skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why is something always faster the second time you run it
Try any website, measure how long the HTML takes to load (in Chrome, press F12 and go to the network tab, in Firefox use ctrl+shift+K). Now press F5 and look at the time again. It likely got something like 4 times faster.

This is easily explained because the network needs to find a route, perform a DNS lookup, all that stuff. What my question is about though: Why does the same thing happen on a local server, or even localhost?

Write any PHP script, run it and measure the time in your browser, then run and measure again. It'll go much faster, even though memcache or anything like that is not enabled. If you make PHP (or whatever language) generate a random number to output, you'll see that you get the real output every time, so it's not cached.

The effect resets itself after a while (I'm not sure how long, I guess a few minutes). Is this something the CPU optimizes in its caches? Or is something stored in the RAM by either the webserver or the OS? Or does the file handle remain opened?

The effect works on every computer and system I've tried, and I'm really wondering what it could be. Perhaps someone knows?
Perhaps the difference is in testing.

A large mfg, I would imagine, would test a configuration repeatedly before making it available, and then, once approved, the individual systems would go through burn-in, probably with more rigor than beige boxes. So even beige boxes with pricier (but unproven configurations) might suffer from grater failure rates. In addition, large mfgs might be able to demand better "lots" from their parts mfgs/oems.

Just a thought.
I'm more interested in people who remain operational as founders or CEOs in larger (>25) person companies. I've never seen good come from being entirely about todos, delegation, etc. in large companies -- all the great people I know remain hands-on even past the point where it's necessary.
Why Twitter Was Down #PathViewCloudFindsProblem
Network performance analysis discovers why Twitter was down this past June 21st outage. Hint - the carrier was not to blame!
I think you may be missing the point. Most databases use transaction/redo logs, it has to do with how often the writes to the transaction log are flushed. With proper durability, the transaction log is flushed with every commit, not when buffers become full or a background thread gets around to it.
Brilliant demo! I did think this was going to be about old school side scrolling games, though, but I was not disappointed!
I wish those plugins worked on plain Windows (were written in C++ or Python), but they mostly depend on external utilities. (In other words: there aren't things like Emacs' js2-mode that really are native to Emacs and will work everywhere).
Some times a benefit can be indirect and hard to see immediately. Being "technical correct" reduces complexity, which again reduces costs down the road. For example, it makes it easier for third parties to integrate with your service, to name one benefit.

It may never be clear for each individual feature, but violations compound to form a mess of unpredictability. Facebook generally appears to me as being a company with a very strong engineering culture and so it surprises me a bit that they would let something like this slip. Maybe I'm just not seeing the whole picture and it is a clearly thought-out tradeoff and not simply negligence.
I can attest to this, the headphones will work for any device but remote and mic are only compatible with apple products
MySQL's InnoDB has configurable durability: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/innodb-parameters.htm...
Not everyone has the privilege of working on interesting things. Consider yourself lucky.
If I were Funnyjunk, I'd be seriously considering getting another lawyer. I'd almost consider it performance art, but parts of the situation are in bat country and it's going to skew the case horribly.
I'm really not sure I see how you're able to get 4 paragraphs of objections from such a simple point.

We're talking about a $780 invoice. The invoice was generated before written contracts were completed because... it's a $780 invoice. The project was worth so little to the client and was so trivial to the vendor that it was able to commence with neither a full spec, nor a master agreement, nor a simple statement of work.

This isn't about "pick great clients"; it's about avoiding the rats nest of potential projects where there will always be a temptation to work under fly-by-night terms like this.

And once again, every time someone says "pick better clients", someone here has to come out of the woodwork to preach the gospel of the freelancer- who- makes- a- great- living- servicing- small- clients- and- we- can't- all- be- Patrick- Mckenzie. Well, with all due respect to my friend Patrick, but I have hung out with him many times and I can assure you he has not been bitten by any radioactive spider, at least so that I can perceive it. The guy built a bingo card generator --- a kind of Platonic minima for value derivable from software --- and parlayed it into his current business.

For cripes sake, you're on the same message board as he is; do what he did, get better clients. Stop complaining when people in very similar situations as you, or who started in very similar situations to you, tell you how to do better. Look at the advice you're getting: none of it involves kissing the ass of some financier at a VC firm. (1) Pick a specialization more narrow than "software development" so you're not competing on oDesk; (2) Segment your market so you can identify the most lucrative clients; (3) Tailor what you get good at to that market; (4) Be choosier; (5) Get paid. More.
Thanks for the submission! I'm an engineer at Rocketr and our talented team is very excited to get shipping!
Can I ask why you disable the swap file?

As someone with a computer that is horribly unstable (in the process of replacing it over the course of next month), the swap file has saved my ass on a few occasions.
I switched to iOS development. ;)
I've done the "kick a design around in my head as I'm driving home" on this problem a few times, and the optimizer is always what ends up stopping me dead. I can create a new query language, I can write the compiler to turn it into an equivalent SQL query, but I have no interest in the monstrosity the language would become if it tried to give you enough control over the resulting SQL to satisfy optimizers. A query language that produces uselessly slow SQL is itself useless, so it's hard to get up the motivation to start a project like this when there's basically no way I can produce something usable.
It is great! It really is! Give it a shot just to see what we Emacsens are missing.

But if you're like me... Well, Emacs is a way of life and it does a whole lot more than just editing text. I would love to have smooth scrolling and multiple cursors and slick animations and a cursor that can be off-screen. But at the end of the day, I prefer magit and org-mode and keyboard-only navigation and macros and so on. It still is awesome though. Do give it a try!

Maybe in a few decades it will have accumulated enough awesomeness to compare to our beloved Emacs.
I don't- but for discoverability purposes, I'm more likely to find success by clicking on a method name than by randomly pawing keyboard shortcuts. Once discovered, I'll happily take the shortcut.
From colors to text objects, most of my vim config/plugins is not about speed but about reducing strain (which has the positive side effect of enhancing speed)
That list is missing multiple cursors, which as far as I'm concerned, is the only reason to use ST2 and not vim.
But ORM's don't actually help for the trivial queries.

I generally find myself writing functions to automate the trivial ones: get_single_field_by_primary_key(), get_row_by_primary_key(), get_values_by_field(), etc. There are maybe 4 or 5 of these. An entire ORM is total overkill.

As for the common joins, in my experience they rarely are that trivial. Sometimes it's a left join, sometimes an inner join. Sometimes there's a limit or not. Sometimes there's an aggregate function.

If you find yourself writing the same query structure 20 times, then create a function for it. But I've never found that to be the case in projects I work on.

I just personally find that ORM's are total overkill in the situations where they can be usefully applied. So the disdain for them kind of makes sense.
5 Tips for Successfully Working on the Go
"but a sane person could see how boxopus will likely be used for piracy."

And a sane person could see how a butter knife could be used for murder.
It's certainly possible to write code without a good editor, but a good editor simplifies a lot of tasks which get in the way of writing good code.
KnotGL - Explore knot topologies in WebGL
That's a bit heavy-handed; additional benchmarks will be published against a variety of configurations and other databases.

Companies use MemSQL because it uses memory as the primary locus of data. If you have a fast data problem, you couldn't use a disk-based system. At high speeds, you'd want to deploy any database in an active-active mode.
The power to govern is, in effect, speech, so by limiting ones ability gain political influence, you are limiting speech.

The ability of small political parties to gain representation in government is, I believe, a good thing, even (perhaps especially) when the views of those small parties are unpopular. Even those with extreme views have a right to express them.

Now, while I believe that all people have a right to speech, they do not have a right to be heard. There's an important distinction there. If someone cannot get elected due to extreme or unpopular views (I, for instance, will not vote anyone who holds various social stances that I consider detestable), that's acceptable. Not being able to get elected due to a mandated ban on your position is not something I can accept.

I'll grant you, the ability to gain office with extreme views has had some pretty dire consequences in the past, but I still cannot bring myself to believe that, even in the most extreme cases, limiting speech is acceptable.
That assumes that democracy is the goal. America traditionally holds that freedom is more important, although there have been small-d democratic movements that seek to violate the rights of minorities.

The point of having elections in America isn't because democracy is awesome. It's because elections serve as a check on government power.
Carrying Out Tasks in the Background with HTML5 Web Workers
HTML5 offers a range of improved options for executing JavaScript functions. With Web Workers, you can execute scripts in the background, so that intensive processing need not interfere with the main functionality of your page. Of course this is most useful for complex tasks, but in this tutorial we will demonstrate the basics of using Web Workers with your pages using a simple example.
Pretty season's Vim user here. This editor looks awesome, and I would love to give it a whirl, but I feel like I can't switch without these plugins. I'm sure they exist, if someone could point me to one that would be excellent.

+ Syntastic [https://github.com/scrooloose/syntastic/] eclipse-like real-time linter. Gives me compile errors and warnings.

+ Tag bar [http://majutsushi.github.com/tagbar/] navigate tags in the code

+ Not as essential, but EasyMotion is pretty awesome [https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-easymotion]
Congrats Sam. Sam and Nick have generously hosted me during previous Startup Schools, including during crunch-time of their first Y Combinator startups years ago, even though we barely knew each other, so I'm forever grateful.

Are you guys going to post some visual or marketing on the product? When DropBox 'launched' on Hacker News, Drew posted just a video. Even though it didn't have any actual pictures of the product, it got me excited.

Unrelated, I notice we have the same top color of abcdef. I read your user profile because I'm launching a Google Chrome extension for Hacker News (later today) that shows profiles via a popup inside the story. I'm currently working on my own demo video for it before I post the link, but maybe I should just launch now, too!
I've heard about these lawsuits, and I don't doubt that there is some inflation of job placement data. However, these accusations tend to happen more at the mid-rated schools, and we are talking about the "elite" here (ie., top 5 or so).

While there does seem to be some basis for questioning the data, I do think that the employment reports support the notion that the average starting salary for someone out of a "Top 5" law school greatly exceeds the pay for an MS or PhD grad of a top engineering school.

Is this something you'd disagree with? - ie., do you think that the job placement reports from the various grad schools at UC Berkeley and other top institutions are so unreliable that we can't draw general conclusions from the numbers?

I also completely agree with you about biglaw and consulting. Law actually does resemble a cartel in many ways, and oligopolies certainly exist in consulting and drive up pay. But to me, that's beside the point. If smart people can make gobs of money in other fields (never mind why, the important thing is that they can), why should we be surprised that they won't become programmers for 80K a year?
Always great when people think they know how the world works stumble into something they clearly don't understand. And instead of trying to understand it, or admitting they don't get it, they flail around using their old tricks.
I've just started out at TFL and the goal for open data is far from being cracked down upon, in fact it seems they are trying to make more available, give me a shout if there are any particular problems you've experienced and I'm sure I can try and help out.
Drive does, yes. (https://developers.google.com/drive/v1/reference/)
Well, it's infinite trialware, but it pops a few nag screens here and there, especially when saving files. And this, when you are working and have a habit of mashing Cmd+S regularly, gets in the way often enough.

I think the nag dial is just about right between casual use/unlimited evaluation and I'm using this editor for real shit.
The only thing I found that was similar was holding down shift and drag selecting with the right mouse button.
> It people find the content valuable, does it matter if he's gaining something from the exposure?

No. Nothing wrong with tatsuke95 giving the reasons why he thinks the emperor has no clothes either, though.

Maybe if the consensus at HN is that some organizations are over-using link bait for self-promotion, a little more awareness of that isn't a bad thing.

Personally, I found the link to have a couple of interesting tidbits, but I welcome contrary thoughts on the value of the article as long as they're stated reasonably politely and appear to have some logic behind them.
I find it is extremely rare that typing speed is what slows me down

Auto-complete isn't about typing speed. It's about API exploration.
Gates has no teaching experience and no academic credentials in education. We should listen to him because... he's rich? Any 22 year old first year teacher is more qualified to set education policy.
Most people don't actually take that time, even if they could easily find the time. (I, for one, don't take the time, even if I end up clicking on links on Reddit like a zombie at the end of the day)

So having it on a schedule isn't a bad thing. I think it's in a previous post that Ryan was talking about that as a mini-meditation. Many people meditate at specific times, he just does it at a smaller scale, and I'm sure it's still better than nothing.
Except that plenty of people never find a job they like. They're stuck working at Burger King or some menial office admin job, and they hate it. They are, in general, not hanging out on HN or blogging about their amazing experiences wheeling and dealing their MBA cred. Hence the bias.

And, in anticipation of the standard reply on this, we cannot assume such people don't also have MBAs or PhDs in Social sciences. The cards just don't fall right every time. To paraphrase another HN discussionf from a few days back, a series of fortunate accidents allow certain people to become wildly (or at least comfortably) successful. The same chain of accidents, playing out differently for others, draw them in the other direction.

If there is a second, standard reply to this idea, it usually has to do with inherited ability (or innate talent) versus disease. So we should also explicitly not assume the people I'm describing have any such disabilities. Those would be additional forces, but plently of able, coherent people never nail a full-on life-hack, in the long-term.
For being Apple's secret weapon, Samsung sure has a lot more of them. I wonder why Samsung's number of design patents issued peaked in 2008.
How is it heavy handed? As I understand the article, MemSQL by default will often say that a transaction has been committed even though it only exists in memory, not on disk. Comparing that scenario with a MySQL setup which only says a transaction has been committed once it's on non-volatile storage is just wrong.
I'd like to see a one-finger method for switching tabs in the next version. What I mean by this is the following: On larger phones (pretty much all the new phones), its hard (for most people) to reach the top of the screen to toggle the tab changing button.

Besides that, changing a tab is at least a 2-tap process. The Chrome browser allows tab switching by swiping the edge of the screen; Dolphin HD allows tab switching by pressing the volume buttons; even the default browser allows faster tab switching than firefox as the navigation bar can be accessed by pivoting on the edge of the screen (not on by default).

I use firefox on the desktop, and I'd love to use it as my default browser on android as well. For now, I'm using Chrome. Works well enough for me.
Actually the Go team has mentioned what happened with Java is a reason why they have not added generics, they have said they wont add them unless they are 100% certain that they are happy with the design and that they will not damage the language.
Funny, I bought it more or less right away and ended up using Emacs instead. I still don't feel bad about it though. It is a worthy tool in my belt and I love to support it.
"wantrepreneur"... I love it. That word alone deserves an upvote.
A lot of people are saying "it depends" - I totally agree. Some products are built to spread virally, others need to acquire users/customers via advertisement.

Eric Ries has some really interesting thoughts on this topic. Check out this blog post: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/11/what-is-custome...
I continue to be haunted by something a good artist friend used to say: "Don't obsess over your tools. They are not the goal".

This would ring in the back of my head as I spent many hours configuring my editor / shell / terminal setup. It felt like a guilty pleasure.

It dawned on me however, that what had drawn me to programming in the first place was a sublime text editor (TextMate), and that my business is in fact tool-building. My love for computing tools and the experience of using them reflects in the kind of software I build for clients.

On top of this, evaluating and obsessing over hacker's tools isn't confined to picking between models at the hardware store. I have pored over (and patched, however minor) bash, vim, tmux, rxvt-unicode, and many other programs that I use every day.

These things may well be rationalizations, so here's a simpler justification: the time I invest into my tools have made my experience of sitting down in front of a computer incredibly enjoyable. I once lived computer free for three years because I detested the uninspiring (and frustrating) experience of Microsoft Word and Windows 98. If that was what computing was, I wanted nothing to do with it.
While I do agree that false positive and false negative are better names, they do have one shortcoming in comparison:

Classical statistics suffers from the inference problem, where instead of "tested positive for presence" you have to say "tested negative for absence". So a type I error is a false negative as much as it is false positive, which can get confusing.
I understand that they want to read my mail. They want to know who i interact with.

But why do you put up with that?

Not having a Facebook account is starting to make me feel like an anti-social loser. But I just can't get over how creepy they are. How do other people live with that?
Why? YC does not have an unblemished record of perceiving and rejecting scumbags. pg described airbnb as "among the nicest of the people we've funded" and yet: http://gawker.com/5853754/the-seedy-spammy-past-of-airbnbs-c...

I want to like them, but they aren't perfect, and they haven't made a big deal out of "not evil" in their positioning.
And you don't have to be a genius to see this coming. In fact you have to be amazingly tone deaf. Fanatasies about the great pirate revolution are fine but legitimate businesses have to deal with reality.
Whenever I read an article like this, I often end up feeling that on the 'truthiness' spectrum the scale goes like this: lies, damn lies, statistics, benchmarks ;-)
I agree that this is useful, especially if you are disabled, but it is just a matter of time before "terrorism" is cited as a reason to take it down.
Handsontable - Excel-like table editor in HTML & jQuery
But so do Vim's t text object (one of the few text objects that Sublime's Vintage mode doesn't implement) and dot command, along with Vim's C-o and C-i cursor history commands.
This is what happens when developers design.
I was excited to try this out then I encountered a strange issue: in every website I visit when I type an & symbol into an input element it is replaced with a 7 (e.g. I type "password&" the input shows "password7"). It's happening across all sites for both text and more importantly password inputs so I can't login to many of sites I regularly visit and really try the app. Anyone have any ideas?
Actually in this case you could infer they like cheap hotels (or don't like expensive ones). If someone is willing to go to a lot of effort to hide who they are, to hunt for bargains, or check they are getting a good price, they are probably very price sensitive, and would like the cheapest hotel you have, they've shown they are willing to waste their own time to get cheaper prices.
This is a little misleading; an internal checkpoint happens upon transaction commit[1]. The comment makes it sound as if one or more transactions can commit before a checkpoint writes them to disk.

[1]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186259(v=sql.105)....
Always nice to see the bounds of UI scripting being pushed to the browser's limit. I won't be surprised to see some of these position manipulation paradigms integrated into the core browsing experience (in sort of a jQuery-esque fashion) in the near future.

Nice choice with the name as well. Easy to rememeber and has a good typing rhythm.
works fine on firefox 13, core2 1.8ghz, integrated intel gpu
Perfect thing for a HN demo