pretzel

QuBit - London

We just got our Series A (and got the founder of Business Objects, Bernard Liautaud on our board) and are looking to bump up our Eng team! We're hiring across the board: http://www.qubitproducts.com/about/jobs/ (Email careers@qubitproducts.com and mention that you came from Hacker News)

If you want to help the biggest companies in the UK (and soon the world!) figure out exactly what they should be doing with their web sites, and do interesting things with the most complete data set about visitors interactions with them, come talk to us! It's going to be a great year.

It is another point of failure. I'd hope that this point has a lower frequency of failure than otherwise.

Consider:

Adding one line of code to a page and then adding 5 scripts added from a vendor-approved and tested library.

Adding 5 snippets of code to your own site in various sections on various pages.

Because you would be putting some everywhere, some on specific pages and some only firing on special rules, you actually have a lot that you have to manage. You could just put this in your CMS or in some version control, but then they aren't all in one place anymore, but scattered all over your code. If you want to remove something, do you just remove it in one place or everywhere? If you need to make a change are you sure you have done it in all the right places? If you need to just pause something right away, how do you do that, without changing your live site?

All these things require changes which have a higher likelihood of failing, than doing it through a properly controlled automated system.

>When you load JavaScript from a third party you should do it asynchronously.

When you load JavaScript from a third party, you shouldn't put it directly in your code! There exists a whole eco-system of providers that allow you to manage this now, called "Tag Management Systems"

I develop one of these (that is free to signup and use until you get to 1M PVs per month - opentag.qubitproducts.com).

OpenTag and most TMS-es have many advantages of putting specifc vendor code on your website.

* Only one line on each page - don't need to worry about bloating your home page. By doing this you get a nice separation of concerns between actual functional code and 3rd party code.

* Code can come from a tested library of vendor approved script templates - we have ovr 100 and are constantly growing.

* By using "universal variables" which telling the scripts specific values in a well-defined manner, you can easily configure scripts up. For example on a purchase confirmation page, you may have several scripts that fire off to remarketing, affilliate and analytics providers. By setting these variables up once, you can easily plug-in new variables when your marketing team requests it.

* You can tell scripts to only fire on certain scenarios - only on certain pages, or only when a visit came from a certain referrer or not when they come to a landing page with a specific utm parameter.

* Asyncs your document.write code at the click of a checkbox (or automatically if it is from the library)

I think there is very much a difference.

24 hour news is banal not because of its immediacy, but because, since it is always on, it needs to fill itself with lower quality items. Frequent and recent updates on a current event on a ad-hoc basis is different in that it doesn't have the imperative to fill up the gaps.

Also, due to the ranking of posts, the compelling stuff rises. Compellingness, while not always correlating with quality, is at least an indicator. If quality posts rise and are then being used to then shape the discourse at an early stage, this flows through and directs the thoughts of those presenting more measured and considered pieces, thus making the whole eco-system better.

Sampling the news daily is quite enough for most people, but surely if you are wrapped up the event and need urgent news this format is a good thing. Also, if it improves the news that you then get at a daily rate, this is also good.

The internet is important. For the UK economy it is very important: contributing over 10% of GDP. At QuBit we are working to make the internet better. We want to make each company we work with as profitable as possible by processing online data intelligently. And we need your help.

We are looking for Front End Developers, Customer Solutions Engineers and a DevOps / Systems Engineer. You'll need a degree in Computer Science or similar discipline from a top university, the flair to do well in a dynamic growth-phase start up and an Open Source state of mind.

Front End Developers need to have skills in JavaScript, HTML, CSS and cross browser debugging. Any experience of the Back End or UI / UX design will be a major plus. We use tools like Backbone, Redis and Nodejs on the Front End side, and would love to hear from you if you do too.

Customer Solutions Engineers have all the skills of the Front Enders, with the ability to be client facing. You'll be dealing with major players in the eCommerce space and helping to troubleshoot and solve problems on their websites. In depth knowledge of server-side coding and web design would be really beneficial here.

Our DevOps / Systems Engineer is going to help us optimize our platform. We're looking for someone with crossover Sys Admin and programming experience. You'll be autoscaling our use of Amazon Web Services and maintaining our networks and systems including a Hadoop cluster.

We're looking at graduate, junior, mid-level and senior people for these hires. If your kung fu is the best let us know, we'd love to hear from you. Send a CV to careers@qubitdigital.com and maybe you'll be joining our team in London's Soho and enjoying life at Wired's start up of the week: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-02/28/startup-of-th...

Qubit Fulltime - London (Soho)

At Qubit - http://www.qubitproducts.com/ - we're helping some of the biggest companies in UK understand their data and providing them with actionable intelligence. Founded by 4 ex-Googlers 2 years ago, we're looking for Front-end/Infrastructure/Statistical engineers to help build our core infrastructure to find deeper insights into our huge data sets.

We mainly use Java, to develop our Hadoop pipeline on AWS, and JavaScript, both in browser and on our nodejs/redis servers, with a bit of R, Python and what not in the mix. 2012 is going (to continue) to be an exciting time for our company and we'd love to have a bunch more people help us grow!

Have a chat with us at hiring+yc@qubitdigital.com and let us know what you are looking for to get the ball rolling.

I thought you we're someone from our company - exact same thing happened to us!

London (Soho) - Full Time

At Qubit - http://www.qubitproducts.com/ - we're helping some of the biggest companies in UK understand their data and providing them with actionable intelligence. Founded by 4 ex-Googlers 2 years ago, we're looking for top Front-end/Back-end/Test/Infrastructure/AI/Statistical engineers to help build our core infrastructure to find deeper insights into our huge data sets faster.

We mainly use Java, to develop our Hadoop pipeline on AWS, and JavaScript, both in browser and on our nodejs/redis servers, with a bit of R, Python and what not in the mix.

2012 is going (to continue) to be an exciting time for our company and we'd love to have a bunch more people help us grow!

Have a chat with me at will+yc@qubitdigital.com an let me know what you are looking for to get the ball rolling.

London, UK Qubit group - http://www.qubitgroup.com/join-our-team

We're looking to double the size of our company over the next 12 months. We're hiring senior and graduate software engineers in the next quarter, plus a whole bunch of other roles. We're not looking for any skills in particular, just smart people.

Qubit Group is a 18 month-old company founded by 4 ex-Googlers. We're in the business of making company's websites perform better, by generating rule-based concrete advice.

We've a bunch of huge clients already, and are trying to keep up with growth! It's a busy time and you'll get thrown in the middle of bunch of AI work, doing cloud computing and presenting complex data to clients in a simple actionable manner.

It's a fun place to be (not just because we're in the middle of Soho), there's a bunch of perks for everyone and there's both strong leadership from above and freedom for everyone to do things the way they know best.

If you are interested, send an email to careers+yc@qubitgroup.com.

It's not competitor analysis, necessarily. I think rather they are trying to find out where users came to their site from so they can more accurately attribute the site that directed them, and thus throw more money at sites that do a good job of referring you to them, as opposed to just using "last click attribution". It's about them finding out how to best use their advertising budget.

So did I! chattrr.net - code is there too

Seems like a fairly standard node thing to do!

London, UK

Qubit digital - http://www.qubitdigital.com/join-our-team

We're looking to double the size of our company over the next 12 months. We're hiring senior and graduate software engineers in the next quarter, plus a whole bunch of other roles. We're not looking any skills in particular, just smart people.

Qubit Digital is a year-old company founded by 4 ex-Googlers. We're in the business of making company's websites perform better, by generating rule-based concrete advice.

We've a bunch of huge clients already, and are trying to keep up with growth! It's a busy time and you'll get thrown in the middle of bunch of AI work, doing cloud computing and presenting complex data to clients in a simple actionable manner.

It's a fun place to be (not just because we're in the middle of Soho), there's a bunch of perks for everyone and there's both strong leadership from above and freedom for everyone to do things the way they know best.

If you are interested, send an email to careers+yc@qubitdigital.com.

No, we're all working pretty closely as an engineering team, and there's a lot of interaction between engineering an all the other teams that wouldn't work without the personal contact.

London, UK

Qubit digital - http://www.qubitdigital.com/join-our-team

We're looking to double the size of our company over the next 12 months. We're hiring senior and graduate software engineers in the next quarter, plus a whole bunch of other roles. We're not looking any skills in particular, just smart people.

Qubit Digital is a year-old company founded by 4 ex-Googlers. We're in the business of making company's websites perform better, by generating rule-based concrete advice.

We've a bunch of huge clients already, and are trying to keep up with growth! It's a busy time and you'll get thrown in the middle of bunch of AI work, doing cloud computing and presenting complex data to clients in a simple actionable manner.

It's a fun place to be (not just because we're in the middle of Soho), there's a bunch of perks for everyone and there's both strong leadership from above and freedom for everyone to do things the way they know best.

If you are interested, send an email to careers@qubitdigital.com.

I saw cofoja (http://code.google.com/p/cofoja/) yesterday, and realised it would be good to be able to code like that, but since I spend my days doing mostly Javascript I wouldn't get to use it. So I've basically just ported it across. It's just an afternoon's work so it's probably incredibly bug ridden - don't even consider thinking about using it for real production code!

There are some other libraries that do the same thing for Javascript, (http://www.cerny-online.com/cerny.js/ http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/weirdal/archives/016921.html and one also called jsContract (oops - - looks like I might have to change my name...) http://kinsey.no/projects/jsContract/)

The difference with these is they all expect you to call a special library within your functions. My library takes the cofoja approach, where you keep your function the same, but wrap it up with annotations that specify the contracts. You can even turn contracts off completely, by setting a variable.

It has some tests there, but they aren't in jsUnit - I'll do that tomorrow. My next step is to put contracts on each of its own functions, just to prove it works.

I saw cofoja (http://code.google.com/p/cofoja/) this afternoon, and realised it would be good to be able to code like that, but since I spend my days doing mostly Javascript I wouldn't get to use it. So I've basically just ported it across. It's just an afternoon's work so it's probably incredibly bug ridden - don't even consider thinking about using it for real production code!

There are some other libraries that do the same thing for Javascript, (http://www.cerny-online.com/cerny.js/ http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/weirdal/archives/016921.html and one also called jsContract (oops - - looks like I might have to change my name...) http://kinsey.no/projects/jsContract/)

The difference with these is they all expect you to call a special library within your functions. My library takes the cofoja approach, where you keep your function the same, but wrap it up with annotations that specify the contracts. You can even turn contracts off completely, by setting a variable.

It has some tests there, but they aren't in jsUnit - I'll do that tomorrow. My next step is to put contracts on each of its own functions, just to prove it works.

I think you mean var, not val.

If you were using val you would do:

  class Kitty(val purrVolue: Int)

which would turn out to be in Java:

  public class Kitty {
    private final int purrVolume;
    public Kitty(final int purrVolume) {
       this.purrVolume = purrVolume;
    }
    public int getPurrVolume() { return purrVolume; }
  }

So where does Google fit in on that scale?

Because we can't change something if we don't talk about it?

  Women account for 51 percent of the US population, 
  but only 92 women, or 17 percent of the seats, 
  serve in the current 111th US Congress. Seventeen 
  women serve in the Senate and 75 women serve in the 
  House (Members of the 111th United States Congress
  http://en.wikipedia.org

Wait - they use wikipedia as a reference? Are the Chinese even allowed to view wikipedia?

>This philosophy leads to becoming the IKEA of software.

As in the most succesful?

>I certainly wouldn't be spending my weekends and nights writing an application if I didn't think I'd get some money for it, and I doubt that I'm rare

http://www.gnu.org/

http://www.linux.org/

http://www.freebsd.org/

http://www.apache.org/

http://www.mysql.com/

http://www.mozilla.org/

And Python, Perl and PHP...

I think enough people who spend their lives working for free to make it worthwhile!

I am going to be in Leeds, UK in 2 months time working on a p2p database/webserver. If you are interested, around the UK, and know Java, let me know!

I agree with this, being able to do both would be best. For my PhD I have been using various AI techniques to get information out of Computational Fluid Dynamic simulations. Initially I wrote a whole bunch of scripts in python to do various tasks, eg make data files, monitor the progress of a simulation and extracting and processing data. Then I wrote more scripts to tie these scripts together (automate the progress of a CFD) and then more scripts that tied all these together, automating many runs simultaneous CFD runs and teaching the results to neural nets.

In the end it was hell. I had data going everywhere in 3 and 4D arrays, was getting confused which data was input data and which was output data and forgetting the return type of functions. I rewrote it all in Java and though it took some time, was definitely worth it. Creating a nice framework where you can label everything and see it in front of you makes understanding what you have done much easier, especially with Java's generics and a good ide that can predict what you want to type.

I got a lot done at the start, and that is thanks to python. But to understand what is going on and thus be able to tweak stuff you haven't touched in months or years, self-documentation in the form of a good type system is invaluable.

Now if only there were a language that I could write a thesis in quickly...

It just makes life easy to have a website without having to do anything else. It's a central place where you can put up stuff and let people see it. No hosting, no payment and its simple. It's nifty for many applications: its an open wiki for anything.

And if you have a look at the first 5 comments, 4 of those commenters have all posted in the last day (2 in the last hour). So it has not completely lost its potential. It just needs a channel through which it can bloom again.

I would argue that it does. The talks about holism vs reductionism, the introduction to programming with in it, extending to writing programs that write themselves and other strange loops are all very relevant.

Perhaps most relevant of all is learning how such varied fields relate. It's all very well being a hacker, but working out how hacking is a general thing not specific to computers is quite edifying. Learning how the tenents of the hacker are seen in religion, philosophy and art as well as science is quite profound.

Godel Escher Bach, by Hosfstadter

1. Encryption

2. Local storage

3. Local storage

What we need is the desktop as the container...

But really, what we are talking about is just a resurgence of thin clients. And why not? They make sense. No updating software, all your files are there for you whereever you go and today we have the bandwidth to handle it (we do vid downloads without batting an eyelid!).

Especially with Google's gears coming along, it will mean we can do everything offline. It's getting close to CMS your home dir and apps.

When I was in high school (15 years ago or so) I said the perfect computer app would be one where you didn't know it was there and just used it to do what ever you wanted, like in TNG. This is getting close!