skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, you measured the ideal ATR inflection point for poll vs. epoll in your synthetic microbenchmark.

But you guessed wildly about what ATRs people see in the real world: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1572292 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1572418
Barnes & Noble Considers Selling Itself
I've had that song stuck in my head all day. :(
FreeBSD 5.x was the learning curve for SMP (and also brought in a lot of other technologies such as power control); there was a tremendous amount of changed code. For some people it worked fine; for many it was pretty rough.

The decision for 5.x was to gamble that single-core systems were going to become less important than multi-core systems, and that FreeBSD should push to optimize for the latter. Around the 7.0 timeframe, that promise finally started paying off. By that time, performance and stability on SMP were on a par with what 4.x had had on single-core.

Let's put it this way: there were no tears shed when 5.x went EOL :-) (fwiw, the last maintenance release of 5.x was in 2006.)

For anyone whose last experience was 5.x, 8.1 will be a difference of night-and-day.
Do you have positive things to say about negative people, or only negative things?
Things we don't need to hear, EVERY LAST TIME anyone says anything quantifiable about programming language performance:

1. People are more or less productive in different languages.

2. If a task can be done mostly in a library the speed of the programming language is less important.

3. The performance difference between languages depends on the workload.
For some reason, the unicorn's mannerisms remind me of the King of All Cosmos from Katamari Damacy. I have the sound off at work, so I don't know if he's speaking in scratches.

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, this 404 page isn't incredibly useful. It doesn't provide help on finding the page you were looking for, it doesn't link back to the homepage until you click alllll the way through, and it encourages the user to click the unicorn instead of interacting with the site in a more meaningful (and revenue-producing?) way. That said, for some companies style, image, branding, etc are worth a lot, so having this easter egg could be worth the cost. I'm not familiar enough with Blippy to judge.
And no setuid executables either, at least not in the path.

http://ideone.com/lQbpi
Ligatures, kerning, hyphenation, etc. can be enabled in Word:
http://jeffhuang.com/better_word_papers.html

It's just not on by default which is a shame.
Sorry, I meant level-triggered. :)
I think edge-triggered does add an extra overhead as you stated.
Noted (http://notedwiki.com), a wiki that will be easy to use, attractivelly designed, simple to theme and have functionality focused on small business and freelancers.

It will be a software product sold for a one-time fee and will be compatible with pretty much any environment that has PHP. The syntax will be based on the cross-wiki WikiCreole standard, but it will also support WYSIWYG. We have some great ideas and are gathering feedback from people who are interested in wikis or an easy way to store their information.
Adjunct professors != adjunct instructors.

VERY important distinction.
If they knew what page you were looking for, they would be much better off redirecting you to it. A 404 page is an absolute last resort—a "we have no idea what you want, so here's a unicorn with a double-rainbow on its head" sort of page. I guess, at most, they could include a little form to let you tell them what you expected to see... but I don't imagine too many people filling it out anyway.
I found the title of this article quite ironic because that's exactly what happened to me in college. I was employed by the school and benefited more than the regular students. I was able to get a job on campus as a Sys admin and that's where most of my education came from. I really wish the opportunity I had was offered to more students on campus. Working 40hrs and going to school more than half time (9 hours or so) was a hard but the experience really put me ahead when I was applying for work. I already had 5 years of experience when I graduated and got the first job I applied for when I decided to leave the school.

I guess my point is, if you go to a school try to find a decent job on campus (not something useless like working as a library clerk if you want to be a programmer). Most universities will pay for your school if you work for them full time.

I still ended up racking some student debt ( I didn't work full time for the first 2 years which got expensive) but hopefully I'll have that gone soon. Not so lucky for my wife, she's earning a masters in library science right now and we are looking at over 50K total for her education. I'll probably have to get a new job when she graduates to cover the increased expense. 50K is ridiculous, and they won't give you 30 years to pay that off anymore.
There are basically three sorts of traffic that I have experience with and would expect to be the major portion of whatever goes over the web:

- underwater ajax requests

- regular website content (images, dynamic html, css and other relatively small (say < 250K) files)

- media servers (filedumps, video servers, streaming audio servers)

Each of those requires fairly specific tuning of the TCP stack to get the most out of it, so you're not likely going to find all of these on one and the same machine unless it is a small operation (and in that case this whole discussion is moot).

A benchmark done in isolation is meaningless because in the end, real world traffic is what it is all about. So, I personally don't care whose site(s) you test with, as long as there are enough of them to get a statistically valid result.

Google's or Yahoo's would be fine with me, I've given my results above, if I have the time I'll do the same thing on a couple of other high volume sites.

I've (unfortunately) studied this problem quite a bit because of the size of the websites that I'm involved with and so far I've learned that you can play around on your testbench all day long it doesn't matter one little bit for production purposes unless you are very careful (such as in that other test linked from this page) to simulate users clients.

You could do a lot worse than to play back a log file in order to make an experiment repeatable. I assume that real world performance is what Zed is after, not theoretical performance.
Yes - It's a tent card with guest name and table number on it. Guests will (hopefully) pick them up as the reception starts and they head to sit down.
He's on a throwaway account; I would venture a guess that anonymity is valuable to him/her.
My comment was in reply to the author's statement that "sharing a copyrighted design is theft". This is clearly false.
The tax code is filled with loopholes that require complex accounting to achieve, amounting to a huge regressive tax on those who do not have personal accountants.

As a person that broke the mark about 6 years ago, I have to agree. The first year that I "made it" was the first year that I could afford a real CPA. The loopholes where amazing. I ended up paying slightly less taxes than the year before and earned twice as much.

As much as I take advantage of the system (anyone in their right mind would). It is unfair, I feel that I pay enough, but it is ridiculous that we have to use loop holes in the first place.

The politicians raise taxes on the rich to win some points with the voting mass, they create some loopholes with a wink, wink to the rich who go along because in the end it is the same net. Meanwhile the taxes are not spread even, the rich and middle class end up bearing the brunt of taxation while it hurts the middle class far worse.
I am fully aware of the quality of Russian military equipment and military during WW2. (they had the best mass-produced tank in the war, one of the best air support fighters, and they had much simplified logistics vs. the US) However, after Stalin purged most of the officers, and the damage of WW2 to the industrial base, and then the results of planned economy (shrinking the overall size of the economy), it's pretty amazing they had the resources to maintain near-parity with the US for ~10-20 years. They only really achieved this by devoting a much larger fraction of their industrial base to the military than was done in the west.

Also, any discussion of Russia during WW2 needs to include Simo Hayha ("White Death"), just because he's the most amazing sniper in the history of the world.
I'm almost finished with a PhD in CS which I started after many years of working in industry. Like you, my topic is in an area that interests me immensely. My experiences:

Tried to do it part-time many years ago, gave up after five years. Too difficult to juggle work pressures and research efforts. YMMV

This time around, doing it full-time. Thanks to GFC my savings have dwindled faster than budgeted for. The wife is not impressed and counting down the days to when I submit the thesis. At least, should avoid the "all but dissertation" syndrome.

Research is not tinkering. It is very deep, meticulous, frustrating and depending on your university you will be distracted by having to publish conference and journal papers.

If commercialization is a major goal for you, then perhaps you should be looking at doing a startup.

Consider that having a PhD may actually make you less employable, unless you want to compete for the few jobs in academia and research labs.

If the many comments on HN to your question haven't discouraged you yet, then may I suggest:

* You research in detail the topic you want to do research on. Google Scholar is very good.

* You track down a couple of recent PhD theses in related areas and read them carefully. Ask yourself whether you can match or exceed those standards.

* Write up a research proposal (you'll need it anyway) and only submit it to the top universities.

* If you get accepted, then seek out how you can earn enough to support yourself and family and study full-time.
Good news, but if you're into trying unreleased roms, why not take the extra effort and step up to Cyanogen? CM6 RC2 on Droid is fantastic.
Seconded. Invest in a good external monitor and you have a better environment than most of us started with.
No, but if I didn't curse, my useless, content-free flamebait post would probably only have gotten +10, not +20.

Amazingly, rufius's comment was at +11 before I posted. My speech must have been very convincing.

I get the feeling that voting for comments on their merits here is a long lost cause.
I think what he's saying is that it should be pretty easy to change between poll, epoll, and "superpoll", as you can easily abstract a common interface. Then, you could worry about the performance of that particular bit only when you encounter it, and use your time arguably more effectively on actual feature needed to productionize Mongrel2 better.

I sort of agree with him, except with an important detail: this question is basically about prioritization of your time, and I'd say that this is nobody's business but yours! You can optimize memcpy() all day, for all I care. ;-)

There's one aspect where you'd be quite right to do some investigation before implementing: if the outcome changes the interface you'd need to implement.

For example, here's an hypothesis: using epoll's edge-triggered mode could drastically reduce the number of events (since you only get an event when an fd becomes readable/writable the first time, instead of every time it's in that state). Since epoll is O(N) on the number of events returned (not on the number of fds that are currently readable/writable), you'd lower the effective ATR a whole lot. In fact, a really busy server would have fewer events, since a readable fd would stay that way for longer if data is received at a great rate (the write-side story might be less brilliant). You'd also have to do much fewer calls to epoll_ctl, since you could just stop caring about the reading side while you're trying to write the last batch of data on the other side (no need to remove it from the interest set, you won't get events for it). You only need to set it when flipping from read to write, and the other way (after receiving/sending headers and bodies).

Now, if that's true, that's a big deal, because now you have to change your design a fair bit. You have to remember that an fd is readable until you get EAGAIN from read() yourself, so there's some more state management, moving that fd from one list to another, etc. Finding out that this would be a million times faster (or slower!) now would save you a ton of work, either way.

But finding whether poll or epoll is faster, or an hybrid solution with the same interface? Meh, it could wait.

(about my hypothesis, that's actually what Davide Libenzi designed epoll for, which might explain some of the weirder bits)
> I'm a scientist

I've never come across a scientist that took criticism of their work the way you do and that responded in the way you do. Shouting down, deriding, insulting and in general being a jerk to those that don't agree with you because 'you're a scientist' is not the way of science.
Within Europe, they had a massively superior conventional force, to the point that the US almost certainly would have initiated the use of nuclear weapons (tactical or strategic), after being overrun. Part of this is that they really only had to put their forces on their own border, and could support them with lines of communication entirely on land and within their own territory. The US had to pay a lot more to sustain forces in Europe, and keeping the Atlantic open during a major war would have been difficult.

At some point, nuclear forces are pretty much a binary thing -- either you have enough to guarantee a second-strike countervalue capability, or you don't. China seems to believe it can do this mission with ~200 warheads, today.
I'm a bit depressed that you are being downvoted.

This article, right or wrong, is about perception; your comment perfectly captures the way the same act can be perceived by different groups. Can one of the down modders please explain why they did so? The only thing that is coming to mind is that you disagree with the opinion (and that really is no reason to do a down mod)
After Afghan War Leaks, Revisions in ‘Media Shield’ Bill
Flash For Mac OS 9
Job title: Software Engineer - Mac OS
A similar article from 4 years ago:
http://tastyresearch.com/2006/10/12/people-take-on-the-trait...
The language rule was relaxed so you could use embedded languages so long as you couldn't expose them to the end user. Javascript must be executed using Mobile Safari.
I dunno, that is how a lot of scientists I know interact with people. :/
The best would be if it would be possible to code up superpoll to be adaptive, and in effect, benchmark itself to come to the same conclusion, dynamically. So if one day the kernel people fixed epoll to be better all the time, Mongrel2 would magically not use poll() much on systems using that kernel, and favour epoll.

Of course, that's often Kinda Hard To Do (tm). ;-)
> Asking the public to pay attention to amendments made in committees and subcommittees is wishful thinking.

Of course - and not my wish, incidentally. The whole point is to use technology to lower the cost of informed participation to the point that just about anybody is willing to do it. This means that somebody has to pay attention, but we want that somebody to be somebody else. That voters don't have time, but trusted intermediaries can doing legislative scrutiny for them and simplify it down to a actionable information for busy voters - a simple score. Interest groups have been issuing this sort of thing for years. Ever heard of the NRA report card? It's the lynchpin of gun advocacy political success.

At VoteReports, we're opening up the process of creating these report cards, simplifying and systematizing it so any user can create them, and building higher-level concepts and tools on top of them so any voter can get answers easily and quickly.

> It doesn't matter what your rep's voting record is ... the sausage has already been made.

So I guess courts don't matter - the crime has already been committed, right? The logic of accountability is it deters bad behavior going forward. And if politicians start losing their cushy jobs because of accountability, do you really believe they won't shape up?

And yes, as of this week we'll be adding amendments to the mix - so we'll bring the sausage-making to light by including those actions in their ultimate score as well.

I guess my logic is a little different: I'm saying, if politicians are voted for based on their actual actions, rather than party label, incumbency, or what-not, then bad behavior is punished and the opportunity for proper representation presents itself. Is that so crazy? What kind of sane political system doesn't have people voting based on the issues?
It's not that union workers are overpaid as a rule, but that a few unions manage to get unmaintainable benefits for their workers (particularly the more influential ones) in order to justify high union dues and bring more power to those union bosses. A lot of union workers I know don't really like their unions too much, but it doesn't matter — those unions have become hungry political entities that are no more the sum of their workers than the American government is the sum of its populace.
I've never had a job here (or heard of anybody in a professional job) that required them to be there by 7am. 10am is pretty much the standard.
I don't know what the GP meant by it, but "everything happens for a reason" can be of comfort when people are going through hard times. Connecting to purpose of some kind can help people find strength. It might not resonate for you, but it doesn't mean it can't help someone, sometime.
It's ironic the article mentions Stanford, then describes university presidents as not having "done anything memorable, apart perhaps from firing a popular athletic coach." The president of Stanford is John Hennessy, a founder of MIPS and a board member of Google and Cisco among others.
I wouldn't say that the statement is meaningless, but I would say it's both false and irrelevant to the lack of women in technology. I also think this is a view which is common among people who don't know the subject very well and is similar to to what has been used to explain why women couldn't do other things which are now commonplace.

I think essentialism is problematic as a concept because of it's different usages and I only used it because it was featured in the wiki. I much more comfortable talking about sex and gender. Sex being your biological properties and gender being your cultural or socially constructed identity. I see a lot of argument offering flaws in the sex or gender of women as explanation, but not very many considering the flaws in tech culture.

I'm not saying there aren't differences in biology between women and men, I just think these are grossly overshadowed by the difference in gender. I also believe gender to be variable. For example I believe encouraging women to take risks, e.g. with an startup incubator, could change their social role even if it would be "based in" biology (which I don't think it is in this case).

For the record I do think these things should be discussed, I just wished the discussions were better. Like I've expressed before I find that when it comes to social sciences, the bar lowers significantly for what's considered a good argument.
Sounds like an argument from ignorance. Nobody has proven the language restrictions don't decrease the number of crap apps, there for it's proven they do? WTF.

I'm not the one making the stupid claim (that the language restrictions reduce crap apps). The burden of proof lies with the claimant in this case.
Finally. Been waiting for this for a while. It is still not as good as Mailplane so I will stick with it for now. People that are managing multiple Gmail accounts including google app emails should check it out.
Does anyone know if there are limits to the number of Google Apps accounts you can have? I'd like to link several free accounts I have together--is there any risk in doing this?
Thank you; I couldn't have asked for a more comprehensive and encyclopedic reply to the parent post!

I share your pet peeve about businesspeople who have deemed academia an unnecessary economic sink.
Not only that, but combine some random code you don't really know about, and slightly less than stellar (aka average) security practices on the web and you might end up with a backdoor trojan implemented in your open source project:
http://www.unrealircd.com/txt/unrealsecadvisory.20100612.txt
Barnes & Noble Is For Sale: Amazon Should Buy It
The examples you give are more evidence of poor suppliers, setting ubuntu to not shut down when you close the lid is as easy as power preferences -> what to do when you close the lid, ditto for what to do on low power conditions.

Not rocket science.

My girlfriend uses Ubuntu and she's totally fine with it, why? Because I set it up for her and everything "just works", taking the role that would otherwise be taken by the system integrators at Apple.

It's not the Linux core system that's broken, it's the dodgy culture built around rapid and poor attention to detail at the low end of the computer market, and this is what you're expressly comparing Apple's high end offering to.
Multiple-choice meta-reactions:

A) This is nonsense. Yes, the social construct of 'mental health' obviously excludes those who are deeply disturbed by the social status quo. Of course there is a strong correlation between having a low opinion of the people around you and being depressed, but simply adopting a rosier view of the world at best cures only the symptom.

B) Wow, this is great! I love it when scientific studies can provide insight into things we intuit but have trouble putting into words. I've always thought this, and it feels great to see others confirming my ideas. I can't wait to read the full paper, but until then I'll remind myself that a positive outlook will help both me and those around me.

C) Both A and B.
Then why do we run countries that way? If "benevolent dictatorship" is good enough for giant multinationals, why isn't it good enough for nations? If it isn't good enough for nations, why is it good enough for multinationals that have as much or more power than many nations?
We have something truly revolutionary and really exciting in progress

I'm guessing that it's not to bring back HyperCard...
> Alexis you bastard, making me cry at work!

Thirded
I want a simple way to just set up the plans and have my users redirect to the payment provider's site to put in their card info and get charged.

I would like to get notified when new subscription starts/plan changes/gets cancelled. I want to minimize the amount of code I have to write to do all this since there is already a large list of items I need to address.

I guess so far Amazon and PayPal are the two candidates.

I think Amazon has better rates and API. I would like to get your opinion on the brand image of both companies too. I am afraid when people see the Amazon logo to make a payment they will freak out thinking that the application will be stealing their Amazon information. What do you think?
I am in the US. What was your experience with PayPal for a recurring payment business model?
New Craigslist Design for anyone else?
This article is rubbish.
Every company would describe itself as a meritocracy though. In github's case they're probably still small enough for that to be true.
I concur. Now I use the snipmate plugin, which provides a subset of the functionality: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2540