Top all-time · #630
Greg Linden
Personal blog · glinden.blogspot.comaidatabusiness
Greg Linden writes Geeking with Greg, a personal blog at glinden.blogspot.com about ai, data and business. Since 2007, 99 different Hacker News readers have linked it 168 times, most often “Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Rarely recommended · 4 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Linked for its data on how page-load latency hurts conversions, its early Amazon and web anecdotes, and its search and information-retrieval reviews.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- 'A nice compilation' of startup tactics; its RMSE commentary; 'interesting technical articles'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Writings on artificial intelligence, personalization, recommendations, and the tech industry.
Most-linked posts?
- Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2007-07-11
- Early Amazon: Door desks5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2007-04-16
- /4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2007-06-21
- Book review: Introduction to Information Retrieval3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-02-07
- Notes on Jeff Dean keynote at WSDM 20093 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-02-18
- Exploiting spammers to make computers smarter2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-05-07
- A/B testing at Microsoft and Amazon2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2007-07-01
- Collective intelligence requires more than voting2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-05-30
- /2008/05/yahoo-builds-two-petabyte-postgresql.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-09-28
- Geeking with Greg: Stories about Amazon's Early Days2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-08-14
What Hacker News says?
Google's index has been in memory for most of its life now: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2009/02/jeff-dean-keynote-at-wsd... It's actually more complicated than just a single static index, which is also why it's unrealistic to expect a search engine to be deterministic at scale.
Comment linking /2009/02/jeff-dean-keynote-at-wsdm-2009.html
on “It seems that Google is forgetting the old web”Submitted When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet as a story · 175 points
HN discussionCame to the comments looking for these links, too. Results of my research are below; everything I found is anecdotal, consistent with the other comments. The most robust is the presentation at Velocity in 2009. [4, 5] My notes: Small ecommerce vendor, 2012. One second delay in page-load causes 7% loss in customer conversions. [1] Marissa Meyer, 2006 Web 2.0 conference. Extra 1/2 second in page load time dropped traf…
Comment linking /2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html
on “Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend”Submitted Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic as a story · 106 points
HN discussionAds strike me as a laughable local maximum on our ability to monetize spare brain cycles of the human mind. Critical thinking cycles, arguably the most precious resource, is subverted for single digit clickthrough rates. Ad tech makes me cry, and after reading science fiction, depressed. Let's please please gtfo out of this paradigm and figure out how to bootstrap these things between our ears for creation, than con…
Comment linking /2006/12/slides-from-my-talk-at-stanford.html
on “Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users”Submitted Portal game in CoffeeScript as a story · 74 points
HN discussion1999 Amazon when after Ebay with Amazon Auctions, about the same time Amazon zShops (now Marketplace) started. Back then a big bet in terms of money and resources that failed. https://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/04/early-amazon-auctions.h...
Comment linking /2006/04/early-amazon-auctions.html
on “Amazon buys PillPack, an online pharmacy, for just under $1B”Submitted Put that database in memory as a story · 57 points
HN discussionIt doesn’t seem intuitive at first but this is a well researched phenomenon. https://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20...
Comment linking /2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html?m=1
on “Kagi Assistant”Submitted The value of Google Maps directions logs as a story · 54 points
HN discussionThe highlight of this article for me is: Amazon: 100 ms of extra load time caused a 1% drop in sales (source: Greg Linden, Amazon). Google: 500 ms of extra load time caused 20% fewer searches (source: Marrissa Mayer, Google). Yahoo!: 400 ms of extra load time caused a 5-9% increase in the number of people who clicked "back" before the page even loaded (source: Nicole Sullivan, Yahoo!). Answered my own question but w…
Comment linking /2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html
on “Asynchronous UIs - the future of web user interfaces”Submitted Data is good, code is a liability as a story · 54 points
HN discussionThis is exactly backwards. My network latency to North America is >200ms (RTT). Three round-trip times is about 750ms. You can do 75 disk accesses and three billion mathematical calculations in that time. If your database and computations are requiring multiple seconds on a normal web page, you have serious user experience problems. When you're under 140ms, it feels like the response is happening at the same time as…
Comment linking /2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html
on “Google and Microsoft Cheat on Slow-Start. Should You?”Submitted GFS and its evolution as a story · 47 points
HN discussion- ay · 2012-01-24
I assumed that I did not need to mark the post with <sarcasm/>. What I implied is that companies are no different to humans in some respects - your life's mission when you are 5 is different from your life's mission when you are 15, and is different from your life's mission when you are 35. And there's nothing wrong about that - companies, like people, have the age. Welcome to the new grown up Google, I suppose. (of…
Comment linking /2004/08/google-playboys.html
on “Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else” Submitted Clever method of near duplicate detection as a story · 39 points
HN discussionI'm not sure of what it's supposed to prove, who knows how many clients and how much money Steam lost because of slow loading/painting times or just plain broken JS. From experience I can tell that I gave up buying a game on Steam at least once because of broken jQuery. There are real metrics from top industry leaders[1][2] to prove that loading time has a clear impact on conversion rates. >Consider this when you ne…
Comment linking /2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html
on “How true hackers write JavaScript”Submitted Ted Linden, 1938 - 2009 as a story · 36 points
HN discussionIn this case you're probably right but in general, latency can make a big impact on profit and revenue. For example Marissa Mayer claimed (though this was in 2006) that a 500ms delay directly caused a 20% drop in traffic and revenue: https://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20... Optimizely found that for The Telegraph, adding a 4s delay led to a 10% drop in pageviews: https://blog.optimizely.com/20…
Comment linking /2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html
on “Things I learnt making a fast website”Submitted The experiment infrastructure at Google as a story · 34 points
HN discussionMeaningful improvement is in the eye of the beholder. There's the old tale of how Google found out 500ms in latency was a 1% drop in traffic. http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.... 20 to 17 minutes is a 15% time savings still.
Comment linking /2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html
on “Software Engineering principles to make teams better”Submitted Book review: Introduction to Information Retrieval as a story · 34 points
HN discussionIf you are in this, maybe you could find interesting this review of a paper from googlers to approach a CAPTCHA design, in which humans are asked to select the right image rotation: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2009/05/exploiting-spammers-to-m... As always, one of the most interesting part of truly great CAPTCHA systems is that they are advancing the state of the art in image recognition. But on the other hand we sti…
Comment linking /2009/05/exploiting-spammers-to-make-computers.html
on “How not to design a CAPTCHA”Submitted The computer scientist CEO as a story · 32 points
HN discussionhttp://glinden.blogspot.com/ Mix of interesting technical articles (most related to search and information retrieval) and tech industry prognostication.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What unknown technical blogs or sites do you read?”Submitted Starting Findory: Acqusition talks as a story · 30 points
HN discussionHow is increased FCP, LCP, ttvc better ux and DX? We've had hard data that decreasing page load time make for better user experience[0]. Please don't make this an Us vs. Them thing. [0]: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20....
Comment linking /2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html?m=1
on “Building a robust frontend using progressive enhancement”Submitted Insights into the performance of Microsoft's big clusters as a story · 26 points
HN discussionGoogle has actually talked about testing results with more than 10 search results: "So, Marissa (Myer, Google VP) ran an experiment where Google increased the number of search results to thirty. Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%. Ouch. Why? Why, when users had asked for this, did they seem to hate it? After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncont…
Comment linking /2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html
on “Life Below 600px”Submitted How Google crawls the deep web as a story · 24 points
HN discussion
