Thumbtack Engineering Blog - Latest Comments

Re: Gambling with the devil: A/B tests done right

annielin — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:24:38 -0000

http://www.zazzle.com/the_revo...

Re: Gambling with the devil: A/B tests done right

annielin — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:22:45 -0000

http://www.zazzle.com/the_revo...

Re: A primer on Python decorators – Thumbtack Engineering

Peter Bengtsson — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 14:58:36 -0000

Maybe you should also mention (and recommend even) to use functools to automatically make decorators. It's more convenient and it takes care of "copying" the doc string too.

Re: A primer on Python decorators – Thumbtack Engineering

Bosco Wambua — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:20:04 -0000

very detailed and well written, nice post

Re: A primer on Python decorators – Thumbtack Engineering

maheshcr — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 23:31:48 -0000

Very well written, been avoiding decorators for a while now...not any more!

Re: A primer on Python decorators – Thumbtack Engineering

Paul J Warner — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 15:04:08 -0000

Make sure the memoize definition is created BEFORE you use it.

Re: A primer on Python decorators – Thumbtack Engineering

Philip Rideout — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 11:26:56 -0000

Very well-written post. Nice!

Re: A primer on Python decorators – Thumbtack Engineering

Pete Austin — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 05:56:37 -0000

I make a point of stepping through all new code in the debugger, so as to double-check what it's really doing, but this is a pain with decorated functions, making them much less useful. Do you know of any python IDE that allows you to bypass the wrapper code when stepping? Genuine question.

Re: A primer on Python decorators – Thumbtack Engineering

Andrey Shipilov — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 03:54:30 -0000

You should just create the def memoize(): function before.

Re: A primer on Python decorators – Thumbtack Engineering

Jonathan M. Lane — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 01:30:15 -0000

The Fibonacci memoization example definitely reminded me of the CS class when we learnt about recursive functions.

Re: A primer on Python decorators – Thumbtack Engineering

Anmar Mansur — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:50:10 -0000

Informative and very well written. I'm referring a whole bunch of CS101 students your way. They've learned all about recursion and memoization. I'm sure they'll enjoy adding decorators to their code.

Re: A primer on Python decorators – Thumbtack Engineering

Erich Blume — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:45:02 -0000

Kyle Gorman - You probably have a typo, my guess would be in the very first line of the 'memoize' decorator definition. The error is suggesting that 'memoize' hasn't been defined, which means you probably wrote something like 'def memorize' on accident, instead of 'def memoize'.
I checked it on 3.2.1 and it seems to work just fine.

Re: A primer on Python decorators – Thumbtack Engineering

Hassan Shah — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:26:30 -0000

Pretty nice writeup on Python decorators.

One nitpick though, Java does let you call class methods through instance variables (behind the scenes it is still a call to the class' method).

Re: A primer on Python decorators – Thumbtack Engineering

Kyle Gorman — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 22:32:46 -0000

I feel like I'm missing something, since the memoization code snippets crash in both Python 2.7.2+ and Python 3.2.3rc2 with the following error:

NameError: name 'memoize' is not defined

Is there some module I should be importing or something?

Re: A primer on Python decorators – Thumbtack Engineering

CasualSuperman — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 21:18:22 -0000

Neat, love learning new things!

Re: A primer on Python decorators – Thumbtack Engineering

okonomiyaki3000 — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 20:46:23 -0000

This is pretty cool. Do you have any idea if there is something similar planned for a future version of PHP?

Just kiddin.

Re: A primer on Python decorators – Thumbtack Engineering

mintypt — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 20:10:48 -0000

I have been postponing the reading of how python decorators work. You just blew my mind! Thank you!

Re: Gambling with the devil: A/B tests done right

Aaron Goodman — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:23:41 -0000

This is an excellent approach.

+1 Using Aggresti-Coull confidence bounds. Normal approximation are notoriously flawed [1]
+1 Using Multiple Test Corrections
+1 For using exact conditional value

Nice Work!

Aaron Goodman
Lead Data Scientist
Custora

[1] Lawrence D. Brown, T. Tony Cai and Anirban DasGupta Statistical Science Vol. 16, No. 2 (May, 2001), pp. 101-117

Re: Building our own tracking engine with MongoDB

Adrian grigore — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 19:23:55 -0000

Thanks for the interesting post! I'd be very much interested in how you evaluate the data you are collecting. Collecting it seems relatively easy in comparison.

Re: How we got people to earn our schwag

whit537 — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 09:05:01 -0000

They are indeed high-quality. I never take schwag but I happily earned these. My entry featured a Pythonic "Direction" object as well as docstrings and a test suite. :D
https://gist.github.com/211124...

Re: Googlebot makes POST requests via AJAX

Repliques De Sac — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 03:10:44 -0000

The real Google crawler sometimes are difficult to catch its track and content-capture style.

Re: How we got people to earn our schwag

Roey Chasman — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 22:56:54 -0000

I am a CS undergrad and these examples really expanded my mind to what is possible! Thanks for posting them, all these programmers are incredible.

Re: Food rules for startups: eight delicious ways to build a better company

Hong — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 01:09:09 -0000

Can't wait for my lunch and/or dinner at Thumbtack! See you next week. :)

Re: Food rules for startups: eight delicious ways to build a better company

Jeffrey Tagen — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 07:22:12 -0000

Wow, taking a guess from the photo, your chef cooks korean bibimbap? That's awesome!

Re: Food rules for startups: eight delicious ways to build a better company

Thomas — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:50:36 -0000

This is an old bible proverb..a family that prays and eats together stays together.