Hacker News Reader

timaelliotton A syntax comparison across many languages

http://hyperpolyglot.org/scripting is a similiar resource for php, perl, python and ruby only.

timaelliotton Marco Arment on Dropbox: Don't use it for anything valuable

I use http://sugarsync.com personally which provides versioning and also lets you arbitrarily sync directories, not just the 'dropbox' one.

timaelliotton Advice for Marissa Mayer from an ex-Yahoo

He already told you, they are good with the goddamn customers. They have people skills, they are good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you?

timaelliotton Heroku Postgres Basic Plan

I don't disagree nor do I use heroku, it's moot for myself.

I was just commenting how row-limitations were a very NoSQL way of enforcing data limits and inappropriate for an RDBMS.

timaelliotton Heroku Postgres Basic Plan

I like that you guys pointed out more efficient ways to do stupid things :)

timaelliotton Heroku Postgres Basic Plan

I disagree. By restricting the number of rows I think you're just going to end up with folks creating sloppy schemas specifically to avoid going over the limit.

  post.categories (varchar) = "1,51,78,84,100"

and other wonderful non-normalized approaches.

timaelliotton Login vs Log In

Is making otherwise innocuous changes which have a substantial impact on user behavior important to the startup culture?

No, no at all.

timaelliotton Patent Troll sues Facebook, Amazon and others for using Hadoop

I fantasize about computers too. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see.

timaelliotton The Education of Groupon CEO Andrew Mason

Took about 45 seconds of Google+Yelp to determine it's http://www.yelp.com/biz/mirai-chicago

timaelliotton Don’t Have a College Degree? Your Chances for Unemployment Have Just Doubled

Nice try, overpriced US universities and for-profit degree mills.

timaelliotton Ask HN: Negotiating equity. Is 10% enough?

Awesome response from Spolsky but that's not Quora. You can tell because it has users and content :)

timaelliotton Ask HN: Negotiating equity. Is 10% enough?

Why do you think you'd only get paid $33k? If that's the case, that's suggesting the compensation and ownership is:

  Co-Founder: $33k Salary, 45% Equity
  Co-Founder: $33k Salary, 45% Equity
         You: $33k Salary, 10% Equity

I'm hoping the problem is self-evident.

timaelliotton Twitter says they fixed the Memcache calcification problem. Dormando disagrees.

Yes.

In 2008/2009, another engineer and myself built an ad-platform that received around 500M impressions per day, 5M clicks per day. And it wasn't just recording a tweet or publishing out to followers. We took the user input query, had to do some keyword/relevancy targeting, geofiltering, matching to advertisers and deliver back a large result set of adverts. All within 100ms.

Our platform was also apache, mod_php, memcached, mysql and rabbitmq. So definitely not the most optimal of platforms by any means. We had two colos with ~20 servers (dell r410s) at each facility.

Twitter just recently announced 400M tweets/day. I'm not trying to brag about my experiences, because looking back now we made numerous amateur mistakes, but just showing that Twitter's "scale" is a joke compared to everyday challenges at any large internet ad network.

timaelliotton How I Turned Down $300l from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub

What unit suffix is 'l'

timaelliotton Twitter says they fixed the Memcache calcification problem. Dormando disagrees.

Twitter's attitude is laughable. Yes, you have a decent amount of traffic but you're also only dealing with ~160 uncompressed bytes (plus whatever overhead) per event. The hurdles you've overcame aren't that particularly amazing nor challenging.

timaelliotton The Cheapest Route to 6 Continents

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem

timaelliotton New Dropbox Pro plans

Yeah, just not cutting it for me. I understand the workarounds but the reality is they shouldn't be required. I should be able to right-click a directory and "Add to Dropbox"

timaelliotton "The whole Droplr stack runs on HTTPS" ...except content

I use droplr for quick screen-sharing, pastes, file-transfers, etc. I do not use it for anything sensitive whatsoever.

timaelliotton "The whole Droplr stack runs on HTTPS" ...except content

They really should have more intelligent individuals manning public-facing support channels.

timaelliotton What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies

Redis is a key-value store. S3 is a distributed file system.

Can we stop labeling the set of "not a rdbms" data storage mechanisms with the stupid fucking "NoSQL" moniker.

timaelliotton What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies

Hrm, so for a proximity search it basically has to take a combination of all potential encompassing geohashes and then do a second-pass (substantially reduced data set) using a haversine approach or something.

I suppose that might work pretty well.

timaelliotton What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies

So you make the r-tree 3 dimensions (lat,lng,time). PostgreSQL supports this.

I dunno I can't envision Solr being more efficient than a properly designed RDBMS for these situations. If you were integrating a full-text search I'd absolutely believe that to be the case but...

timaelliotton New Dropbox Pro plans

I really wish Dropbox would add the ability for arbitrary directory syncing. This single "dropbox" folder is so annoying.

Until them, I'm quite content with one of their competitors.

timaelliotton What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies

> For our geo-search API, we used PostgreSQL for many months, but once our Media entries were sharded, moved over to using Apache Solr. It has a simple JSON interface, so as far as our application is concerned, it’s just another API to consume.

Does anyone have particular insight to share on this? Last I checked, Solr's geospatial searching methods are rather inefficient -- haversine across all documents, bounding boxes that rely on haversine and Solr4 was looking into geohashes (better but have some serious edge-case problems where they fall apart).

Meanwhile PostgreSQL offers r-tree indexing for spatial queries and is blazing fast.

Am I missing some hidden power about Solr's geospatial lookups that make it faster/better than an r-tree implementation?

timaelliotton Stripe Raises $20M From General Catalyst, Sequoia, Thiel

Paypal hates everyone, not just developers.

timaelliotton Dumping PHP For Go

Author has either been making some ridiculously inappropriate system apps or is about to start making equally questionable web apps.

Obviously languages can serve multiple purposes but the intended uses of these have almost no overlap.

timaelliotton Plivo (YC S12) launches scalable API platform for Voice & SMS Apps

I strongly suggest you communicate your pricing as $0.008 instead of 0.8 cents. Be consistent with your units and more importantly: how people think.

timaelliotton Starting out with Ruby on Rails

http://www.codeschool.com/courses/rails-for-zombies

http://www.codeschool.com/courses/rails-for-zombies-2

http://www.codeschool.com/courses/try-ruby

timaelliotton PHP: The Right Way

This is an excellent point. I so often attribute my disdain to Java itself when, in reality, the issue is the majority of Java engineers.

Java itself can be a beautifully terse language.

timaelliotton PHP: The Right Way

Java still gives me nightmares ;(