mmp

AdGear – Montreal, Canada – Full Time - Analytics Developer

AdGear is a fast-growing digital advertising technology company. We provide software and services for publishers, advertisers and media agencies.

As a hybrid between back-end software developer and data scientist, you will build tools to stream, process, monitor and analyze event logs, which you will then use to develop forecast models to inform our ad decisioning processes.

You should apply if this describes you:

- Formal training in statistics. Ideally, experience with R, APL/J/K, Julia, or similar.

- Proficient working with databases. Ideally, experience with columnar stores or OLAP cubes.

- Ideally, experience working with Hadoop, Cassandra, Kafka, Storm, or large datasets in general.

Check out http://adgear.com/company/careers/#AnalyticsDevMontreal for more details.

No offense, but I'm not sure that the Language Shootout is the best showcase, the SBCL code submitted there could hardly be called idiomatic Common Lisp. Mandelbrot is one of the most egrerious offenders in that regard [1], compare that with the Java submission [2] which is both cleaner and faster...

[1]http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test...

[2]http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test...

Maybe it's just his students that are like this, and not all young people.

Considering how mediocre and ignorant most journos are, is it that surprising to consider that the same may apply to journalism students? When I say mediocre journalists, I don't have Hunter Thompson or Helen Thomas in mind, but the people that invariably make you cringe when you read their newspaper article on a subject you're familiar with.

This rant would be worth reading weren't it for the fact that programming language provability is but one of many areas of research in CS, which is something the author doesn't seem to realize in either of his two rants.

Almost no one cares about program provability, well gee golly, I'd never have known!

Why should anyone who needed years in grad school to figure that out even be taken seriously?

Languages don't matter, eh?

A month ago I heard a couple of hackers talk about how they were able to complete a personnel scheduler in Scheme in 20'000 LOC and a few weeks time, when the previous C++ codebase was 200'000 LOC and was never going to be finished.

Not always, but for certain endeavours, certain languages are just much better tools for the job than others, and by better, understand order of magnitude better. That's a very real fact, even if it doesn't make the languages zealots any less obnoxious.

On never using popular products:

If you refuse to use certain tools because of religious or ideological reasons then you're just narrow-minded.

If you're an start-up entrepreneur, you're in the situation of having to efficiently allocate scarce resources, ideally you should be using the best tools for the job without arbitrarily limiting yourself, no?

Luckily for them, the guys at Google decided to go ahead using boring uncool commodity hardware instead of the 'better' fancy machines.

640K ought to be enough for anyone!

The smarter students become aware pretty soon that grades are meaningless, and only care about them if they have a good reason to (scholarships, etc).

There's a middle ground of fellows like him, who are smart enough to get good grades if they work really hard, but think it matters.

It can be very interesting to see what other coders did and compare it with your own solution, in the messageboard (when you solve a problem you get access to the corresponding thread).

You can compare the actual algorithms and ways to approach the problem, of course, and they can be very varied, so you end up learning a thing or two. And the languages themselves, you can see their strengths and weaknesses in particular areas. It stimulates curiosity and opening your mind to new ways of doing things. I think that's important and valuable because when you think about it, there aren't that many opportunities to do so.

Also, when you're tackling something novel, it seems to me you're going to restrict yourself pretty early to tools you already know, and you're not going to try radically new things once you're into it because the penalty would be too high (I may be wrong though).

The reason behind full employment of programmers is actually pretty down to earth.

Enrollment into CS programs dropped dramatically when the bubble burst, and has remained low to this day, even though the market recovered in only a couple of years after the crash. It's a matter of inertia, really: it takes a few years for people's perception of the job market to adjust and 4 more years to graduate.

This `Microsoft experience = viruses + popups + hardware problems` complaint may have been true as little as 5 years ago, but it certainly is no longer the case with XP SP2 and Vista, the author is being a bit dishonest here.

Doesn't invalidate his claim that Apple makes nice machines, though.

How do you make sure the times are synchronized?

Why don't you just have your server broadcast a bunch of bits that change every minute and use them instead of a timestamp to hash with your secret?

Your protocol seems vulnerable to eavesdropping, technically couldn't someone sniff any client's packets to find out which port to connect to?

Also, I suppose you have some kind of tolerance for when you send a packet to the server at minute x and 59 sec and it arrives at minute (x+1) and 01 sec?

I'm a CS grad student at the Universite de Montreal. It's probably not what you're looking for (what's security?), since it's francophone and concentrates mainly on operations research, but if there's any interest feel free to email me.

If you do come to Montreal, check http://montrealtechwatch.com/ for local startup activity. In any case, it's a great city to live in.

Very interesting work. Could results on 'C++' or 'C#' also appear as results for 'C' though? Or is the search strict enough for that not to happen?