Dan Ariely research and books are excellent! I’ve just finishing his second book “The Upside of Irrationality”.
Here is a short example to the wonderful world he is clearing for us:
Author Archives: greenido
A Good Example to an Elevator Pitch
Very nice idea… As for this start up, I’m not sure what will be their revenue stream since this space is:
1. Crowded like crazy. The big guys are there (google, yahoo local, yelp etc’) and some cool start ups like Techcrunch 50 winner – RedBeacon. They are doing the same.
2. Local is very hard because it is a pure tail game. Even if they will try to focus on the 5 biggest cities in the USA first, it is still very hard to build an index and have a community to put comments/reviews/thumbs/scores on all these little business.
We will see…
New Data Stack Workshop: Building A Scalable Internet Datacenter
Here are few notes I took during yesterday conference in Stanford. The organizer (=Accel) did a very good job in bring some of the leading minds in the new emerging field of ‘Scalable’ and ‘Cloud’. Right… all of the speakers were ‘Accel companies’ – but they are the one who pushing the technology forward – so we cool with that.
The first company was NorthScale (and their chief architect is the same guy that we helped a year ago – with some real world data from high gear media servers). They have a very impressive open source project – Membase What is Membase you ask? Well, “Membase is an open-source (distributed, key-value database management system optimized for storing data behind interactive web applications. These applications must service many concurrent users; creating, storing, retrieving, aggregating, manipulating and presenting data in real-time. Supporting these requirements, membase processes data operations with quasi-deterministic low latency and high sustained throughput.”
In a nutshell:
- Membase it’s like memcached but better.
- Simple – get/set works with memcache client.
- Fast – ram, ssd and disk layer.
- Predictable latency.
- Availability – All nodes are created equal.
- Replication between data centers.
The second company was Cloudera – The bring to the table a full stack of Analytical Data Platform (ADP).
- It’s not only a map/reduce solution but the full stack of ‘watching the wheels moving’ and understanding where you want to steer them.
- BI is science for profit.
- View of the world / answer question to make money
- Pose hypothesis and validate them.
- A/b testing – feeding the business with real world hypothesis and their verifications.
- HDFS and map/reduce
- Jim gray – ‘fourth paradigm’
- HBase – base on google bigTable.
- Hive – SQL intercede for Hadoop.
What is Hadoop? Hadoop is the popular open-source implementation of MapReduce, a powerful tool designed for deep analysis and transformation of very large data sets - A good paper from Google: “The unreasonable effectiveness of Data’
- Beautiful data – buy the book.
Last (for me) was Facebook. Here the story is very simple… scaling from 4-5M in 2006 up to 400M now is putting some challenges on the development team.
- Scaling to 400M (efficiency is taking a hit at the beginning)
- Need all the data all the time.
- You / 100 friends / 100 objects-friends = 10’s of possible objects.
- Web Server / memcached / MySQL – and make sure you can replicate boxes in each layer without any changes to your code.
- Testing – Testing and some more unit testing, A/B Testing, System testing… you got the point.
- Push a new version every week. Don’t let your software ‘get old and stick’.
- Monitor EVERYTHING and when there is a problem always do what every you can in order to understand the root cause. Yes – even after you fixed it and everything is working now.
- No single point of failure (sometimes – your software will be the single point of failure).
Overall, it was very productive 3h that will make us try few new opensource projects. Good times.
jQuery 101 – Quick Good Presention with Examples
I saw this one few days ago… very cool pretension that will give you the power of jQuery in less then 5min.
Like the best things out there. Their power is lay in a simple philosophy they are based on. In jQuery case:
1. Find some DOM elements. For example: $(“p”)
2. Do something with them. For example: $(“#myDiv”).html(“<h2>Yo yo – this is very impressive bike</h2>”);
The power is the simplicity and the way you can chain functions. Example: $(“#myDiv”).html(“foo bar!”).fadeIn(slow); <– yes, this will make the addition fading into the screen in a nice slow animation. Try to think how many lines of JavaScript you need for that. There are lots of other goodies in the pretension – so give it a ride.
Last but not least (for every developer, designer and well… human) – coffee. I know some will say Starbucks is NOT coffee. But nevertheless, this ‘poem’ on the cup got my attention. As we know, it’s not about YOU…
How much are these Apples?
Great video that show you how to world has change and a lot of people are evaluating everything just by the ‘packaging’ and the ‘fancy’ descriptions.
What a real life examples? go to Draegers and then just go to Trader Joe’s – for the SAME cheese you will pay in Draegers… much much more.
The Best Motivator?
It’s not money… Once you get above rudimentary cognitive skill –> Rewards don’t works the way you think they should. It’s the opposites around.
Marathon Tel Aviv – Hot Hot Hot
In a nutshell, it was the hardest marathon I did due to the fact that the weather was…
How can I put it? hot as the desert in a very hot day. Overall, it was great event with lots of good friends running ‘around’ you in the marathon, half-marathon and 10k race.
Amarel did her first half-marathon and she did it in an excellent way! Very cool!
Now it is time to drink something…
Great Cycling Day With Two Mountains: Montebello-HWY9
Here is a little ‘recovery’ day I did yesterday with a good friend.
For full details:
Montebello-HWY9 With Guy Marom.
Yes – cycling in the bay area is an amazing adventure.
All the little roads that clip to HWY 35 are super nice.
Advanced jQuery & Javascript For Your Web App
This is an excellent 25min that (the one and only) John Resig gave at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami 2010.
If you don’t know when to use the new features of jQuery 1.4.2 like: .live and .delegate events – you must see it.
Main points to take home with you:
- Event delegation – Event delegation is a technique that routes around the traditional method of binding events. You must understand it and start using it if you have apps that use a lot of DOM elements. The example he gave was of a table with 10,000 cells. You do not need to bind the event to each cell but rather one event to the table element and by using the bubbling of events in the browser these events will be executed with less code and more efficiency.
- Use CDN. What is a CDN you ask? Well, A CDN is short for Content Delivery Network and what that effectively translates into is a bunch of geo-position data centers around the globe. Not all of us have the finances to build a whole bunch of data centers all around, but there are a number of great services that handle this. Amazon CloudFront is one that we (at High Gear Media) use and they are good and cheap.
- Minifying and gzipping your JavaScript. Easy and save lots of time. Performance – performance – performance (like Steve balamer like to say).
- Use jQuery UI and don’t re-invent the wheel. jQuery UI is a set of components and set of widgets that you can use, you can drop into your application, and they will just work. I’ve used them over and over again and each time they are getting better and better with a great API that let you (the developer) all the power to customize and work with them.
Ido Green 
