Dan Nguyen

Could have used etsy's help back in 2013: “Seeing more items faster is presumed to be a better experience”, McKinley said. But the A/B tests showed various negative effects of the feature, including fewer clicks on the results and fewer items “favorited” from the infinite results page. And curiously, while users didn’t buy fewer items overall, “they just stopped using search to find these items.” http://danwin.com/2013/01/infinite-scroll-fail-etsy/

http://danwin.com It used to be more personal, but now I try to blog about things related to work, including my photography. It's Wordpress hosted on Dreamhost. It's been on HN a few times and the WP Super Cache plugin has handled it like a breeze. I've always thought about changing everything to Octopress, but as long as Wordpress cache plugins work as promised, I guess there's not much need to

I can't speak to the name (or even existence) of any fallacy that this describes, but pricing strategy you mentioned is known as price anchoring, where a higher number anchors the value against which the lower number is compared. Sometimes it's an explicit comparison of price, for or example where a higher price is offered, then "discounted" to a still high, but percieved bargain price; or a comparison of price to value (eg. ROI); or to an unrelated value that sets a subconscious numeric anchor for the price that follows. This is relevant: http://danwin.com/2011/12/the-irrationality-of-price-anchoring/

> But no one really show how they're actually solving problems with LLMs and how the alternatives were worse for them. It's all claims that it's great with no further elaboration on the workflows. To give an example, one person (a researcher at DeepMind) recently wrote about specific instances of his uses of LLMs, with anecdotes about alternatives to each example. [1] People on HN had different responses with similar claims with elaborations on how it has changed some of their workflows. [2] While it would be interesting to see randomized controlled trials on LLM usage, hearing people's anecdotes brings to mind the (often misquoted) phrase: "The plural of anecdote is data". [3] [4] [1] https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2024/how-i-use-ai.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41150317 [3] http://blog.danwin.com/don-t-forget-the-plural-of-anecdote-is-data/ [4] originally misquoted as "Anecdote is the plural of data."

recurring reminder - the original quote is "the plural of anecdote is data" http://blog.danwin.com/don-t-forget-the-plural-of-anecdote-is-data/

The plural of anecdote is data, though. That’s the original expression [1]; unclear why it became popular to flip it around. [1] http://blog.danwin.com/don-t-forget-the-plural-of-anecdote-is-data/

Ha - Hollywood/Debears infected post-war Japan too: https://danwin.com/2010/08/how-de-beers-diamonds-won-over-the-japanese… The scope of their mass brain washing is indeed staggering. Heck I have a good friend in the jewelry business and we still get into heated discussions about how he feels there is nothing wrong and how he is providing value as an agent of Debears brainwashing. It is pretty disgusting.

http://blog.danwin.com/free-python-guides/ http://ftp.ntua.gr/mirror/python/topics/learn/non-prog.html https://github.com/vhf/free-programming-books/blob/master/free-program… https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/

"You may have heard the phrase the plural of anecdote is not data. It turns out that this is a misquote. The original aphorism, by the political scientist Ray Wolfinger, was just the opposite: The plural of anecdote is data." http://blog.danwin.com/don-t-forget-the-plural-of-anecdote-is-data/

Here's a good piece about why it didn't work at Etsy: http://danwin.com/2013/01/infinite-scroll-fail-etsy/ A presentation that goes into some of these results is here: http://mcfunley.com/design-for-continuous-experimentation

Although as a counterpoint, infinite scroll wasn't successful at Etsy and their audience is also primarily female: http://danwin.com/2013/01/infinite-scroll-fail-etsy/

https://jrock.us/ https://jgc.org/ http://kaledavis.com/ https://aegir.sexy/ https://www.gwern.net/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/ https://danwin.com/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/ https://www.magic.do/ https://edweissman.com/ https://jakeseliger.com/ http://www.fogus.me/ https://www.stavros.io/ https://jasonlefkowitz.net/ https://minimaxir.com/ https://www.robinwhittleton.com/ https://ciexinc.com/ https://rongarret.info/ https://williampietri.com/ https://bpier.re/ https://joshtriplett.org/ https://ooer.com/ https://feross.org/resume/ https://www.brandons.me/ https://benjaminpbreen.com/ http://hokstad.com/ https://www.scott-a-s.com/ https://www.bermita.com/ http://tlrobinson.net/ https://ldpreload.com/ https://dotat.at/ http://xavvy.com/ https://correa.in/ https://adriann.github.io/ https://leclan.ch/ https://joeyespo.com/ https://pius.me/ https://adamierymenko.com/ https://drewdevault.com/ https://battlepenguin.com/ https://chris.improbable.org/ https://www.snellman.net/ https://ocdtrekkie.com/ https://www.cryptolotus.com/ https://www.gregkogan.com/ https://david.kitchen/ In no particular order. From: https://jessimekirk.com/blog/hn_users_links/. I went through about half of the list looking for personal websites to use as inspiration for my own.

You shouldn't blindly perform standard statistical analysis on such data with the usual techniques. But to declare it statistical garbage is simply going too far. In fact, anecdotes are the way in which we are able to make sense of the world at all. We do not as individuals do most of our learning via explicit statistical analysis. Your essential point, however, stands in the sense that one should certainly not act as if anecdotes are statistically unbiased. And your average person is terrible at proper statistical reasoning. People tend to over-emphasize their own experience. (Though this is evolutionarily and historically useful - a feature, not a bug). So, yes, someone presenting their own anecdote or set of anecdotes as data is often misguided. But there are, in fact, many studies (academic or industrial), that, are, in fact, just that! Collections of anecdotes. Self-reported experiences via surveys, error reports, reviews, and the like, which can be mined for data or looked at to see if there are any patterns. There are issues such as "WEIRD" (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/… There are three basic approaches: Ignore the problem and use the results as-is. Declare the sample hopelessly biased and throw it out altogether until you can find a more representative sample. Or acknowledge the bias in…

The way I view copyright law (IANAL), this is the correct approach. Each upload of an item to Megaupload is an independent assertion by the uploader that they have a license to put the work in question on the site. _Content_ itself is not prima facie infringing; instead, it is the unlicensed _use_ of the content that is infringement. This was essentially Youtube's argument when Viacom uploaded "roughed up" content to their site [1]. In that case, the roughed up copy as originally uploaded would be a licensed copy, but any copies that other users uploaded, even with the same MD5 hash, would be unlicensed. On the other hand, child pornography can never be "non-infringing." It is always illegal to knowingly store obscene content, regardless of who stores it. Thus, one link to a child-pornographic file is as culpable as the next, justifying mass removal. This is essentially the argument made by Katherine Oyama of Google at one of the SOPA hearings [2]. [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8575666.stm [2] http://danwin.com/2012/01/the-sopa-debate-and-how-its-affected-by-cong… (Ctrl-f "REP. MARINO")