tessro

Right. And you can also ratchet up the statistical power you want, at the cost of increased sample size requirements.

> you do have good reason to believe that the choice is harmless.

The issue you will run into here is that 95% confidence means that you will only have a false positive 5% of the time. It does not mean a neutral finding is 95% likely to be neutral. The lever that controls that is statistical power, which is oft-ignored in conversations about A/B testing. Most statisticians use 80% power, which means a full 20% of neutral findings were false negatives.

Cool! I'm happy to provide guidance, and I'll take a pull request if you can get it working with some unit tests.

Yeah, that's a neat project. I was already thinking about building this before they launched, and their positive reception spurred me on.

If you're already using Heroku Postgres there's a ton of overlap between the services, but I'm hoping to provide a decent open source alternative for the rest of us. :)

If you can run Rack apps in your environment, it would be pretty straightfoward to add a SQL Server driver to Oculus. Right now it supports MySQL and Postgres.

Thanks! (Sadly I think the demo cron job will delete that after an hour or so :))

It's designed to be used within a team environment, where you trust everyone. (Although even then, I highly recommend using it with a readonly SQL account!) I would be skeptical of any situation where you could run raw untrusted SQL without any risks, at least without reimplementing MySQL's AST parser.

As for the demo, it's isolated, and locked down as well as MySQL will allow. (For starters, just SELECT privileges.)

Author here. I do a lot of analysis each day and am constantly sharing it with my team by taking screenshots of Sequel Pro. I built Oculus so I could keep a centrally available repository of my research, that everyone could access and collaborate on. It definitely has a ways to go, but I would love feedback!

Also, this is my first attempt at providing a live demo of software that can execute arbitrary SQL. I'm probably crazy for doing this, but I thought it was a lot more interesting than doing a video. If the demo suddenly disappears, you'll know I wasn't able to harden it enough... :)

This is an interesting study, but I found the HN title to be misleading. Here are the bullets from the concluding paragraph:

* The American public has long held generally positive attitudes toward the space program, but is not very familiar with its details.

* Over the history of the space age, an average of more than 60 percent of those polled rated the job done by NASA as either ‘‘excellent’’ or ‘‘good.’’

* Most Americans have shown support for space exploration and view it as important over the years, but also believe that federal money could be better spent on other programs.

* Most are also in favor of NASA as an organization, but are relatively unfamiliar with the majority of its activities and objectives.

* These polls also suggest historically close relationships between public perceptions of NASA and spaceflight depictions in popular culture, especially film. These images from popular culture, coupledwith real-world accomplishments in spaceflight, work together to create powerful visions affecting the public consciousness.

This is a powerful approach when you can quantify your regret. For many startups, however, it's important to understand the tradeoffs involved in moving one metric upward or downward. To take Zynga as an example, they care about virality at least as much as engagement (or perhaps moreso). Adding or removing a friendspam dialog is likely to trade some virality for user experience. What percentages make or break the decision? Sometimes this is a qualitative call.

In environments where you need to look at the impact of your experiments across multiple variables, and make a subjective call about the tradeoffs, it's really important to have statistical confidence in the movement of each variable you're evaluating. This is a key strength of the traditional A/B testing approach.

Unfortunately, screen sharing no longer works in Skype 2.8 on Lion.

I love Giles. His first Archaeopteryx talk was one of the best Ruby-related talks of all time. He's way too harsh on Rails though. The original "blog in 15 minutes" demos that catapulted Rails into the limelight are still possible with Rails 3. Things like 'gem install rails' still work. If you are determined to skip bundler, you can do that too. What's more, unlike 2005, in the 15 minutes it takes to build a Rails blog, you can deploy to Heroku and have a live site running.

Node is fun. V8 smokes MRI. But Node's web framework ecosystem has a long, long, long way to go before one can reasonably say that Rails is a bad investment. If anything, we should be celebrating the number of options that are open to us. It's a great time to be developing for the web. Good things will come from Node's ascendancy, whether its frameworks dethrone Rails or not. The negativity is unnecessary.

Also, you can't make a Ruby object falsy. So if you overload #nil? you get fun problems like:

    obj.nil? # => true
    !!obj    # => true

Here's a video of a recent (July 2011) version of the talk.

http://confreaks.net/videos/614-cascadiaruby2011-confident-c...

It does in fact share memoization. Easy shared state is a key strength of the single-threaded model. :)

Re: Node.js, you're right. The core of the debate is whether the single-threaded, evented model is a legitimate theoretical approach to concurrency. That programming style is the same across Node.js, Tornado-web, EventMachine, etc. It translates literally to Tornado-web because the idioms are the same.

It's good to see that in this day and age the government has still mastered the tried and true "print, sign, scan, email, then download via FTP" approach to file downloads.

I totally agreed with this mentality until I saw the video of the GoDaddy CEO slaughtering an elephant in Africa.

Demand Progress PAC's website is down, but they released a statement:

(from: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9k5ryiX... )

Cambridge, MA– Moments ago, Aaron Swartz, former executive director and founder of Demand Progress, was indicted by the US government. As best as we can tell, he is being charged with allegedly downloading too many scholarly journal articles from the Web. The government contends that downloading said articles is actually felony computer hacking and should be punished with time in prison.

“This makes no sense,” said Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal; “it’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”

“It’s even more strange because the alleged victim has settled any claims against Aaron, explained they’ve suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute,” Segal added.

James Jacobs, the Government Documents Librarian at Stanford University, also denounced the arrest: “Aaron’s prosecution undermines academic inquiry and democratic principles,” Jacobs said. “It’s incredible that the government would try to lock someone up for allegedly looking up articles at a library.”

Demand Progress is collecting statements of support for Aaron on its website at …URL…

“Aaron’s career has focused on serving the public interest by promoting ethics, open government, and democratic politics,” Segal said. “We hope to soon see him cleared of these bizarre charges.”

Demand Progress is a 500,000-member online activism group that advocates for civil liberties, civil rights, and other progressive causes.

About Aaron

Aaron Swartz is a former executive director and founder of Demand Progress, a nonprofit political action group with more than 500,000 members.

He is the author of numerous articles on a variety of topics, especially the corrupting influence of big money on institutions including nonprofits, the media, politics, and public opinion. In conjunction with Shireen Barday, he downloaded and analyzed 441,170 law review articles to determine the source of their funding; the results were published in the Stanford Law Review. From 2010-11, he researched these topics as a Fellow at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption.

He has also assisted many other researchers in collecting and analyzing large data sets with theinfo.org. His landmark analysis of Wikipedia, Who Writes Wikipedia?, has been widely cited. He helped develop standards and tutorials for Linked Open Data while serving on the W3C’s RDF Core Working Group and helped popularize them as Metadata Advisor to the nonprofit Creative Commons and coauthor of the RSS 1.0 specification.

In 2008, he created the nonprofit site watchdog.net, making it easier for people to find and access government data. He also served on the board of Change Congress, a good government nonprofit.

In 2007, he led the development of the nonprofit Open Library, an ambitious project to collect information about every book ever published. He also cofounded the online news site Reddit, where he released as free software the web framework he developed, web.py.

Press inquiries can be directed to demandprogressinfo@gmail.com or 571- 336- 2637

Finally, someone learns to RTFM.

If you're looking for a comparison of the Free and paid plans, you can find the UK version here:

    https://www.spotify.com/uk/get-spotify/overview/

It's a shocking omission on the US site, but the plan features are the same.

Real-time clickstreams are one of Clicky's most popular features. This is definitely an attempt to win over customers that might otherwise choose the competition.

As far as the creepiness goes... unless you think request logging should be totally disabled, anyone can simply tail their web server's logfile to see real time click data. How is it more of a privacy violation, just because it's easier to read? In fact, the anonymization Mixpanel is doing does more to protect privacy than a simple tail would do.

Wow. Is this what HN is getting reduced to, that the top-ranking comment is filled with ad hominem attacks?

Whether you agree or disagree with the author's motivations, at least be civil. "Nitwit", "liar", "What are you 8?" ... ugh.

I had a totally different reaction to Joel's post. He seemed to emphasize shaping corporate culture deliberately in positive ways, rather than letting things happen by accident. He emphasizes creating a positive social environment in the office: welcoming new people and promoting inclusivity.

It seems like you mostly object to one line in Joel's post:

when new people start work at the company, they’re not allowed to sit off by themselves in a corner

I agree with you that it sounds a bit Draconian. But I don't think that was Joel's primary point. It's more of an implementation detail. He's contrasting his efforts with other environments, where people don't naturally get included. Point being, by deliberately defaulting to inclusion, corporate culture can be improved. You might disagree with his implementation technique, but I think his objective is noble.

The overarching risk Joel is highlighting is the risk of "programming by accident" applied to corporate culture -- as is done at many companies.

We've listed a bunch of these types of internships on my startup's website. (collegejobconnect.com)

Shoot me an email if you want, my contact info is in my profile.

Sadly, they removed some power user menu options, like "Open Frame in New Tab".

Did anyone else notice the that the chart, "Do People Love or Hate their Version Control System?" was horribly misleading? CVS gets 3.5 hearts, and SVN gets nearly 4. Meanwhile, far below on the page: "Only 11% of Subversion users said that they loved using it; the number was zero for CVS and VSS."

The way uncapped convertible debt works, there is no valuation when the investment is made. That means that, when the agreement is inked, the investor can only guess at how much equity they are purchasing.

Typically when the next round of financing occurs, the investor gets equity at the valuation of that round.

I know the HN community has mixed feelings (at best) about Mahalo, but definitely watch the video!

When I saw Mahalo in the title I almost skipped the article completely, but Jason provides a solid dissection of his company's evolution and the strategic mistakes they've made so far. (Plus it's pretty short.)

(Skip the Mahalo promo at the end.)

Can you point us toward data that backs up your point that "the scalability story is more or less false"? Seems like FUD.

There are several well-documented, major production deployments of MongoDB already, that seem to contradict your assertion:

    * Etsy
    * CERN
    * BoxedIce (600MM+ documents)
    * BuzzFeed (400MM+ datapoints/month)

That's just a few from http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Production+Deployments

Aren't micro instances $15/month? (Plus EBS backing, unless you want to lose your DB on reboot.)

Regardless, it's added complexity that you can avoid with MySQL early in your application's lifecycle. Even if it's not much more expensive, you have more hardware to administer. Compare that to a Rails+MySQL stack, which you can run on a single box. (There are added benefits of replicas, sure, but they aren't easier to set up, per se, then just installing your stack on one machine when you're getting going.)