Top all-time · #1523
Foursquare
Company blog · engineering.foursquare.comdataprogramming
Foursquare is the company blog at engineering.foursquare.com, writing about data and programming. Since 2011, 47 different Hacker News readers have linked it 64 times, most often “Rogue: A Type-Safe Scala DSL for querying MongoDB”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-15, and you can follow it by feed.
Explore Foursquare's library of guides, case studies, and blog posts on location data, attribution measurement, geospatial analytics, and data-driven marketing strategy.
Most-linked posts?
- Rogue: A Type-Safe Scala DSL for querying MongoDB4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-01-21
- Quattroshapes: A Global Polygon Gazetteer from Foursquare3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-06-11
- Foursquare Engineering Blog3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-01-21
- How Foursquare embeds open source projects into an internal monorepo2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-08-15
- How we found the rudest cities in the world – Analytics foursquare2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-02-28
- Foursquare iOS Networking Library Open Sourced: FSNetworking2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-07-19
- Improving Our Engineering Interview Process2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-04-07
- Hadoop Stack at Foursquare2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-08-13
- Building a recommendation engine, foursquare style2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-03-22
- MongoDB at Foursquare – conference talk on Dec. 42 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-11-27
What Hacker News says?
Foursquare ( https://foursquare.com/jobs)| New York, NY and San Francisco, CA | ONSITE only We make the Foursquare and Swarm apps. Foursquare is a place recommendation engine with worldwide coverage. Swarm is an app for checking in to places you go to share with friends, life log, get perks and win prizes, or just for quirky fun. Built on the foundation of our apps, we also have suite of location intelligence produc…
Comment linking /2016/04/04/improving-our-engineering-interview-process/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2016)”Submitted Building a recommendation engine, foursquare style as a story · 84 points
HN discussionI think it's important when interviewing candidates that he/she can demonstrate fundamental CS knowledge. In any software project, you may be working out very complicated features, and CS knowledge is often the common language for conveying complex and subtle ideas. That said, it's perverse that there's a cottage industry around software engineering interview training on both sides of the table for the crazy questio…
Comment linking /2016/04/04/improving-our-e...
on “Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry”Submitted Websites are clients, too as a story · 63 points
HN discussionI've been meaning to put together a more technical blog post about the various geo pieces that we've released at foursquare. But for now, here's one that's an overview of the things we've been working on: http://engineering.foursquare.com/2013/06/11/quattroshapes-a... The biggest piece is http://twofishes.net/ , our coarse (city/neighborhood level) geocoder based on geonames data. It also serves as our coarse revers…
Comment linking /2013/06/11/quattroshapes-a-global-polygon-gazetteer-from-foursquare/
on “Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs”Submitted The Mathematics of Gamification as a story · 58 points
HN discussionIf a database lost data in a single server configuration, why would you trust it as a cluster? Please be serious here. EVERY database has had at one point lost data due to a bug. It doesn't mean that there is some systemic problem that means you should jump ship immediately. To this day Foursquare who are the ones referred to in the article still use MongoDB: http://engineering.foursquare.com/2012/11/27/mongodb-at-f…
Comment linking /2012/11/27/mongodb-at-foursquare-from-the-the-cloud-to-bare-metal/
on “A Year of MongoDB”Submitted How the World Looks to Your Phone as a story · 57 points
HN discussionPeople liked this may also like Rogue http://engineering.foursquare.com/2011/01/21/rogue-a-type-sa... which is Scala DSL for MongoDB. It is not a SQL database but can be compared in terms of semantics.
Comment linking /2011/01/21/rogue-a-type-safe-scala-dsl-for-querying-mongodb/
on “Meet Korma, a SQL DSL for Clojure”Submitted Rogue: A Type-Safe Scala DSL for querying MongoDB as a story · 46 points
HN discussionThis reminds me of an article by Foursquare about how they use Scala Phantom Types to ensure MongoDB queries are semantically well formed: https://engineering.foursquare.com/going-rogue-part-2-phanto...
Comment linking /going-rogue-part-2-phantom-types-d18ece7235e6
on “Leveraging the type system to avoid mistakes”Submitted MongoDB strategies for the disk-averse as a story · 21 points
HN discussionhttp://engineering.foursquare.com/2012/08/16/checking-in-at-... Roughly 30k active users, about 1 qps of live stream foursquare data. Not sure what to do with it, I'm not currently storing any of it. Thoughts?
Comment linking /2012/08/16/checking-in-at-the-movies-heres-how-to-never-miss-an-after-the-credits-teaser-again/
on “Sell HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell?”Submitted How Foursquare embeds open source projects into an internal monorepo as a story · 16 points
HN discussionScala code http://engineering.foursquare.com/2011/01/21/rogue-a-type-sa... Take a look at the APIs of some of the libraries you are likely to use, before you get scared off by how complex the syntax can potentially be.
Comment linking /2011/01/21/rogue-a-type-safe-scala-dsl-for-querying-mongodb/
on “Yes, Virginia, Scala is hard”Submitted Fun with MongoDB replica sets as a story · 16 points
HN discussionSEEKING WORK - SF Bay Area, Remote OK, Travel Negotiable I'm an ex-startup Software Engineer. Full stack, with a focus on backend systems. I was a core team member for http://getaround.com and http://wakemate.com . Heavily experienced in consumer products, collaborative consumption and quantified self. {Python: [Django, Flask, Bottle]} '(Clojure Compojure) Google App Engine, Heroku, Redis, Mongo, Mysql, Postgres. I…
Comment linking /2012/08/16/checking-in-at-the-movies-heres-how-to-never-miss-an-after-the-credits-teaser-again/
on “Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (June 2013)”Submitted How we found the rudest cities in the world – Analytics foursquare as a story · 13 points
HN discussionHere is the actual blog post from today announcing a bunch of Pants milestones: http://pantsbuild.github.io/announce_201409.html This is actually a collaborative project between Twitter, Foursquare & Square. All three companies contributed a ton of work. Here's the announcement on the Foursquare Eng Blog: http://engineering.foursquare.com/2014/09/16/introducing-pan... And here's the one on the Square Eng blog: http:…
Comment linking /2014/09/16/introducing-pants-a-build-system-for-large-scale-codebases-like-foursquares/
on “Pants: Build system by Twitter, Foursquare, and Square”Submitted Show and Tell: MongoDB at foursquare as a story · 10 points
HN discussionIt's not Agda, but you may be interested in this article by Foursquare about how they use Scala Phantom Types to ensure MongoDB queries are semantically well formed at compile time: https://engineering.foursquare.com/going-rogue-part-2-phanto...
Comment linking /going-rogue-part-2-phantom-types-d18ece7235e6
on “Learn you an Agda (2011)”Submitted Switching to a Probabilistic Model for Venue Search in Foursquare as a story · 9 points
HN discussionHappy to help out. FYI you can check out our eng blog at http://engineering.foursquare.com to see other posts about the technical details of foursquare.
Comment linking /
on “Why moving to Scala - Part I - Writing less code”Submitted Mongo on AWS: Stability in the midst of chaos as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThese are some of the top sites' engineering blogs which I collected over a period of time - I removed those which have already been posted: Google: http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/ http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/ http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/ YouTube: http://youtube-eng.blogspot.com/ Baidu: http://usa.baidu.com/category/baidutechblog/ Yahoo: http://yahooeng.tumblr.com/ http://yahoodevelopers.tumblr.…
Comment linking /
on “GitHub's Engineering Blog”Submitted Machine Learning with Large Networks of People and Places as a story · 9 points
HN discussionMore like throwing some wood into the fire. Was instigated by the talk[1] "Solr Power FTW", and "Building a recommendation engine, foursquare style" [6] (where Justin Moore admits: We are dumping the data from Mongo and loading it into Hadoop over S3 files. Map reduce is in this system, not in our mongo databases. ). Was wondering how much has this evolved over the last 6 months, how viable machine learning algorith…
Comment linking /2011/03/22/building-a-recommendation-engine-foursquare-style/
on “Full Text Search in Mongo”Submitted APIv2: Woulda, coulda, shoulda | Foursquare Engineering Blog as a story · 9 points
HN discussionMaybe using Rouge? http://engineering.foursquare.com/2011/01/21/rogue-a-type-sa... Persistence IMHO doesn't have to be a very important feature in a framework, since a good one should be able to be pluggable. I use Django, but in some projects I don't use their ORM (or any ORM).
Comment linking /2011/01/21/rogue-a-type-safe-scala-dsl-for-querying-mongodb/
on “Simply Lift”Submitted You Are (Probably) Here: Better Map Pins with DBSCAN and Random Forests as a story · 7 points
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