Ask HN: How complex is what you are working on?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3461282

by heelhook • 15 years ago

12 10 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

On a scale from 0 to 10, how complex would you say is the project you are working on? (0 being a hello world) Why?

Note: By project I mean, the entire project, not just what you are working on, but also what other team mates are doing.

rg81• 15 years ago

What would 10 be? I need some more context before I can attempt to answer this question.

heelhook• 15 years ago

Right, 10 would be the most complex software you can think of related to what you are working on. What in layman terms could be referred to as "rocket science".

triggit• 15 years ago

Some of the most complex projects are also the least sexy.

At Triggit we are building technology around how to buy digital media. What does this mean? It means a start-up with less then 20 people evaluates over 12 billion ad impressions, across hundreds of millions of user records, every day. Since we bid and buy these ads in in Real Time we get less then 100 milliseconds to leverage the data provided by the sellers (people like google), the data provided by our clients (advertisers), internal data, and 3rd party data to dynamically evaluate and bid on inventory. We look at about 150,000 queries per second with hundreds of different bidders. Because of latency restraints and load balancing issues we can't work in the cloud, which means we must coordinate this entire effort across four data centers on three continents.

We legitimately deal with big data - so much data that its not worth storing the vast majority of it. Hadoop sort of keeps up, Hbase breaks regularly and the guys at MapR are up to some pretty cool stuff.

Who said an online advertising start-up couldn't be interesting :) Check it out at triggit.com.

byoung2• 15 years ago

8, on a logarithmic scale. Our web app uses 100 EC2 servers doing data aggregation, a recommendation engine written in Java, a cms using Drupal, an API written in PHP, and a front end using JSrender. We're using Mule for eventing, APE for push notifications, and pretty much every AWS service there is.

AznHisoka• 15 years ago

what web app is this, very curious

bri3d• 15 years ago

You've supplied the low-end of the spectrum (hello world) but not the high-end.

Asking people to describe the "complexity" of their product also seems to invite bragging about over-engineering - I could make my blog require 3 datastores and a message queue (this seems to be popular in some circles), and then post about how I'm solving complex problems and you should come work for me.

For what it's worth, I'd describe what I work on right now as quite complicated from a UI/UX and "number of inputs" standpoint, but quite simple technically - so I guess it falls somewhere in the middle in terms of "complexity?"

gdhillon• 15 years ago

I would say around 8 because of NLP usage and complex algorithms. Checkout http://diglig.com

glimcat• 15 years ago

It isn't very clear from how you get from text mining to tasks.

petervandijck• 15 years ago

I'd say a 6. The project itself is a 2, add 2 for technical constraints and 2 for partner constraints.

chris_dcosta• 15 years ago

I'd say 4 but to me it feels like 11 ;)

Just don't have enough time, money, or knowledge, and could do with some help actually!

Ask HN: How complex is what you are working on?

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