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Quartzy | Palo Alto, CA | http://quartzy.com | Full-time | Onsite

Quartzy's marketplace team builds systems to help find our users the best price possible for materials they use every day in their labs. We’re on a quest for an extraordinary application engineer who will join us to help grow and improve our marketplace applications.

You are a self-starter with a bias for action, and you can take projects from start to finish. You want to work as part of a small, tightly-knit team that moves quickly and pushes changes to production many times a day. You always admired your friends in science, but your knack for computers led you to programming.

Quartzy is a global two-sided marketplace for the life sciences. Our platform helps labs order scientific supplies ranging from beakers to capital equipment; we make life easier and save money for scientists and lab managers in academia and at pharma and biotech companies. We give the software away for free and earn revenue when labs buy their supplies from us. With over 200,000 scientists from all over the world relying on Quartzy, we help accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, and we need your help to accelerate our own pace as well.

What we're looking for:

- You have three or more years of experience writing clean, thoughtfully crafted PHP that scales.

- You have experience with other parts of our technology stack: MySQL, Redis, Beanstalkd, RabbitMQ, nginx, Git.

- You have the ability and desire to own projects that directly impact Quartzy's bottom line.

- You are a strong communicator. You write well and can easily explain complex technical concepts to non-technical people.

Does that sound like you? We'd love to hear from you -- go here to read the whole job description and apply: http://grnh.se/7nl1uo

"Inspired"? Sorry, but are you trolling? It's about as close to an exact copy as you can get.

Wow. This is horrible advice. I'm sure it works for the hiring company to get a better picture of the candidate, but this is unethical and potentially illegal in some states/countries. Legal issues are why many companies recommend/require references in a specific format- 'this person worked here from [date] to [date]', etc... devoid of any 'opinion' statements.

Here is a per-state summary of job reference shield laws (sorry, not sure how current it is): http://www.crimcheck.com/resources/job-reference-shield-laws...

(Sorry-- Off-topic) HN Powers That Be: How did this get submitted twice? The URL is the same as far as I can tell... except a trailing slash? (see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2790700)

If you've done any daytrading, you've seen these algorithms in action. I know a few folks who could make a small fortune daily just by "fooling" the algorithms by setting extraordinarily high or low order prices, and rarely actually filling one of those orders. There is lots of money to be had (and lost) by mathematicians in the stock market, and there is a lot to be said for technical analysis... but it's a jungle out there.

Thanks for the info. Watching through the Gerrit's Diary videos is fun. The amount of detail they put into this is astonishing.

Very interesting. There are more videos/details of it here:

http://www.miniatur-wunderland.com/exhibit/video/section/air... and http://www.youtube.com/user/MiWuLaTV

Their YouTube channel has a lot of videos called "Gerrit's Diary" (the main guy building it), and he goes into some detail about the different parts as they are building it (it is in German, with English subtitles). I haven't found anything specifically about the programming, but I would love to know some more about what went into that.

This is a great story; I wish there was more of this. Obviously Pop Cap has something to gain from this story-- goodwill at least, since they mentioned proceeds will go to Make A Wish. Too often around here we're flooded with the "out for yourself" mentality, which I suppose rightly fits in with the entrepreneurial nature. This is a nice break from that.

>> I would be reluctant to build a business around a domain which an unscrupulous domain "land-lord" could then redirect to a different site at his whim.

That was my first thought when reading that option. You'd definitely need some legal coverage if you decide to enter into that kind of agreement.

>> it almost sounds like RIM may be able to acquire their way back into the market.

At this point, they basically have no other choice but to acquire their way back in.

Interesting idea I guess, but the design looks horribly outdated... could really use a designer's touch.

"Watch web videos like TV" and "try it now" are the two things that people really need to see. Your "try it now" button should attract more attention.. you can try repositioning it, or increasing the size, or changing the color.

Add a header above the channels at the bottom saying "our channels" or something. I didn't realize what those links did until I clicked them.

http://designfestival.com/

http://blog.typekit.com/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

http://methodandcraft.com/

http://webdesignerwall.com/

http://www.netmagazine.com/

http://webdesignledger.com/

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/

http://www.alistapart.com/

http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/

Should be enough to get you started.

I like the lack of comment scores (to avoid everyone piling on one comment), but I think I would like it more if I knew what went into how high a comment was on the page. Is it a fact that the first displayed comment will be the one with the highest score? I know some different inputs are used, such as the karma of the submitter, how new it is, etc. but I guess we don't know "for sure".

I don't think the solution is to bring back scores, though. A possible "simple" solution could be to color/star a comment above 50/100 points, etc. Comment scores could also be displayed as percentage or on a scale of 0 to 1, 0 to 10, etc. I'd be more likely to read a comment with a score of 95% than one with a score of 20%. This way you at least get an indication of the helpfulness of the comment other than just its position on the page.

Startup? This is a 23-minute infomercial filled with meaningless psychobabble.

Someone with access to your phone can also access your emails, text messages, contacts, photos and more... I guess to some people location data is more sensitive than those things, but not to me.

Yes, you could have them vote and then give them the opportunity to sign up. Store a cookie or something so they can only get one vote as an unregistered user. Of course, this could be hacked, but you could put in provisions to check for multiple votes from the same unregistered user's IP, etc.

I agree. Let non-users vote, but make people sign in to add comments or post their own predictions. You can include some kind of measures to make sure someone doesn't vote more than once or twice.

Well, it probably wasn't apparent to many (or any) thieves either, but it is now.

Anyway, of course I'd agree it's worth fixing on Apple's part. In the meantime... hold onto your phones, I guess?

The simple solution is select encrypt backups in your iTunes options. If my computer or phone got stolen, I'd have more important things to worry about than whether the thief can find a list of locations I've been. It's fun/interesting to see it mapped out though.

You're getting 3k-15k visits/month currently? I would encourage you not to kill it off. The design could use some revision, but if you have the users, keep them. Any idea how many of your users come back on a regular basis (weekly/monthly)? You have a good opportunity here.

Let people sign in with Twitter as well as Facebook (which you have already). Encourage users to share the votes on FB, Twitter, etc (and make it easy for them to do so). Maybe have a weekly 'Featured Vote' or something. There are a lot of possibilities with a tool like this, it just needs some guidance. Giving people a way to "be heard" on issues that they care about is valuable.

No matter how nice the landing page, there is probably a sizable number of people who will just close it without either 1) an interactive demo page showing an example user's tweets, or 2) a video demo. Video demos are pretty easy to make with tools like screenr.

Without some idea of exactly how it's used and how it will benefit me, I'm at least a little hesitant to sign into it using my Twitter account.

FWIW, no "astroturfing" from me. I got the e-mail that they launched and submitted the URL, because I've been looking forward to taking a look at it (didn't get a beta invite). Haven't used it much yet, but I like the concept, and to me the execution looks promising.

You don't have to reduce the feature set by a lot, but you can at least put the technical features under an 'advanced' section or something so non-technical users are not intimidated.. or you can take them off completely. Facebook integration would also help, I'm sure.. Can't tell if you have it or not from the site but it looks like just twitter. The ability to share events and such on FB that would take members to your site would help (I would think).

Well, you are competing with a behemoth with Zondervan publishing and The City (http://www.onthecity.org), and your pricing seems to be only marginally better (for hosting.. I just now noticed the part at the bottom about being able to host it yourself for free). Do you know how many people are using it for free vs. paying for it? You may want to re-think the open source model, though I can't imagine there are TOO many churches that would want to bother hosting it themselves.

You may be better served finding a smaller niche and doing it really well, rather than having such a huge feature set that may be overwhelming to people on their first visit. You don't necessarily have to pivot to something less social, but I'm sure you can do some research and find out something that you already provide that church staff think could be much easier, and make that an emphasis.

Well, you've "been asked" to do it.. employment is always "at will" ;).

Assuming you are an exempt worker (non-hourly), they obviously don't have to pay you for overtime, but you do have to be off a "full week" for a furlough week to count. If you do any work during the furlough week you will have to be paid, as far as I know.

You might want to check your employment contract or employee handbook and see if there are clauses about what they expect from a "typical workweek" or anything like that. Otherwise I don't think it is necessarily illegal. You can always call your state or federal Department of Labor and ask, or take it up with your company's HR department. Though if I were you I would fervently seek other opportunities ;).

Zappos would drive me crazy. I have been in an environment like that. It's "cute" at first, but then you realize you're just living in a messy corporate cubicle. It really inhibits work if your job is something such as development or design, in my opinion... just too much visual noise.

37signals office seems virtually distraction-free. If you need groups of people to work together efficiently in an office environment (that is still comfortable and not a cubicle farm), this is the kind of space works well, I think. Because they have so many remote employees, I think they want their real "office" to be Campfire anyway.

There is a significant difference in philosophy with how the companies operate, I think. Zappos wants people to be comfortable (or 'at home') where they work, and 37signals wants people to work wherever they are comfortable.

I think they tend to pride themselves on their service (which is pretty good I guess.. the tech people you talk to at least seem to know what they're talking about), and they emphasize their scalability. I'm not sure if those things justify the price, but I guess some people think so.

The acronyms are how Media Temple refers to their different hosting packages. A look at their website reveals (gs) = grid service, (dv) = dedicated virtual.

Personally, I have worked on one site that was hosted on a (dv) server with Media Temple (for three months.. I was only filling in), and had nothing but good experiences with them.

Their prices are definitely high though, so I don't know if I'd call them exactly startup-friendly. I wasn't the one paying for the site I worked with, but if I had to pay for it myself, I'd probably look elsewhere.

I can see where it would help a ton to have that link up there. Very interesting write up!

Loren, just out of curiosity, would you be able to say how much you promised him for posting the link and removing the other T-Shirt links? ...or if you promised him a set amount/shirt at all. If that is coming up in another write-up, I can be patient. Thanks for sharing!