

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

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...
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ColinWright
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.

~~~
cfontes
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.

~~~
ColinWright

      > ... 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.

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Nursie
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.

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polyfractal
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.

~~~
cfontes
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.

~~~
just_testing
You were working in EMBRAPA?

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

------
nekopa
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)

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svec
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.

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amorphid
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.

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hieronymusN
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.

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jfb
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.

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

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just_testing
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.

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jelmerdejong
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.

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Pitarou
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....

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pnathan
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. :-)

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__--__
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.

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eLobato
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.

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msutherl
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.)

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verdverm
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

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

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

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

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ImprovedSilence
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.

~~~
Toenex
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.

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Symbol
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.

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ericcholis
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.

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Kliment
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).

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ajdecon
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...

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codegeek
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.

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prawks
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.

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harnhua
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.

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loungin
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.

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jheriko
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.

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stangerman
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 :)

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

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pavlov
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

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ct
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.

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

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binarysolo
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.

~~~
just_testing
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"?

~~~
binarysolo
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.

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martinariel
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.

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theorique
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.

~~~
philip1209
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...](http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Theory-Finance-Mathematical-
Black-Scholes/dp/0821839519)

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KohgnaK
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!)

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pionar
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.

------
nva
RF guy building RF hardware.

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

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

------
Vivtek
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.

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

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bobdvb
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.

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

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philip1209
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 . . .

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chintan100
Freelance iOS Developer here. Just quit my job last month after nearly 4 years
of full-time iOS Development to become independent.

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

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Mz
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

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hdra
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

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ericosperrella
Biotechnology and mining. Python and C for simulation.

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

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

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pknerd
What's wrong with web?

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

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signa11
wireless infrastructure, more specifically epc-core.

------
OafTobark
Here here

