hackNY Summer Lecture Series: Union Square Ventures

hackNY Summer Lecture Series: Union Square Ventures:

In this post 2011 hackNY Fellow Akarshan Kumar describes the hackNY Summer Series lecture by the partners at Union Square Ventures.

On Monday, July 25, 2011, the hackNY fellows were hosted by Union Square Ventures in their swank new office on Broadway. We got a chance to speak to three of the firm’s partners, Brad Burnham, Fred Wilson and Albert Wenger, and also spoke to Gary and Christina about their experiences working with USV. With investments in companies like Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga and Etsy, Union Square Ventures is one of the best VC firms in the country – we were excited to be there.

The partners spoke on a variety of topics – like what the firm looked for in prospective investments, the importance of a good team (as opposed to just a good idea), and what, according to them, were the characteristics of a good pitch (“A pitch is like a party” – Wilson).

Gary and Christina hung out with us later, and it was nice to hear their take too. Gary, having worked in a number of different environments, shared his perspective – “You should follow what you genuinely love doing… If someone doesn’t like what you are doing, it’s their problem, not yours.” Christina talked about her career-path post college and how (and more important, why) she left the Boston Consulting Group to come work for USV.

It was inspiring to see the entire team up close, and it was the perfect talk to begin our final week of hacking in New York.

MySQl Cluster 7.2 at OOW Demo Pod

MySQl Cluster 7.2 at OOW Demo Pod:

Be sure to drop by the MySQL Demo Pod while you are attending Oracle Open World. There you will see a demo of the changes in MySQL Cluster 7.2. My favorite part of this release is that you can access the same data via SQL, LDAP, REST, memcached or via APIs. You get the best of both SQLand NoSQL worlds in one. At the Demo Pod, you can see how to see how Adaptive Query Localization speed up joins. Plus the demo will preview the latest and

greatest 7.2 DMR capabilities, and also demonstrate how MySQL Cluster

remains operational during node failures, upgrades and re-configuration

and how simple it is to create a live cluster using MySQL Cluster Manager. In the past, many cluster users avoid joins and simply used primary key or key/value pairs. But Adaptive Query Localization gets the data nodes to do more of the work in parallel.

And Cluster Administration has been greatly streamlined. So less typing gets you more performance.

So drop by the MySQL Demo Pod as you will want to see MySQL Cluster 7.2 in action. And there will be several session on cluster covering in detail things I have not mentioned here.

Red Hat continues to convert the masses to Linux.

Red Hat swells sales and profits in fiscal Q2

This is definitely one of the better investment choices I've made over the years. Think I'll continue to hold onto this stock.

Major Online Poker Site's Owners Gambled with Players' Deposits [Gambling]

Major Online Poker Site's Owners Gambled with Players' Deposits [Gambling]:

Even though they've been shut down for months, online poker sites are still finding new ways to get themselves into trouble. Full Tilt Poker—probably the most popular site for high-stakes players—is accused of taking players' deposit money and gambling with it. More »

yet another online pokersite currupted. At one point is it just not worth the risk of joining on of these?

Android > iOS (And Other Statistics)

This is actually a pretty decent debate. Can you make decision though based on just page view from either device, probably not. Crawl the AppStore and you'll find it hard to find a decent stackexchange app, While in the Market you have a few really good options.

P.S - Android all day!!

Android > iOS (And Other Statistics):

As you can imagine, we’re sitting on quite a bit of data here about programmers and the technologies they use. We’ve used this for various things in the past (for instance, you can use your history on the site to promote yourself on Careers 2.0) but we’ve never done a deep dive into the data and presented what it says about the popularity of various technologies among developers.

Well, as you can tell from the title of the post, that ends today. Thanks to the help of our summer math intern Qiaochu, we pulled millions of data points around some of the most popular technologies and are now ready to settle the debate and declare with certainty which technologies developers prefer.* We’ll start with two matchups today, but we’ll be doing some more in the near future.

Before we get started, a quick note on the methodology (since I know it will get challenged in the comments): we looked at a number of different metrics and ultimately settled on using % of total users who are active (active being defined as asked, answered, voted, or commented on a question in that month) on the relevant tags. All of the other metrics you’d think of (page views, total votes, etc) tracked pretty closely with the users numbers but were much more likely to be skewed by “blockbuster” questions and were therefore deemed less reliable. And with that out of the way, on to the matchups!

#1 – Android vs. iOS

WINNER: Android

There have been endless articles written debating which platform is more popular with developers, Android or iOS. Some have claimed that iOS is more developer friendly, while the other side claims that Android is bound to win and so developers should focus on that. After analyzing all our data, the verdict is: Android is now more popular than iOS with developers.

As you can see below, iOS was running ahead of Android for several years, but peaked and stagnated in June 2010 (following the release of the iPhone 4). Android, on the other hand, has been on a tear since December of 2009 and overtook iOS as of the beginning of 2011. Unsurprisingly, iOS continues to stall (even declining somewhat) whereas Android continues its growth and is now approaching utilization by 10% of all SO developers.

#2 – Flash v. HTML5

WINNER: HTML5

This one is another biggie with most people coming down hard on one side or the other (and being fierce about it). But for most, the fact that HTML5 is the winner here isn’t the big surprise: rather, it’s how long its taken HTML5 to overtake Flash.

Flash has been on a long (but slow) slide downward as its fallen out of favor in the last few years. That said, there’s a lot of legacy support left for it and a lot of people who still really want it (can you say, restaurants) even with it’s inferior user experience; and as such, there’s still plenty of developers asking and answering questions about it on SO. HTML5 on the other hand has been on a slow and steady climb; not the rocket like growth that Android has shown.

Still, we can see that HTML5 is the rising star and Flash is on the way out, but it looks like it will still be around for a while before it does.

So there you go, Stack Overflow’s first round of technology face-offs. We’ve got more planned, but feel free to suggest any others that you’d like to see and we’ll try to fit them in.

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*obviously this line is in jest – but we do still think this is a pretty good approximation and insight into how the usage of various technologies has evolved

Setting up a new machine for Ruby development

Setting up a new machine for Ruby development:

It used to be a jarring experience to setup a new machine for development, but progress has paved the dirt road into a silky smooth autobahn. These are the tools we use today:

1. Homebrew: Remember how painful it used to be to get imagemagick installed? Now it takes about a minute. “brew install imagemagick”. Same story for git and other Linux dependencies.



2. rbenv/ruby-build: We have some apps running on Ruby 1.8.7, some on 1.9.2, and some on 1.9.3. ruby-build makes it easy to compile all three, rbenv makes it easy to switch between them on a per-project basis. We run rbenv in production as well, so all you need to do to change the Ruby version there is alter .rbenv-version—development and production is always on the same page.


3. Bundler: Not everyone at 37signals loved Bundler at first, but now that it’s stable, they’ve been won over. I now curse whenever I have to use an old application that hasn’t been setup with Bundler. Manually tracing down dependencies?! How prehistoric!


4. rake setup: All our apps has a rake setup task that’ll run bundler, create the databases, import seeds, and install any auxiliary software (little these days) or do any other setup. So when you git clone a new app, you know that “rake setup” will take care of you.


5. Pow: No more messing with Apache or nginx for local development. All it takes for Pow to add another app is a symlink. All the apps are always configured and available at basecamp.dev, highrise.dev, etc without messing with the hosts file either.

Thanks to Max Howell for Homebrew, Sam Stephenson for rbenv/ruby-build and Pow, and Carl Lerche/Yehuda Katz for Bundler. Thanks to them, starting from scratch has never been easier.

Just think on it for a sec..

After a bad management decision (well, one in the line of many) at work this evening, I have come to wonder a few things.
How did the people who are in power come into power? What about them said that they had the skills and insight to organize and maintain? Who made that decision?
Did it happen all at once? Did we just say go ahead and ruin our days? Or was it more just a rising by a series of unfortunate events?
This line of questioning is not just limited to work. Turn on the news and it is there again to haunt me.