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martian

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martian··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2015)
Thumbtack - San Francisco - Software engineer and data science

Our mission is to help people accomplish personal projects by matching their needs to the right service professionals in their area. From wedding photographers and DJs to home contractors or French tutors, Thumbtack can help.

We are backed by Sequoia and Google Capital. Great offices in SoMa with daily home-cooked food and a friendly, ambitious team of 30 engineers. We're looking for expertise in Python, Go, AWS, the full web stack, Android, iOS, machine learning, and data science.

Current projects:

* New data pipeline (Hadoop/Spark) to support customer and business needs

* Advancements to the matching algorithm so both sides of the marketplace are better served

* Migration of all backend systems to AWS

* Shipping an Android app to make our customer experience faster and more efficient

For more information:

http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering

Also, feel free to email me (chris at) with any questions!

martian··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2015)
Thumbtack - San Francisco - Software engineering

Our mission is to help people accomplish their personal projects by matching their needs to the right professionals in their area. From wedding photographers and DJs to home contractors or French tutors, Thumbtack can help.

We are backed by Sequoia and Google Capital. Great offices in SoMa with daily home-cooked food and a friendly, ambitious team of 25 engineers. We're looking for expertise in Python, Go, AWS, the full web stack, Android, iOS, machine learning, and data science.

Some upcoming projects:

* New data pipeline (Hadoop/Redshift) to support customer and business needs

* Advancements to the matching algorithm so both sides of the marketplace are better served

* Migration of all backend systems to AWS

* Own and ship an Android app to make our customer experience faster and more efficient

For more information:

http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering

Also, feel free to email me (chris at) with any questions!

martian··on Retiring Python as a Teaching Language
I think this is easier than you think. About 8 years ago I was working on a big project in Qt that was two parts -- one part a 3d rendering engine, one part an interactive web view. Having the two interoperate was surprisingly straightforward, and we could do all kinds of HTML/CSS layouts and use JavaScript hooks to call to the Qt classes. I can't imagine it's regressed much since then, though I'll admit it's been a while since I touched it.

PhoneGap provides this kind of experience for mobile.

The issue always ends up being performance -- running the JS runtimes in sandboxed webviews is always* slower than native code.

martian··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2014)
Thumbtack - San Francisco, CA

Join a small tight-knit engineering team that is changing how services are bought and sold. Thumbtack's audacious dream is to do what eBay and Amazon did for the consumer retail economy, but for the consumer services economy -- an estimated $800B domestic market.

We value code with integrity, an earnest engagement with scaling the product challenges we face, and a commitment to humility in the face of an ever-changing market landscape. We code in Go, Python, and PHP. We're backed by great investors from Google Capital and Sequoia.

Our office is in SoMa, SF: beautiful hardwood floors, natural light, roof deck, and an easy commute from almost anywhere. Our chefs Aubrey and Ben source food from around the Bay Area and cook fresh lunches and dinners daily. We like board games and beer brewing, and sometimes we build robots on the weekends.

We're hiring for data scientist, software software engineer, site reliability engineer, iOS engineer, and summer interns.

H1-B visa and interns welcome.

Let me know if you'd like to learn more.

chris @ thumbtack.com

http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering

http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

martian··on Portrait of the Hilbert Curve (2010)
Aldo's project is awesome. I remember reading this a few years back and was really curious to see what would happen if you plotted color spaces other than RGB on a Hilbert Curve. Plotting colors in YIQ and HSV spaces turns out to be really fascinating.

http://visualmotive.com/colorsort/

martian··on How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb Into a Billion Dollar Business
I thought the same thing, but some say otherwise:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4497569

martian··on Sparklines for your shell
Edward Tufte (original creator of sparklines) hosts a long-running discussion of theory and practice:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

martian··on Little brother, if I had to go to college again
Yeah, I hear you. My first jobs out of college were also not as inspired as they could have been, partially because I didn't have a great mentor to guide me through the process.

My advice for finding a mentor is to look for a job at a company with people you respect and look up to. You want to work with engineers who are better than you and can teach you things. It sounds like you're in school right now, but if this is an option for you: start interviewing at tech companies and see what you find. There are many mediocre companies but also many great ones. If you're in SF (or willing to move here) send me an email and I can help out.

If you're not able to get a new job, you can still learn a lot from people around you. I have mentored a few people off and on over the past few years. Some people I've met through friends or through formal mentorship programs like HackBright. I think you'll find that there are a lot of engineers out there willing to meet up and help you learn.

And if you're currently in school: well, that's what school is for ;-)

martian··on Websites are for Humans
Yes, websites are for humans. But, for better or worse, humans live in a world that is driven by advertising, media, and funny concepts like SEO. If you want to stand out, you have to not only provide a great website (that works for humans) but you have to tell humans about it. Sometimes that means advertising, or doing a few things to make your site more easily crawled by bots. This is ok, and a natural part of a website's life. Most businesses have a marketing department, or at least a marketing budget. If you want your ideas to spread, you need to consider what to do to get people to show up.
martian··on Little brother, if I had to go to college again
This is great advice. Starting a business is difficult work, though. My advice is always to get an internship at a big tech company that you respect. Learn from the masters in your industry. There is so much to being a developer that is not taught in CS curriculum: tools, teamwork, managing a large codebase, dealing with ambiguous specs and constraints, etc.

More and more I have come to believe that while knowing the fundamental CS theory is important, software engineering is a craft that is best learned through apprenticeship. Sure, you can learn the theory in school, then try a bunch of things and figure it out on your own, but the best developers I've met are those that have studied under great mentors for the first few years of their careers. Once you have that basic training, you are much better equipped to venture off on your own.

martian··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2014)
Thumbtack - San Francisco

Thumbtack helps people accomplish personal projects central to their lives. Thumbtack can help you remodel your kitchen, get photographs taken at your wedding, or teach your daughter how to play the piano. We are a two-sided marketplace that connects buyers and sellers in these service industries. We work hard to empower small business owners nationwide to grow their businesses.

Thumbtack's core values are 1) help locally, scale globally, 2) obsess over our customers, and 3) improve relentlessly. We look for people who have raw talent and drive, work well with others, are motivated to improve, and are personable and intellectually curious.

Our engineering team is a lean 12 people, and supports the larger Thumbtack team of 500. We work in a beautiful office in SoMa, eat family-style meals cooked by our in-house chefs, study CS theory together, read and debate literature at book club, brew beer, and provide annual stipends for self-improvement. We offer competitive salary and equity along with great health insurance and a flexible vacation policy.

We're hiring entrepreneurial engineers with the following kinds of expertise:

  * Statistics
  * Data science
  * Front-end engineering
  * Back-end engineering
  * Analytics and big data
  * Android
  * iOS

http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering

http://www.fastcompany.com/3030952/whos-next/thumbtack-is-co...

H1-B and internships available.

Please contact chris @ thumbtack for more information.

martian··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2014)
Thumbtack - San Francisco - Software Engineer

Thumbtack is a new way to hire local services. The same way other companies have brought B2C retail commerce online, we have brought the B2C services industry online.

Some numbers:

  - 10M monthly uniques
  - 500k businesses have joined nationwide
  - 900+ categories of service
  - $18M+ total funding from Sequoia and others
http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering

Or email chris at thumbtack with questions.

(Sorry we are not accepting intern candidates at this time.)

martian··on A/B Testing Significance Calculator
I agree with other critiques here that this A/B testing calculator does little to add to the conversation, and someone who uses it would be mislead in how to interpret results.

The procedure my team uses is:

1) hypothesize an expected conversion rate and whether to use a one-sided test (if we're testing that the state of the world remains unchanged) or a two-sided test (if we're testing that that the state of the world has changed as a result of the variation)

2) run those numbers through this power/sample size calculator to determine the number of visitors we need before we can analyze the experiment: http://www.stat.ubc.ca/~rollin/stats/ssize/b2.html

3) wait for traffic

4) after enough visitors have come to the funnel, pass the resulting conversion numbers through ABBA http://www.thumbtack.com/labs/abba/ [1] to see confidence intervals on our results

For further reading, I highly recommend:

http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/how-to-...

[1] disclaimer: my colleague wrote ABBA

martian··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2014)
San Francisco - Thumbtack (H1B ok!)

Thumbtack is a Sequoia-backed startup that is changing the way people hire local service professionals like house painters, guitar tutors, or wedding planners.

We like Python. :-)

http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering

http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

Email me (chris@) if you're interested, or if you'd just like to grab a coffee in SF.

(to pre-empt a common question: we don't have any internships available right now, please check back in September!)

martian··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2014)
San Francisco, Thumbtack. H1B welcome.

(You probably haven't heard of Thumbtack. We've been flying under the Silicon Valley radar for quite some time.)

Thumbtack is a new way to find and hire people to help you get things accomplished: whether a DJ for the party you're throwing this weekend, a contractor to renovate your kitchen, or an SAT tutor to help you prep for exams, or anything else, Thumbtack will help. And on the flip side: if you provide any kind of service, Thumbtack will help you connect with new clients and grow your business. Millions of people are using Thumbtack already.

Our engineering team is currently 10 people. We're looking for software engineer generalists, or specialists in any domain (frontend, backend, mobile, ops, data science). I often describe our team as being academic, deliberate, and compassionate.

Things we like: Python (Pyramid), Postgres, Mongo, R, Pandas, AngularJS.

Our office is in SoMa. Our chef cooks amazing meals for us everyday, we brew a lot of our own beer, we read books together. We play, but mostly we're just excited to be making amazing products for our users and making their lives better.

Come help us transform the local services industry, bring it into the 21st century, and change the lives of millions of people.

http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering

http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

Fee free to email me (chris@) as well. If you're in SF, let's grab coffee!

martian··on The Engineer Crunch
I'm curious to know what kinds of problems you work on, then?

I find that I need to have a strong working knowledge of data structures every day. Hashes, lists, trees, and so on. Knowing how to apply data structures in production code matters a lot: the difference between a hash lookup and a linear scan, for example, can mean the difference between a reasonable response time for an application and an absolutely terrible response time.

In interviews, I have found that good understanding of these data structures (and the algorithms one uses to manipulate them) correlates strongly with ability to solve larger and more complex problems.

martian··on The Engineer Crunch
The Bay Area is a great place to be if you're an engineer. You get many job offers in your inbox every week. Your friends have long since stopped asking you if you want to work at their startups, but you know just how quickly that would change were you to signal that you wanted a new job.

I think the crunch is at least somewhat real. We've hired a couple great people we met through Hacker News -- I couldn't have imagined them working out any better. And recently I've been trying to hire more people at my startup and, frankly, it's tough to find good people.

We've worked hard to make our interview process quick, insightful, fun, and accurate. Do we do pair programming? Sure. Do we ask about data structures? Absolutely; any programmer worth anything knows something about data structures. Do we do whiteboarding? Yep. Programmers at our company, it turns out, need to be good at communicating with humans as well as with computers. Do we give people answers immediately, and tell them why we are rejecting them? Yes, we do. We are more humane and reasonable than so many other places.

(It drives me crazy how many bad interviewers there are out there. Some of my friends recently interviewed for entry-level positions and some shall-not-be-named companies in SF and were treated terribly: given the run-around by the recruiters, brought back in the office 4 separate times for interviews, and ultimately rejected by at least two companies when they decided they didn't want to sponsor H1Bs after all. Insane. In a war for talent, you'd think practices like this would cease.)

Anyway: this is all to say, I'd love to meet your friends or anyone else out there who's looking for a programming job. My colleagues and I are not awful people. We like to brew beer and write code and help make the world a better place. We have a book club and eat good food. Oh, and we pay well and sponsor visas and are generally, you know, warm and friendly folks.

martian··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2014)
San Francisco, Thumbtack, Software Engineer

Thumbtack is a new way to hire local services, e.g. photographers, tutors, or home contractors. With millions of users and an active consumer base across the US, we're riding the proverbial rocketship with insane month-over-month growth figures. If you want to join a company that has ridiculous growth, opportunity, but also impact on the real world, Thumbtack might be a good choice.

Some things our users are saying: "I owe my business to you", "50% of my business is from Thumbtack", "I can work less and earn more with Thumbtack." We help small businesses build their client-base. And on the flip side of the marketplace, we help consumers find just the right person to do the job with minimal effort on their part.

H1B is great. :-)

We're a human-focused company: we brew beer, eat meals together (cooked by our in-house chef), and otherwise enjoy the usual startup perks in downtown SF. But we maintain a serious perspective about our software, engineering discipline, and experimental rigor.

If you're in SF, I'm happy to meet up for coffee: email chris @.

http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering

martian··on So Singletons are bad, then what?
A great talk on the topic is this one. The basic argument is that global singletons (and global state generally) is detrimental to maintainability, flexibility, and testability. The talk discusses several strategies for moving away from global-state to a dependency-injected and testable codebase.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKXt9fBDVoY

Slides: http://www.gostevehoward.com/presentations/20131212-moving-t...

martian··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2014)
San Francisco - Software Engineer (H1B welcome)

Thumbtack is a new way to find and hire local services like DJs, photographers, house cleaners, and contractors. Over 300k small businesses around the country have joined Thumbtack, and we're making real money in the local services marketplace. We're backed by great VCs like Sequoia Capital.

The team is full of down-to-earth, practical, and intelligent people. Everyday for lunch we all sit down to a meal cooked by our in-house chef. On Wednesday nights, we stay late for a hot dinner, some wine, guests, and great conversation. Sometimes we drink beer that we've been brewing in the back closet.

Ping me (chris @) if you want to chat. I'd love to meet for coffee if you're in SF!

http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering

martian··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2013)
San Francisco - Software Engineer (H1B welcome)

Thumbtack is a new way to find and hire local services like DJs, photographers, house cleaners, and contractors. Over 250k small businesses around the country have joined Thumbtack, and we're making real money in the local services marketplace. We're backed by great VCs like Sequoia Capital.

The team is full of down-to-earth, practical, and intelligent people. Everyday for lunch we all sit down to a meal cooked by our in-house chef. On Wednesday nights, we stay late for a hot dinner, some wine, guests, and great conversation. Sometimes we drink beer that we've been brewing in the back closet.

Ping me (chris @) if you want to chat. Happy to meet up for coffee if you're in SF.

http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering

martian··on FixYT
> "supports privacy and stores no information"

Interesting that there's still a Google Analytics tracking call on the page.

martian··on Show HN: Get your health records from any doctor
I agree that the word "Social" is loaded -- the tech industry has contorted its meaning and I did (yes) take the word in a more literal/historical sense. Prime might be wise to rethink the branding. Maybe "social" is the wrong word, even if its the right concept.
martian··on Show HN: Get your health records from any doctor
There is a lot of negative commentary on this thread (thanks HN for always providing such valuable feedback), but I'd like to point out what I think is useful and positive with Prime.

First, health is inherently social. When you're sick, do you tell your loved one (boy/girlfriend, spouse, parent, close friends, etc?). Of course you do. You want them to know that you might need their care for a few days, that you might have to miss some events that you'd planned together, that you might need help going to the pharmacy to pick up some meds, etc. More serious health issues are even more social. Name one person you know who has suffered from a severe medical condition who has not told their loved ones. When my close family and friends are ill or going in for checkups that are potentially not routine, I want to know immediately what happened. If my loved one were to be drastically ill, I would want to know everything about their condition, the test results, the doctors' reports, the latest research, etc. Surely the HN community understands the desire to geek out over knowledge (health knowledge) and Prime aids that.

Furthermore, I recently suffered some major personal health issues. When I was in the midst of a flurry of doctors visits and medical procedures, my family and friends were all very curious to know what was happening and if they could help out, etc. I was already exhausted by the doctors' visits, and sharing the result of every test and exam with dozens of people was really straining for me. I was extremely lucky to have people near me who could assist me in spreading the word to the people who cared, but this whole "sharing information" problem would have been perfectly solved with Prime. I intentionally did not share any of my health information on Facebook, because I didn't trust Facebook's data privacy and sharing policies. While health is social, it's still private. But Prime may solve this.

For more routine procedures, I can see Prime being very useful. Did my elderly grandmother get her flu shot yet? Check. What was the result of my father's latest checkup about his cholesterol level? Easy to know.

Beyond "social", Prime provides centralized repo for all your medical data. Remember Mint? Remember how everyone gave up their bank passwords to a web-based service so they could see pretty charts and better budget and manage their finances? Remember how Mint took that information and sold ads and upsells against it? Yeah. Right. That's what is happening with medical data, too. Someone (Prime, perhaps) is going to be the one to collect all this information in one place, make it easy to read and understand, and become "the Mint of health data". I would bet on this. The world of health data is too fragmented to not be consolidated sometime soon.

The issues Prime faces are not small: first, ingesting data, and second, earning their users' trust.

I wish them the best of luck.

martian··on Tetris and The Power Of CSS
Geoffray Warnants did a simple CSS3 Tetris in 2011: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/tetris-css3...
martian··on Batch Processing Millions and Millions of Images
This is an old post and it suffers from some shiny rhetoric, but it was very technically relevant for work I did recently.

I had a similar problem as the OP: millions of images stored on S3 that each needed to be rescaled to a set of four new dimensions. Etsy's work encouraged me to dive in with the hope that I could accomplish my task with relatively little pain.

Indeed, I was able to write some multi-threaded Python that ran on a single XXL EC2 instance and was able to rip through every image in less than 48 hours.

Thanks to Mike, and the folks at Etsy, for posting about your experiences!

martian··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2013)
San Francisco - Software Engineer (H1B welcome)

Thumbtack is a new way to find and hire local services like DJs, photographers, house cleaners, and contractors. Over 250k small businesses around the country have joined Thumbtack, and we're making real money in the local services marketplace. We're backed by great VCs like Sequoia Capital.

The team is full of down-to-earth, practical, and intelligent people. Everyday for lunch we all sit down to a meal cooked by our in-house chef. On Wednesday nights, we stay late for a hot dinner, some wine, guests, and great conversation. Sometimes we drink beer that we've been brewing in the back closet.

Ping me (chris @) if you want to chat. Happy to meet up for coffee if you're in SF.

http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering

martian··on Poll: RIP Google Reader. Which RSS solution do you use nowadays?
You should add Feedspot and Goread. Both are reasonably faithful clones of the original.

Goread has the advantage of also being open-source, in Go, so you can install your own on Google App Engine. https://github.com/mjibson/goread

martian··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2013)
Feel free to email me directly if that page doesn't work. Cheers!
martian··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2013)
San Francisco - Software Engineer (H1B welcome, Intern positions available)

Thumbtack is a new way to find and hire local services like DJs, photographers, house cleaners, and contractors. Over 250k small businesses around the country have joined Thumbtack, and we're making real money in the local services marketplace. We're backed by great VCs like Sequoia Capital.

The team is full of down-to-earth, practical, and intelligent people. Everyday for lunch we all sit down to a meal cooked by our in-house chef. On Wednesday nights, we stay late for a hot dinner, some wine, guests, and great conversation. Sometimes we drink beer that we've been brewing in the back closet.

Ping me (chris @) if you want to chat. Happy to meet up for coffee if you're in SF.

http://www.thumbtack.com/jobs

http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering

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