Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality. Please visit our About page for more information.

Douglas_Knight comments on [META] My Negative Results - Less Wrong Discussion

37 Post author: RobertLumley 28 January 2012 08:44PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (23)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 28 January 2012 10:26:06PM 5 points [-]

You are pretty much wasting the x-axis, which is pretty much redundant with the colors. It would be better to do a scatter plot of time and size, rather than imposing the ratio on people like me who think it is a silly metric.

This may be a realistic way to measure time for new users, but that is irrelevant to your complaint, since you are not a new user. The large size of the site includes files that don't change much, like the javascript. These load quickly, at least per byte, contributing to a fast measure. Some users will be bandwidth-limited. But when you return to the site, these files are cached and the total download is much smaller. But you still have to wait for database queries to build the main content. This has only a very loose relation to number of bytes, even the number of bytes the pages, and using number of bytes as an excuse for speed seems silly to me. (But there is a lot of variation from time to time and if you had caught it at a bad time it would probably look bad by your metric, too.)

Comment author: RobertLumley 28 January 2012 10:29:10PM 0 points [-]

Hm. I don't know much about the way websites are parsed, but I figured it wasn't a perfect metric. At any rate, that's why I did both raw time and website size.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 29 January 2012 04:21:28AM -1 points [-]

No, you did not do raw time. That's the whole point of my comment.

Comment author: RobertLumley 29 January 2012 01:42:23PM 0 points [-]

Perhaps you can't see the graph for some reason. (But why you could see one and not the other is beyond me) There were other complaints as well, and I had a problem getting them to show up just for me. I tried uploading them as images, but I got a "Bad image" message. I'd suggest just opening up the spreadsheet I linked to, it's in there.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 29 January 2012 02:56:55PM 1 point [-]

Sorry. My fault.