I think it is an A/B test, as you described, based on this part:

> We created a secret landing page. The product and design were identical. The only difference? One was labeled “Made in Asia” and priced at $129. The other, “Made in the USA,” at $239.

It's odd that they changed the text AND nearly doubled the price. They seem to attribute the conversion rate dropping to the text change, though.

The post is unclear on this. I'm not sure where the "secret landing page" came into play here. They even show a screenshot with both options visible.

And they also say: "The visitors were given the choice to either buy the Made in USA or the Made in Asia version."

A/B would be randomly showing either ONLY the USA with higher price to some people and ONLY the cheaper Asian one to others.

However, even that isn't apples to apples as the price is obviously different.

I'm assuming they mean "in aggregate, visitors were shown both options" rather than "each visitor was shown both options".

They might mean it, but between the very clear language in the sentence and the screenshot they provided, I doubt it.

Seems more likely they don't understand A/B.

Ah, you're totally right. The screenshot has radio buttons for selecting one of the two shower heads.

It's technically correct, but feels a bit forced.

> User interface designers aim to reduce cognitive load, improve ease of use, and guarantee access to all (Johnson, 2020).

Do they, though? Anecdotally, they seem to be primarily focused on optimizing engagement metrics, secondarily on adding gratuitous padding, and tertiarily on making all the buttons flat and harder to distinguish from the background. Rant over.

Can you explain the fallacy in more detail? It doesn't seem like a leap that if marriage is less popular, a larger percentage of the population is single.

They can be in a relationship (not single) but not married. I know people in relationships for 7+ years who haven’t married. That was far less common the further back you go.

Sadly, these clean contexts also include vast swathes of the internet. I bet someone already came up with "pigment of your imagination".

I was responding to the parent argument that the pun couldn't have been written by chatgpt, when that is literally the _only_ pun that ChatGPT comes up with.

I'm curious how much review happens in Nix packages. It seems like individual packages have maintainers (who are typically not the software authors). I wonder how much latitude they have to add their own patches, change the source repo's URL, or other sneaky things.

Not a lot in most cases. You’re still just grabbing a package and blindly building whatever source code you get from the web. Unless the maintainer is doing their due diligence nothing.

Goes the same for almost all packages in all distros though.

I’d say most of us have some connection to what we’re packaging but there are plenty of hastily approved and merged “bump to version x” commits happening.

Nixpkgs package maintainers don't usually have commit rights. I assume that if one tried to include some weird patch, the reviewer would at least glance at it before committing.

I’ve never looked at the process of making a nixpkg, but wouldn’t the review process only catch something malicious if it was added to the packaging process? Anything malicious added to the build process wouldn’t show up correct? At least not unless the package maintainer was familiar and looked themself?

I am not sure I understand the distinction between the packaging and build process, at least in the context of nixpkgs. Packages in nixpkgs are essentially build instructions, which you can either build/compile locally (like Gentoo) but normally you download them from the cache.

Official packages for the nixpkgs cache are built/compiled on Nix's own infrastructure, not by the maintainers, so you can't just sneak malicious code in that way without cracking into the server.

What package maintainers do is contribute these build instructions, called derivations. Here's an example for a moderately complex one:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applicatio...

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applicatio...

As you can see, you can include a patch to the source files, add custom bash commands to be executed and you can point the source code download link to anywhere you want. You could do something malicious in any of these steps, but I expect the reviewer to at least look at it and build it locally for testing before committing, in addition to any other interested party.

Nice work! It might be nice to hint to iOS users that they should disable silent mode via the little side toggle if they want to hear anything. Just a quirk of iOS that took me literally years to figure out -- I assumed it just didn't support the Web Audio API and went on with my life.

Or as the developer you can play some silent audio in the background via an `<audio>` element: https://github.com/donbrae/onscreen-piano-keyboard/blob/main.... This will ensure the Web Audio API produces sound even with the ‘silent’ switch active.

I hit this on https://ambiph.one - my solution ended up being similar (use an <audio> element) but because I also wanted audio to play in the background and when the screen is off there's an extra step of tricking Safari into thinking it's playing a livestream, since apparently that's the only kind of audio Apple thinks should be allowed to play in the background.

Coincidentally someone asked me about this the other day so I put together a minimal demo here in case it's useful to anyone: https://codepen.io/matteason/pen/VYwdzVV

Interesting, i already do something similar and never had a chance to check if it really works. Here is my code:

var buffer = dm.audio.createBuffer(1, 1, dm.samplerate); var source = dm.audio.createBufferSource();

source.buffer = buffer; source.connect(dm.audio.destination);

if (source.start) { source.start(0); } else { source.noteOn(0); }

I believe you need to use the audio element specifically. The Web Audio API is subject to different restrictions than the audio element. I used a similar approach on Audjust: https://www.audjust.com/blog/unmute-web-audio-on-ios/

(nice site you created btw! I love seeing audio stuff for the web)

Thanks mate! I'll implement your solution:)

Do you mean the hardware slide toggle? I’m on an iPad on iOS and I can’t get sound working, no matter what. My iPad doesn’t have a mute toggle.

Yes, exactly. This is on an iPhone, to be clear. Maybe the control center on iPads has an equivalent software toggle? Sorry, that probably isn't very helpful.

Thanks, I fiddled with the volume and would have given up without your advice.

And this web app is indeed very cool. Enviable idea & execution!

Fun fact, `find`'s wonky argument syntax predates GNU syntax. It was part of Version 5 Unix from 1974. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Find_(Unix)

I used find frequently for more than a decade and it just never felt natural to me. I get there in the end but have to stop and think.

With fd, a modern 'equivalent', I barely think just type.

Same for grep.

As was `dd`, another program with an unorthodox syntax.

You charge what the market will bear, not the individual.

No, it just hasn’t been possible to differentiate as well before.

One example is biscuit manufacturing, where it’s a fairly open secret that supermarket own brand biscuits are the same product as name brand, because it’s better to capture that segment at a lower margin than to lose it to competition.

Tech now makes it possible to target individuals rather than demographics, but there’s nothing inherently against the status quo in doing so.

Nothing against the status quo. Yes, let’s perpetuate our dystopian nightmare. Good plan.

The post you’re replying is an ‘is’ post, not an ‘ought’ post.

Didn’t say it was a good plan, just that unless you’ve got some brilliant replacement for late-stage capitalism, it’s a logical progression.

I have a side business and virtually every customer pays a different price, what you’re saying is simply not true. Airlines do it, hotels do it, I have different rates for my customers at my day job, etc.

And even if they pay the same price, they’ll have different costs.

I’ll gladly take all the free alcohol an airline will give me, but other people don’t at all!

I sell some stuff on eBay. If you appear untrustworthy, I’ll spend more for tracking/better tracking on your order so you’ll actually get your stuff faster/more reliably.

Oh, I'm not denying this is the way things are done. I just don't think it should be legal.

Price segmentation was more palatable a few decades ago, but technology has enabled us to push it to this absurd (to me) extreme where individuals get different prices at different times of the day.

It feels wrong to size up your customer and pick the highest price you think they'll pay.

Burger chains have at least gotten a start on differentiating their pricing - by raising prices dramatically across the board, and telling anyone who’s frugal or just broke that they can only get discounts (to bring prices slightly lower than today’s pricing, but still a lot more than before) if they use the app. Upper-class people don’t bother with it and pay full price, frugal people take the time to figure out the cheapest way to use one of the current “offers” to assemble a meal.

Upper class people don't bother with it because we all know those discounts are temporary but they'll never let go of the data they extract from those apps and will try to spam you

One can always use a fake email and login account. Upper class people don't bother because they don't eat at fast food chains as often enough as lower class people to warrant needing an app for each one; 99.9% don't give a shit about data collection, only people on HN and other technical fora do.

>One can always use a fake email and login account.

When you're using that fake email be sure to have a burner phone or public internet so they can't link it to your IP, also don't use your computer or any computer you've logged in on so that browser fingerprinting doesn't tag you, also turn off your GPS so they can't geo correlate you.

Of course the rich person is in the same boat, their geolocation will log that they went to Burger King, or their credit card company will snitch on them. Okay, fine, pay with cash, cover your phone in a tin foil faraday cage. Now you also will need to drive a 30 year old car to said establishment since the car manufacturer put a cellular modem and GPS in your car and sells the fact that you went to Burger King to the highest bidder.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head, I'm sure there are dozens of other ways people are tagged. At some level may as well either use the app or just not go.

Yep, that's why it's usually not worth it trying to pretend one has online privacy.

The market ensure (mostly) there is another individual.

Aren’t they just creating a market of 1?

"just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here

Aren’t they creating a market of 1?

Perfect!

Graphviz! The syntax is kind of absurd, but it produces some beautiful results and can be version controlled.

Definitely a personal fan of Graphviz as well! One thing I'm curious about are usecases that require version-controlled diagram sources. Do you guys have e.g. a build step that updates the rendered version somewhere? Or Confluence integration, etc?

I'm not the person you replied to, but for projects I maintain at work we've got a plugin for Confluence called Mark. It allows using Markdown to create Confluence pages, which is useful because the company uses Confluence for some reason. For diagrams (Mermaid, GraphViz, etc.) the source for the diagram is kept with the Markdown & I've got a CI job that generates diagrams & then runs Mark to update Confluence.

It makes it a lot easier to keep the documentation in sync with the code than having to remember to go to Confluence and update things. And avoids the pain of dealing with Atlassian's slow-loading site.

I work at a BigCorp with a fancy md-to-html generator that supports graphviz via code blocks, e.g.

    ```dot
    digraph { a -> b }
    ```

But day-to-day, I actually use graphviz inside emacs org-mode (and in a private git repo). If you press C-c C-c with your cursor on the code blocks, it plops the rendered graph below.

TIL org-mode can do that (though I really shouldn't be surprised). Thanks for the info!