skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's two problems in one, I think you want a script that logs the exact load times of a bunch of files, then a secondary stage to convert that data in to a graph.

For the first bit you'll need a script that loads a url and all it's dependencies, starts a fairly precise timer at the moment the connection to the server is initiated for each of the elements, uses persistent connections if possible and logs a secondary marker whenever an item has completely loaded and how many bytes got transferred.

So, this then outputs a series of data items, four fields per item:

resource, start time, end time, amount transferred

You then sort that by start time and generate a graph.

Are you a programmer ?
Does Microsoft patent 7617530 affect Ubuntu?
I have seen a lot of discussion about how this patent does (or does not) resemble the sudo command. I am also interested in some other verbiage in that patent application about how users can do bad things if they are logged in as administrators and that is the subject of a blog post http://hypecycles.wordpress.com/2009/11/15/microsoft-patent-7617530/

My question for HN is this: Doesn't the thing that Microsoft patented exactly match the kind of thing that Ubuntu does for administrator activities?

You can also read my blog post at http://hypecycles.wordpress.com/2009/11/15/microsoft-patent-7617530/
In the interest of "truth in advertising", the author should add an "h" to his last name. His blog makes a lot more sense then.
Thanks. The important thing about CouchDB is that it allows you to write applications you could never dream of, with the standard LAMP stack. p2p replication makes a huge difference.
I would guess contention on sync primitives in the dispatcher. The queues look like they need to be locked before they can be modified:

// Scheduling helpers. Sched must be locked.
static void gput(G*); // put/get on ghead/gtail

This is the comment on the lock:

in the uncontended case,
* as fast as spin locks (just a few user-level instructions),
* but on the contention path they sleep in the kernel.
* a zeroed Lock is unlocked (no need to initialize each lock).

A better approach for multicore would probably be work-stealing queues.
> If you can omit them, you can do way more than 3 million threads.

Via IORefs? Or?
Yours is here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943346

Have a look at the actual URL. Yours has this on the end of the URL:

?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&\
utm_campaign=Feed%3A+weblogsinc%2Fengadget+\
%28Engadget%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

(I've deliberately split the line) and hence it didn't match this one, which is clean.
Thanks. Yes I'm a programmer, and yes I agree with your breakdown.

I'm looking at various scripting options like using a headless Firefox, wget, and the like. Nothing seems straightforward and so I asked to see if anyone knows of a solution that does everything.
If you reply it helps to give a correct answer and be helpful.

EDIT: To clarify in response to ugh's clarification below:

It is not randomness that the duplication was permitted.

However, yes, it is (partially) apparently randomness that makes one submission appear on the front page and not another. My observation is that one submission may go unnoticed, and a duplicate does get noticed, up-mud once, and away it goes being noticed. If the first submission gets noticed, the second never happens.

The dynamics aren't difficult, really, although they are prey to the random timing of people looking and liking (or not).
Tankafritt.nu, against punishment for filesharing
Look at the output of `objdump -d prog | grep call | grep _chk | wc -l', if the value returned is zero/0/0x0 you haven't got FORTIFY_SOURCE enabled, and would be unnecessary to add -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE.

However this is dependant upon implementation set restrictions and defaults.
I like to Use ToodleDo and Evernote on my iPhone.

Both apps sync with the web, and offer offline modes. This makes it easy to use no matter where I am. I used to use my blackberry and outlook, but really wanted web integration.
If Apple takes on the gaming market and develops a few of their own in-house games, you can bet your bottom dollar that they will be pushed front and center and other games shoved to the back.

I am the biggest anti-Apple fanboi in existence, but I don't see the connection here. All of Apple's marketing for the iPhone and iTouch is about third-party apps. There is a huge Apple billboard outside my office advertising a bunch of third-party games for the iTouch. So if they start banning third-party games, this will be an unprecedented reversal in their current policy.

As an aside, I am looking forward to the day when I can get AdBlock in real life.
I wouldn't bother making it that complicated, just write a script that makes socket connections to the servers.

Keep it simple! (and reliable, headless firefox, and wget would carry a lot of overhead and when you're benchmarking something at the millisecond level that overhead can get in the way quickly).

I posted this site the other day:

http://webpagetest.org/

I like their display a lot better than the google one.
Fully agree, TFA is almost information free IMHO.
Isn't this the exact opposite of our favorite over-hyped buzzword: "The Cloud"? Instead of accessing all your data via freemium 3rd party hosts, you keep your own data, and those 3rd parties pubsub to/from your server. I like this idea since it's an elegant solution to our current web mess of walled gardens, multiple accounts, vendor lock-in, privacy, and the low quality of content on the web in general.

But I think we're 10 years away from having this because the hardware just isn't there yet. The idea will have traction when our cell phones can run as this "universal personal server". Then it can actually have the mass-scale adoption required for it to work. But the majority of end-users can barely operate an OS, they don't even know what the difference is between a browser and an app, and almost nobody understands what the Internet actually is. From the common point of view, the Internet might as well represent the highest achievement of magick rather than science. So until it's as ubiquitous as having a cell phone, personal servers will remain in the domain of geeks who will hack up, tweak and preen their own solutions.

It's interesting how the software industry is utterly craptastic at anticipating how the plummeting cost of better and better hardware changes the kind of software services which people will use. In short time spans too. Amazon, Google et. al. have spent billions going long on the bet that 12 years out, everything will be served from global super-computer clusters distributed across mega-datacenters around the world. It is interesting to ask if Amazon, Google and everyone else are about to get blind sided, and not only miss the boat, but fail to even see it.
Please take a look at Chickenfoot

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/chickenfoot/index.php

maybe it does what you want? I was very impressed with a video I had seen about it a couple of years ago.
Go and Brand X: A language comparison
The thing we see with CouchDB in production is that, although under low load we aren't the fastest kid on the block, as you ramp up concurrency (hundreds or thousands of simultaneous clients) with mixed reads and writes, on a multi-GB database, we don't slow down.

an old BBC case-study:

http://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/London2009/speakers...

Building a test harness is non-trivial, Igal's tests are a lot like ones I used in the CouchDB book to illustrate the importance of batch updates, so I don't blame him for the imprecision.

Right now the best test driver for CouchDB throughput looks to be Baracus: http://blog.cloudant.com/benchmarking-couchdb-with-baracus
Ask HN: Have you ever written (extensive) code that works the first time?
As I continue down a little project of mine, I realized that I've never written an app that works completely the first time I run it.<p>I wondered if it was my incompetence/lack of experience/ignorance/etc., or if it was a common phenomenon.
Exactly! If you are like me, you probably spent more than four hours just thinking about that monkey on your back. This happens almost on a daily basis for me. I deal with it by at the least telling myself that it's ok to not do something, but it's not ok to be thinking about it all the time. At least this way whenever I do get to it, I wouldn't have wasted hours fretting about it which is the real time sink.
I think we are now using the current version.
if you think it's a joke you aren't like the rest of the people (like me) who upvoted it because they were smiling and shaking their head in disbelief at how well the author quantified their behavior habits
What happens to your email when you die?
Google Chrome Developer Tools and SDK
From the Slashdot FAQ: "If You Can't Be Deep, Be Funny: If you don't have something truly developing to the topic, some humor is welcome. Humor is lacking in our lives and will continue to be promoted. Remember though, what rips your sides out may be completely inane to somebody else."
Not sure I follow - in our case, MySQL performs well, but also scales to the volumes both us and Digg need?
Just to clarify: I (presumably, still not sure) misunderstood the parent.

I read his comment as “I posted this also, why does this submission appear on the front page, not mine?”, to which the correct answer is “Randomness.” (I think).
Next time someone defends the US health system point them at these graphs.
I suspect the problem is much like with literary writing:

The first draft is NEVER perfect.
Sure it can. I mocked up an example solution for the Stackless list, here: http://www.stackless.com/pipermail/stackless/2009-November/0... with a followup using the channel itself as the dispatcher and not some text string name. It's not as nice as syntactical support, but it gets the job done.

Thing is - it doesn't seem to have been missed from Stackless, which makes me wonder when it's needed.
I think the longest thing I've written that worked the first time was a Pascal program about a page or two long, in college. I'm never likely to surpass that record, because I'd never write so much code now before testing it.
Still subject to attacks on the management system, which is written with existing architecture. True Harvard architecture instead of Von Neumann may help, as it discriminates between code and data.
That's really neat to know. I really like that idea of defining a static service, similar to DNS, for looking up a user's "transient web" data.
Do you have a link to your paper? I'd love to read it.
EDIT: Sorry about all the typos. Really .. really tired :)

Maybe if you were more organized.... (just kidding-- I couldn't resist)

I'm a notebook man myself. Haven't graduated to moleskine yet, just the composition books for "back-of-the-envelope" type notes, and spirals for meeting/strategy/etc. notes.

I use Daytimer for calendar, but am starting to migrate to Thunderbird/Lightning for the monthly planning and weekly meeting stuff. It's a bad method to have more than one calendar, so I haven't quite resolved that yet.

Daily to-do lists go in the Daytimer, numbered and prioritized.
TFA (or MFA for My FA?) asks why Pike emphasized Go's concurrency performance when it was almost certainly worse than Stackless Python's, then showed why I inferred that it was worse.
This is one of the reasons I voted for browser-based text editing on Dropbox.
++1 for HtmlUnit. I'm now writing selenium tests for a GWT app that I'll "play" on various browsers to verify correctness, but I'll run them on HtmlUnit as part of the post-build regression tests.
ha yes, even better, my bad
Twitter And Facebook Turn Everyone Into An Affiliate Marketer
Programming Dynamic Models: Outbreak on a Network
That's limited to the microsoft platform for now isn't it ?

Or does the term also apply to java ?

One of the things that I've been wondering about, that maybe you can answer is this: If languages such as javascript, lisp, python and so on (as opposed to say C) treat functions as first class citizens, doesn't that open up a completely new can of worms with respect to security ?
If anyone is looking for a good reference to one of AI's subtopics--Machine Learning--then I highly recommend Christopher Bishop's Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning.

I believe the book was published in 2006, so a vast majority of the material is cutting edge. It's a difficult read, and not really meant for the duct tape programmer. But if you have the patience to stick with this book for as long as I have (an entire year), then you'll be well positioned to tackle any problem in Artificial Intelligence.
For my long-term learning goals, I wrote a quick python script to randomly select a daily study topic from my list. I'm also considering using spaced repetition for reviewing what I've already covered.
I'm excited about atlas. However, posting a "watch this page" notice on HN is a bit out of place. How about posting the HN notice when it actually is available?
From what I know of the authors, they would have picked the simpler solution until it actually turns out to be a problem in the real world.
Inside Livermore Lab's Race to Invent Clean Energy
if it was steamrolling along, we would have seen it for sale in August, like they planned.
Do you plan on releasing the book as an ebook anywhere? Such as the kindle or any other form?
> That's exactly why this shouldn't be allowed. There is a very small number colours that the eye can readily tell apart, if we allow big corporations to claim these the rest of us will be communicating in black and white.

Exactly.

If memory serves, you can't hold copyright on the design of a font in the US for similar reasons. A file containing the instructions describing the shape and properties of a font is subject to copyright, but you can't stop someone else from writing a different file with their own instructions, which happens to reproduce equivalent shapes afterwards. Otherwise, the first big companies to grab rights to a basic serif, basic sans, etc. would soon be charging a licence fee to anyone wanting to communicate in writing.

If similar common sense doesn't apply with colours, then as I will shortly be creating Primary Designs Ltd., a business specialising in web design using the colours red, green and blue, I look forward to a profitable lawsuit against T-Mobile, whose web site does appear to activate all three of my company's colours when viewed on a typical computer display.

Seriously, if you build your entire brand around a colour, then I'm afraid that's your own foolishness. Using a colour in an attempt to pass one business off as another is wrong and shouldn't be allowed any more than any other falsification/trademark infringement, but mere use of a colour (particularly an obvious, popular one such as magenta or orange) should not in itself constitute an attempt at passing off. That's just crazy law, probably bought and paid for by expensive lobbyists.
I noticed that wget doesn't do ms resolution. Might have to script it after all.

Thanks for your help!
Ask HN: Chatbots ...
I've got a robot on Richard's Play By Email server that plays CoNeutron, and I've been thinking of adding a "ChatBot" on the side. I've played with Eliza and a few others, but I was wondering if anyone here on HN has some experience, recommendations, warnings or suggestions.
Redmine (redmine.org) is a free, open source alternative to basecamp/trac written in rails. It's great for tracking issues for your own projects, but especially useful to small teams. There are numerous plugins available to meet individual needs (scheduling, time tracking, etc).
lol :) Glad to know the party's getting bigger! Best Wishes :)
Mistakes in Typography Grate the Purists
it sounds like Jaxer has a build of SpiderMonkey running inside it which provides server side JS support.
On speed: Rob Pike's video demo compiled 120kloc RTL in 8 seconds (~15kloc/sec). Your C compile took 7 seconds for 25kloc (3.6kloc/sec) or 2.75 (9.1kloc/sec).

On concurrency: you compared a parallelized CSP implementation, with a single-threaded one, where the test was dominated by communication costs. Single-threaded communication is much faster than potentially contended parallel communication.

On benchmark hygiene: there are a plethora of different machines, different performance profiles and different numbers flying around here. The kloc/sec numbers don't mean anything unless they're on the same machine; similarly, the performance numbers are dependent on degrees of hardware parallelism and the kind of workload (proportion of per-task vs communication vs task startup, all the different variables in cost). Several different benchmarks would need to be run to actually tease out these different variables, to really figure out which one is better.
i just send myself emails. since so many tasks are email based anyway, it keeps everything in one place. i.e. "follow up with John Smith about X". when i complete the task i delete the email from my inbox
Metaprogramming in Ruby: It’s All About the Self
Live Your Life
In the Corporate Patent State, innovation is illegal.
This is how to do it, apparently: http://www.multicians.org/andre.html
I've written a couple and I had great fun with them.

One of the best attempts was a really nasty little trick, basically a human-backed chatbot. The way it worked was like this:

You get an icq (at the time) client and proxy it through the bot, the bot goes and makes random friends.

When someone reponds to the bots 'opening' line (Hi how are you?) you get back a response. You now answer with two things at once, the first a regexp that matches the response and puts in wildcards for linguistic fluff, and the actual answer.

The bot stores both in its database, and passes the answer to the user. Who then replies.

Meanwhile the bot continues to find new 'victims', and everytime it gets back an answer it tries to make a match based on it's canned responses. It knows where in the conversation it is (context), so a response will only be matched in the right spot in a conversation.

After being the bots 'backend' for a couple of days it could keep up a conversation for a good 20 minutes from the 'hi how are you' until it would run out of steam, by using wildcards in a smart way it is amazing how 'relevant' an answer can be even though the match is only on one or two words.

It was some of the most fun I ever had with computers, not because it 'fooled' the users, simply because of seeing all these patterns in language.
Very good document. You might consider making this a wiki, So others can add to it?
If it's not a commercial secret, I wonder, are sites like Reddit and Digg low margin businesses, or are hardware/bandwidth costs a tiny speck compared to the ad revenue generated?

In your "IAMA" thread on reddit, someone estimated that Reddit must be pulling on the order of $1M per month, making the costs neglibile. Digg must be earning even more, because of its greater number of users and their higher susceptibility to ads.
I wrote (and use) http://voo2do.com/ . I'm currently working on turning it from a popular side project into a business, so I'd love any feedback on it. My email is on every page.
Spanning Trees and Aspects (The 15th Annual Christmas Tree Lecture)
I've written modules of 500-1000 lines which worked perfectly the first time I successfully compiled it. In any large block of code, I'm prone to make occasional typos (usually missing semicolons, unmatched parentheses, not declaring a temporary variable, not #including a required header, etc.) but the compiler always finds those for me, so it's not really a problem.

I've also written code which didn't work at all, and then spent days debugging it. But I've learned that I'm really bad at debugging code, so instead I take the time to plan out what my code is doing so that I can get it right the first time.
Gattaca meets OKCupid. It was only a matter of time I guess.

This is pseudo science though, you can do all the genetic testing in the world it's not going to give you any insight on whether people are going to like each other or not.

And if you just want to go for the most genetic diversity, simply find a partner that is as much unlike you in every phenotypical aspect that you can think of.
http://celerity.rubyforge.org/

OR

http://wiki.openqa.org/display/WTR/FireWatir/
Is anyone else much less excited about the CrunchPad than they used to be? This bit of news is the first I heard about the CrunchPad in months, I used to think it was a great idea, now... not so much. A 12" tablet that boots into firefox? I'm perfectly happy with my android phone. Is this supposed to be a mobile device? I have hard time imagining how successful a single purpose tablet will be for people on the go. Devices now are about convergence. For $300-400 you could buy a netbook, iPhone, or Droid. The average consumer won't see any value in purchasing an overpriced internet tablet over alternative devices (that have more functionality and are smaller).
Ask HN: hiring vs. buying to produce a prototype
Hi everyone,

I am just getting up the courage to do my own startup, however I need a bit of guidance and advice. The product I have in mind consists of 3 pieces: a embedded piece, a windows app part, and a web services portion. I think the best thing to do is to produce a prototype paid for with my own savings before I try to get funded. I am a embedded software guy and I don't really have too much experience with the windows and web software (I do think I know enough to be able to identify what is BS). I was wondering what the experts here think about these 3 approaches:

1. Hire a couple of guys with this type of expertise to do the windows and web pieces.
2. Pay another company to develop the windows and web pieces I need. (would I just get my lunch money taken :-)?)
3. Partner with someone with that skill set (unfortunately I don't know anyone with this set of skills, so I think this is very similar to hiring).

I am currently favoring choice 2 because I think a experience company can do what I need faster and probably cheaper since I need less infrastructure. I will then add the glue code to tie everything together. I would love to hear what others with personal experiences on what is the pro and con of these approaches.

Thank you in advance for your help!
53% of electricity is way below 53% of energy. And that's just peak, wind gets average utilization of 30%.
How much is a themed Google logo worth?
Sounds pretty amazing. It sounds better, at least, than any bot that I've seen. Is it open source? ;)
You're welcome, if you need a hand or get stuck let me know, email is in the sig.
Atlas Beta Program Launched
Opening up government data with Adobe, Google, Scribd
Redmine is nice, though I think I prefer the little things that Backpack gives you that's tailored towards personal/team use and the better UX. It's only $7 a month if you use the (unadvertised) "solo" plan, which you can upgrade to after you sign up for a free account. (I hope jasonfried doesn't mind.)
Why Rational Thinking Is Not All It's Cracked Up To Be
Hmm. I think I may have gotten the compile numbers from another video about Go, and as I'm reaching the end of my stamina for this topic, I'll just assume I got that wrong.

On concurrency, I thought Go right now was configured by default for only a single kernel thread running goroutines, which would make both of them single-threaded implementations.

A few people now have reported benchmark numbers on their machines, with both Stackless and Go. In every case so far, Go has been slower than Stackless for the 100,000 tasklet/goroutine case. Of course, if Pike had a MacBook Air with an SDD then the compile times are absolutely not comparable.

Agreed also about how to tease out the different variables. Still, recall that I mostly want to know why Pike, for example, stressed that there were no tricks going on underneath the covers to make the performance fast, with the implication that people wouldn't quite believe how fast it was, when the performance does not seem exceptional compared to other similar languages.
Oh gosh. Soon I bet people are going to start claiming individual words.