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Routific | Vancouver, BC | Full-Time, Onsite | https://routific.com Routific is a smart logistics platform that optimizes routes for last-mile delivery fleets, saving businesses up to 40% on time and fuel. Today, the power and efficiency of our proprietary algorithm combined with a stellar user experience makes Routific the best routing solution on the market and the leading route optimization API.

To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/routific

Here are our open roles:

- Algorithms Engineer: https://angel.co/routific/jobs/233236-algorithms-engineer

- Full-Stack Engineer: https://angel.co/routific/jobs/200057-full-stack-engineer

- Senior Customer Success Manager: https://angel.co/routific/jobs/360724-senior-customer-succes....

- Senior Mobile engineer (React Native)

Tech Stack: Rust – Common Lisp – React – Angular – Typescript – Node.js

We're also looking for Senior Engineering talent; we don't have a job posting up for this, as we would prefer to craft the role around the candidate. Ping me to learn more. We will sponsor your work permit and cover your relocation cost to beautiful Vancouver! We have sweeping mountain and ocean views from our office ;-)

The art of worldly wisdom, by Baltasar Gracian.

Timeless classic, tiny book of 300 maxims. Each one very profound, highly re-readable as you go through life. I've been reading it over and over little bits at a time, for well over a decade by now. Life changer for sure.

Routific | Vancouver, BC | Full-Time, Onsite | https://routific.com

Routific is a smart logistics platform that optimizes routes for last-mile delivery fleets, saving businesses up to 40% on time and fuel. Today, the power and efficiency of our proprietary algorithm combined with a stellar user experience makes Routific the best routing solution on the market and the leading route optimization API.

To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/routific

Here are our open roles:

- Algorithms Engineer: https://angel.co/routific/jobs/233236-algorithms-engineer

- Full-Stack Engineer: https://angel.co/routific/jobs/200057-full-stack-engineer

- Senior Customer Success Manager: https://angel.co/routific/jobs/360724-senior-customer-succes...

- Senior Mobile engineer (React Native)

Tech Stack: Rust – Common Lisp – React – Angular – Typescript – Node.js

Routific | Vancouver, BC | Full-Time, Onsite | https://routific.com

Routific is a smart logistics platform that optimizes routes for last-mile delivery fleets, saving businesses up to 40% on time and fuel. Today, the power and efficiency of our proprietary algorithm combined with a stellar user experience makes Routific the best routing solution on the market and the leading route optimization API.

To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/routific

Here are our open roles:

- Algorithms Engineer: https://angel.co/routific/jobs/233236-algorithms-engineer

- Full-Stack Engineer: https://angel.co/routific/jobs/200057-full-stack-engineer

Tech Stack: Node.js – Rust – Common Lisp – React – Angular

Routific | (beautiful) Vancouver, BC | Full-Time, Onsite | https://routific.com

Routific is a smart logistics platform that optimizes routes for last-mile delivery fleets, saving businesses up to 40% on time and fuel. Today, the power and efficiency of our proprietary algorithm combined with a stellar user experience makes Routific the best routing solution on the market and the leading route optimization API.

To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/routific

Here are our open roles:

- Algorithms Engineer: https://angel.co/routific/jobs/233236-algorithms-engineer

- Full-Stack Engineer: https://angel.co/routific/jobs/200057-full-stack-engineer

- Product Manager (ping me)

- Next-level Engineer (ping me)

Tech Stack: Our stack consists of Koa.js, MongoDB, and Angular – because they were the hottest things a few years ago. Now we’re playing with React, React Native, Flow.js, and Postgres – because Postgres is cool again :)

Yes! Loved that game. You could mount each other and create the almighty LevTerr. I wonder if it's still alive

A third of the front page of Amazon; what's going on? Did they release a dozen products in one go? Interesting release strategy to bulk everything as opposed to spacing it out..

For the js crowd, here's an implementation of KNN in Node I did a few years ago: https://github.com/axiomzen/Alike

And it's cousin KD-tree: https://github.com/axiomzen/look-alike

This is awesome! I'm glad to see this on the front-page of HN. I believe core value alignment is one of the most important things in a team, both from the company as well as the employee's perspective. Unfortunately very often ignored..

I had just blogged about the importance of culture last month [1] where I heard a talk from a CEO that grew his team rapidly to 60 strong, only to have to let 21 go in one day, due to a lack of cultural alignment.

[1] https://blog.routific.com/the-importance-of-startup-culture-...

Also known as Collaborative Filtering in recommender systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering

[1] Balthasar Gracian, "The Art of Worldly Wisdom"

Timeless classic, 300 short maxims containing sage advice, written in beautiful prose. One of those books you can read just a few pages whenever you feel like. Currently re-reading it for the third time since I first read it 10 years ago. Still updates my mental model.

[2] James Allen, "As a man Thinketh"

At 21 pages, by far the most impactful piece of work on an impact-to-effort ratio. Very simple, yet very true. Changed my mental model completely, also 10 years ago, and also a book I'm re-reading for the third time.

[3] Nassim Taleb, "Black Swan"

A much more modern business book on the now-mainstream concept of "Black Swan" events. But the true value of this book goes beyond the concept – it changed my view of statistics, knowledge, empirical scepticism, philosophy, cognitive biases, societal dynamics, and sure, made me quit investment banking.

[4] Brian Greene, "Fabric of the Cosmos"

Mind-blowing primer on physics, all the way from Newtonian physics, to General Relativity, to Quantum Mechanics, to String Theory (and beyond). Concepts explained without a single equation.

[5] Douglas Hofstadter, "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid"

What a unique masterpiece. Covers a wide range fascinating concepts through the three geniuses in Math, Art, and Music. Most mind-blowing is his meta-writing style, using short fictional dialogue interludes (sprinkled with easter eggs) to convey each concept in very subtle manner. The joy when you see it.

[1] http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/aww/index.htm

[2] https://wahiduddin.net/thinketh/as_a_man_thinketh.pdf

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan_(Taleb_book)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabric_of_the_Cosmos

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

UPDATE: format

I discovered the "Disconnect. Offline only." article through the thumbnail :)

Beauty. Almost a piece of art.

I was on a plane yesterday (literally on airplane mode) and I finished a book I've been working on for a month, and prepped/wrote half of a presentation. Quite often I produce much of my writing on a plane.

I find myself very productive on a plane. Especially on cheap flights that don't have in-flight entertainment. Literally no distractions for a preset amount of time. You're not only offline, you're also physically stuck. Best way to make the time fly by is by being productive.

For first time entrepreneurs, yes. And if you don't care about becoming a unicorn, but rather build a slower growing but healthy business.

For serial entrepreneurs that are looking to raise heaps of money and be in SV, going big or go home, then YC is the better choice.

It is indeed misleading to say that $80b in value was created, because Uber and Twilio were not Techstars companies.

"The market cap on Techstars website is $7.5B, whereas YC’s portfolio was valued at $30B in 2014" [1]

A more interesting days point (that ignores outliers) is the number of startups that raised a Series A round; and using that metric, you can rightfully claim Techstars to be #1 [2]

[1] https://blog.routific.com/which-startup-accelerator-is-right...

[2] https://mattermark.com/500-startups-accelerator-company/

Alum here. TS Chicago 2015.

Best experience of my life.

Biggest difference between YC and TS (from what I hear) is that TS spends much more time hands-on mentoring.

I had the honor to have ~60 1on1 meetings with very respectable entrepreneurs and investors during the program. In addition to very high quality workshops and inspiring talks almost every day. Compare that to the weekly office hours at YC (again, through multiple grapevine branches).

I personally deem the TS experience the most accelerating for my personal career, as well as our start-up.

I wrote about my experience and my lessons learned here: http://www.techstars.com/content/accelerators/lessons-busine...

I have heard mixed stories from other Techstars chapters, especially the corporate sponsored ones. But I can vouch for Chicago :)

Despite gaps between technology and the real-world, there is still tremendous value to be had by technology, if you combined it with the real-world, i.e. humans.

Routing algorithms can come up with extremely efficient routes, which can serve as a starting point for the human route planner to fix (to account for real-world knowledge).

Consider the alternative where the human route planner starts from scratch.

Given the scale of the problems they are tackling, I'm quite surprised how little they are saving. $5m over $120m is only 4%. I would imagine municipalities' manual route planners wouldn't be that great.

We have found with many real-world scenarios, that at a much smaller scale we could save easily up to 40% in driving time and fuel costs. When we studied cases of 20+ vehicles and ~1000 stops, sometimes the savings were up to 60%.

In one scenario we took 8 cars off the road form a fleet of 30. [1] That's 26% compared to the article's 11.5%. Not to discount its results, dropping 75 bus routes is incredible! Imagine dropping another 75 :)

Note that since this is an NP-complete problem, the larger the size of the problem, the more constraints you add, the harder it is for any human route planner to plan routes efficiently -- so the larger the potential efficiency gains for an algorithm.

Disclaimer/plug: founder of Routific here.

[1] https://routific.com/stories/spring-hope-food-drive/

> Only 7% of the high-performing CEOs we studied had an undergraduate Ivy League education, and 8% of them didn’t graduate from college at all.

If you confuse correlation with causation, you could say that it's better to be a drop out than graduate from Ivy League

Interviewer here. Apologies for the tone, totally not intended. The true intend was to help PhDs be more prepared, not to express smugness.

Here are some details that were cut out of the post:

- we have an extensive engineering interview process, typically 3-4 sessions. First chat, tech screen, take home assignment, and half day hackathon with a few engineers - sometimes we do the initial chat and tech screen together so we had a 40 min chat, and 20 min simple tech screen in this case - proposed of simple tech screen is to decide if this person knows basic coding/problem solving (eg Josephus problem) - goal is not to write code on the white board, but rather talk and discuss approach, general problem solving

This candidate was specialized in OR, so we asked an optimization related question (given an array of products and prices, how to spend all your money exactly). Instead of a discussion, the candidate dove into writing mathematical proofs, and after framing the goal of the exercise and a few hints, he ended up writing a 10-level deeply nested for loop...

Obviously I'm not trying to make generalizations, but I've interviewed over 100 candidates in my career, and there is a strong negative correlation with PhDs in particular, hence the article. Understandably, because they are trained in other methods, typically unsuitable to startups, as others have commented. But if they want to get into startups, I hope these tips would help.

Would love to see more of these articles on Hacker News; very educational, almost adventurous, Kevin Mitnick style (obviously not quite).

I know that Paul Graham had a different definition of "hacking" in mind when he started HN, but still. I love these hacking write-ups.

Great primer on ICOs - thanks for enlightening me :)

I'm surprised there is no mention of D-Wave systems - the quantum computer that Google bought a while ago [1] and how/why they decided to build it themselves from scratch.

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Google-pay-for-the-quantu...

Agreed. These kinds of competitions or coding interviews may cause over-fitting.

If you care about your company's culture, a person's humbleness, art of concise debating, etc - more important parameters than sheer GPA or coding skills imho - you can never do away with in-person interviews.

Calling them "utterly useless" is an utter click-bait.

Weather here is amazing! Vancouver has such a bad rep when it comes to rain, but honestly it's not that bad. Here's what it's really like:

Between May and October, basically half of the year, you'll have very comfortable T-shirt weather, and blue skies I'd say 70% of the time!

Between December and March it's gloomy, but you'll have awesome snow in the mountains, just 30 min from downtown :) from our office we can see the slopes. Just went skiing with the team 2 months ago.

Vancouver is one of the few cities you can ski in the morning and lie on the beach in the afternoon, grilling BBQ and play beach volleyball.

Life's not that bad! I've been here 5 years :)

BTW, if anyone is in town for the YC interviews, I'd love to show you a good time!

In a scenario where more YC companies set up shop in Vancouver, and US investors follow to bet on the next Slack up here, then this will naturally change as a function of supply/demand.

It would be awesome if they set up a remote office here in Vancouver :)

A lot of the things they had to build in-house for repo/build/test/deploy as described in chapter two, all of us are fortunate enough to get for (almost) free with all the tools these days.

It's a good time to be a founder :)

But this is already common practice with Bloomberg terminals -- banks paying big bucks get 15min earlier information than the public