Hacker News: anuraggoel

New comment by anuraggoel in "The Zen of HN"

anuraggoel — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:55:01 +0000

You could add something to the effect of 'say nothing you wouldn't say to our face'.

New comment by anuraggoel in "Starting Up, One Year Later: The Downward Spiral"

anuraggoel — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 09:41:31 +0000

> Mostly only people wound as tightly as me

Isn't that demographic also your target audience for this post?

New comment by anuraggoel in "Customers given too many choices are 10x less likely to buy"

anuraggoel — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 04:38:21 +0000

Fair point, but isn't the jam example also a product aisle with 24 varieties of jam? My current frontpage recommendations include around 15 laptops and 15 books - I can't possibly buy all of them - aren't they asking me to choose? If they showed me just three from each product category, and fewer categories overall, I might actually be interested in the recommendations.

New comment by anuraggoel in "Customers given too many choices are 10x less likely to buy"

anuraggoel — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 04:27:35 +0000

This sounds reasonable. But I've always wondered about Amazon.com's UI strategy in the context of choice - they always show me much more crap than I am interested in: on the home page, on search result pages, on product detail pages, pretty much everywhere on their site. Right now I can see well over 30 'recommended' items on their homepage (and this is after the huge Kindle ad). Surely they've conducted A/B tests. Why don't they see the same results?

New comment by anuraggoel in "Updated YC Company Hosting Stats"

anuraggoel — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:35:40 +0000

Why did you switch to Rackspace?

New comment by anuraggoel in "Celery: A Distributed Task Queue for Django"

anuraggoel — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:54:19 +0000

I might not want to swap out Django with CGI, but I might want to use RabbitMQ-based distributed tasks in Pylons. Seems like a waste to write all that code from scratch. For Django users (and I am one), Celery is clearly useful. But a distributed task processing library, even if it is a thin wrapper over RabbitMQ, should not depend on a web-framework.

New comment by anuraggoel in "Celery: A Distributed Task Queue for Django"

anuraggoel — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:57:10 +0000

Looks interesting. But shouldn't a library like celery work outside the context of a web framework? I don't see a reason to call this a distributed task queue 'for Django' specifically, except for the dependencies on Django's ORM and settings definitions. Swapping out Django's ORM with SQLAlchemy (or DB-API) would make this project much more useful.

See pp (http://www.parallelpython.com/) for something similar, without the django dependency. More parallel processing goodies at http://wiki.python.org/moin/ParallelProcessing.

New comment by anuraggoel in "Scribd on the front page of BusinessWeek.com"

anuraggoel — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 23:53:49 +0000

On WSJ.com too: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124475525754407679.html#mod=...

It looks like Scribd is building a reader for the iPhone, and this app will also allow searching within Simon & Shuster pbooks. This is interesting because it sounds similar to what you can do with Google Books, though on a much smaller scale.

Also from the WSJ article, Scribd's PDFs can be read on the Sony Reader but not on the Kindle DX - which means they've probably adopted Adobe's DRM. Are we going to see DRM-free paid content from Scribd at some point?

New comment by anuraggoel in "Mapping Out Your Web Startup"

anuraggoel — Sun, 31 May 2009 09:13:51 +0000

Great list. I would also add a box for 'Core Values'. It might help, for instance, in computing a more accurate valuation of 'Fear' as a trade object.

New comment by anuraggoel in "Curing Python's Neglect"

anuraggoel — Sat, 30 May 2009 08:14:13 +0000

http://docs.python.org/library/constants.html#exit

In CPython, exit is actually an object of type site.Quitter (the actual class is implementation dependent). site.Quitter overrides the __repr__ special method (which is called by the interpreter on any expression typed in the shell to print the result). site.Quitter also overrides the __call__ special method, so when an object of type site.Quitter is called, the overridden __call__ method invokes system exit.

   >>> exit_class = type(exit) #gets a reference to the class
   >>> my_exit = exit_class('bye') #the arg is used to print the message
   >>> my_exit
   Use bye() or Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit
   >>> my_exit()

Minor inconsistency: typing "bye()" doesn't work so technically the message is incorrect. But I suppose they don't want you to be hacking exit() in the first place.

New comment by anuraggoel in "Bing"

anuraggoel — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:21:50 +0000

They explicitly state they don't use SearchWiki to influence ranking right now.

From http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/11/google-searchwiki-l...:

"At this time we aren't using SearchWiki to influence ranking but it is easy to see how that could happen in the future," says Marissa Mayer.

I suppose they are going to wait until they get a meaningful amount of user data before they start using it.

New comment by anuraggoel in "Bing"

anuraggoel — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:16:36 +0000

Xmarks search is indeed a cool concept (much like delicious search), but I don't bookmark everything useful I find on the web - so bookmark-based search will never be quite as comprehensive.

In a way, search engines already account for up-modding by factoring in which links you click on when you are given a page of search results. But you are more likely to click on results already at the top, so I wouldn't give too much weight to that information.

The SearchWiki concept has a lot of potential if Google decides to go down that path though.

New comment by anuraggoel in "Bing"

anuraggoel — Thu, 28 May 2009 18:47:00 +0000

A user's SearchWiki rankings do not influence other users' search results. Yet. Till that happens, it's not really HN-style modding.

New comment by anuraggoel in "Plastic Logic: Like Kindle, but Thin like iPhone."

anuraggoel — Thu, 28 May 2009 04:08:02 +0000

Actually, Plastic Logic first started marketing this reader in fall 2008. Makes you wonder.

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29020

Line-profiler: line-level profiling for python

anuraggoel — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:02:40 +0000

Article URL: http://packages.python.org/line_profiler/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=628849

Points: 26

# Comments: 1

New comment by anuraggoel in "Topsy Search Launches: ReTweets Are The New Currency Of The Web"

anuraggoel — Wed, 27 May 2009 03:18:10 +0000

While its a nifty service, Topsy seems to be 'static' search for Twitter - another version of "

site:twitter.com" (especially when you consider Google's time-range search options). A lot of people seem to be linking to tweets on blogs and forums, and the 'old-fashioned' currency of these links seems to be missing in Topsy (and present in the Google version). This omission could be an issue for their ranking algos when linking to tweets becomes more common.

If I were the Topsy team, I would also worry about Twitter adding a static option to their own search. Unless of course I am hoping to go the Summize route.

Benchmarking BDB, CDB and Tokyo Cabinet on large datasets

anuraggoel — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:06:06 +0000

Article URL: http://www.dmo.ca/blog/benchmarking-hash-databases-on-large-data/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=622350

Points: 41

# Comments: 22

The Publisher as a Digital Concierge

anuraggoel — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:38:33 +0000

Article URL: http://personanondata.blogspot.com/2009/05/digital-concierge.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=620793

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by anuraggoel in "Scribd Invites Writers to Upload Work and Name Their Price"

anuraggoel — Mon, 18 May 2009 03:39:25 +0000

Amazon pays Kindle authors/publishers 35% of the list price (which is set by the content owner). The retail price is set by Amazon. Scribd's margins are clearly more lucrative. Smashwords (http://www.smashwords.com) operates a similar model and pays out 85%. I think this is a great move - high traffic alternatives to Amazon can only be good for the self-publishing ecosystem.

An Open Letter To Newspaper Publishers

anuraggoel — Sat, 09 May 2009 22:47:55 +0000

Article URL: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/05/an-open-letter-to-newspaper-pu.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=601536

Points: 1

# Comments: 0