alexdias's comments

alexdias | 4 years ago | on: Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook

An ad that is “relevant” to me is an ad that leads me to think “yes, this item is exactly what I was looking for”. Sometimes you know you want to buy something (let’s say a backpack) but you don’t know which brand/model to go for.

This is where ads come in: a backpack company can run ads that should be shown to people interested in buying backpacks, and it’s potentially a win-win: you find a cool item that you buy, and the company gets a new customer.

alexdias | 7 years ago | on: A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11M Users on Amazon's AWS (2016)

Depends on your stack and requirements (do you want to know about errors ASAP, or is a 2-5 minute delay ok?), but I personally love NewRelic because of how easy it is to set up (and the number of features that it has).

If you want tools that you can manage yourself, then a combination of StatsD + Grafana for metrics, and Sentry for errors. For logs, Graylog if you want to set up something complicated but powerful, and syslog-ng if you just want to dump the logs somewhere (so you can simply grep them).

alexdias | 8 years ago | on: Why I love Go

1) The struct's fields will have the default value for their respective type. I understand you might want to force specific values, but if this is the case, maybe you could only export an interface to the struct? And said interface would have the "constructor" methods.

2) You can always encapsulate errors. Your code will still have a type assertion or switch, but you don't need to use string parsing (although I have seen string parsing used in libraries such as mgo - the MongoDB client library).

3) Because maps are references, just like slices. You can still call len() on a nil map and therefore treat it as an empty map? If you mean the assignment to nil maps: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-nuts/RkYIF8Sq...

4) This is subjective I think, but I disagree. I like just being able to type "return" instead of for instance typing in 6 different places "return something, err".

5) Do you mean un-exported structs (and therefore lowercase)? I haven't come across this, but I can see where it could be an issue. I usually just use VSCode and mouse over to quickly see a name's definition.

I agree with you that it's not perfect, but as I saw someone else say on the internet, it's the least bad language (in my opinion). And I don't envy you for working with dependency injection in Go :)

alexdias | 12 years ago | on: What Real-Time Gambling Data Reveals About Sports

They handle real-time events exactly as your latter example stated: an external (licensed) company provides live data, and orders that were placed during a dangerous situation (e.g. one-on-one) are subsequently voided if a goal is scored.

alexdias | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2013)

Smarkets, London, Software Engineer (Python, Erlang & Mobile), QA and Test Automation Engineer, Operations Engineer

Smarkets is disrupting the global betting industry by offering a modern betting exchange with significantly lower transaction fees than the competition. We're a well-funded company with a small, agile development team, and our platform has handled over £365 million of bets since launching in 2010. Smarkets has been featured in publications such as Wired, The Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch and was recently selected as part of the Startups 100.

We're building a reliable, low-latency exchange system to facilitate automated traded strategies, as well as a fast, modern web interface. Our team constantly works on significant, challenging software engineering problems; if you're fed up of writing yet another boring CMS, we might be able to help. The Smarkets platform is written predominantly in Python and Erlang, and relies heavily on asynchronous programming techniques and REST. We make extensive use of version control, configuration management and automated testing, which allows us to reliably deploy code to production several times a day.

Our team builds on a modern, open-source software stack which includes Linux, Vagrant, Flask, Eventlet, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, ElasticSearch, Graphite, Chef and Git.

For more info: http://info.smarkets.com/about/jobs/

alexdias | 13 years ago | on: The Great Dropbox Space Race

Yes.

#2 is especially known for its technical institute (IST, where I study), which competes with another one in #8 for the title of the country's best engineering school (the one in Porto has been winning past years' programming competitions).

#6 is known in the country for its CS degree.

alexdias | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: All films for rental on iTunes (in 61 stores) by price/popularity/genre

Good job, but the data could use a little more refinement.

I'm in Portugal, and for instance The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is shown as being available for 3,99€. The movie page then lists the movie as being available for rent at $3.99 (SD) or $4.99 (HD).

When I open the iTunes store though, the movie is only available for purchase at 13,99€.

I take it that your movie page gets the data from the US store, but from a user experience point of view it should get the data from the user's country.

alexdias | 13 years ago | on: Eastwooding Photos

Clint Eastwood appeared as a surprise guest yesterday on the GOP Convention in Tampa, Florida. He pretended that Obama was sitting on a chair next to him and proceeded to ask it questions.

alexdias | 13 years ago | on: The Exodus of Tech from Portugal

I'm a soon to be MSc graduate from a top university in Portugal (Technical University of Lisbon). I've been thinking about my options, and right now I'm pretty sure that I'll try to find my first job outside of Portugal. I've got very few colleagues that I know of that will do the same. Most will go to consultancy companies - that's the market in Portugal. The remaining will go for PhDs.

However, one thing that they all have in common is that they have spoken of leaving Portugal sometime in the future. Be it after their first year or so in consultancy or after their PhD, the thought of leaving has crossed their minds.

Given that other industries are a lot worse than tech right now (civil engineers, lawyers, etc) I'm not really sure how this will turn out for the country.

alexdias | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: MoodTrack, a simple iPhone app to track your moods and thoughts

Personally, I think emotions would be more intuitive/easier to choose from than numbers. However, the number of emotions to choose from would have to be low (I'd say 4 or 5). I can see why you'd want to use numbers for analysis, but you can assign a value to each emotion as well.

A list/grid of emoticons would be fine for displaying the options. Nike+ does something similar to this when it gives you the option to say how you felt during a workout.

alexdias | 14 years ago | on: My U.S. Border Nightmare

Well, I guess that all depends on your upbringing.

I'm from Southern Europe and I'd say it's quite normal for waiters to greet customers like that (except on fancy, expensive places of course). You don't have to "create bonds" with them, it's just a matter of being friendly.

Also, don't forget that waiters in the U.S. live off their tips, so I guess that can be a reason as to why they try to be as friendly as possible.

alexdias | 14 years ago | on: IPhone. Single. Looking to make friends on any network.

From what I can see on my Macbook Pro, yes, there is. One of the hostnames (the one that connected after the original) is automatically changed (in my experience it either appends a number to your current hostname or it completely changes your hostname, to something based on the network).

PS: I'm guessing here that the iOS behaviour when it comes to hostnames is similar to Lion's.

alexdias | 14 years ago | on: Ask HN: Should I start looking for remote/freelance work outside my country?

Thank you for the words of support.

Unfortunately people in my generation are not seeing a brief end to this. Emigration has increased by about 40% last year. And this is in a country where the public universities are the best ones, so the state ends up investing in people's education, but it cannot keep them in the country.

Also, low salaries in computer engineering are not the only thing wrong in the profession. I have heard countless stories of people working in consulting companies, having to do unpaid overtime work. Internships are also usually unpaid (and this is on every area, not just Comp. Eng.).

I am a senior student at the aforementioned top university, and I don't think I know anyone that isn't thinking about leaving the country (even if for a while, not permanently). The university's vice-president gave an interview for a national newspaper: he referred to this problem as "our brains are leaving the country" (and he meant not only students, but researchers as well).

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