Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11081937

Points: 20

# Comments: 2

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.

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. :)

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

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... :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4069751

Points: 30

# Comments: 13

* 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.

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.

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.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577105

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3219144

Points: 90

# Comments: 38

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

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

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.