It’s a big month for awesome events at Yelp HQ!  Of special interest to those wondering how Yelp uses Hadoop is the Hadoop User Group on the 19th.  I’ll be presenting on where Hadoop fits into our Big Data stack.  Unfortunately, Hadoop isn’t quite pixie dust you can sprinkle on data and transmorph it into insights.  To get the most of the system, we’re careful what we feed in, how we schedule jobs, and what we do with the results.  Please RSVP to join me for a great discussion! Other meetups this month include the always diverse and interesting Designers...

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The desktop 3D printing evolution has taken the world by storm. For me, it all started a little over two years ago when Yelp bought its engineers a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic 3D Printer to play around with. The sounds and smells that accommodate desktop 3D printing have since become second nature to our corner of the office. While we haven’t yet found a way for 3D printing to help our users connect with great local businesses, it has been a great driver of innovation and fun in our engineering team. What started out as a few engineers printing toys has since...

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This summer, our interns spent their weekdays in downtown San Francisco alongside full-time engineers developing some of Yelp’s latest releases: mobile reviews, Yelp’s launch in Brazil, and others still in the works. Mark M. and Olivia G., interns from our mobile and community teams, shared a little about their projects. Though rivals on their college campuses, our Cal and Stanford interns put aside their differences to engineer some really neat stuff. Mark M. (Mobile Team - UC Berkeley) “I spent the summer creating an entirely new framework built around data analytics. My tool allows us to visualize and analyze critical...

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On Wednesday, November 20, Yelp opened up the doors of our new space and invited tech industry friends to come by and see what we’re up to. Scott Clark and John B., two of our engineers, gave presentations about current technology challenges we’re working on here at Yelp. Search Engineering Manager Chris T. gives us a play-by-play below! The crowd started arriving at our new building in San Francisco even before the official start time of 6pm. I ended up chatting with some folks in front of the building and did not get up to the party on the 8th...

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This post comes to us from Allen C., an engineer on our mobile team. The mobile team has dozens of innovations under their belt, and today Allen explains how the iOS team uses HTML views to quickly roll out features that originate on the web. In the third quarter of 2013, the Yelp mobile app was used on more than 11 million unique mobile devices on a monthly average basis. We’re continuously pushing the envelope to make the app user experience as great as possible. A common requirement in our app is displaying embedded web content for a variety of...

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Here at Yelp we take pride in providing accurate business listings. This is a harder problem than you might think. There are about 50 million businesses listed on Yelp, businesses come and go at an astonishing rate, and reasonable people can — and frequently do — disagree about whether a piece of information is accurate or not (e.g., does a doctor qualify for his own listing or just to be listed under her medical practice?). We’ve always thought we did a pretty good job, but we thought it was worth benchmarking ourselves against the competition. Though there is always room...

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We’ve been brewing up some cool events for October! We took a break in September to move into our new digs, so please come to the right building :) Yelp is primarily a Python shop, so we are especially excited to be hosting the language’s creator, also known as the Benevolent Dictator for Life, Guido van Rossum, for a talk on his work replacing Python’s async I/O libraries with something called Tulip. We’ve also got a bunch of cool talks on Venture Capital brought to you by Women Who Code to a SFHTML event where Chris Wilson is talking about...

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The Challenge The inaugural Yelp Dataset Challenge opened in March 2013 with the release of our latest academic dataset featuring reviews and businesses from the greater Phoenix metro area. The goal of the dataset was to encourage development of new techniques in data analysis and machine learning while providing the academic community with a rich dataset over which to train their models. Students who submitted their research related to the dataset were eligible for a cash reward and further incentives for publishing and presenting their findings. The Winners of the First Yelp Dataset Challenge The challenge was viewed by many...

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