Ask HN: What startups use C and Python?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4308207

by brewerhimself • 14 years ago

37 59 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I know Mixpanel uses both of these, but what are some other startups that use both C and Python?

EDIT: Bonus points for any companies hiring junior developers!

henningpeters• 14 years ago

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...

brewerhimself13• 14 years ago

I've sent you an email. Thanks :)

rotw• 14 years ago

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

ronnix• 14 years ago

What Python tools or libraries are you using for infrastructure automation?

dkhenry2• 14 years ago

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

brewerhimself13• 14 years ago

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?

wyclif• 14 years ago

Loads of software engineers don't have a degree.

jasonlotito2• 14 years ago

> 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.

dkhenry2• 14 years ago

there are lots of engineers who are at SevOne that don't have degrees. Send me an E-mail and we can talk about it. we are always looking for talent regardless of their background.

reiz• 14 years ago

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.

brewerhimself13• 14 years ago

Google is too large for me .. at least for now. :) I'm looking for a place where I can work on an entire (or at least a large portion) product.

fauigerzigerk• 14 years ago

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

jrockway• 14 years ago

We have some C; adb for example.

dman• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

projuce• 14 years ago

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

matticakes• 14 years ago

bitly is overwhelmingly C and Python

brewerhimself13• 14 years ago

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.

danielwozniak3• 14 years ago

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/

brewerhimself13• 14 years ago

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

danielwozniak3• 14 years ago

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

aydo• 14 years ago

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

brewerhimself13• 14 years ago

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.

davidjohnstone2• 14 years ago

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.

danielwozniak3• 14 years ago

I'm not sure that you would be able to get it as fast in Python but if you have not checked out the bisect module, I highly recommend it.

brewerhimself13• 14 years ago

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!

davidjohnstone2• 14 years ago

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.)

pulletsforever• 14 years ago

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

brewerhimself13• 14 years ago

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.

shrughes• 14 years ago

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

rgrieselhuber2• 14 years ago

Agreed. When I'm hiring developers, when they tell me they only want to work in certain languages, it's almost always a red flag in terms of their overall problem-solving ability. Just my experience though.

ssylee• 14 years ago

What about if they say they are only fluent in certain languages at the moment while having a basic knowledge in the languages that you use? Do you look more for ability to solve computer science and discrete math problems?

greenyoda• 14 years ago

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.

brewerhimself13• 14 years ago

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

endlessvoid94• 14 years ago

Kontagent uses both.

jurre• 14 years ago

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

brewerhimself13• 14 years ago

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

waterside814• 14 years ago

Repustate.com

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

the_cat_kittles3• 14 years ago

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

waterside814• 14 years ago

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.

rikthevik• 14 years ago

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.

alwild• 14 years ago

http://www.needle.com

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

jongos• 14 years ago

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.

brewerhimself13• 14 years ago

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.

brewerhimself13• 14 years ago

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.

orionvmjoseph• 14 years ago

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.

octopine• 14 years ago

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

zhicheng• 14 years ago

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。

Ask HN: What startups use C and Python?

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