req2

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.h... suggests your fervency is misplaced.

But that doesn't mean everyone who didn't have a technically inclined college experience and doesn't have a hacking job should give up on the whole concept of cofounders.

The fact that your counterexample doesn't work- patio11 has shown that his direct-marketing type sales letter gets more conversions with each additional 'above the fold' actionable element.

It's also an unusual onus to expect him to update his past writings when future evidence that isn't his to display suggests anything other than what he has found.

Relationships and politics aren't the best examples - even the "experts" on all of these topics fail to demonstrate that they actually know what they're saying.

Even in topics like psychological research or evolutionary biology, people are willing to spout forth uninformed crap because they prefer their own "years of experience completing projects in the trenches against her psych lab any day." Dunning-Kruger is in full effect on HN, and it's a great argument for a liberal education.

The depth of the ignorance and resistance to modern science here is somewhat shocking.

This doesn't immediately require pg's input - generate a sufficiently unusual string per user and authenticate only the users that have that hash in their HN 'about' page.

I'm sad to see that no one else has upvoted you; you seem to be the only one here that has had the experience to weigh in on the issue.

I figure because you roundly condemn Nielsen, providing but a single nebulous example that is debunked by patio11's experience.

Too bad you have your own false certainty.

I'll point out that patio11's bingo card creator gets more conversions for every single order button he's added, even as they get to the point where they're "above the fold". Your own criticism is much too 'black and white', but I'd say that it is also MYOPIC!

I'm curious as to what their test protocol is that it has dispelled every other posting on this topic. A person told to buy shoes at Amazon.com isn't going to be stifled by a scrollbar, but someone who isn't being directly told to interact with the website in a given manner doesn't seem as likely to scroll down looking for content that isn't found on a sparsely populated top page.

(Related: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/word-matching.html)

You could maintain the same professor-student ratio, but you wouldn't be able to retain the same professors. If Harvard expanded, it would be less able to maintain the 'superstar professor'-professor ratio because other colleges would be able to court the professors away with offers of greater access to better facilities and bigger corner offices with better grad student support.

How does an accelerated (e.g., psyco enabled) version of the python compare?

The Java one would probably still win, but an easy two lines may bring them closer to parity.

White's rules improve unenjoyable prose.

Strunk & White devote a lot of time to misrepresenting grammar and presenting rules that don't mean much. Both of these distract an author from writing with irrelevant questions of passive voices and adjectives.

Pullum points out how silly most of the book is in this article: http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549...

A better respected book that wastes less time is Joseph William's Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace.

A short review, with some excerpts: http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Econ_Articles/Reviews/williams.h...

You are using terms in a loose and nontraditional way.

The argument isn't logical so much as it is valid. It isn't sound, based on the untrue premises, but it preserves the truth of the premises.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundness

Occam's razor provides a reasonable metric for burden of proof. Any position that requires Saturday to have a special property that affects light switches is obviously more complicated than the null hypothesis that light switches are agnostic with respect to the day of the week. The valid arguments in favor of a special Saturday are not terribly satisfiable (in a technical sense), and are thus unfavored.

Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=847620

"Cognitive tasks, as well as emotional tasks such as regulating your emotions, can deplete your self-regulatory capacity to exercise,"

A distinction made more clear by the non-blogspam linked in the comments here, but perfectly evident in the words of the lead author.

I hold my years of experience completing projects in the trenches against her psych lab any day.

"This is science?"

just my opinion

If your opinion is that science isn't science until it satisfies your intuition, it's not wanted.

It's obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the blogspam of a press release isn't going to have the citations of a study. I don't suggest psychology gets away without citations, but a cursory knowledge of the field would let you know the Stroop test is science, and that an examination of the actual study, should you care to put any effort into something other than your denigrations, would inform you that your flippancy is unfounded.

The Stroop test is a fairly standard and well-respected test. To claim otherwise takes a post with a lot more substance than the one you have offered.

Care to explain why the test or metric is subjective or questionable, or why you are qualified to declare such?

Until then, refrain with your indignant declamations.

Roy Baumeister has done a lot of the early work on ego depletion. Wikipedia has a good background of reading material:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion

Memorable passwords don't need to be simple, dictionary, or insecure.

MySonPlaysLittleLeague is a password that someone can easily remember, but few people get pointed in the direction of good sentence passwords, and most password policies indirectly limit the use of sentence passwords with character limits or number and punctuation requirements.

Um, oops. Apologies.

That shortened URL and generic name got me. :(

Inane or not, you should be aware of the false analogy you've presented: rails is not obviously cyclical, as spring is.

Dup.

http://searchyc.com/sidewiki

Norvig's article on experiment design is valuable, and a more targeted discussion of sample size with respect to the size of the effect being studied can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_power, and in some of the references contained within.

re 'homebrew theories' on risk:

"That’s an important first clue to how culture uses men. Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women. I shall propose there are important pragmatic reasons for this. The result is that some men reap big rewards while others have their lives ruined or even cut short. Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also don’t give them the big rewards. I’m not saying this is what cultures ought to do, morally, but cultures aren’t moral beings. They do what they do for pragmatic reasons driven by competition against other systems and other groups."

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

This has been covered a few times already.

Here's one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=819926

Lines are a special type of curve - a straight curve. This precise and simple mathematical definition precludes such confusion.

I believe the standard interpretation of 'lined up' is 'in a line', as in a 'straight curve', which disallows your otherwise ingenious foil.

The warden is not compelled to cooperate.

Providing a safe environment in which to learn how to recognize that you aren't performing at your best is wonderful; it's hard to simulate the other conditions that give suboptimal results, but lack of sleep gives a good cross-section of drowsy, distracted, over-caffeinated, agitated, etc.

I've asked this question before, and though I haven't gotten to the point where I could direct you to the best place to start, it would probably be in one of these books:

E.T. Jaynes, "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science"

Judea Pearl, "Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems"

Bayesian Data Analysis, 2nd ed by Gelman et. al