Hacker News Reader

luccasteraon MIT Lisp lecture from '86. wow.

At Georgia Tech, they filmed a lot of lectures and you can go back to the library and watch the tapes there. I found it to be one of the best ways to study for an exam. It's funny how the second time you watch a lecture, it all seems so easy to understand.

luccasteraon A visual thank-you to the top submitters

eeeeee

luccasteraon Tutorial on embedding concurrent Erlang into Ruby

Cool. Did anyone try this?

luccasteraon How 7 Mongrels Handled a 550k Pageview Digging

I don't remember where I got the following snippet from so if someone knows, please point it out so that I can give them credit.

How many mongrels?

Here's a simple formula to follow:

A. Take the (average or median) request time, in seconds. Say, 0.250 seconds (250ms)

B. How many requests do you want to handle at peak? (e.g. 10,000 a minute, 166 a second)

C. Multiply A x B : 0.250 * 166 = 41.5

So you need about 40 mongrels to handle the load. At about 60MB per listener, that's 2.4GB of RAM, plus a bit of room for leakiness and swapping. Ezra at Engine Yard suggests "about 10 dogs per CPU core", which means that if we have a 4-core opteron box with 3GB of RAM, then this is possible on one box.

Your mileage will vary, which means, if the box is lagging, remove a few mongrels.

luccasteraon Webgen - How Zed Shaw managed to be slashdotted/reddited/yc.newsed and survive

He talks about it in his latest post: http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2008-01-04.html

luccasteraon AskYC: Quick GUI app in off-beat language? Or...?

If you want to give Ruby a try and you are building a small app. Check out Shoes: http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/shoes/

luccasteraon Ask news YC: Your best sources to learn about design & usability

another good one: http://slash7.com/articles/2006/12/30/6-things-you-need-to-k...

luccasteraon The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing (excellent free book)

Thanks nickb. If you are on a windows machine you need to use "wb" instead of "w" for this to work. Here is a version that works on windows:

require 'open-uri';(1..34).to_a.each{|x| open("CH#{x}.PDF", "wb").write(open('http://www.dspguide.com/CH1.PDF').read)}

luccasteraon Free idea: candy aisle

check out http://rightcart.com/

luccasteraon How well do you know prototype.js?

There is also a part 2 of the series available here: http://thinkweb2.com/projects/prototype/?p=3

luccasteraon IDEAS WANTED : How to create Buzz for new Start-up?

I would also recommend reading Buzz Marketing: http://tinyurl.com/3bzxyw

luccasteraon The Gphone is coming; how Google could rewrite the rules

I am as tired as speculative journalists as you are, specially around the Gphone and this is why I posted this.

Out of all the link-bait articles about the gphone, I thought this one had a good analysis and that the mock designs of the phone were interesting.

luccasteraon Does any ruby/rails IDE have breakpoints?

From the Netbeans page at http://www.netbeans.org/community/releases/60/

"Ruby Debugger. Single-step or run through Ruby code, set breakpoints, look at local variables, navigate the call stack, switch threads, and evaluate expressions by just hovering the mouse over the variable in the Editor. There is also support for the "fast debug" extension."

luccasteraon What do you install after a Windows re-format?

linux

luccasteraon Map of Internet Usage By Country - Country size proportioned accordingly

Wow! It's so sad to see Africa so thin in the map. I hope the OLPC project will help fatten it up a bit.

luccasteraon Texty

Is this a ycombinator company?

luccasteraon My startup idea: ClipArena.com - I made it in one week. What do you think?

vuknje, there is a typo on the url in your profile info. fyi.

luccasteraon Lamenting the Loss of Reddit

I agree that the main page of reddit has become pretty lame. However, I think that subreddits are still a good place to visit: http://programming.reddit.com/ or http://joel.reddit.com/.

I think if they had more subreddits it would help but a lot of people do not seem to know about them. I've heard many people complain about the same issue that did not know the existence of these subreddits.