midas

San Francisco, CA - priceonomics.com/jobs Software Engineer

Priceonomics is the price guide for everything. We're a team of four who are passionate about reinventing how people search, discover, and purchase products.

Crawling & indexing millions of pages per day is not an easy task, but you're good at it. You enjoy optimizing systems, making them perform faster, and appreciate git commits where more code is removed than is added. Our backend stack currently consists of Postgres, Celery, Django, and ElasticSearch. We need to be able to handle billions of data points, and hope you can build something to that can do much more.

Small puzzle with instructions to apply:

DJkmoljtnJLtrJ91VTEyL29xMFO0nTymYPOyoJScoPOioJSlDUOlnJAyo25ioJywpl5wo20tq2y0nPO0nTHtp3IvnzIwqPOfnJ5yVPqvo29gVTxtq2yhWl4=

It's amazing how much cheaper new TVs are getting, it's one tiny indicator of how much the quality of our lives (or at least or technology) is improving.

Thanks Forrest! We'll now be upgrading to pasta and red sauce.

Haha, thanks!

What are you typing in? If you enter "priceonomics" (no quotes) it should redirect to /priceless.

@nknight and @olalonde thanks for the feedback guys, genuinely helpful. It's nice to see that on HN.

Feel free to email me directly anytime: michael [at] priceonomics [dot] com.

Thanks! I had an intentional 100ms delay between keystrokes, but I just lowered it to 25ms on my local and it's looking much better.

Ha!

How did you get that result? The javascript should autocomplete to our cars guide if you type in "car": http://cl.ly/0x0z2F393U20383s3b2G

You can manually override if you want to, but if it's not doing it by default that's a bug.

Priceonomics (YC W12) - San Francisco

Front-End Engineer - Full Time

Priceonomics is the price guide for everything. We're a team of three who are passionate about reinventing how people search, discover, and purchase products.

We're based in the heart of San Francisco, on the edge of SoMa/Mission. We have great investors like Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, Ron Conway (SV Angel), Crunch Fund and many more.

Details (and a fun puzzle!) here: http://priceonomics.com/jobs/

I wonder if the reason that there are so few e-readers for sale is because their use-case doesn't really change. In other words, they remain useful for much longer.

This might make people hold onto them instead of constantly upgrading to the latest version.

It's a bit surprising that rank on HN and general traffic/mentions aren't very well correlated.

I wonder what iPhone ownership is like in Microsoft's turf (Redmond WA)?

I don't normally give to charity, but this is totally awesome.

I'm not sure, but I love that the ratio of the price to fix a cracked screen vs the value created by doing that is roughly the same across all model of iPhones. Put differently, it makes sense that you can always make a little money by fixing up iPhones. You'd expect people to value that more than just the cost of doing it (no uncertainty, not having to look around, etc).

Priceonomics has great data on that as well (median price = $150): http://priceonomics.com/phones/htc/droid-incredible/

The post looks at the no-contract prices, so it assumes you paid ~$600 for the phone and then sold it for ~$300 18 months later.

It's pretty amazing that we pay ~$90 a month to Verizon but only ~$13 a month to Apple. Intuitively it feels that Apple is the one creating most of the value.

It makes sense intuitively that heavy appliances would be the most profitable. People don't say, "sure you can have my iPod for $20" but I could see them being willing to part with a washing machine for that price if someone would carry it out of their third story apartment.

Sorry if that's not clear, it's all indexed to 100. Those are all relative values and not absolute values.

It's practically impossible to reverse engineer the SERP, but if you look at the Domain Authority for both codecademy.com and codecademy.org, you'll find that the former is orders of magnitude higher (65 vs 35). This might explain a lot.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

You can also lookup how many inbound links the sites have using different anchor text like "Code Academy".

It really depends on how many pages you have. If you just have 10 pages off the domain (/signup, /login, /about, /jobs, /how-it-works, etc) then there's really no benefit of having a hierarchy. If you have > 1k pages, then a flat structure will confuse google/users and do a poor job spreading your site's link equity amongst your pages.

Is that what you're asking?

We use all kinds of cool tools (maybe we should put them all on the site somewhere?), but we use python mostly. We love python!

Thanks for the feedback and sorry about that. We made some tweaks to our search this morning to speed it up for launch and some searches like yours suffered as a result. This (unintuitive) search should get you what you're looking for: http://priceonomics.com/search?s=apple+macbook+air

We'll get it cleaned up for you in the next version!

Aren't there other ways to do database replication?

My company was in a similar boat with a decade plus old domain (though I don't think it ever had anything scummy associated with it before we bought it). When we first started testing our site in January '09, our "click here to verify your email address" emails were going to spam, and it was a major bummer. After a week of calling ~100 of our friends with @gmail accounts to sign up and mark the email as not spam, our messages finally started going through.

I have no idea if that's a normal sample size, nor any proof that that's what made the difference. Regardless, I strongly believe that having lots of people go to their spam folder and mark you as not spam has a huge effect; if I was designing a spam filter I'd definitely weight that feedback heavily. If you can somehow build that into your app (i.e. make people verify their email to continue), in the long term it should solve your problem. In the short term, your UX will be a little worse and you'll be constantly wondering how long it's going to take until google trusts you. Welcome to the nightmare that is email deliverability!