
Ask HN: What startups use C and Python? - brewerhimself
I know Mixpanel uses both of these, but what are some other startups that use both C and Python?<p>EDIT: Bonus points for any companies hiring junior developers!
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henningpeters
Skoobe, a new ebook subscription service based in Munich/Germany.

C and Python are in fact our most-used and loved languages.

We developed a cross-platform library in C that makes our codebase reusable
across multiple platforms, currently we support iOS, Android, Linux and
MacOSX. Next: maybe Windows/Windows Phone?

Most of our backend services and our web site are running on Python/Tornado.
Additionally, we use Python a lot for infrastructure automation on AWS.

Btw: we are currently hiring in both areas, send me a mail in case you are
interested: hp@skoobe.de

If you want to take a look at our app, go here:
[http://itunes.apple.com/de/app/skoobe-e-books-leihen-
statt/i...](http://itunes.apple.com/de/app/skoobe-e-books-leihen-
statt/id425361265?mt=8)

~~~
rotw
Why've you got one of Thilo Sarrazin's books featured in your screenshots?

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shrughes
Don't pigeonhole yourself by languages you want to use. Interestingness of
work is not correlated with language very much.

~~~
greenyoda
Good advice in general, but if C and Python are the only languages that he
currently knows, getting a job at a company that uses them might be much
easier than convincing an employer that he could quickly learn Ruby or
Haskell.

~~~
brewerhimself
This is pretty much my line of thought in a nutshell.

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dman
Enthought - www.enthought.com

We are the scipy/numpy folks and use Python/C to solve interesting scientific
/ engineering problems. I have been writing interesting Python C extensions
for the last six months.

~~~
m_rcin
Python and C (maybe C++ more than C) are very popular in scientific
programming. In the fields I know something about (crystallography,
bioinformatics, molecular dynamics simulations) probably the majority of
projects that started in this century is in C++ and Python.

Consider interesting, underpaid academic jobs for programmers. There is a good
chance that your software will make a bigger difference to the world than in a
startup.

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davidjohnstone
The server side code of <http://www.cyclinganalytics.com/> is almost entirely
Python with a small amount of C.

There's one particular bit of data processing that gets a couple of orders of
magnitude speedup by writing the code in C rather than Python. It involves
lots of loops and indexes, and it's possible there's a faster way to do it in
Python, but I couldn't think of one.

~~~
brewerhimself
I've been considering getting a bike for some time now. It should be in the
budget soon, so I'll bookmark your app and use it some time. Thanks!

~~~
davidjohnstone
Thanks. You might want to check out Strava too.

My site is focused on the niche of "serious" cyclists who use power meters.
The three main ones are PowerTap, Quarq and SRM, none of which are cheap (you
can get a PowerTap wheel for about $1k, and that's the cheapest). They're
widely used by competitive cyclists, and as somebody who loves numbers, I
highly recommend them (power data is the most revealing data that can be
collected on a bike), but the vast majority of bikes don't have them (yet).

I'm not trying to dissuade you from using my site, but you might be more
satisfied with Strava. That said, it's possible to use both — rides uploaded
to my site can be automatically uploaded to Strava.

(I'm going to remake the front page to make it more informative soon.)

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reiz
I know that Google is using C and Python. The first version of Google was
written in Python. Today the webserver and the web page are written in C, for
performance reasons. But internally they still use a lot of Python.

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fauigerzigerk
So far I have only seen C++ from Google, never C. Are you referring to
anything specific from them?

~~~
jrockway
We have some C; adb for example.

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danielwozniak
Orvant has lots of Python under the hood. It allows us to move quickly. There
are very few things we actually need to use C or C++ for. The main reason we'd
use C is to write Python bindings for a C library. :)

<https://www.orvant.com/>

~~~
brewerhimself
Orvant looks really cool! Are you hiring, by chance?

~~~
danielwozniak
We are not actively hiring right now. Though if you think what we do is
interesting I encourage you to send your contact info and resume to
support@orvant.com

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dkhenry
The company I work for uses C and PHP mainly , but as our platform is Gentoo
that also makes us users of python. I also write most of the utility scripts I
use in python.

<http://sevone.com>

~~~
brewerhimself
SevOne's careers page says that a Bachelor's degree is a requirement. How
strict is SevOne (or any other company, for that matter) on this requirement?
Do you know of any software engineers that don't have a degree?

~~~
jasonlotito
> SevOne's careers page says that a Bachelor's degree is a requirement

Don't let this stop you. Every. If you honestly think you have the skills for
the job after reading the description, seek it out. Let them determine if you
are right for the position.

Don't be the no in your life.

~~~
brewerhimself
> Don't be the no in your life.

I feel like this is from the movie Yes, Man! That aside, I take your advice to
heart. I don't want to be the no in my life. :)

~~~
jasonlotito
It's not. At least, I've never seen the movie. I forgot where I heard that. So
I googled it.

In a search looking for that exact quote, I came up with only a few links. All
from either comments I made previously or a blog post.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2504632>

That was where I originally used it.

I was proud of it, mostly because it was short and to the point. I'm usually
not short and to the point.

Anyways, in writing about this on my blog, I had a wonderful surprise happen.

<http://www.jasonlotito.com/advice/sometimes-i-amaze-myself/>

From his LinkedIn profile, I take it he never got/took the job. But, he seems
to be doing well.

But yeah, I think it's good advice.

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pulletsforever
Nest is using both C (for embedded Linux on the thermostat) and Python (some
of the API services) they are also hiring for lots of positions, some are
listed at nest.com/careers

~~~
brewerhimself
Nest looks really cool and I like the idea of having a physical (as opposed to
virtual) product. Are you interested in hiring any junior engineers? Feel free
to drop me a line (my email is in my profile) or leave your email here, I'd
love to chat.

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waterside81
Repustate.com

Our machine learning code is in C and accessed from Python via Cython.

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the_cat_kittles
did you write the libraries yourself? is it libsvm with a python wrapper? I'm
curious

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waterside81
Definitely influenced by a few existing libraries (libsvm, svmlight etc.) but
ultimately custom built to really ramp up performance and scaling. Our
customers throw the Twitter firehose at us, so we need to be able to analyze
data quickly.

~~~
achompas
Sibling comment is impressed, but I'm skeptical that you've improved libsvm.
Sorry, can't help it. :)

Can you speak a bit about how you optimized it? I took libsvm to be fairly
optimized as far as SVM libraries go...

~~~
waterside81
Yeah, in terms of performance "improved" is the wrong term. We've tailored
things more to our use cases, especially since we need feature weighting and
multi classification, rather than simply binary classification.

~~~
achompas
Very cool! I geek out over SVM optimizations and tweaks--have you collected
your work anywhere (post? HN comment?) by any chance?

~~~
waterside81
Not really, sorry, but we're adding a new API to be able to setup and
configure your own svms. Stay tuned or follow us on twitter @repustate

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alwild
<http://www.needle.com>

the core chat/webserver is written in C and accessed via Python. And yes, we
are hiring jr devs

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jongos
At metalayer.com we use Python heavily for our web app and some C for
backend/scalability stuff. We're also hiring. Would love to chat.

~~~
brewerhimself
I checked out the website, but I didn't see a jobs page. I'd be interested in
chatting too, so feel free to drop me an email (my email can be found in my
profile) or leave yours here.

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projuce
I'm pretty sure Spotify is mainly C/C++ in the client and python for the web

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brewerhimself
Just a note: I plan on replying to every comment here. I'm on the tail end of
my lunch break right now and don't have the time, but I'll do it first thing
when I get home.

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zhicheng
Maybe Youtube does?I heard they were using Python.And if you doing a video
share site,you will use ffmpeg or something like that.It's must be written in
C。

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rikthevik
I worked for Veridae (veridae.com) doing some really interesting EDA software
and we used both very heavily. They got acquired by Tektronix last year.

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orionvmjoseph
OrionVM in Australia.

We do alot of async and evented I/O in Python/C/Cython using Gevent.

Python is just one of those languages that is so easy to extend with native
code.

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aydo
Check out www.omnicloudapp.com - they're hiring devs in Stockholm / the US for
disrupting the hosting world.

~~~
brewerhimself
I checked out the jobs page, but I got a 404 error. I'd love to talk though,
so feel free to drop me a line (my email is in my profile) or leave your email
here.

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octopine
Counsyl uses Python and C. <https://www.counsyl.com>

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matticakes
bitly is overwhelmingly C and Python

~~~
brewerhimself
Bitly has always interested me because it looks like it would be such a simple
project, but there are obviously interesting scaling problems to be solved at
Bitly.

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endlessvoid94
Kontagent uses both.

~~~
jurre
Just FYI, that means butt-agent in Dutch :)

~~~
brewerhimself
I found this funny enough to tell a co-worker about it.

