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Directed Edge News
Company blog · blog.directededge.comstartupsprogramming
Directed Edge News is the company blog at blog.directededge.com, writing about startups and programming. Since 2008, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 41 times, most often “On Building A Stupidly Fast Graph Database”. The last post was in 2013, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Cited on HN as a source rather than judged on its writing: commenters link its posts on Y Combinator interviews, the company logo story, Facebook's news feed, and graph database speed.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- On Building A Stupidly Fast Graph Database3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-02-27
- The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-11-05
- The Logo Story2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-08-11
- Facebook’s news feed: The beginning of a recommendations dominated web2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-10-23
- On Building a Stupidly Fast Graph Database (2009)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-21
What Hacker News says?
We track the programming language that our customers are using on sign up. Our customers aren't particularly early-adopter-ish, so I assume it's a reasonable approximation (taken over a decently large sample of sites): http://blog.directededge.com/2010/05/30/what-programming-lan... See also: http://www.indeed.com/jobanalytics/jobtrends?q=ruby+rails%2C... Or even (this one surprises me, since I figured Python general…
Comment linking /2010/05/30/what-programming-languages-do-our-customers-use/
on “Matz (creator of Ruby) joins Heroku”Submitted The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not as a story · 167 points
HN discussionC++ is largely backwards compatible to C, but idiomatic code is very different in modern practice between the two. A somewhat dated blog post I wrote on the topic a decade ago: https://blog.directededge.com/2009/05/21/c-and-c-are-not-the...
Comment linking /2009/05/21/c-and-c-are-not-the-same-language/
on “Ask HN: What should a systems/low-level software engineer know?”Submitted On Applying to Y Combinator as a story · 161 points
HN discussionMost people don't get into systems programming by writing a database completely on their own, and it's fair to say that the line between application and systems programming is fuzzy. Here are a bunch of things I would broadly consider systems programming: - Kernel and driver development - Low level library development (pretty much anything involving bit wrangling) - Platform abstraction libraries - Database developm…
Comment linking /2009/02/27/on-building-a-stupidly-fast-graph-database/
on “Ask HN: How to learn proper systems programming?”Submitted On Building A Stupidly Fast Graph Database as a story · 159 points
HN discussionI'm sorry, but this is not a YC grievance comment by any stretch. And it is not mine. Damien Katz wrote it a long time ago, and he is not bitter. I submitted to HN as I could not find it posted here, and wanted to know the community had to say. I had in mind it would foster a discussion on YC interview tips and experiences, which are sorely lacking arond the web (specially failed interviews, and these teach more tha…
Comment linking /2009/11/05/the-interview-with-y-combinator-thats-not/
on “How not to Pitch To Y Combinator (2006)”Submitted Google Spam Heresy: The AdSense Paradox as a story · 84 points
HN discussionYou wouldn't get to give a slick presentation even if you had one. We had a few bullet points on a piece of paper that we wanted to hit and I think we maybe hit one of five (and were accepted). We actually had a bunch of supporting materials that we never used. The starting point generally seems to be the demo and then your ability to talk about it. We did have various demo-y things on my laptop loaded up and ready…
Comment linking /2009/11/05/the-interview-with-y-combinator-thats-not/
on “How not to Pitch To Y Combinator (2006)”Submitted The easiest way to add recommendations to your Rails app: acts_as_edgy as a story · 70 points
HN discussionThanks, we are in fact very happy with our logo and how it all came together: http://blog.directededge.com/2009/08/10/the-logo-story/
Comment linking /2009/08/10/the-logo-story/
on “Recommendations engine DirectedEdge opens up to developers”Submitted Making ActiveResource 34x faster: QActiveResource as a story · 68 points
HN discussionJust for clarification, we've of course been open to developers in the past, what's new here is that we've created a free developer's plan: http://www.directededge.com/signup-developer.html And of course all of the stuff about Shopify integration, which we're really excited about: http://apps.shopify.com/shopify_applications/e7d74dd9b5d86c9... More on that here (which I just posted separately, since that's mostly a…
Comment linking /2010/01/06/directed-edge-shopify-easy/
on “Recommendations engine DirectedEdge opens up to developers”Submitted C and C++ are not the same language. as a story · 60 points
HN discussionyou're idea reminded me of this blog post: http://blog.directededge.com/2009/10/23/facebooks-news-feed-... i certainly agree that increasingly, software fortunes will be made by applying ever more intelligent and adaptive criteria to the information that actually makes it to an eyeball.
Comment linking /2009/10/23/facebooks-news-feed-the-beginning-of-a-recommendations-dominated-web/
on “New Twitter, JTV RFSes; Winter 2010 deadline pushed back 2 days”Submitted The curious case of equidistant boxes, a CSS fail as a story · 50 points
HN discussionHmm, messing around with this at the moment. Your test case works in IE 7 (fired up VMWare to give it a spin -- noticed my example code actually doesn't, but the real widget does), but I still haven't gotten it working with real images. I'll update here once I see if I can get that going. As an addendum, in the non-contrived case (the one the widget actually uses) it also allows text to spread beyond the width of th…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2010/04/recommendations-test-shop.png
on “The curious case of equidistant boxes, a CSS fail”Submitted Facebook’s news feed: The beginning of a recommendations dominated web as a story · 49 points
HN discussionI'm trying to see how a graph database would be significantly faster than a key-value database. The only thing that comes to mind is that with graph databases a node's edges contain direct pointers or offsets to the other nodes, instead of containing the "public" string key of every other node, which has to be looked up via the B-tree index. This conclusion is supported by http://blog.directededge.com/2009/02/27/on-…
Comment linking /2009/02/27/on-building-a-stupidly-fast-graph-database/
on “Neo Technology Raise $2.4M To Commercialize neo4j Graph Database”Submitted Search vs. Recommendations, or Authoritative and Related Sources in a Graph as a story · 43 points
HN discussionI think the title is fine. He's not suggesting that this new malloc is the one "to rule them all". It sounds like he hasn't even tried it yet. Instead, he's wishing that there was such a malloc: That’s the crazy thing about malloc implementations. They all claim to be awesome in every way. So the burning question is: is this better than what I’m using today? I don’t know, but I’d sure like to! I like the article, bu…
Comment linking /2009/02/27/on-building-a-stupidly-fast-graph-database/
on “One malloc to rule them all”Submitted In defense of Perl. as a story · 43 points
HN discussion"Answers go out by mail at almost exactly the same time as rejections. I’ve never heard of YC finishing them up before relatively late at night." Scott Wheeler of DirectedEdge (YC), http://blog.directededge.com/2009/11/05/the-interview-with-y...
Comment linking /2009/11/05/the-interview-with-y-combinator-thats-not/
on “Is anyone else dying to know......”Submitted For the love of POSIX: A more useful way to not segfault from null pointers as a story · 39 points
HN discussionOne of the interesting things on doing some analytics on our customer base was seeing just how wide the gap is between the usual HN fare and reality: http://blog.directededge.com/2010/05/30/what-programming-lan... The core message being: things like Scala, Erlang, et al still represent a tiny portion of the actual tech world. (And our customers tend to be biased towards being techy anyway.) Just because CoffeeScript…
Comment linking /2010/05/30/what-programming-languages-do-our-customers-use/
on “Poll: Have you moved from JavaScript to CoffeeScript?”Submitted Directed Edge driving recommendations in Microsoft’s MediaRoom CES demo as a story · 39 points
HN discussionI think as startups grow, they tend to end up with something of a frankenstein-ish mix of languages as they write bits that are well suited to each language. For us I ended up checking C++, Java, Javascript, Perl and Ruby, though we have little bits also in Python, Scala and PHP as well. As a sidenote, we track which programming languages our webservices customers are using and I made a graph of such here: http://bl…
Comment linking /2010/05/30/what-programming-languages-do-our-customers-use/
on “Poll: What programming language do you use for your app/startup?”Submitted Directed Edge (wheels' startup) launches public beta, finds related articles in Wikipedia as a story · 36 points
HN discussionI wrote about us applying multiple times (and eventually being accepted) here: http://blog.directededge.com/2009/09/30/on-applying-to-y-com...
Comment linking /2009/09/30/on-applying-to-y-combinator/
on “So you didn't get into YC...”Submitted The Logo Story as a story · 32 points
HN discussion
