

Runa is hiring Clojure developers - amitrathore
http://www.WorkAtRuna.com

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plinkplonk
What do people on HN think of the idea behind this startup? Do you think it
has the potential to be huge and/or a good acquisition target? Would you
apply/Are you applying for this job? Why or why not?

It certainly sounds like they have everything (business case /tech etc) well
laid out. If I were a potential employee I'd have liked some information on
what kind of equity a new employee could expect - RethinkDB set the standard
here (<http://www.rethinkdb.com/jobs/>), but other than that very very minor
quibble i think this is as good a recruiting pitch as I have seen.

(Due Disclosure: (a) Amit Rathore is a good friend of mine. (b) I have nothing
to do with Runa or this ad. I am just curious as to how people here perceive
the opportunity).

~~~
Arun2009
From my personal experience, Amazon's ploy of suggesting related books has
been _very_ effective on me. I've often gone there with the intention of
spending perhaps USD 40 on a specific book and ended up spending thrice that
amount (happily!).

Hence a suggestion, FWIW: in addition to improving conversion rate, it might
be also worthwhile to try to sell more stuff to existing customers. You know
what they want and you know they're not averse to spending money online.

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strlen
Cool, sounds like an interesting project and the perfect use case for Clojure.

How do you intend to differentiate yourself from Direct Edge (my take is
you're specifically looking to target CTRs rather than build a recommendation
engine?) as well as a start-up in San Mateo the name of which escapes me which
does something like this (but is well funded and more enterprise focused)?

Best of luck!

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praptak
Putting location on the hiring page would be helpful. Spoiler:
<http://runa.com/contact-us/>

~~~
khill
It's stated on the "Destiny" page with a note that they will provide
relocation assistance.

<http://www.workatruna.com/destiny.html>

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bitsai
I'm quite intrigued by the solicitation for FPS experience on the Clojure
developer page.

~~~
plinkplonk
I suspect it means nothing more than that FPS es are what people play on the
PS3 s or XBoxes in the office! Glad to be mistaken though. Amit?

~~~
amitrathore
Yes, we play Quake III Arena these days. We're also starting Team Fortress 2,
now that Steam was released for Mac.

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noelwelsh
They need someone to optimise their landing page. In particular put the call
to action -- i.e. the apply now link -- on the front page.

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MADMEN
Sorry, but I dont get point of using an Obscure language like Clojure.

Also how are they different from directed edge a YC funded start up.

If they are doing predictive analysis/machine learning stuff, It makes sense
to use Java, Python and C in that order since Java is what Hadoop is written
in, while python and C allow very low dev time and latter provides extremely
fast execution.

Using an unproven second class language like clojure shows that the team
behind this project has a little experience in statistical modeling and
related fields.

No one case which lanugage you use if its FP or ruby or even worse fortran. In
statistical modeling it finally boils down to fast execution of some sort of
huge matrix multiplication.

Really the only concern w.r.t language is readability/ compatibility with
existing systems and low dev. time

~~~
sgrove
I'm not sure you're quite familiar with Clojure - Java interop is pretty easy.
There are problems, as with any lisp-dialect interacting with C/Java. My
scheme-based 3d game engine has, at its lowest level, what essentially looks
procedural opengl. But you build layers around these (quite quickly) in the
lisp of your choice.

That said, I spoke with this team a bit ago, and they seem like they
definitely know that they're doing. The fact that they're writing in Clojure
would make me think that 1) They're a team of capable hackers, and 2) They're
a team of _practical_ hackers.

 _Really the only concern w.r.t language is readability/ compatibility with
existing systems and low dev. time_

Did you just describe the main benefits of clojure to a T there? :)

~~~
MADMEN
sorry but programming hacking/ data (not database) hacking are two different
things.

I have met proud programmers who think that Maths/stats are shit.

Their aim as a company is to utilize the data collected by the website and
build relevance models. Such models are mathematical models. thus its
important which equations you come up with and now which language you use to
write them.

The reason I suggest Python / C++ / Java even R is that there is an extremely
huge codebase in those languages.

e.g. can you show me anything that matches capabilities of numpy scipy or R
packages or the amazing code which is available on this website
<http://mloss.org/software/>. in clojure.

When data is at heart of your startup your focus should the models and not
some weird programming language ideals.

infact it tell me that they are: 1: Bunch of programmers who have no expertise
in Data Mining / Predictive Analytics.

2: Language nazi's and confused bunch who put up stuff like we love ruby, we
adore clojure and you must play counter strike.

A good example of a data based startup would be these people.
<http://www.cellixis.com/>

By mentioning some stupid programming language in the whole discussion they
have moved away from their core problem.

