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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

#41

Post by thrdOriginal »

moconnor wrote: post #38
moconnor wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, my other unreleased side project has come to light. Time to add some login screens, then :-)

Actually, forget the login screens, it can stay public. This is the first time I've ever launched a site in a 4th level comment, though. Analytk's a pet real-time blog tracking site I wrote because I was thoroughly dissatisfied with the typical ones. It tracks each post individually, updating every minute to begin with (exponential backoff after 1 hour, not truncated). It also picks up HN and reddit ranks and scores,…

Whoops, didn't mean to out your pet project. I enjoyed your post and I too was curious which analytics script you were using so I checked the page source to see what was going on. I wondered about the lack of documentation on the homepage...looks cool though.

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

#42

Post by jdp23 »

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...

Very useful -- excellent post and looking forward to the followup!

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

#43

Post by binomial »

stevenbedrick wrote: post #25
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…

I'd love any resources you could point to that were helpful to you when builder your recommendation engines (also, do you have links to the actual engines?). I've been going through a tutorial to understand how SVD works [1], but it would be nice to find something that will help me deal with implementation details. I thought I might just use Gensim [2] for now, but the authors of that tool themselves say that Gensim is more of a framework to learn about these things rather than a production-ready tool.

[1] http://www.miislita.com/information-retrieval-tutorial/svd-l... [2] http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/gensim/index.html

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

#44

Post by Groxx »

JimEngland wrote: post #26
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/

Proof that The Internet does indeed hate you, and wants everyone to remember it forever, even if you don't.

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

#45

Post by raccer »

"Day 5 - Embarrassing Flaw #3: Making a stupid business plan, then ignore it anyway"

Awesome! (I lol'd) I love inventing. It's only recently that I've started to add business logic to my imagination, I'm no Jedi in this capacity, but the force was strong at startup school; and I want to train!

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

#46

Post by zrail »

bricestacey wrote: post #32
nopal wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only difference between Blossom and Koi is the size of the database. The only way to improve performance is to increase the number of dynos or workers you use.

This is actually possible to do dynamically[1] so you can keep your costs down. I found this post last week and implemented it over the weekend, and it's pretty neat to watch it work. So far I've only implemented this for workers, but it's certainly possible[2] to implement it for dynos.

[1]: http://blog.darkhax.com/2010/07/30/auto-scale-your-resque-wo... [2]: http://github.com/ddollar/heroku-autoscale

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

#47

Post by jayliew »

moconnor: did you keep a journal while you were building this app?

I'm thinking to myself as I am reading this that there's no way you could have gotten from A-Z, then only after that started filling in the blanks accurately about what you did on day #X. (Heck, I can't remember what I ate yesterday!)

Motivational, good stuff, thanks for sharing.

Now I'm thinking of an app for HN'ers who just need a little help getting something like this off the ground: An app that lets you chronicle every day a short paragraph of what you did to move the ball forward.

Plus, there will be a nagging^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeer-accountability feature built-in. Your progress is public and other HN'ers can "tap" you on the shoulder if there's a lack of progress and say "what's up with this?"

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

#48

Post by gridspy »

jayliew wrote: post #47

moconnor: did you keep a journal while you were building this app? I'm thinking to myself as I am reading this that there's no way you could have gotten from A-Z, then only after that started filling in the blanks accurately about what you did on day #X. (Heck, I can't remember what I ate yesterday!) Motivational, good stuff, thanks for sharing. Now I'm thinking of an app for HN'ers who just need a little help gettin…

Personally, I keep a timesheet on when I started and finished working on something, for instance

Tue 19/10/2010 | 15:40:00 | 17:10:06 | 1:30:06 | Looking at admin interface for sensor daetails. Trying to fix None issue, seems to be related to subclassed models. Adding code to twisted for CT settings

Turns out that one of my Django models is breaking the Django admin interface, and also that I have to have calibration details for the Current Transformer sensors we use (http://gridspy.co.nz)

Another one

18/10/2010 | 8:50:00 | 9:56:36 | 1:06:36 | Server maintaince, removed orbited, checked memory usage. Killed backup scripts, installed python 2.7

Naturally it is all in an Excel spreadsheet. :)

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

#50

Post by jayliew »

gridspy wrote: post #48
jayliew wrote: post #47

moconnor: did you keep a journal while you were building this app? I'm thinking to myself as I am reading this that there's no way you could have gotten from A-Z, then only after that started filling in the blanks accurately about what you did on day #X. (Heck, I can't remember what I ate yesterday!) Motivational, good stuff, thanks for sharing. Now I'm thinking of an app for HN'ers who just need a little help gettin…

Personally, I keep a timesheet on when I started and finished working on something, for instance Tue 19/10/2010 | 15:40:00 | 17:10:06 | 1:30:06 | Looking at admin interface for sensor daetails. Trying to fix None issue, seems to be related to subclassed models. Adding code to twisted for CT settings Turns out that one of my Django models is breaking the Django admin interface, and also that I have to have calibration…

Do you find that it helps? The closest thing I got that looks like what you got above there are my git log messages!
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