I know how to make and sell software online, and I can share my tips with you.
Visit stevehanov.ca → RSS feedOn Hacker News Aug 2009 – Apr 2026
Software Engineering 9Math & Algorithms 4Web & Frontend 3Tech Industry & Business 2Startups 1Networking & Internet 1
<img src="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/bandits/MAB-2.jpg"/> A/B testing is used far too often, for something that performs so badly. It is defective by design: Segment users into two groups. Show the A group the old, tried and true stuff. Show the B group the new whiz-bang design with the bigger…
Stop burning cash on cloud bloat. Discover the exact $20/month stack I use to run multiple $10K MRR apps—before expensive infrastructure kills your startup.
<img src="http://stevehanov.ca/blog/images/acer.jpg"/> If you have a web site with a search function, you will rapidly realize that most mortals are terrible typists. Many searches contain mispelled words, and users will expect these searches to magically work. This magic is often done using levenshtein distance. In…
<img src="http://zwibbler.com/shared/1024.png"/> jQuery creator John Resig needs a little help storing lists of words in his side project. Let's go overkill and explore a little known branch of computer science called Succinct Data Structures.
<img src="http://stevehanov.ca/blog/wheel1.png"/>
If you are writing an application in Javascript, soon you will have to worry about memory leaks. But it is difficult to even know if a memory leak exists. This handy method can help.
On Monday, I was pleased to be an uninvited speaker at <a href="http://devwaterloo.pbworks.com/">Waterloo Devhouse</a>, hosted in <a href="http://postrank.com">Postrank's</a> magnificent office. After making some surreptitious alterations to their agile development wall, I gave a tongue-in-cheek talk on how C++ can…
<img src="http://stevehanov.ca/blog/images/acer.jpg"/> If you have a web site with a search function, you will rapidly realize that most mortals are terrible typists. Many searches contain mispelled words, and users will expect these searches to magically work. This magic is often done using levenshtein distance. In…
<img src="http://stevehanov.ca/wavelet/cup.png"/> Let's say you have millions of pictures of faces tagged with names. Given a new photo, how do you find the name of person that the photo most resembles? <p> In the cases I mentioned, each record has hundreds or thousands of elements: the pixels in a photo, or patterns…
<img src="http://stevehanov.ca/blog/images/stick-figures.png"/> Now it's a commercial product, but <a href="http://zwibbler.com">Zwibbler</a> was once a fun side-project, and here's some details on its implementation.
Sometimes you need complete control over the server, and don't want to pay $20 to $40 a month for a VPS. In this article, I'll describe step by step how to set up a home web server using Ubuntu, capable of handling modest spikes in traffic.