I doubt the 25% conversion increase is significant with a $5 a day budget for testing unless you're getting large amounts of traffic and conversions from other sources.

Once you get Google Website Optimizer up you'll see that it not only tells you the difference in conversion rates, but also how statistically significant the results are.

It's hard to define a concrete point where you aren't being pompous by calling yourself a CEO, but having more employees (or at least contractors) than yourself is probably a good start. I find it a little depressing when I'm reviewing the resume of someone applying for an engineering position and I see their first job experience listed as CEO or CTO of X, especially if the date range is before graduating from high school. "Founder" seems like a much more legitimate, scalable and reasonable option.

In other news, rare space station orbits the Earth. Is 'rare' really the best word for something like this?

Facebook is cash flow positive (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=136782277130), so the accounting related to the judgments probably has little or no impact on their profitability.

The best part is that they're pursuing criminal charges against him.

Are you kidding? Unless you're a breeder it's socially irresponsible not to fix your pets.

It's always disappointing when you get articles about your company into major news outlets, but they link to your competitors and not your own site.

"ls *.c" is not dangerous. The pipe is dangerous.

Seems like a rather sensationalist headline. Craigslist is not the competitor, these guys: http://www.google.com/search?q=no+fee+rentals+nyc are.

How are these complaints really different from developing desktop software? Remember those little "system requirements" blurbs that use to be on the sides of software boxes when people actually went to stores to buy physical media with software on it? Developing for any platform is hard and having to deal with missing or inadequate hardware has always been a stumbling block.

Desktop applications have shifted to the web. It's only a matter of time before mobile apps are also obsolete.

Cancer death rate goes down to zero when everyone dies from other illnesses.

The article didn't mention this, but in my experience, the person who most negatively affects the team's chemistry is the first one out. Producing bad code (or not enough/none at all) or breaking things is sure to destroy your connection to the team, but so is being overly negative, distracting or intrusive.

Maybe "brag" is too strong of a word, but it all depends on what kind of company you work for. Keeping quiet pretty much ensures that only your peers and possibly your tech lead will know what quality and quantity of work you're churning out, unless they decide to share.

If you're working for a small company where the CEO sifts through source control to see what's changing, producing good code will certainly suffice, but if you work in a large company with a multi-tiered management structure, keeping quiet only pushes the responsibility to promote your work to someone else - and you can't always rely on that happening.

The eye-tracker used in the HCI lab at Rice is actually used in experiments and implemented in CL. http://chil.rice.edu/facilities/eyelab.html

Depending on the keyword and the title/description of each result, those numbers entirely possible. I've seen exponential traffic differences between 1st and 3rd results for a few keywords, so I'd have to guess that the 2nd result would behave similarly.

You also have to consider the searches that result in no clicks or a modification of terms.

It would be very interesting to see actual click through rates for each spot in a few representative sample search results.

I agree. You can't have a rectangle with a null width, so why should you be able to instantiate one?

This is straight out of Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End

The other style guides are worth a look too: http://code.google.com/p/google-styleguide/

Does anyone know if Google has a Java style guide?

I'm not saying the poster is necessarily faking, but how should we know that someone who chose the name MattCutts is the Matt Cutts he claims to be? Do we assume he's not an impersonator because we like his answer? This comment is the very first activity on that account.

There's a company called AggData that scrapes and sells location datasets: http://aggdata.com

Geocommons Finder http://finder.geocommons.com/ has quite a lot of free location data.

I'm speaking of impressions, not uniques.

In my experience, CPM from AdSense does not scale by itself. When you're only serving up a few thousand impressions per day, all it takes are a few good advertisers on your keywords for you to get a pretty nice daily payoff, but as soon as you burn through the high CPM ads from AdSense, you get down to their low CPM remnant inventory.

For example, at 30k impressions per day, you might make $75 from AdSense at a $2.50 CPM. If you keep relying on AdSense as your traffic numbers go up to 500k impressions per day, you'll still get the $75, but most of the traffic above that level comes in at a low CPM, say $0.20, and you end up with $169 for that day rather than $1300.

The takeaway is that you can't rely on AdSense to scale, and selling your own ads makes sense at a certain traffic level.

Oh, good point. I read Charlotte's web so long ago that I forgot to think of what pigs ate. Still, hopefully the slop she's making is from scraps that never made it to the dumpster, otherwise the same concern about contaminants applies.

Amen. I can't count the number of times I've solved a problem while walking somewhere or doing something completely unrelated to work.

There was an article about marketing on the front page of HN yesterday that said 'think smarter, not louder,' and I'd argue that working a 90 hour week for any reason is just thinking louder.

Along that vein, I'm curious about the inflection of this quote regarding her homemade prosciutto: "It proves you can make really good pork off of dumpster scraps." I hope it's sarcastic, or saying that she would have thrown the pork away otherwise, but something is nagging at me to take it at face value. Some chemical contaminants might actually taste good.

http://hotpads.com has about 350k rental listings spread all over the US, and none are from craigslist.

From http://blog.freescreencast.com/2008/08/28/update-on-the-stat... "8000 downloads, over 2500 accounts"