skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I record everything to Google App Engine data store, then have a script to export the data into a simple text file on my machine that runs from cron. Then I can run Python scripts on my own computer to just go through the text. I get about 60MB of events / day. Soon I will have to start deleting old events from App Engine, because I have to pay Google for data store entities stored.

At first I was planning on doing some clever incremental thing to get all the stats on App Engine, but it's a lot simpler if you can just have everything locally and rerun any analytics quickly when I make mistakes. It only takes a few minutes to load a week's worth of data and go through it, so doesn't make sense to spend days trying to be really clever about doing it on App Engine.

My favorite thing to extract is kind of a life story of users. When a user joins, what do they do on average in the first 24 hours? How about the next day? This is a pretty different point of view than Google Analytics, because it is from the user point of view and not historical of the whole app.

So does this point of view give you some new insight? At least in our case. For example we are now testing which of two profile box designs is better on our MySpace app. Just a simple stat would reveal that the new design has a better clickthrough rate. BUT, when I look at the whole story, it seems that users are more likely to remove the app when they have this new design, so end results may be worse.

Additionally I use Google Analytics events tracking, but I end up looking more at the life story than those events, because it is difficult to pull out how many events happen per visit, or how many events happen per visit in first 24 hours since user joined etc.
Anyone have a link to toss in, or a comment, on a few issues ? Namely:

- Binary diffs (svn is best was my impression)

- Multi-platform (svn and hg do well ?)

- Hg seems to get the most non-git DVCS uptake. Are the bzr technical merits enough to justify the push by Canonical/Ubuntu ?

P.S. just took a look at http://bazaar.canonical.com/en/ ; I had not checked on bzr for a couple of years, and it looks impressive now, with plenty of multi-platform support and nice-looking GUI.
The truth about student loans
Agreed. Basically, even when there are no page loads, GA allows you to register events, actions, etc. to be tracked. You can have dynamic names that you send to Google analytics using javascript, and everything will be visible when you check your stats in addition to the normal metrics like page views, etc...
Yeah, if I had been saying it out loud I would have been grabbing for words halfway through and would have realized it was a bit overwrought.
So it is a sortfolio.com clone for a different variety of designers?
Would love more detail about how you do this... how exactly do you "record everything to GAE data store"? Did you create a GAE REST app? Why GAE? What do you record? Can you post an example of a few events that you record?
Well, then you don't know English.
Why not try Google Analytics for Flash's event tracking? I've used that in the past and it's been interesting
This was news more than half a decade ago; at this point, all the major search engines do clustering at various levels.
How are his claims not true? Mozilla posted Metalab's designs on a public wiki page and used them for promotion - after rejecting the design (ie. not paying for it). If you don't want to pay for it, don't use it. That's pretty straightforward ethical behaviour, I would've thought.
it sounded real to me (an englishman). that didn't stop it sounding extremely annoying.
The Future of Ecommerce
Ecommerce sales have continued to rise despite the economic slowdown. Research has shown that the future of ecommerce sales will continue to improve further over the next few years.
The dieting example did sound like a fallacy for me, too (I did the diet, put the effort, and lost 40 pounds :) ).
It's not 3d, but it could well be consuming as much resources as a 3d game would (I don't know for certain, but I imagine that it's hardware rendered 2D). It's not hard at all for a game to consume close to the maximum power.
But a strange coincidence that they just happened to pick Metalab's design to rip off, no?
A biometric ID card for all American workers?
Or the Google Maps Terrain view? http://bit.ly/blsELO

You can drag the route around to avoid hills manually.

It would be nice if it did it automatically, to avoid the worst hills. To do it optimally it'd need to know your weight...
LHC: On the threshold of new territory
Who Else Wants to Crash His Lamp with Hammer? « Lighting Universe
Experimenting with html minifier
The app server is already in App Engine, so it was easy to just add an Event model and create an Event entity every time the user does anything that I might want to track. This is what it looks like to browse the events in App Engine admin panel: http://i.imgur.com/yJTeZ.png

The model is just 10 lines of code, and storing things there is even easier. For events that happen on client side I have to do a silent ajax request to the server to let it know what happened, similar to what Google Analytics does, but mostly everything that happens in the app already is known by the server.
I'm kind of a metrics junkie.

One thing I've learned over the years: tracking data is easy. You can generate a virtual firehose of noise just by snapping your fingers. Tracking data which actually drives decisions meaningful for the business is a bit trickier.

I use a mix of Mixpanel, the DB, and key/value stores. I have log files, too, but log files are where data goes to die.

In general my core activity loop is generating a hypothesis, asking what I need to answer the hypothesis, either building just what I need to capture that data or a more generalized system (particularly when I keep asking the same kind of questions -- this is how I ended up writing my own A/B testing framework), then analyzing the data and trying a few things in response to it. The hardest part about drowning in data is understanding, in your bones, that if it doesn't drive a decision at the end of the day, you're just wasting your time. Even though the graph is pretty.

I generally get more bang for my buck out of simple hypotheses than complex ones. Simple ones are easy to describe, easy to instrument, easy to test, easy to improve, and likely to apply to a large portion of my users/business/etc. Complex ones are, well, the exact opposite. For example, while it is within my capabilities to target behavior at Mac-owning Firefox users who are interested in Catholicism... I'm probably going to spend time working on buttons seen by substantially everyone.

I generally do the first cut of analysis by playing around in my Rails console. When I find something interesting in playing around, I often promote it to a graph somewhere on the backend.

I think if you count all the data points I've got filed away somewhere you'd come up with a number in the low tens of millions, so my chief bottleneck is less technical/scaling (3 million entries in a key/value store? Oh well, iterate over all of them.) and more that the time, creativity, and attention to ask the right questions are very limited.
Groovy & Grails presentation at Kabisa ICT
Would you consider the book to be a work of fiction? The TV series is definitely dramatized, but I was amazed at how close it stuck to the book. I guess there were enough crazy stories that actually happened that they didn't need to go inventing things!

(I'm not suggesting that you're wrong about the TV series being strictly speaking fiction - I'm just curious).
* the only viable approach? v8 is pretty fast; in my programs, i've seen firefox being faster only once yet (in an optimal case for tracing)

* LuaJIT is a tracing JIT

* what are massive performance improvements? i'd say the jump from pure interpreter to static/tracing JIT compilation has already been a massive performance improvement
What to expect from HTML5
Colorado Senate Majority Leader Beards Amazon
If I Had a Hammer...
The New Digital Underclass
Cross-reference: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1180487
Sounds like it's already there... "They will seek to route around hills, whenever practical." Though in SF that can be tough.
Before watching this, I hadn't realized that

1) Others, such as B&N Apple have been complying with the burdensome regulations

2) The law in question has no actual connection to Amazon Associates, and canceling the Associate program doesn't actually save Amazon anything on sales taxes.
It seems great in theory, but I've had difficulties getting out the info I need. I'd like to know how many of certain events / visit users do. For example, I have a feature in my app that users can steal points from other users, I can see the aggregate stats for a certain time period just fine for the whole event category: http://i.imgur.com/22kxL.png

But if I click on a certain event, "steal" in this case, I get this: http://i.imgur.com/mXUtQ.png It says total events: zero, even though the graph shows something very nonzero. And there doesn't seem to be a way to see how many times users used the "steal" function per visit. How about how many % of users use the "steal" function during their first month of using the app? Maybe it's possible, but I haven't quite figured out how to get these answers from GA.
When it comes to online, in seals we trust
Pretend or not iTunes is #1 music store in US.
Ahead of time compilers do work quite well for a subset of dynamic languages. Just like tracing JIT works well for a subset. This has been proven by projects like shedskin, cython, and tinypyC++. Given typing information, either explicitly or through type inference - massive speed-ups are possible.

Also, tracing JIT currently does not do multiple CPU optimizations - which static compilers have been doing. They also don't do SIMD or MIMD optimizations, which compilers like gcc/icc/etc are doing.

However, runtime assemblers - like 'Orc' 'corepy' and older ones like 'softwire' are proving to be lots faster in multimedia applications compared to traditional compilers or interpreters. These runtime assemblers give authors of programs access to the compilers/assemblers. Just like allowing people to specify typing, letting people construct programs at runtime can give massive speed-ups.

C has even had fast interpreters for a while - see tinycc as an example. It doesn't use a tracing compiler, but a very straight forward direct translation compiler which happens to be faster than many interpreters.

It's quite easy to argue 'No' to this question I think.
Bzr is a huge and slow mess, I can't imagine why anyone would switch to it from git or hg.
Addressing tokenism
Cloud Hosting - Some Frequently Asked Questions
"Will a more static style JIT like Google's V8 be able to keep up?"

V8 compiles everything to assembler and does not do JIT. V8 seems to beat TraceMonkey on both CPU and memory benchmarks ( http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=all... ), so I doubt their approach has "lost". They probably do this because most JavaScript programs are very small and it's relatively cheap to compile everything to assembler from the start. They do their optimizations on assembler level as well - instead of doing it at bytecode level as it's done in most other VMs. This is at least the information I gathered when I looked at V8 last time - it was a year ago, so things might have changed.
It's on purpose so that pg can increase pageviews and, as a result, advertising income.

/you had to think for a second there because you're running AdBlock.
I knew something like this would come up the day the polygon-based 3D was out. The nice graphical games we played suddenly had turned into cold, rigid polygonic characters (E.g. the difference between Diablo I and Diablo II, or AOE or Age of Kings anyone? (Can't forget the moment Griswald the Blacksmith was moving towards me as a polygon zombie in Diablo II, where he looked like a decent Scottish lad in Diablo I). While polygons do give that extra depth feeling, the individual objects look annoyingly geometric unless there are a swarm of very small polygons.

I think this will pick up if the right conditions get in place.
The kind people at OpenStreetMap have been collecting bike paths and rendering maps for quite a while: http://opencyclemap.org/

It has much more coverage than Google currently does, but doesn't do directions.
Then how come portable consoles from Nintendo / Playstation can support like 5-10 hours of usage?
Not to be cynical, but does any of that change the fact that Amazon chose not to do business in Colorado with affiliates? Or that hundreds of Colorado affiliates are now out of a sales channel?

Must be some logical reason in there somewhere for Amazon. And I doubt this guy is going to explain it.
I'm also using bazaar, after moving from SVN. I selected it over git or hg because 1) it is very adjustable regarding using it either in a centralized or distributed setup, working over ssh, even without any server-side support and 2) its command are very easy to learn and the branch and version numbering is best of the 3, IMO. Git was very foreign for me, coming from the SVN.
Link to demo: http://www.xtwip.com/demo/

tl;dr and I have no idea what the demo does.
Google backs their network.China hackers on it again
I love my Steelcase Criterion. It's killer feature for me is the arm rests that slide inward (I have a narrow frame). I had one at $big_company, and managed to hunt down a used model after I left.

In general I've been pretty happy with build quality. However, one of my arm rests is jammed and won't raise atm, and I'm too poor to afford a replacement part.

My office is in a friend's living room. His brother has an Aeron he lets us borrow, so the rule is whoever starts work first gets the Aeron for the day and everyone else has to sit on the folding chairs. =) Gets us going in the morning!

Luckily a neighbor just moved, leaving us several standard office max chairs. As chairs go, they're not much, but they beat the plastic ikea folders.
Sounded a bit like Lloyd Grossman to me, and 'data' as 'darta'. From some digging around, I think these guys are in Australia. There are a couple of other vowel slips which would fit.
How to Quit Your Job
> C has even had fast interpreters for a while - see tinycc as an example. It doesn't use a tracing compiler, but a very straight forward direct translation compiler which happens to be faster than many interpreters.

How is tinycc an interpreter? It's a full-blown compiler, alas a very simple one with very little optimization. If it weren't faster than an interpreter, I'd be shocked. For well written code, it reaches 50%-70% of modern gcc speed from tests I did a couple of years ago. I think that's on par, or even slightly better, than gcc 1.x
I always feel the need to squirrel away more gold under the mattress after listening to Schiff talk.
Don't know the book, sorry.
If you're as big as Amazon, retaliation might be a logical reason. Doing this does cause political problems for Democrats in CO, and it also lowers the income of CO affiliates, thus directly decreasing state income taxes and indirectly decreasing sales taxes, property taxes and anything else Coloradan affiliates might spend on.

This sort of retaliation will definitely be on the minds of the legislature of the next mid-sized state to consider doing something Amazon doesn't like.
> The incremental-JIT approach (LuaJIT) has less information to work with, and it's not aware which parts of the program are bottlenecks, so it can't intelligently decide which parts parts need optimization most.

You are probably thinking of LuaJIT 1.x; The recent LuaJIT 2 is tracing JIT, and it beats to hell out of every other dynamic language compiler, bar none.

Mike Pall for president!
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Retaliation for what? According to this guy, it doesn't affect Amazon.
Didn't know that. Even so it seems very unlikely that they simply filmed the 1:1 memories.

OK then: but Saving Private Ryan definitely was just fiction? That was mentioned in the article along with BoB.

The reality is that in the long run these movies will be what people think of as history (as in it will be the only history they know). I think that is slightly disturbing.
The 8-minute demo has lighting and simple reflections.
Good points. In retrospect I think it would be pretty easy to beat a fine. Imagine the following scenario:

- I download the song 'Happy Birthday' illegally
- I get caught and get a fine, which I have the option of appealing in court (lets say the fine is something outrageous like £500)
- I option to appeal but before the court date I go to HMV and buy a single of 'Happy Birthday' for £5, and scratch it up a bit so it doesnt look shiny new.
- I get to court with my CD and say "I already legally owned a copy of the song, but its all scratched so I downloaded it"

Strange thing is, you beat the fine but the record company still gets your £5 for the purchase (and you keep your copy)...so minus the hassle, everyone wins.
My concern is the same.. there are a lot of questions I can ask my current relatively rudimentary system, that I couldn't ask of GA.
Eh. It's the good old escalation argument all over again. Sure, you can fix some problems by cutting the broken solutions and letting it escalate until it solves itself. Sure, the end result will be better than the status quo, but why would anyone ever want to go through the mess that would lie in between if short-term planning is so strongly encouraged (by human nature, if nothing else)‽
You have no idea what you're even talking about. Both Diablo 1 and 2 used pre-rendered sprites. Yes, technically they're "polygonic", but in the same sense that a Pixar movie is polygon-based: the amount of detail is only limited by the time they were willing to give their render farms. This page has a nice animated comparison's between D1's and D2's sprites for Diablo himself, you'll see how small the difference actually is. http://diablo.wikia.com/wiki/Diablo If anything, the models they used for D2 were more detailed, better lighted, and encoded with more colors.
I, for one, am impressed with the graphics seen here. Even if it turns out that the issues such as animation and lightning dynamics are really limiting, the degree of artistic freedom this kind of technology already offers is really exciting. There will at least be a niche for these kinds of games, I think.
Summary: Political rant with editorialized title. Speaker advocates for cuts to student loan programs to produce massive cuts the university budgets leading to decreased program quality but affordable prices.

I'm not sure this is even worth criticizing because frankly this guy is completely clueless, but:

* The decreased program quality part seems to be skimmed over.

* Educational institutions that just react to market forces are bad educational institutions. Market forces result in grade inflation and low graduation standards, something I think most people agree are extremely unfortunate trends.

Alternative proposal:
Redirect student loan subsidies from students towards institutions directly, possibly also bias the subsidies towards public institutions. The result should be lower tuition for everyone, mild downward forces on private institutions' tuition costs, hopefully no cuts to program quality and reasonable levels of affordability for reduced income students who will still rely on need-based aid more than loans and continue to have fairly cheap public schools they can opt to go to.
I've always used the walking path and it worked quite well
A Healthy Diet is Important for Teens Too
I heard about The Underground History of American Education here on HN during a discussion about Bill Gates. Someone said they wished Bill were more into Gatto (author of Underground History) than the Knowledge is Power program.

I wish I could post this link to HN and have it sit at the top for a while because I think everyone should read this book.

Gatto, who was an NY and NYC teacher of the year and publicly resigned in the Op Ed of the WSJ, traces out the origins of compulsory school and it's detrimental effects brilliantly.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
Ed ecco il primo spot per iPad
Download Pack_Vista_Inspirat_1.1
> - Binary diffs (svn is best was my impression)

I am not sure how svn handles binaries.

I believe bzr uses binary diff ( http://old.nabble.com/Re%3A-SVN-and-graphics-binary-files-p2... )
IIRC there is also a file locking plugin.

> - Multi-platform (svn and hg do well ?)

As you already mention (as PS), multi-platform support is good. I primarily use it on Windows and Linux. Haven't tried OSX but there is an installer.

> - Hg seems to get the most non-git DVCS uptake. Are the bzr technical merits enough to justify the push by Canonical/Ubuntu ?

I haven't use hg much so I can't comment on that but bzr does have better storage efficiency as mentioned at http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/why-switch-to-b... . Its closer to git in repo size. rename and directory versioning is first class (no need for .ignore files). Performance is comparable to hg. One reason I use bzr is its support for wide range of protocols including sftp, ftp. There are some good plugins like bzr-upload[1] that allow working with remote hosts. bzr-explorer[2] is also nice.

Also, launchpad integration is really good.

[1] https://launchpad.net/bzr-upload

[2] http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/explorer/en/
Even Einstein Canât Track Googleâs âScript Kiddieâ Hackers
Only from Hulu - they'll still be available for online viewing on their respective websites, which Viacom claims it has been able to successfully monetize.

Availability remains unchanged in India though :-)
How to download or save Twitter profile background image
I think it sounds a lot like ray tracing:

The Unlimited Detail engine works out which direction the camera is facing and then searches the data to find only the points it needs to put on the screen it doesn’t touch any unneeded points, all it wants is 1024x768 (if that is our resolution) points, one for each pixel of the screen.
"If you think about it at all, it's a very organic result. Chinese people don't link to stuff about what happened on the square 20 years ago nearly as much as they link to stuff going on there normally, because they live there and it's an enormous public plaza."

Good point! No one ever "links" to things that happened in the past! That would just be stupid!

"Americans, on the other hand, don't mention it for any reason other than in the context of China's embarrassment."

Exactly! Americans are a bunch of pricks, yo!

"Aren't the censored results always annotated as such anyway?"

Exactly! Oh, wait, no they're not. Nice try though!