Ask HN: Any other readers Not working in a web-based start-up? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any other readers Not working in a web-based start-up?

38 pointsToenex75 comments

Reading HN one could come to the conclusion that start-up = website + marketing and that node.js, bootstrap and github are the only technologies you'll need. Now I'm not for a minute deriding either fantastic web based start-ups or wonderful new technologies. It's just that I work for a medical image analysis start-up and we build conventional technology, desktop applications for highly regulated clinical end users. Just what the diversity of HN readers is in terms of their role, technology, company size and domain. Perhaps I just want to know I'm not the only one who never learnt javascript...

View on HN

FWIW, from my profile:

    I'm a PhD in Pure Maths (Combinatorics and Graph Theory)
    from the University of Cambridge.  My BSc(Hons) was in Pure
    maths from Monash University, Australia.  I work in industry
    as a director of Innovation and Research, helping to create
    equipment that does the maritime equivalent of Air-Traffic
    Control. Basically, we provide kit to help people stop 30,000
    tonne oil tankers from crashing into nuclear submarines.

The day job involves image processing, data compression, machine learning, behaviour analysis, user psychology, encryption, fault-tolerant systems, data merging, and some other stuff.

Hum... interesting I do the same thing but with rail roads and only software (Desktop software) we use other people sensors and GPSs( thanks God our problem is 2D, yours is a lot harder)

The Company software is planning the train routes so 15k tons trains filled with gas don't crash into another 15k tons train filled with iron ore in the middle of a city.

It's not a startup but we are only 30 people and half are administrative roles, so we are pretty small.

  > ... our problem is 2D,
  > yours is a lot harder

Most of ours is 2D - as I say, we do the maritime equivalent, so we're watching ships, most of which stay at sea level. We do have to track low flying helicopters, micro-lights, and other aircraft, but we're primarily 2D.

C programmer here, mostly traditional server-side stuff with an emphasis on high performance and security.

Not working for start-ups either, unless you consider my freelancing/contracting company a startup, which I suppose it is because I only started it this year. Its only product is me though.

--edit-- You may still be the only one that never learned javascript! I did a web-frontend project earlier this year.

On the side, I'm building experimental composite frames for quadrotors. If I come up with something usable, I plan on selling them to the quadrotor FPV community. Not really a startup, but hopefully a profitable side business.

Most high performance quadrotor frames are made out of carbon fiber. This makes them expensive, brittle, prone to horrible vibrations and not so great for RF interference. I'm basically tooling around in my garage with new combinations of composites to see if I can replace CF with something else. =)

I'm ex-biology and a year ago worked in a wet-bench neuroscience lab.

Sounds cool. Fellow FPV'er here. I think this hobby will explode in popularity really soon, if that isn't already happening.

Agreed. Components are just getting cheaper and cheaper. The biggest obstacle right now is information and experience, in my opinion. All the good information is locked up in billion-page forum posts. I've considered writing a bunch of in-depth tutorials and info-guides...but just haven't found the time.

Experience...well, you just have to crash a few times because the servo is installed backwards before you really understand =)

What's your take on batteries? I've heard a lot about hobby RC LiPo batteries turning into flaming fireballs due to both improper charging or over-draining.

Hehe...yeah...

They are mostly safe, you just have to treat them nicely. Improper charging is the biggest risk, so as long as you charge slowly with a proper balance charger there is basically zero risk. It takes longer, sure, but I'd rather charge at 2C and not burn my house down than charge at 10C and play LiPo roulette. I charge and store my batteries in a flame-proof LiPo bag, and will be getting a fireproof safebox soon.

A lot of people will fast-charge when they are outside charging from a car battery or something, so it's less of a big deal if it explodes (since you should be charging it on a concrete block or something away from people).

Over-draining isn't really a problem, since even cheap ESCs have over-drain protection and won't let you drain the battery. I don't think explosions are a problem when you over-drain anyway...you just permanently damage the battery.

Otherwise, the only thing you really have to worry about are crashes. After a good crash, check your batteries to make sure they are uninjured. If they look a little deformed, best to play it safe and store them somewhere safe (bucket of sand, metal box, etc) for a few days to see if they get puffy.

Puffy == dangerous, discharge safely and dispose.

Nice project...

I am also an ex-biologist and 4 years ago was working with Sugar Cane genetic engineering and Bioinformatics, it's sad that here in Brazil they pay you s* to research like that and a lot to program in Java.

So here I am.

Haha yeah, that's why my dayjob is as a software engineer. I feel your pain

You were working in EMBRAPA?

(I ran away from there because of the shitty payment) ((Nowadays I work in finance...))

Have you done more research into CF layup? A lot of the characteristics of carbon fiber and defined by the weave of the cloth and layup of the module.

The problem with quadrotors are that they're effectively 4 tubes on CF bolted together. A single module system with proper dampening would probably be perfect.

For example go ride a really cheap carbon fiber bicycle where they just stick carbon fabric into a mold and then go ride one of the really high end ones where a lot of engineering has gone into the layup and construction.

I haven't, but mainly because I don't have the necessary space/facilities to work with CF. I live in an apartment and don't really have space to make a CF-safe work zone (somewhere to contain the dust, keep my dog from eating the epoxy, etc). Ditto to a proper vacuum bagging setup [1]. I agree that CF is probably the ideal composite.

I'm working mostly with wet-layup fiberglass cloth and sandwich panel constructions, as well as some semi-silly experiments with glue/paper/fiberglass. Also exploring some designs that use tension cables to support the load. Lots of fun, if not entirely fruitful so far

[1] I could probably find space for a vacuum bagging setup...but my girlfriend barely tolerates all the stuff as it is. Best not to push my luck :)

CF is wonderful in compression but leaves a bit to be desired in tension- an ideal composite in your situation will need to support both (and hence their inbred children, shear, torsion, and bending).

Kevlar-49 (aramid) and Spectra (UHMW polyethylene) make great complements to carbon fiber. Wrapping your CF with Kevlar fabric (particularly Kevlar prepreg) will help arrest delamination and make the finished composite a lot tougher. Since Kevlar doesn't conduct electricity (graphite does anisotropically), this may help with your RF issues as well.

English as a second language teacher here. Spend most of my time teaching lawyers and board members English. Cargo cult programmer (since 1980) and about to launch a website where I kill my inner cargo cultist and embrace the light of Knuth. My project for the next year is to see how my cargo cult side fares against my newly found inner Knuth as I tackle writing a web based system to schedule teachers at our school (150+) for lessons all around Prague at different companies. It's a race to see if copy/paste from open source to make an MVP wins against understanding the domain problem from a mathematical perspective and applying the correct algorithms hence making a robust, flexible system. From my initial research I think MVP will get done first, but will completely collapse under real world constraints, whereas Knuth will take 10 months to materialize anything, but that thing will be awesome.

But excuse me, I have to get back to reading pre-algebra for dummies (I spent a lot of my childhood travelling and never ever learnt any math, so Knuth is killing me)

I'm an embedded software engineer. I used to design x86 chips.

90% of my programming is in C, 5% in assembly (ARM, mostly), and 5% in Python for test automation and general scripting.

I've worked for companies with 100000 people and 60 people, and a couple in-between; all are in the chip business.

I've done a bit of web stuff on the side, mainly to see what I'm missing in my day job.

I've been recruiting mostly for web companies lately, but recently I started working a company that makes a SAN/NAS appliance. It's a nice change of pace to talk to people doing stuff with kernels and file systems. I suppose you could build a storage appliance running Node.js, but I'm not sure you'd want to.

By the way, you left Redis off your list.

I build internal web applications and services for an insurance company. Not a startup, but not a big company either. We like to play with technology a lot, and since we're a JVM shop we've been sneaking in some Clojure apps. The core products we're working with may be boring, but we keep the job sharp and interesting.

Video -- HLS on a variety of platforms. I did do he YC thing, and before that wrote a bunch of software for Apple. Started out as a general Unix dogsbody for the Departments of High Energy Physics and Anthropology at my alma mater lo these 20 years ago.

Your blog is fun. We need more elder perspective around.

Finance:

I work in Business Intelligence, on the backend side of things. SAS, Python, Bash, Excel and Access (SAS is the tool of choice on most BI environments, especially on enterprise - Hadoop is not known in this world yet).

Thins are heavily manual, I am writing python scripts so some of the things get automatized and also to wrap some of the various data sources (lots of TXT files dumped by mainframes).

Also, I have to deliver some data files in Excel or Access. Python and Tablib are very useful on that regard.

Before that, I worked a lot of time as a sysadmin and some as a mathematician developing models in finance.

Working at a software company that builds portal software for banks. We are not a startup, we are building enterprise software, software that runs on premise and is not sold as SaaS.

However, HN is great inspiration and a valuable source. IMHO enterprise software or enterprise is the market place that is missing innovation and real challengers. More and more companies should fight the status quo and challenge the big dominators (e.g. IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, HP). And I hope to see 2013 as the year where we see more Y Combinator startups and also HN discussion around startups that do exactly this.

I'm an English teacher in Japan. I only started reading Hacker News because one of my private students -- an IT guy who needs to improve his English to keep up with the cutting edge -- got me interested.

I'm a computer nerd at heart, but that's not where life has taken me so far. Maybe one day I'll end up like snugglethorpe, or maybe I'll go back to my home country and do something like what MalphasWats is doing, but currently my day job involves teaching rooms full of surly Japanese teenagers how to use the passive voice.

But I do know Javascript. And JQuery. And Haskell. And C+++. And....

I support/maintain Linux-based tools at an industrial (focus on power grid) infrastructure company. We make devices to protect, monitor and control thingummies related to high-voltage power. Embedded systems, piles of ASM, C, C++.

Some of those tools I develop/maintain are Mercurial based - I am the principal hg supporter at the company. I run a variety of Linux servers for different tasks and hack on a Linux build system in Python. I also drive the team efforts towards CI. :-)

I just wrapped up a MSCS in distributed/embedded systems written 9/10 in Common Lisp, and I hate Javascript. :-)

I work for a social game company that was bought by one of the largest entertainment companies in the world a few years ago. When I was hired, I did web programming (mostly social integration with facebook). I've since transitioned to game client and backend programming, first with flash and java, then with c# (Unity 3d) and java. No node.js for us, it's not nearly performant enough for our purposes. We use java on the backend due to ease of deployment and reliability. I want see how one of our games does with an erlang backend, but I doubt our data center guys want to support another stack.

CERN programmer/devops here, but it involves lots of startup-y stuff like Rails to be honest. I share your impression of HN but there are quite a few nuggets of knowledge that I take away from reading this everyday.

I make art installations, performances, and new musical interfaces using tools like Max/MSP/Jitter, Pure Data, SuperCollider, Processing and openFrameworks coupled with some hardware hacking, but it's difficult to make money doing this before you reach a certain level of notoriety in the community, so I have a day-job as a web programmer.

A short-term goal is to become an expert in real-time/multimedia technology for the web (video, WebAudio, WebRTC).

(If anybody has a startup working with this kind of stuff, please shoot me an email.)

i just finished my masters in cs, thinking about phd, job, or startup... i've learned a little javascript in the past, looking at haskell for applications to the combinatorics of graph theory to cfg's

Where are you based? I'd love to talk to you about a full time role.

We manage infrastructure for a number of companies, some of whom are web-based startups.

BTW, we're hiring: http://www.bashton.com/jobs/

I'm an electrical engineer, working in wireless communications. Most programming I know is self taught, and I have no professional experience in any kind of software development sans MATLAB.

I've found that one of the most difficult parts of programming with an EE background is translating control theory into usable code.

I originally trained as an electronic engineer, but have spent my entire career working in software and specifically medical image analysis. Essentially I'm a fraudulent software developer, statistician and radiologist in one! I'm also arrogant enough to think I can hold my own in any of those areas within my domain.

I'm a game programmer currently working at a small, boutique-like studio. I came from a casual gaming company , and before that from a big, "AAA" (whatever that means) studio. My work is mostly in C++, but increasingly involves middleware that uses Flash or web tech. I've been part of startups, including a YC one. I'm no stranger to web programming, but I dont think I fit the picture you painted either :)

I'm doing some work on the side that involves web and mobile gaming, as well as some writing.

I guess it's a technicality, but I work for an e-commerce company that has it's roots in brick and mortar stores. We actually run four B&M stores and a fifth outlet-style location. We were the first in our industry to have an e-commerce site, before "start-up" was even a term.

Our shop runs a wide range of technologies. I work mostly with Python, Javascript, CSS (Sass/Compass), HTML, PHP, MongoDB, and various SQL systems.

I do open source hardware development and open source desktop software. I don't enjoy doing web stuff (but I can bruteforce my way through it when necessary).

I work in high-performance and scientific computing. Mostly I'm a sysadmin and cluster builder, but I also do a bit of related software development, and I often have to help debug issues with user code running on my clusters.

In terms of background, I started off in physics and gradually drifted into HPC. From the number of ex-physicists I meet, this does not seem to have been a unique experience...

My professional work has nothing to do with web dev/apps etc. I only do this as my own personal hobby (and in the hopes of building something useful). I work as a tech. BA/dev (role switching) in investment banking industry and deal primarily C++, perl, python etc. I have seen light web work when I was indirectly supporting E-commerce team which involve a bit of the web goodies.

Programmer analyst at a Fortune 250, mainly prototyping and iterating on re-writes from legacy platforms to .NET.

Sounds a little boring, but it's fun to consider design decisions that were made in the past and how to improve upon them. My first job out of school, and I've learned mountains about working with large legacy codebases in an environment with hundreds of systems.

I work on Tcl, Perl and shell scripting for Windows and Linux environments, to automate semiconductor chip design over networks.

It's part electrical engineering (my background), part OS-level scripting, part data-parsing, and I'm enjoying the cross-domain development very much as it seems to encourage thinking about problems from multiple angles and levels of abstraction.

I currently do full stack web development but not for a startup. Hate it, especially being knee deep in JS every day is something I won't miss when I move on from this position. My feelings towards JS are that it is being over-used and ruining my internet experience.

tl;dr Looking into systems administration and do my programming at home on my own time and my own projects.

Game and app developer. A small company, not necessarily a start-up - just 7 people.

Previously I have worked on 'AAA' games and database/financial software.

I do find all the web stuff provides background noise rather than value for me on HN - however I do believe most readers live in the web world, so for them the articles I get value from are probably noise.

Development Manager for large private company. Came up through dev ranks, mostly on the MSFT stack, and will always be a dev at heart. Stumbled upon HN in the last year and love reading it as a way to keep a finger on the pulse of the industry. Don't get to dev at work as a manager, but stay involved with side projects at home as my wife allows :)

Working for small company doing web/business intelligence/SOA work, but definitely not a startup. They are profitable though :-)

I make desktop content creation software (mostly video stuff), and have been doing my dinky startup thing with that for about 7 years now.

Right now I'm trying to finish a web multimedia design app called Radi: http://radiapp.com

It's at version 0.9.6, so that means it's 96% done, right? :D

Desktop Windows dev here. I'm not really too interested in learning JS until it gets much better dev wise. Played around with Angular, Node, etc. but meh. Spending my free time learning Objective-C and playing with some Unity3D/C# to stay in my native roots.

I'm a Computing teacher in a UK secondary school. I do web development stuff in my spare time.

Data scientist/consultant using a blend of Python, Postgres, Mongo, d3.js, R, Hadoop and other ML goodies. I was a grad student tired of my PhD program and ended up gathering a group of fellow alums at Stanford to become a small data/analytics shop.

Do you have any clients in finance? If so, how do you deal with the issue of "it's sensitive, we can't let you have this information"?

Yes; NDAs and what not + ssh-ing into their servers or going on-site to use their equipment so the data stays in their machines.

Tech lead in a software company, we build VRP&AVL systems on top of a custom map engine. The core algorithms are built in C++, and the different clients(gui) are built in a broad range of technologies: Java, Delphi, C++, C#, javascript and so on.

Finance - C, Python, bash, R.

I do a little javascript for our home brew monitoring tools and screens, but that's for in-house only. We're not building a product out of them - the "product" is trading faster and smarter than other people.

I'm off to take the final exam for my first-ever finance class [1]. It's an upper-level undergraduate engineering course taught by a mathematician. Possibly some of the most difficult math I have done!

[1] Based on this book: http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Theory-Finance-Mathematica...

PhD in microscopy image analysis here, full academia.

Mainly prototyping with MATLAB/Python, I'm trying not to let my C/C++ skills rust too much by having a few side projects (rewriting old commodore/amiga games now, I love you Pang!)

I'm a developer working on enterprise-level software that's been around 18 years. Talk about legacy code! It's gone from a C++ Windows Desktop/Server app, to ASP, to C#/ASP.NET, to now a SAAS C#/ASP.NET/WCF system.

RF guy building RF hardware.

Same here. Profitable two year old hardware startup in niche distributed antenna systems and M2M www.RFvenue.com

Hey that's really cool. I'm from thinkrf.

Technical translator freelancer here, looking to do a patio11-style consultancy startup sometime in the near future. Maybe not as successfully, but hey, there's gotta be a really long tail there.

Must be the only designer/project manager here. Working fulltime and running a startup selling people http://royaltyfreemodels.nl/

I work at the European offices of a major Asian electronics company. Little web or start-up about my work. The skew on web start-ups on HN is just buzz, I don't click on half the links.

I'm currently a dev writing C# desktop applications for financial services companies... we are working on a cloud-based solution, however.

I'm an engineering and physics student. Did some of my first Javascript last week helping with the Numbers.js project I saw on here . . .

Freelance iOS Developer here. Just quit my job last month after nearly 4 years of full-time iOS Development to become independent.

I'm an undergraduate Engineering Student. About 16000 undergrads in my University. EDIT: I also know javascript

Oh, we aren't even all programmers. I am a former military wife and homeschooling mom with a homegrown solution for my incurable deadly genetic disorder, trying to figure out how to use the web as an education platform of some sort and means to make money. It is still somewhat up in the air what direction that will go in. So, in part, I am a wannabe programmer who currently knows a smidgeon of html and css.

Now you should feel TONS better about what you do! :-P

undergrad student. I am interested in your average HN-ish stuffs, startups, web, mobile apps, but I mainly code in C#, JS and PHP, still looking for a field to jump into

Biotechnology and mining. Python and C for simulation.

C#/ASP.NET developer, freelance web development work.

compiler/os dev (etc) for a large japanese semiconductor company

What's wrong with web?

Nothing, web is great. Just wanted to get a feel for the diversity of the readership.

wireless infrastructure, more specifically epc-core.

Here here

Reply on news.ycombinator.com