jshydra news

Since I happen to have some downtime thanks to the short space between college and a summer job, and some spare time with four wisdom teeth newly missing from my mouth, I have returned to work on jshydra. I am in the midst of simplifying the build structure for new or non-Mozilla hackers, and am also patching up one of the main scripts I have, the documentation-association script.

On Monday, May 11, 2008, at 1:00 PM EDT (10:00 AM PDT, or 1700 UTC), I will be holding in the #static IRC room for the benefit of users a "learn jshydra" day. You may of course ask me questions any time I'm actually on IRC (nick: jcranmer or derivatives thereof).

I hope to finish up the build structure by then and get a wiki article on the topic started as well. A feature request list is already starting, including the ability to take JS out from an HTML file. If you have others, communicate it to me somehow, and I'll stick it somewhere where I can remember it.

Is this faster?

Last Wednesday morning (in the EDT timezone that I go to school in), I took my final in Probability & Statistics. It was a moment that I didn't think too much about until this morning, when, in one of the newsgroups I frequent, there was a discussion as to how much faster one option was compared to another. This post come up:

A good idea would be to measure each iteration separately and then discard outliers by e.g. discarding those that exceed the abs diff between the mean and the stddev.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why that's not a good idea. In any case, the last unit of the class dealt with the fun part of statistics, which is to actually evaluate whether observed data is statistically significant. The actual math involved isn't too bad, assuming you have someone spit out a cumulative distribution function for the t-distribution for you (here is Boost's code), but it's a bit convoluted to write here, so read Wikipedia's page. The correct tests are actually the two-sampled t-tests.

But I got to thinking. One thing I've wanted to see for a while is a profiling extension, one that would run some JS code snippet multiple times and produce various reports on profiling runs. Wouldn't it be nice if such an extension could compare two runs and determine if they was a statistically significant difference between them?