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trefn

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Cofounder at Mixpanel, YC S09.

ttrefren@gmail.com

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time.com 2y ago

Solar Sales Bros Threaten the Green Energy Transition

trefn
2pts0
mixpanel.com 7y ago

Mixpanel introduces query-time sampling: fast, lossless user analytics at scale

trefn
1pts0
petapixel.com 10y ago

CoeLux: Artificial Sunlight That’s Real Enough to Trick Your Camera and Brain

trefn
276pts81
code.mixpanel.com 11y ago

Building a (not so simple) expression language part II: Scope

trefn
7pts0
highscalability.com 11y ago

Three simple rules for building data products that people will actually use

trefn
13pts0
itsokbecause.com 13y ago

You're Not Alone

trefn
7pts0
mixpanel.com 14y ago

Mixpanel introduces People Analytics

trefn
124pts45
online.wsj.com 14y ago

Yelp IPO Opens Up 47%, Then Moves Higher

trefn
9pts0
appsumo.com 15y ago

AppSumo YC Week: LIFETIME Mixpanel.com Startup Plan

trefn
2pts0
techcrunch.com 15y ago

Mixpanel Launches Tool To Analyze Email Analytics

trefn
39pts7
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: Creating an internship program

trefn
28pts24
code.mixpanel.com 15y ago

Easy Python Deployment with Fabric and Git

trefn
1pts0
code.mixpanel.com 15y ago

Secure your code: OpenVPN in the cloud

trefn
66pts40
techcrunch.com 15y ago

HipChat’s Enterprise Communication Platform Adds Video Chat And Guest Access

trefn
15pts2
techcrunch.com 16y ago

PHP Founder Rasmus Lerdorf Joins Group Payments Startup WePay (YC S09)

trefn
100pts33
mashable.com 16y ago

Virality is overrated

trefn
25pts6
blog.mixpanel.com 16y ago

Mixpanel (YC S09) releases macro-level A/B testing tool

trefn
55pts15
blog.mixpanel.com 16y ago

A/B Testing to Increase User Engagement

trefn
47pts5
www.insidesocialgames.com 16y ago

Mixpanel’s Real-Time Analytics Show How Social Games Grow and Die

trefn
34pts0
www.slideshare.net 16y ago

Metrics for social games

trefn
17pts1
blog.mixpanel.com 16y ago

Funnel Analysis with Mixpanel (YC S09)

trefn
22pts5
www.techcrunch.com 17y ago

Mixpanel (YC S09) Takes Stat Tracking Beyond Google Analytics

trefn
123pts23
blog.mixpanel.com 17y ago

Analytics - not just for optimization

trefn
31pts5
blog.mixpanel.com 17y ago

Introduction to Analytics: Funnel Analysis

trefn
24pts3
blog.mixpanel.com 17y ago

What assumptions are you making?

trefn
11pts0

I have a similar tic. I just edit my hosts file to redirect those requests to localhost. Then when I mindlessly navigate to one of those sites it doesn't work and I realize I did it unconsciously. I do the same for gmail because I have the same tic for checking my mail.

If I actually want to go to one of those sites I just edit the hosts file and comment out the redirect line.

On my mac, the /etc/hosts file looks like:

  # #
  # Host Database
  #
  # localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
  # when the system is booting.  Do not change this entry.
  ##
  127.0.0.1 localhost
  255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
  ::1             localhost
  fe80::1%lo0 localhost

  127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com twitter.com www.facebook.com reddit.com
  127.0.0.1 mail.google.com

It may just look different now.

At my company (Mixpanel), the modern equivalent is our support team, which is filled with smart, hungry people who want to get their foot in the door in tech.

Now, we have former support folks all over the company (sales, sales engineering, services, software engineering, product - just to name the departments I can think of offhand), who are often our top performers as ICs or who have grown into leadership roles. Some have left to start their own companies.

It's actually been one of our most effective hiring channels!

we're a/b testing the button copy... the Starter package is free and the Growth package pops up a plan builder with pricing.

It's complicated because the price is based on your user volume so there's not a single price to show. We've heard this feedback though and are working on an improvement!

(founder of mixpanel here)

I'm really excited about this release - sampling has been necessary to support some of our largest customers for many years, but has a bunch of issues, as Vijay points out in this post.

I love the fact that moving sampling to query time lets us beat the tradeoff - we get something like 90% of the speedup of ingestion time sampling with none of the downsides, and the only incremental cost is storage which is cheap. It's a big win.

I hadn't heard of this person before, but a couple of points resonated with me:

First, the framing of equality and redistribution, and the suggested emphasis on focusing our efforts on raising the floor rather than lowering the ceiling:

In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals, regardless of where you were coming from or going to. This was, at heart, an exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions. If one person’s supposed freedom results in someone else’s subjugation, that is not actually a free society in action. It’s hierarchy in disguise.

To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest). Egalitarians should focus policy attention on areas where that order had broken down. Being homeless was an unfree condition by all counts; thus, it was incumbent on a free society to remedy that problem. A quadriplegic adult was blocked from civil society if buildings weren’t required to have ramps. Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences. A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,” Anderson wrote.

There's also an interesting bit that I haven't considered or heard of before: the original arguments for the free market were to escape a tyrannical hierarchy, topping out with the king - a free market was much better than that. But as we have built out free-market economy, we've gotten to the point where the decisions your employer makes are just as arbitrary (and probably have a greater effect on your daily life).

Images of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.

(I work at Mixpanel)

Honestly you could probably write a quick pipeline to dump your json data into Mixpanel and then use JQL -- it would be a little hacky but if you have less than a few million rows it shouldn't be too much work (and would still be free at that volume).

Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" goes into great detail about Isaac Newton's life, and his focus on alchemy and theology. It is of course fiction, but well researched and utterly fascinating. I recommend it!

Mixpanel (YC S09) | San Francisco, CA [ONSITE]

Mixpanel is growing very rapidly - 13 people at the start of 2013, 36 by Jan 2014, 120 at the beginning of this year. Currently 200.

On the financial side, revenue is growing apace and we were recently valued at $865M by a16z.

==MOBILE==

On mobile, we are hiring lead engineers for both iOS and Android. On both platforms, we build crazy things that dig deep into platform internals (https://mixpanel.com/mobile-ab-testing, https://mixpanel.com/codeless-mobile-analytics)

==SITE RELIABILITY==

We are also hiring SRE’s - this is a new team, built to improve reliability and performance across our infrastructure. We have > 1K leased dedicated machines, mostly running our custom datastore.

You can find more info about what we work on at https://code.mixpanel.com, and more info about the jobs at https://mixpanel.com/jobs.

If you're interested, send me an email at tim@mixpanel.com and I'll point you in the right direction.

100 hours is nowhere near enough time to meaningfully change someone's life. You'll spend that long just gaining their trust -- and why should they follow your advice, anyway?

This doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, but it's a much bigger investment than 100 hours.

Mixpanel (YC S09) | San Francisco, CA

Mixpanel is growing very rapidly - 13 people at the start of 2013, 36 by Jan 2014, 120 at the beginning of this year. Currently 170.

On the financial side, revenue is growing apace and we were recently valued at $865M by a16z.

We are hiring for many engineering roles:

  * Product engineering manager - lead a team of product engineers, building everything from APIs to user facing products
  * Lead iOS engineer - lead our iOS efforts; we build crazy things that dig deep into iOS internals
  * Product engineer - mostly python/js/less; lots of work building tools to interact with and visualize data.
  * Systems engineer - mostly C/C++/Python; lots of work on scaling, reliability, and infrastructure. This team works on our custom datastore, written from the ground up in c/c++.
  * Site reliability engineer - this is a new team, built to improve reliability and performance across our infrastructure. We have > 1K leased dedicated machines, mostly running the datastore.
  * Machine learning engineer - come help us build predictive analytics. We have 1 brilliant person working on this now, but need more.
You can find more info about what we work on at https://code.mixpanel.com, and more info about the jobs at https://mixpanel.com/jobs.

If you're interested, send me an email at tim@mixpanel.com and I'll point you in the right direction.

San Francisco, CA Mixpanel (YCS09; http://mixpanel.com) is the most advanced advanced analytics platform ever for web & mobile applications.

Mixpanel is profitable, with thousands of customers and millions in monthly revenue.

ENGINEERING CULTURE

Our engineering culture:

  * We do very thorough, line-by-line code reviews using GitHub pull requests. This keeps our code quality high and helps us learn.
  * We try to have two people work together on every project (collaborating, not pairing). It's more fun and it results in better code.
  * We practice rapid iteration. If it's better than live, we ship. We also build things so they can go live (whitelisted) long before launch day.
  * We write tests for things that are mission-critical, prone to failure, or cause paranoia. Think billing and datastore code, not Django views.
  * We care about learning. Right now we're reading through Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment.
  * We currently have 9 vim users, 2 IntelliJ, and 1 emacs holdout.
ENGINEERING POSITIONS

We have two types of engineering positions available - systems and product. Both of these positions require you to be able to work in San Francisco, CA.

Systems engineers build and scale our infrastructure, and write mostly C, C++, and Python. We are working on a number of new products right now with serious infrastructure challenges and we need more people with great depth to help us solve them. This position requires at least 5 years of experience.

Responsibilities of this role include:

  * Working on our custom datastore (written from the ground up in C)
  * Scaling the data processing pipeline (currently handling > 50K requests per second)
  * Building notification delivery infrastructure (currently sending > 100M emails & push notifications per month)
  * General improvements to performance, reliability, and security
  * Work with the rest of the engineering team to design, build, deploy, and maintain systems
If you're interested in a more full-stack role, check out the Product engineer position: http://boards.greenhouse.io/mixpanel/jobs/7910

--

The engineering team is still small (14), and there's a lot of interesting stuff to do. Happy to talk details.

If you're interested, drop me a line - tim@mixpanel.com.

San Francisco, CA Mixpanel (YCS09; http://mixpanel.com) is the most advanced advanced analytics platform ever for web & mobile applications.

Mixpanel is profitable, with thousands of customers and millions in monthly revenue.

ENGINEERING CULTURE

Our engineering culture:

  * We do very thorough, line-by-line code reviews using GitHub pull requests. This keeps our code quality high and helps us learn.
  * We try to have two people work together on every project (collaborating, not pairing). It's more fun and it results in better code.
  * We practice rapid iteration. If it's better than live, we ship. We also build things so they can go live (whitelisted) long before launch day.
  * We write tests for things that are mission-critical, prone to failure, or cause paranoia. Think billing and datastore code, not Django views.
  * We care about learning. Right now we're reading through Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment.
  * We currently have 9 vim users, 2 IntelliJ, and 1 emacs holdout.
ENGINEERING POSITIONS

We have two types of engineering positions available - systems and product. Both of these positions require you to be able to work in San Francisco, CA.

Systems engineers build and scale our infrastructure, and write mostly C, C++, and Python. We are working on a number of new products right now with serious infrastructure challenges and we need more people with great depth to help us solve them. This position requires at least 4 years of experience.

Responsibilities of this role include:

  * Working on our custom datastore (written from the ground up in C)
  * Scaling the data processing pipeline (currently handling > 50K requests per second)
  * Building notification delivery infrastructure (currently sending > 100M emails & push notifications per month)
  * General improvements to performance, reliability, and security
  * Work with the rest of the engineering team to design, build, deploy, and maintain systems
If you're interested in a more full-stack role, check out the Product engineer position: http://boards.greenhouse.io/mixpanel/jobs/7910

--

The engineering team is still small (12), and there's a lot of interesting stuff to do. Happy to talk details.

If you're interested, drop me a line - tim@mixpanel.com.

San Francisco, CA

Mixpanel (YCS09; http://mixpanel.com) is the most advanced advanced analytics platform ever for web & mobile applications.

Mixpanel is profitable, with millions in monthly revenue, and we're backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Max Levchin.

ENGINEERING POSITIONS

We have two types of engineering positions available - systems and product.

Systems engineers build and scale our infrastructure, and write mostly C, C++, and Python. These are the people working on our custom datastore. This position requires at least 2 years of experience writing systems software. Solid C experience is a plus.

Product engineers are full-stack developers who build the parts people interact with - reporting interfaces, APIs, dataviz stuff, and more - and write mostly Python, JS, and Less. This position requires at least 2 years of software engineering experience, no specialization required. Solid JS experience is a plus though.

The engineering team is still small (11), and there's a lot of interesting stuff to do. Happy to talk details.

If you are interested, drop me a line - tim@mixpanel.com.