birken

66 ms·

541.
Who exactly is crawling my site?(danbirken.com)
97 points by birken 13y ago|78 comments
542.
by birken 13y ago
Reading also has an additional cost, which is if you read things that are wrong it can teach you incorrect things in addition to wasting your time reading it. Especially in the startup space, a lot of people like to write their experiences
543.
by birken 13y ago
When making short term trips to remote offices within a big company, having nearby corporate housing is awesome. This is probably the main reason Facebook is going to have 15 (not 394) units in this nearby complex. But that wouldn't
544.
by birken 13y ago
I find linkedin is the most useful social network I'm a part of, even though I rarely visit it. I have made many professional connections, and linkedin aggregates them nicely and I find the periodic emails of people getting new jobs o
545.
by birken 13y ago
The classic startup article fallacy. Let's look at these group of winning startups (from the somewhat distant past) and then find some commonalities and then make them a general guide for startups today. Without looking at the losers
546.
by birken 13y ago
There are a couple key omissions (though there are many -- this is not a particularly substantive article): - When you are joining a company, the first question you should ask is "How many outstanding shares are there?" All you r
547.
by birken 13y ago
Not to say that I am even potentially capable of competing at the world level, but the exact premise the author describes happened to me. I won multiple contests at the university level, finished one spot away from going to the world final
548.
by birken 13y ago
FYI: In 2007 was hired as a new-grad software engineer at Google with a college GPA of 2.66 So Google didn't have any minimum GPA requirement. I certainly was asked about the low GPA during my interviews, but it clearly didn't st
549.
by birken 14y ago
At Thumbtack we use Github for our source control, but not our code review. We use rietveld -- https://code.google.com/p/rietveld/ , which is an open source code review tool made to be similar to Google's internal code review tool, Mondra
550.
by birken 14y ago
As somebody who has gone through a startup that was pre-VC and post-VC, I assure you we didn't take investment to get written about or be cool. We took investment because to grow your company beyond the first few people you need to pay peo
551.
by birken 14y ago
I don't mean to pile on, but just one point about the data representation: I wouldn't add the cumulative lines to any of these graphs. It's almost never the right way to visualize data concerning growth, and just makes the data look better
552.
by birken 14y ago
Treating coworkers with respect should always be the first responsibility of all employees. Many of these situations you describe are gender discrimination, but even at a higher level they are just an example of coworkers not showing respe
553.
by birken 14y ago
We at Thumbtack use a similarly simple form, and our chargeback rates are very small [although admittedly we aren't a particularly attractive candidate for fraud]. We also did see both conversion increases and frustration decreases when we
554.
by birken 14y ago
If you want to know about a particular IP allocation, whois will help you out $ whois 173.194.55.0 I won't include the whole output, but here is the link of the allocation: http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-173-194-0-0-1 Basically, this
555.
by birken 14y ago
I don't think this is necessary for basketball. Having played quite a bit of pickup basketball in SF (and other cities), if you want to play basketball just go to the court with a ball. If there is nobody there, you just shoot around unti
556.
by birken 14y ago
Do you have munin monitoring on the production HN server? That would really make situations like this easier to debug. First, it can pinpoint exactly when something started happening, which in this situation might have helped you realize t
557.
by birken 14y ago
Thumbtack has an open-source split testing calculator which makes it very easy to see whether or not results like these are significant or not: http://www.thumbtack.com/labs/abba/#Sunday=47%2C389&Tues... If we treat "Sunday" as the ba
558.
by birken 14y ago
I would say it is a matter of personal preference. However, first and foremost whichever thing you prefer should be codified in your project's style guide. Consistency trumps everything else by a large margin. My personal opinion is that
559.
by birken 14y ago
At Thumbtack we have 2 main repositories, our PHP repo and our Python repo. Our python repo was built from the group up and we use it for lots of things, in fact I think it is larger than our PHP repo. However, our core website is written
560.
by birken 14y ago
If you find an odd situation in PHP due to backwards compatibility or whatever, I highly recommend you just make a wrapper function to do what you want. Another example of a common mistake with default functionality: Did you know json_decod
561.
by birken 14y ago
Preface: I have no personal experience with Y combinator. I've never applied, I've never interviewed, I don't know anything about it, etc. However, I'm guessing that this discussion and this article in general are giving way too little cre
562.
by birken 14y ago
I'd be slightly more careful about making the claim you are making (though in your defense, nearly every person who makes a boastful post about their A/B testing is makes the same mistake). For starters, you are picking an incredibly noisy
563.
by birken 14y ago
I think your point is unlikely to be accurate. The person that, by their presence in the transaction, is stigmatizing frivolous requests costs money too. Probably a lot more money than whatever minor percentage increase in equipment reque
564.
by birken 14y ago
I'm a huge fan of pandas ( http://pandas.pydata.org/ ) for data analysis. It offers a lot of the basic functionality of R, but everything is in python. The original author of pandas, Wes McKinney, even wrote a book about it: Python for Da
565.
by birken 14y ago
I apologize for at all seeming negative, I just want to clarify a few aspects of the story which I feel are a little misleading: "The buy in is a steep $1,000" - Yes, in absolute terms $1,000 buy-in is high, however by WSOP standards this i
566.
by birken 14y ago
Software Engineer - San Francisco, CA - Thumbtack.com We're looking for full time software engineers and mobile engineers. Our delicious company food culture has been featured on Inc.com and inspires many Bay-area startups. We eat family st
567.
by birken 14y ago
I agree with the first sentence, uptime is a very nice thing that users will notice and appreciate over time. However, I strongly disagree with the second sentence. Investing is uptime is not always worth it. Taken to its logical extrem
568.
by birken 14y ago
I think one factor people don't consider enough is the tradeoffs you need to make in order to make your app have incredible reliability. This article and other ones talk about a bunch of work you can do to help ensure you application stays
569.
by birken 14y ago
PHP is an incredibly complex project which is being actively developed [1] and improved. If there were very simple ways to update PHP that were universally agreed upon, they probably would be added (Like short array syntax, built-in HTTP s
570.
by birken 14y ago
I think that is a little unfair. The physical rack structure generally provides two things, a networking switch and power hookup, and both are two of the more reliable things that datacenters offer. In order for your application to surviv

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