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Embarrassing Flaws That Made My ‘Weekend’ App Possible

yieldthought.com

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Re: Embarrassing Flaws That Made My ‘Weekend’ App Possible

#21

Post by theycallmemorty »

moconnor wrote: post #9
zipdog wrote: post #8

"If I’d played around with every piece of technology I should be using whether I felt like it or not, I’d never have got anywhere." I feel like this all the time. Sometimes it's better to do a less-great job in a language you know backwards and skip the learning curve of a new tech. The site works really well btw: after entering a handful of my favs it took my a while to get through all the games I already like to fi…

Great, I'm glad to hear it's proving useful! I'll do a follow up with how well my NoDB implementation stood up to the pounding it's getting at the moment later in the week...

Here's a feature suggestion for you from a fellow BGGer: Allow users to restrict the search to games from with specific amounts of players.

Re: Embarrassing Flaws That Made My ‘Weekend’ App Possible

#22

Post by BrandonM »

pierrefar wrote: post #4
c4urself wrote: post #2

"While thinking about this on a plane to England, my mind makes the natural leap from my motley collection of python functions to turning down acquisition offers from Amazon and being invited to talk at Davos." haha happens all the time, who else suffers from this?

Delusions of grandeur, IMHO, are a key part of the drive entrepreneurs need to slug through the pain of building a new business.

Wouldn't those delusions also be a source of the emotional rollercoaster ride that pg talks about? It seems to me that an entrepreneur that can keep a level head and realistic expectations will not only have lower highs but higher lows.

I would expect that the delusions may help with building a large-scale business: in order to achieve the desired grandeur, a big exit will be necessary. VCs and wealthy entrepreneurs are better off expecting to change the world.

The first-time entrepreneur (and some angel investors), on the other hand, would probably be better served by having realistic projections and reasonable goals.

Re: Embarrassing Flaws That Made My ‘Weekend’ App Possible

#25

Post by stevenbedrick »

kenjackson wrote: post #10

I haven't looked at this data to know if this would fit, but SVD worked really well for the Netflix prize. When I first heard its use in recommender systems I laughed and then thought... wow, that's kind of perfect. Here's a good explanation if you're not familliar with it, and very accessible to those who haven't studied linear algebra (or haven't thought about it in a long time) http://journal.batard.info/post/2009…

+1 to this... I've had very good luck using SVD/LSA-ish approaches for building recommendation engines.

HOWEVER- the big catch with naïve (i.e., simple to implement and understand) approaches to LSA are that every time you add a new datum, you have to recompute the SVD of your data- which is time consuming, and raises some interesting logistical challenges when done in the context of a web app (i.e., how you persist your matrices, etc.). There are more sophisticated LSA approaches that get around some of these problems, but they're more complex to implement.

Nothing insurmountable, but kind of a pain nonetheless, and w.r.t. the system described in the parent post, I'm not sure how well they'd integrate with GAE- can you use NumPy/GSL/etc. on GAE? Or would you be stuck using some sort of Java numerical computing library?

Re: Embarrassing Flaws That Made My ‘Weekend’ App Possible

#26

Post by JimEngland »

ojbyrne wrote: post #18

In the very oldest version of digg to be found on the internet archive, if you view source there's an sql query inside an html comment. Embarrassment, trapped in amber forever.

http://web.archive.org/web/20041209040106/http://digg.com/

Re: Embarrassing Flaws That Made My ‘Weekend’ App Possible

#27

Post by nopal »

albemuth wrote: post #17
Timothee wrote: post #16

This convinced me to use AppEngine for a tiny little project I've been thinking of this past week. It'd be useful to me, probably others, but knowing that I wouldn't have to worry about anything on the hosting side (be it bandwidth, uptime...) would be nice. Actually, I'm looking forward to have some time soon to get started...

also www.heroku.com

I really wish they'd show me what I can run on Koi (links to current sites). I know they make deployment a snap, but I worry that I'd be forced to add more and more resources to keep my site running as I'd hope.

Re: Embarrassing Flaws That Made My ‘Weekend’ App Possible

#28

Post by Timothee »

albemuth wrote: post #17
Timothee wrote: post #16

This convinced me to use AppEngine for a tiny little project I've been thinking of this past week. It'd be useful to me, probably others, but knowing that I wouldn't have to worry about anything on the hosting side (be it bandwidth, uptime...) would be nice. Actually, I'm looking forward to have some time soon to get started...

also www.heroku.com

Interesting, I didn't know they had a free plan. (never looked into it that much)

5MB of DB and 1 "dyno" would be plenty for what I have in mind (let's be honest: 1kB would be sufficient :)), so I'll definitely keep it in mind as well. But now the eternal question for me comes back again: Ruby or Python...

Thanks for pointing it out to me!

Re: Embarrassing Flaws That Made My ‘Weekend’ App Possible

#29

Post by sp4rki »

There was a time in my life where I really thought I needed to keep up with the latest and greatest technologies, libraries, et cetera. As the author discovered, you don't need to. I can now sleep easily knowing that I 'marked as read' the newest no-sql magix and do x y & z gems that I really didn't mind to read about. Great read.

Re: Embarrassing Flaws That Made My ‘Weekend’ App Possible

#30

Post by philwelch »

BrandonM wrote: post #22
pierrefar wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delusions of grandeur, IMHO, are a key part of the drive entrepreneurs need to slug through the pain of building a new business.

Wouldn't those delusions also be a source of the emotional rollercoaster ride that pg talks about? It seems to me that an entrepreneur that can keep a level head and realistic expectations will not only have lower highs but higher lows. I would expect that the delusions may help with building a large-scale business: in order to achieve the desired grandeur, a big exit will be necessary. VCs and wealthy entrepreneurs…

"It seems to me that an entrepreneur that can keep a level head and realistic expectations will not only have lower highs but higher lows."

http://sivers.org/horses

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