Sadly this isn't entirely new news:

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_fra... http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html

I find this: http://martin.kleppmann.com/2014/11/25/hermitage-testing-the... a more informative read on essentially the same topic.

Thanks for posting that link, I agree it does a slightly better job.

Seems like classic Hawthorne effect...

I'd assumed it was a reference to jwz's "how will this software get my users laid":

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

Maybe I'm giving them too much credit...

I don't know if it's any simpler, but I tend to do:

    git init .
    git remote add origin git://github.com/eentzel/dotfiles.git
    git checkout -t origin master

Go has a great solution for this in the binary package:

http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/binary/#Read

I've been working on some code to parse the shapefile format, which specifies some fields in big-endian and some in little (I have no idea why), but the binary package has made it really easy to deal with.

Apparently it's managed to destroy even the minimal level of talent needed to construct a readable PNG.

Agreed that the web doesn't have any "magical properties", but it has the "Worse is Better" survival characteristic; or at least it did in its early days. I think the web's continued dominance depends on the extent to which it retains those characteristics.

I think the snake-oil nature of (much of) SEO stems from the fact that it's difficult or impossible to measure in an accurate, unambiguous way. Since A/B testing includes measurement by its very nature, I suspect it will be more resistant to snake oil.