aidanf

This is very confusing - you might want to think about another name or at least changing your design.

The name, logo and theme/color-scheme are all very similar to sendowl. So much so that I assumed that this was another project by the sendowl team until I saw this comment.

Started working on a book about Swift and released early versions of the first 11 chapters.

http://www.swift-tutorial.io/learn-swift

One of the big problems with AB testing is that the people running tests within a company often don't have a strong understanding of the statistics behind the tests. And unfortunately, they often have little interest in performing statistically valid tests.

They might be from the marketing department, they might be web-designers, they might even be growth hackers (eek), but most likely they are not statisticians.

Their motivations may not align with running tests correctly. E.g. they may want to strengthen the argument for their design over someone else's competing design, or they may be looking for number to serve up to their boss at their monthly review meeting. But performing a statistically-valid test is low on their list of priorities.

I love articles like this that go into the minutiae of how to perform AB tests correctly. But I think they only speak to a small portion of the people who are doing AB tests.

This looks really interesting! But I can't see any way to subscribe to book updates. A mailing list (my preferred means of subscribing to this kind of stuff these days) or an rss feed to get notified when new chapters are ready would be really handy.

"Being available to our customers is my #1 priority (after helping you make insanely delicious meals)"

So it's your #2 priority then...

Also http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...

The parent's tone doesn't come across as belittling to me - it seems more like a playful, joking form of sarcasm - although I guess tone is difficult to decipher on the web. Nevertheless, there's no harm in a little humour, and I prefer to give parent the benefit of the doubt.

PageRank evolved from Kleinberg's Hubs and Authorities[1], which partly evolved from work in ranking research papers.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm

If you were a freelance programmer, you would be much better off taking the time you would spend building a time-tracker from scratch and instead spend it on billable client work at a much higher rate than $5 per month.

Some background context in this thread: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/liftweb/7vvVPmi53Kc/S0kaJ-j2...

FWIW, I tried a different url [1] on both services and I thought the Aylien results were better in this instance.

[1] http://www.football365.com/john-nicholson/9170607/He-Who-Pan....

This article looks like linkbait, and poorly written linkbait at that. There's very little of substance in it, and nothing in the way of comparison with other languages that might alternatively be used.

For example, consider the paragraph headed "Python is a dynamic language".

"One of the reasons why Python has grown in popularity is because it is a highly robust programming language. Python includes a large variety of classes and data types in addition to the interactive and object oriented nature of the language."

"It also incorporates dynamic typing, modules and exceptions making the Python language an ideal way to create innovative solutions within the same operation."

This doesn't really say anything, in fact some of it doesn't even make sense. What does "includes a large variety of classes" even mean? As for having "a large variety of... data-types", pretty much any language you might consider as an alternative to python for web programming will be able to match it in terms of data-types.

I don't want to be snarky, but this article seems way below the quality threshold of what I would expect/hope to see on HN.

If you want to play around with data, here's another good list of open/free datasets: http://bitly.com/bundles/hmason/1

I saw on your blog post that you use clojure - could you give an overview of your technology stack and how clojure fits into it?

Also you can run Weka from the command line http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/

Here's another interesting case-study in exploiting a bad RNG. It's from 1999 and shows how the authors were able to exploit the weak RNG at planetpoker.com to predict the sequences output by their card-shuffling algorithm.

http://www.cigital.com/papers/download/developer_gambling.ph...

App looks nicely done, but I would never use it. I live close to several surf spots and I surf every day that it's good. Like others have said here it's not in my interest to tell others when it's good. My ideal surf session is when the surf is good and there's nobody else out but me. In fact I go out of my way to surf when it's not crowded e.g. early morning on weekends, mid-morning on weekdays etc.

This isn't me being narrow-minded, it's simply a matter of waves being a limited resource. Sharing waves is fine for beginners surfing inside and heading directly towards shore. But when you're out back surfing green waves there's not that many waves to go around. It doesn't take many people to paddle out before your wave-count drops and you have to start competing for waves. It's just a lot less fun.

As regards knowing when the surf is good, I know by looking at weather forecast. When I first moved here I put in the time checking the forecast and checking what the actual waves are like for that swell, wind, period etc. I know what any of my regular spots will be like just by looking at the weather charts for the day. I don't need an app to tell me. Anyone who surfs a spot regularly will similarly be able to tell what it's like from checking the charts.

I think the market for this kind of app is really just beginning and occasional surfers. They will certainly be consumers for the app but they will probably not be much use in providing data for the app.

Just naming surf-spots on the internet is a sensitive subject so putting almost-live photo updates of spots will be even more so. Don't expect regular surfers to provide this information.

The Little Schemer (196 pages) Programming in Haskell (171 pages) are two that spring to mind.

I'd like to see a bit more of what this site is about but everytime I go to http://minomonsters.com/ I get redirected to facebook.

It would be nice if I could view the site and learn something about the game without having to authorize it to access my facebook account and email.

You could set this up with unison(http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) if you want to go the self-host route.

Indeed. This is really bizarre behaviour. The full links are shown in non-clickble text beside the links. But the links actually point to shortened bit.ly links. What's the point of using shortened links here at all?

Any decent rails book will have a section on common security flaws and how to avoid them. There are plenty of web tutorials on the same topic. All the flaws in the linked article are very basic and should have been avoided if they took the time to RTFM.

I've used Unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) to get a dropbox type setup running across several machines.

I'm always wary of posts like this. It's tagged as book review but there isn't much detail about the book in question. It is effusive in it's praise of the book but gives very little detail of why the book is good. And it contains two affiliate links to the book that it mentions. On second reading, it looks like a post that just exists to try to generate affiliate clicks for the book in question.

Well last week we had a post about posterous adding markdown and syntax-highlighting and it got 99 points on the front-page. Now we have this post, about them adding the ability to create pages, on the front-page with 17 points after 1 hour.

I might be interested in hearing about major or innovative new features at posterous but these seem to me to be fairly standard features for a blogging platform and thus not very newsworthy. We don't get front-page stories every time wordpress or tumblr add a new minor feature.

So why are people upvoting this? Is it people who are posterous users and who are upvoting it as a sign of approval? Or people who want to show their support for posterous because they're a YC company. Or are there people who genuinely think that the fact that a blogging app now lets you create a page is really interesting tech news.

Does every feature that posterous releases make it to the front page of HN? I mean, pages, it's not some super innovative new feature. Every friggin blog platform on the planet has the ability to create pages.

How is this newsworthy and why are people up-voting it?

The feature I would really like to see added at Posterous is the ability to opt out of having affiliate links added to my posts.

I was looking through the user preferences yesterday to see if they had added this option but couldn't see anything. I was on the verge of moving my blogs to Posterous when the affiliate link thing came to light. I can't see myself going back to the service until I can opt out of that.

You can symlink individual application preference folders rather than the entire preference folder.

Also some apps let you specify where their preferences folder is located by holding down the option key when you launch them. Then you can set them to use a folder in your dropbox.

Looks like the post has been taken down. Did OP have a change of heart?