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

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

#71

Post by Toenex » Tue, Dec 18, 2012, 6:00 PM UTC

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #49

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 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.

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

#72

Post by ajdecon » Tue, Dec 18, 2012, 7:29 PM UTC

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...

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

#73

Post by mchannon » Tue, Dec 18, 2012, 8:10 PM UTC

polyfractal wrote: post #28

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…

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.

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

#74

Post by nekopa » Tue, Dec 18, 2012, 9:05 PM UTC

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)

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

#75

Post by binarysolo » Wed, Dec 19, 2012, 1:01 AM UTC

just_testing wrote: post #70

binarysolo wrote: post #20

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.

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

#76

Post by ct » Wed, Dec 19, 2012, 4:15 AM UTC

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.

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

#77

Post by harnhua » Wed, Dec 19, 2012, 5:30 AM UTC

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.

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

#78

Post by pnathan » Thu, Dec 20, 2012, 7:23 PM UTC

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. :-)