Runa is hiring Clojure developers
workatruna.com
workatruna.com
It certainly sounds like they have everything (business case /tech etc) well laid out. If I were a potential employee I'd have liked some information on what kind of equity a new employee could expect - RethinkDB set the standard here (http://www.rethinkdb.com/jobs/), but other than that very very minor quibble i think this is as good a recruiting pitch as I have seen.
(Due Disclosure: (a) Amit Rathore is a good friend of mine. (b) I have nothing to do with Runa or this ad. I am just curious as to how people here perceive the opportunity).
Hence a suggestion, FWIW: in addition to improving conversion rate, it might be also worthwhile to try to sell more stuff to existing customers. You know what they want and you know they're not averse to spending money online.
How do you intend to differentiate yourself from Direct Edge (my take is you're specifically looking to target CTRs rather than build a recommendation engine?) as well as a start-up in San Mateo the name of which escapes me which does something like this (but is well funded and more enterprise focused)?
Best of luck!
Also how are they different from directed edge a YC funded start up.
If they are doing predictive analysis/machine learning stuff, It makes sense to use Java, Python and C in that order since Java is what Hadoop is written in, while python and C allow very low dev time and latter provides extremely fast execution.
Using an unproven second class language like clojure shows that the team behind this project has a little experience in statistical modeling and related fields.
No one case which lanugage you use if its FP or ruby or even worse fortran. In statistical modeling it finally boils down to fast execution of some sort of huge matrix multiplication.
Really the only concern w.r.t language is readability/ compatibility with existing systems and low dev. time
Flight Caster or the other company which google bought use huge data but with that they also use huge amount of rules. They are developing rule systems and engines and not Not a data mining system.
The company in the post has a machine learning problem, what they require is fast matrix multiplication and great mathematical models and not some weird ass FP language ideals.
Go to mloss.org and look for projects that use FP languages.
in real life no one gives a fuck about lisp and other FP idiocacy, that why AI book by norvig has now code written in Python, thats why Google being one of the most leading AI companies uses C++ Python and Java.
Thats why you wont find any one in any data mining/ mahcine learning department in any US university MIT/CMU/Stanford using some shit FP lanuages.
Beacuse thats not their core business!
nor spelling correctly is mine.
Good developers (who they are trying to hire) do. This is a recruitment pitch. In that context, "language ideals" are important.
user: MADMEN
created: 38 minutes ago
a) Doing data mining research and exploratory programming in a small company is probably the best use case for a Lisp. When you're Google you can afford to write this in C++ or Java (with layers of libraries taking the boiler plate out) as well waste research/prototype time on compile/link cycle (rather being able to program interactively). When you're Google, you can also afford to only hire machine learning people who know how to write production quality C++ (very rare combination of skills). Clojure is a more acceptable language: despite of what fanboys say, FP is not a black art reserved for 99.9th percentile programmers; the more C++ I write, the more convinced I get that C++ is.
b) Clojure interop with Java makes it easy to use this sort of system with Hadoop, Mahout, Colt, etc... Sure there are more effective libraries available in C++, but they either proprietary to Google (MapReduce + GFS), not designed for fault tolerance (MPI) or more time consuming to use (LINPACK, LAPACK)
c) Python is going to be 10-20 times slower, (perhaps 5x when you're using C interop).
That said, I spoke with this team a bit ago, and they seem like they definitely know that they're doing. The fact that they're writing in Clojure would make me think that 1) They're a team of capable hackers, and 2) They're a team of practical hackers.
Really the only concern w.r.t language is readability/ compatibility with existing systems and low dev. time
Did you just describe the main benefits of clojure to a T there? :)
I have met proud programmers who think that Maths/stats are shit.
Their aim as a company is to utilize the data collected by the website and build relevance models. Such models are mathematical models. thus its important which equations you come up with and now which language you use to write them.
The reason I suggest Python / C++ / Java even R is that there is an extremely huge codebase in those languages.
e.g. can you show me anything that matches capabilities of numpy scipy or R packages or the amazing code which is available on this website http://mloss.org/software/. in clojure.
When data is at heart of your startup your focus should the models and not some weird programming language ideals.
infact it tell me that they are: 1: Bunch of programmers who have no expertise in Data Mining / Predictive Analytics.
2: Language nazi's and confused bunch who put up stuff like we love ruby, we adore clojure and you must play counter strike.
A good example of a data based startup would be these people. http://www.cellixis.com/
By mentioning some stupid programming language in the whole discussion they have moved away from their core problem.
Flamebait like this detract from any points you intended to make. I am hardly the greatest fan of Clojure here, but the "second class" label is hardly justified.