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hassyon Heroku WebSocket performance

I ran a quick test, an entry-level box from Digital Ocean can sustain 350+ connections/sec and maxes out at around 7,200 open connections.

Having root access to the machine would allow you to optimise some things and probably raise those numbers, but then you don't get the convenience of using Heroku.

hassyon A New Look for Facebook

I agree, flat design is in vogue (and is done badly most of the time). Where were all these designers with their beloved flat designs before Windows Phone came out? Rhetorical question, I know exactly where they were: designing and blogging about faux 3D iPhone-inspired UIs.

hassyon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (January 2013)

I'm putting polishing touches on http://wonderwheel.fm and I would love to build another Spotify app.

In general, I'm interested in projects with novel UIs, interesting interactions, and new ways to present information, like I would totally love to work on http://moonbase.com

h@veldstra.org

hassyon 'Black swans' and 'perfect storms' become lame excuses for bad risk management

> The black swan is something that is completely unforeseeable and for which there are no previous partial or complete examples, either of the final outcome or the contributing causes.

As far as someone is concerned. You misunderstand what a Black Swan event is. A Black Swan is at the root an opacity problem, and not one of forecasting. 9/11 certainly wasn't a Black Swan event for the hijackers or the masterminds, but it was for everyone else.

hassyon Startup Ideas: a response

> For a $10mm company to become a $1bn company, know what you need? Luck.

Luck is necessary but not sufficient. You also need to be in a position to disproportionately benefit from luck. I think PG's latest essay outlines what a venture in such a position looks like.

There are qualitative differences between startups that are going for $10m and those going after $1bn. The biggest is variance, which luck is a multiplier for.

hassyon You can do it alone

I can't believe it still needs pointed out to someone who's been on HN for a while:

YC was never about the money.

For an insight into PG's motivations, you might want to re-read his essay on cities (it's more likely to be "power", as in your influence on the world). The footnote in the Black Swan essay linked above seems to corroborate that.

hassyon Why Erlang matters

It's almost an acid test: the person complaining either has only a cursory familiarity with Erlang or is someone who prefers style over substance.

hassyon Ask HN: Learning to write good JavaScript

I think you're right. What I was trying to point out is that learning "Lisp" (which one?) is not a good way to get better at Javascript. Lua or Io - maybe, but even then the suggestions of other people in the thread for actual JS resources are so much better.

hassyon Ask HN: Learning to write good JavaScript

Sexps aside, no continuations, no TCO, and no macros mean that JS is actually pretty far from Lisp.

hassyon Vastrm (YC S12) Promises The Perfect Fitting Polo

Perhaps they have more interesting problems to solve than "how do we build our UI in HTML5"?

Getting a shirt that will fit well ranks much higher in most people's priorities than using only HTML-based webapps.

hassyon Grid (YC S12) Reinvents The Spreadsheet For The Tablet Age

You forgot parsing the formulae. You forgot having to decide which functions to include and implementing them. You forgot testing. Sure those aren't super hard, but minutes add up to hours and hours add up to days which turn into weeks. Most importantly, you forgot the UI. Building the UI for entering formulae - one that makes sense on the iPad and not just a copy of the one from Excel or Numbers (those suck) - would take a while.

hassyon Executives who are exceptional at chess

chess is old school. i want to see a list of founders who are exceptional at starcraft.

(only half-joking)

hassyon Former Facebooker Scoops Up $1.4 Million for Freshplum (YC S11)

So what does it do exactly? Is it something like automated A/B testing on prices/segments of customers? ("let's see if we can charge visitors on Macs a dollar more?" type of stuff?)

Love the design of the site.

hassyon Ask HN: Do you invest in the stock market?

early stage startups and property for example

hassyon Ask HN: Do you invest in the stock market?

I'll worry about it when I have it. But my current thinking is along the lines of: 10-20% in highly speculative stuff (much more so than stocks) and the rest in super-safe stuff (much safer than stocks).

hassyon Ask HN: Do you invest in the stock market?

Taleb is not a source of investing advice at all - he merely illustrates his philosophy with examples from finance as it's something he's more than familiar with.

Stock market is a fool's game by its nature.

hassyon Ask HN: Do you invest in the stock market?

Wouldn't ever do it. Stock market is for suckers.

(Based on reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb and conversations with people that worked on trading floors.)

hassyon Poll: Which text editor do you use daily?

I use ido and imenu to jump around, but this is for when you already know what's where and how it all fits together.

What about when you download some library from Github and want to quickly get an idea of how it all works?

hassyon Poll: Which text editor do you use daily?

What do you use for browsing code in a bunch of files in different directories (if anything)?

I use Emacs 99% of the time, but when I need to look through a codebase I'm not familiar with I use TextMate for its project panel.

hassyon [dead]

Pure trolling for traffic. Reading source code is a very ineffective way to learn beyond the "micro" level.

I consider erudition, a sense of history, and curiosity to be some of the most important qualities in any professional. Someone who hasn't read classics such as Why FP Matters, the original Lisp papers, the YACC paper, Codd's papers, The UNIX Time-Sharing System etc would show a complete lack of all of those.

hassyon Why I'm So Happy About MongoDB

HN is so easy to game - it takes very few votes in a short period of time to get something on the front page. The guy probably sent the link around to his buddies - I've been on the receiving end of a number of such requests (and ignored them).

hassyon Picking technologies on the right side of history

> Surely the right thing to do is to write your systems in such a way that you can pull out (say) a file-system explorer written in flex and replace it with one written in JS in as easy a manner as possible.

Especially if it was indeed as clear at the time that Flex was doomed as the author claims. Hindsight is 20/20 - "the history test" is BS without the benefit of it.

hassyon EBay acquires Hunch for $80m

> I don't believe real time is very hard.

At scale it is. More here:

http://www.quora.com/Hunch/Is-Hunch-actually-doing-anything-... (this one got a vote from one of the founders)

http://hassy.posterous.com/my-favorite-startups-hunch

hassyon EBay acquires Hunch for $80m

Don't forget that Hunch's system is real-time (this is very hard), and is more than just scalable collaborative filtering for items of the same kind. They can ingest a Twitter or Facebook profile, infer your "taste profile", and start recommending things instantly; "things" meaning books, films, music, events, places etc etc.

hassyon EBay acquires Hunch for $80m

> What is ebay thinking?

Impressive back-end tech (the recommendation engine) that can now process millions and millions of items on eBay to help increase sales (something like a quarter of Amazon's sales come from recommendations).

hassyon EBay acquires Hunch for $80m

I am somewhat disappointed since Chris Dixon has said Hunch would be in it for the long-term. (I've followed Hunch since it's early days* and always wanted to see it go big.) $80m is a nice pay-out though, the systems they've built have the potential to bring an immense amount of value to eBay's offerings, and a lot of that money will trickle down to other startups via angel investments.

* http://hassy.posterous.com/my-favorite-startups-hunch

hassyon CoffeeScript Means Giving Up on JavaScript

> First, understand that CoffeeScript is JavaScript - but without its idiosyncrasies.

...and a different syntax. That's my main objection to CS. I'm already working with 5 different syntaxes: Python, Javascript, Erlang, HTML, and CSS. Adding yet another one isn't appealing.

Perhaps if you're writing an app on top of the Node.js stack, you can use CoffeeScript everywhere. What I would've liked to see is CoffeeScript with a syntax as close to Javascript's as possible.

hassyon Spawnfest (Erlang 48 hour coding competition) winners announced

My entry is more of a joke (it won "The Play Your Own Game Prize") as I only had a couple of hours to spend. The code is here: https://github.com/hassy/obf-onion

hassyon The Coming Privacy Panic

He wants to put his money where his mouth is. What's wrong with that?

hassyon Yahoo's hadoop-based Latent Dirichlet Allocation On Github

This is very cool. If you want to play with topic modeling I'd suggest starting with Mallet (http://mallet.cs.umass.edu) For an idea of what topic modeling can do, check out http://bit.ly/wikitopics which provides a web-based UI for browsing through Wikileaks' Cablegate dump (powered by topic modeling/LDA/Mallet).