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Title: Probabilistic programming systems (PPS) define languages that discretize modeling and inference such that any generative model can be easily composed and run with a common inference engine. The main advantage over traditional ML systems in deterministic code (i.e. Python) being concise, modular modeling where the developer doesn't have to write custom inference algorithms for each model/problem. For more info see, for example, [1] and [2].<p>I'm curious though, what applications of PPS are realized in practice? Notably Uber [3] and Google [4] are developing/supporting their own (deep learning focused) PPS, but is it known if/how they're used within these companies? Are the frameworks (Pyro [5] and Edward [6], respectively) used by other companies?<p>[1] Frank Wood (Microsoft) tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te7A5JEm5UI<p>[2] MIT ProbComp lab's page of resources: http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/resources/<p>[3] https://eng.uber.com/pyro/<p>[4] https://medium.com/tensorflow/introducing-tensorflow-probability-dca4c304e245<p>[5] http://pyro.ai/<p>[6] http://edwardlib.org/
Upvote: | 251 |
Title: Electron is a product that seems to have a love/hate relationship with developers and users.<p>That being said, one of the most loved Electron applications, VSCode, is made by Microsoft and now Electron is essentially one of their assets.<p>It seems to me like this could mean good things for Electron.<p>Are there any ways you can think of that MS can improve that ecosystem?
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I have been feeling disappointed that I haven't been able to use my computer science degree to it's full potential. Most of my work seems to be boring CRUD work where the challenge is gluing libraries together or figuring out business requirements. Actual interesting technical problems seems to be mostly wrapped in ready-made libraries / SaaS services.<p>Anyone in the same boat?
Upvote: | 542 |
Title: I am learning Python and Web Development. I want to set up an online store for my friend who does stitching work. She needs a site where she can display her designs and take orders for stitching.<p>As I am learning Python, I am planning to use framework : Sale or - http://getsaleor.com/ or Oscar http://oscarcommerce.com/.<p>For payment, I may use PayPal or Stripe.<p>Budget for building online store is very low. I want to full control over it and independent?<p>What services and technologies do you use when you'd like to quickly build a small online store?
Upvote: | 245 |
Title: I have been a devoted Mac user for years, however apart from needing a Mac to build and release iOS apps, I am increasingly looking for great laptop hardware with great support for Linux, and recommendations on how to jump from the Mac to Linux (preferably Ubuntu). What pitfalls did you face? What apps and support did you miss?
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: Medium was hot, then not as much. Ghost is doing well. Wordpress is the default.<p>What do you use to setup a blog now a days?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: We’re Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie, the founders of Substack (YC W18), and Matt Taibbi, a journalist and author who has written four best-sellers and is a contributing editor to the Rolling Stone. Substack is a tool that makes it simple for a writer to start a paid newsletter – but we’re also experimenting with other models for online publishing. For instance, Matt is using Substack to serialize a novel called The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing: Adventures of the Unidentified Black Male, which you can see here: <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com" rel="nofollow">https://taibbi.substack.com</a>.<p>Matt has so far published six chapters in the book. The serial is an experiment for him, too, but even when it’s done he intends to keep publishing his independent work through Substack. We thought it might be interesting to bring Matt into a Hacker News discussion about this model, other things that might be tried, and the state of online publishing generally.<p>Last time Substack was involved in a discussion here on HN, we got a ton of great feedback (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16326411" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16326411</a>). We’d love to hear your thoughts about online publishing and how tech can (or cannot) help journalism!
Upvote: | 180 |
Title: I'm starting a new gig as a product manager with a startup in a few days. ~20 employees (most but not all in one building). Good customer traction.<p>I'm building a personal checklist of onboarding items. It contains the usual categories - hr/payroll stuff, phone/email/slack setups, product details, customer commits/requests, risks/issues, etc.<p>The main concern is how to be productive from day 1 without being a time suck for the CEO & CTO.
Does anybody have 1) a shareable best-practice checklist, or 2) a methodology of quizzing my new coworkers?<p>Appreciate it.
Upvote: | 168 |
Title: MovingToGitlab has become a buzzword after the Microsoft-GitHub deal announcement. Thanks to the Gitlab marketing team on playing the right game at the right time. The Gitlab imports are on the rise.<p>But, Gitlab is not the only good alternative to GitHub.<p>I know a few more alternatives like Bitbucket and Codegiant that are equally good and maybe even better in a few aspects.<p>If you know any good alternatives, do list them here. let's not fall prey to the Gitlab marketing movement without proper evaluation.
Upvote: | 98 |
Title: I've been applying to remote gigs since August of last year, and I have yet to get very far. My fear is the applicant pool is simply too large, so I will need to find something to set me apart. Still, it seems like most companies don't want to talk unless I have remote experience.<p>Do you have suggestions on how best to present yourself to remote companies when you have no experience with remote?
Upvote: | 52 |
Title: What do you like so much about them?
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: For me, I think it was database design that was most useful - things like normalization especially.<p>Binary search I use a few times for an ecommerce cart. I remember to avoid putting loops inside loops.<p>I use Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) and SOLID principles for code design.<p>Besides that, I haven't used them all that much. Which do you find most useful?
Upvote: | 100 |
Title: With the recent focus on the “community” and the weirdly hidden interview and podcast content, I’ve found IH’s value has diminished for me considerably. The current community seems more like a Product Hunt 2.0, and unfortunately, I’m not a fan of PH or the rather immature (sorry, but being honest) “maker” community. I feel like IH is heading in the wrong direction and it makes me sad. Am I the only one?
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: I've been developing software for the last 15 years and I've stopped 3 months ago and just quit. It wasn't the job, it was one of the better companies I've worked for, the people were nice, the tech was cool and the money was great. Outside of work my life is pretty fulfilled, my first child was born last year, and although its been hard its also really awesome.<p>I've just lost the passion for developing software :(<p>I've taken 3 months off so far, but still can't bring myself to open up some code - I'm wondering now if I should think about changing career completely, what can an ex-developer retrain into?
Upvote: | 148 |
Title: And what do you attribute that environment's productivity to?
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Outside of school/work/neighborhood, how do you meet new people?
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: I'm interested in your feedback regarding my question,In my case, I'm planning to learn Rust, but I'm really struggling between going for Go or Rust.
Thanks !
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: Inspired by a tweet by Leo Polovets: "I'm interested in good overviews of large, interesting sectors like logistics, fintech, ecommerce, etc. What are people's favorite resources for these (and other!) sectors?"<p>For example:<p>- Shipping Industry, Book: "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger"
Upvote: | 61 |
Title: So, long story short, I invested 50k USD into incorporating a company in Japan (a 株式会社) and now I'm realising I probably don't have what it takes to make this work.<p>A bit of background: I've been in Japan since 2011, doing a mix of programming, studying and English teaching. I've never managed to keep a programming job longer than 6 months, so realistically I was mostly supported by English teaching.<p>I like living in Japan but I haven't been able to progress my career much. I thought maybe I would have better luck starting my own company so I paid an judicial scrivener to incorporate a company and I invested all my savings into it. Another reason for starting the company was to allow me to extend my visa.<p>Well, after starting the company at the start of this year I realise I was hopelessly naive. I haven't really managed to do anything (the same problem I had when I was working for other companies). I've only really managed to use my bank account recently. I've got lots of forms and paperwork that I'm supposed to file but I don't really know what its for or how to fill it in. I've very much in over my head.<p>I haven't managed to release any software or do any consulting.<p>What is my next step? I have honestly thought about suicide, or just fleeing the country. But I want to do the right thing, I don't want my actions to reflect badly on other foreigners in Japan.<p>Does anyone have any advice about what to do next, or how to avoid getting into scrapes like this in the future?
Upvote: | 193 |
Title: I’m Jared, one of the partners at YC. When I joined YC, one of the things
that I most wanted to do was to help make hiring and getting hired
suck less. I have a business reason and a personal reason for this.
The business reason is that YC's job is to help the startups we fund,
and helping with hiring is one of the biggest things we can do. The
personal reason is that before I joined YC, I did a lot of hiring for
my startup, Scribd, and for me it was the most rewarding part of
starting a company. Some of the people who joined us had life-changing
experiences - they moved across the world, jump-started a new career,
grew with the company and became leaders, or used their experience
to start their own successful companies. I wanted to help more people
have those experiences and not feel stuck in jobs where they don't
have much impact.<p>So, a few of us at YC have been building Work at a Startup
(<a href="https://www.workatastartup.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.workatastartup.com/</a>), with the goal of making it easier for startups
to hire, and engineers to get hired, at a YC company. We started with
the same insight that everyone else has: the hiring process is broken
and inefficient, and decided to look for ways we could make it
better for everyone, at least within the YC ecosystem. For example,
we could get rid of the burden for applicants of having to send a
resume and cover letter to every company by creating a simple way to
apply to all YC companies at once.<p>While working on this, though, and talking to engineers and HN users
about it, I realized that there's a more fundamental question: why
should people want to work (or not!) at a startup in the first place?
This question has a history and has gone through several phases. In
the early heyday of YC and HN and pg essays there was a ton of
enthusiasm about startups, the freedom and creativity and opportunity
they offer. In more recent years, when I read HN threads (like
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15916350" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15916350</a>, to pick one close to
home), it's common to see people arguing that, for early employees,
joining a startup isn't such a good idea. And frankly, some of their
points are good ones. There are issues that need to be fixed. One of
the big things that YC did in the early days was move the needle in
favor of founders. That was an adjustment that badly needed to happen,
and it did happen. I think the next phase is to move the needle in
favor of early employees. Just how to do this is one question I'm
hoping we can discuss in this thread.<p>So, HN: what are the pros and cons of joining a startup in 2018,
particularly as an early employee? And where there are cons, what
would fix them? If there are concrete ways we can find to shift the
balance, YC is interested in doing that.
Upvote: | 1139 |
Title: I've just scored my first 100% remote developer job making $150k a year. My wife is a full-time parent. We have two kids that are under 4 and currently live in Los Angeles. I'm over the high cost of living, crowds, smog, and have a feeling that we should move to save money, but I'm not sure where.<p>What do you like/dislike about where you live?<p>Where would you live if you could? Why?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: In the consumer and the small business markets, we are having computing power being more and more shifted from desktops or laptops to tablets and smartphones, we are even seeing full computing watches these days. In your opinion, what about DIY, IoT, small robotics, etc. and the generalist barebone computers they use, like Arduino, Raspberry, etc.? Will they become more and more powerful for a new race to bigger, maybe embedded systems or will they stay small, open, very cheap and marginally energy-hungry?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: I remember the time (not so long ago) when 'search' seemed to be the hottest topic in the industry. We had the rise of Google and competitors. There were search startups. Open source projects like Lucene and Solr were in the news. There were books published, blogs, conferences..<p>And now it seems that the industry have moved on. There is a million papers/books/blogs/online courses/video lectures/meetups about ML/AI, but I can't seem to find anything current on search.<p>What are the good resources to learn the fundamentals of search and keep up with the current happenings in that space? Not SEO, but more from the computer science/engineering point of view?
Upvote: | 141 |
Title: We use to do P2P with Limewire, directly downloading from people's devices.<p>Next came Soulseek in popularity, directly downloading from people's devices.<p>Then more than a decade ago, came Bittorrent where you downloaded from the swarm.<p>What comes next? Are there any next-gen systems being developed to replace bittorrent for file sharing?
Upvote: | 64 |
Title: We've been having a lot of great discussions here on HN lately about mental health, and the suggestion to seek professional help rings true.<p>But, depressed and burnt out and feeling isolated, the project of even finding a therapist in the first place can be overwhelming.<p>I live in a large city, where there are literally thousands of therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, licensed social workers, life coaches, you name it. About half of them even accept my insurance.<p>How does one even begin to narrow the options down? After asking my GP and getting no suggestions, I'm at a complete loss.
Upvote: | 287 |
Title: Hi,<p>I'm running a bootstrapped SaaS service in the software engineering space. It's really early and slowly getting some traction. A pretty big player in this market has approached me about a possible acquisition / acquihire. My service would become part of their portfolio of services. I've had talks with C-level and we're moving to a technical due diligence. I'm open to an offer, depending on the terms of course. Any tips from people who went through the same process? Should I have an NDA in place for the DD?
Thanks!
Upvote: | 93 |
Title: Does anyone have any idea if Apple is going to DO something about the MacBook keyboard issue? Or if this is simply the new normal for Apple laptop keyboards?<p>I know that the current butterfly mechanism is v2, it's slightly improved over the very 1st iteration (which appeared on the original 12" MacBook retina).<p>Will there be a v3?
Upvote: | 104 |
Title: Besides an excel spreadsheet, do you use any software for calculating your household budget? I find it hard to trust any cloud solution that is allowed access to my bank account info (e.g., Mint), but it's hard to deny the convenience and reporting capability.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: I am bored now. I am looking for work to do. I already have a full-time job but sometimes I want to do something different and make money. I don't want a regular part-time job. I don't want to waste my time by searching for freelance jobs. I don't want to earn so much. I want to be able to make some money by writing code whenever I want. Is there a way?
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: One of the things that is not taught in university or talked about enough in our industry is managing your manager. I am asking this because I was recently asked by my manager not to give talks in really difficult to get in industry events, despite of getting an acceptance. While I like the company I work for, it seems the un-preached way of managing the manager is to have a thick skin. How true is this? I'm also curious to know how you manage your manager?
Upvote: | 242 |
Title: TL;DR I'm about to get evicted because I ran out of money and can't seem to land a job.
I'm also in a bit of a rush, so i apologize for any grammatical errors.<p>I have been a web developer / software engineer for 15 years (fullstack, 5 languages).<p>I am living in Colorado with my wife -- I quit my job In Jan due to issues I had with the way our company was treating customer data. This turned out to be a foolish move as it has proven difficult to find a new job (I had something lined up when I quit, but it fell through).<p>I did land a contract between then and now, but in order to survive I had about 1.5 months to find a new job and that hasn't happened.<p>I was 3 days late on my rent this month and now have to appear in court to explain why i haven't paid. I fully expect that to lead to an eviction.<p>I've never had an issue finding a job prior to this so I'm quite frustrated with myself.<p>I don't own a good laptop (i use a desktop) and have about $400 to survive on. I've tried upwork but can't drum anything up quick enough / at all. I have multiple interviews lined up but I'm not hopeful at this point. I have things I can sell but I'm not sure how quick I can turn them around. My wife has a job but its only a couple days per week so not enough to survive on... she has another interview on monday but no clue how it will turn out of course. We own a car and are currently planning on a shelter (car is second plan).<p>The questions I have for HN are: what are my best options for survival? any pro tips on how to live on the streets and still land an engineering job?<p>Thanks in advance guys
Upvote: | 181 |
Title: This is a difficult topic to talk. Sadly, many people do not even talk, and many with bipolar disorder commit suicide.<p>I know what it is to be in the dark cycle of bipolar. Last week, some personal issues triggered me to go from highly optimistic to extremely pessimistic.<p>I don't know how to tell my employer that my mind in in another planet right now. I might loose might job since it has been 4 days I do not work (2 sick, 2 because of this).<p>The company is based in the US but fully remote. I am under a contract (and I am not US citizen), while values and culture is something that seemed to be important, recent weeks had been lots of changes and drama inside that I don't think anyone would be able to put even themselves in my place.<p>I am burnt out. Personally and professionlly. I am under therapy and well surrunded. But just need a week break.<p>Last but not least, the company has a "unlimited vacation policy" and they say they force employees to go into vacation. In my last year, no one told me how or when. I think because some internal problems that we need ship fast and soon (or company might go bankrupt) they forgot this, which is not helping.<p>Should I just ask for vacation in the middle of the fire that we have inside? (I would look terrible to my co-workers/team)
Should I disclose I have bipolar? if so, how?<p>I personally don't think anyone how is unfamiliar with bipolar disorder has any idea how hard life can turn. Even the most mundane task, turns into a hell.<p>Thank you
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: With all the benefits at a corporate job I still want nothing more than to be out on my own and start my own SaaS business.<p>Has anyone left a great corporate job for entrepreneuriship and regretted it?
Upvote: | 56 |
Title: Since many online newspapers are putting up a paywall, or straight up blocking visitors from EU, I think it's time to consider adding or changing the "web" link that we see here in the comment page.
I know that it's used to search on Google for the same article with the intent to bypass the paywall, but time after time it failed me.<p>I'd personally love to see an "Outline" link which automatically redirects to the uncluttered version of an article using outline.com, which provides a great service. Or otherwise, a Chrome extension that recreate that just for HN.<p>At the moment I'm using a javascript bookmark, but whenever I visit the WSJ, it has the "GDPR-EU" wall that breaks the URL, so I can't use the bookmark to jump to the Outlined version.<p>Disclaimer: not affiliated with anyone, just an annoyed EU member.
Upvote: | 54 |
Title: So I'm sure many of you have dozens of web application URLs across multiple development, QA, production environments and as many URLs for tools and SSH endpoints you use all the time.<p>My system for keeping all this organized is to sift through bash history and browser history and abortive attempts at keeping Excel spreadsheets or Evernote pages full of this stuff.<p>Does anyone have any pointers for tools they like to make this easier?<p>Thanks!
Upvote: | 88 |
Title: Many people start businesses for more financial independence, or simply want to be their own boss. How many of those started it out of a more dire need, from being unable to get hired anywhere and so needed to make money independently for themselves? Maybe from a pivot away from skills that are no longer in demand, or simply having trouble passing interviews due to a lack of a good network or bad soft skills.<p>It could be anyone from HN reading this, or just anybody else, who has shared their story somewhere about starting their business under these circumstances.<p>EDIT: I have years of experience as a software developer, but my inability to survive in the job market in the past three years has inspired me to make this topic. Either due to bad luck/timing, or bad soft skills, I can't get an offer anymore. So I'm considering other avenues to make a living.
Upvote: | 316 |
Title: I'm just curious what kind of in depth, JavaScript specific questions you've seen before or asked candidates. I'm working up the courage to apply for senior roles, but I'm terrified of looking stupid not knowing about XYZ technical thing that 99% of devs don't know.
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: I searched her name on a couple of patent search engines.<p>Turns out she has around 200 patents (with other people mostly).<p>So if her tech didn't work, then why didn't people figure it out sooner? Why did it take a journalist from WSJ to find the fraud?<p>How come some prominent physicist or biologist doing "competition research" didn't declare that the patents were based on bogus claims?
Upvote: | 207 |
Title: (throwaway account)<p>I have a chance to basically migrate 90% of my F50's data centers to commercial providers. The cost savings are awesome, but what about the people currently doing legacy stuff? theyre doing stuff like manual config, and future state is everythign automated as much as possible in the cloud and shutter the data centers.<p>I think the harsh truth is that many wont have jobs post move, but maybe I'm being cynical. maybe theres a chance to retrain the employees, but even doing that automation generally reduces the workforce.<p>whats your take? what do I tell current employees? how many can I realistically be able to save from being jobless?
Upvote: | 181 |
Title: Currently I'm working as a Software Engineer in a consulting company whose primary expertise is AWS. My day of work is mainly composed of integrating with AWS REST APIs and "designing" scalable distributed systems.
I'm quoting designing, because it's really just a matter of composing AWS Services to fit customers needs (provided clients are willing to throw money at cloud services - and most of the times they are).<p>I just feel that's not something I would like to double down on. I have always enjoyed digging into lowish level libraries like MapReduce or LevelDB and figuring out how it works with layers of abstraction peeled off. I would love to contribute to such a project and I always envy and look up to Jeff Dean and his opportunity to build such a beautiful low-level software and libraries.<p>Anyway, are there companies which have interesting technical problems to solve and not consider outsourcing them to other vendors? Maybe I should get a job in a company which has a well established product (preferably something used by developers) and has some room for creativity? What are those companies?
Upvote: | 118 |
Title: I'm a mid-senior level software engineer with 5+ years of industry experience and making $100,000+. I don't consider myself a bad software engineer, and yet I can't seem to solve some basic problems on a white-board in 30-60min (i.e. traverse a heap, merge sorted arrays etc).<p>I joined my company as an intern ~5 years ago & when I interviewed for the position I didn't have to solve any white-board style interview questions etc., since it was an un-paid internship. After a few months I had demonstrated my ability to write code they made me an offer.<p>When I now casually look around and apply for mid-to-senior level positions I cannot seem to get past phone (coding interview) part, that involves solving some basic algorithm on collabedit. I get nervous and given I need to solve (perhaps a simple) problem in an optimal/sub-optimal way in 30 minutes, my brain sort of shuts off and I cannot arrive at a clean solution, let alone solve the problem end-to-end.<p>I'm respected within the company, if you were to ask any colleague I have worked with whether I can write clean testable code that solves real business problems, everyone would attest that I absolutely can.<p>How do you create that environment of - "Coding under pressure and someone looking at your code while you're trying to think of how to solve a problem and your brain is thinking about everything other than a problem itself"???<p>One idea is to just keep applying and failing until I become immune to it. But each failure kind of brings me down, and makes me think that I'm a bad engineer.<p>Last thing I want to mention is that I don't blame the process itself. I think white-board style questions eliminate a lot of bad candidates.
I know that the process has to be rigorous because those jobs pay well. But there's also extreme examples like the inventor of homebrew that got rejected by google because he couldn't reverse a binary tree.
Upvote: | 206 |
Title: This is more of a rant I guess. HN provides a text box, that's close enough for me.<p>I was born in 1988, I'm officially 30. While technically I never got to see the birth of the internet, I remember it differently sometimes. More nostalgically. The summer that never ended. When I was in my adolescent years, I chatted with dozens of people a day. Some I never got to meet in person. Some I did. People from all over the world. Our gateway drugs to the internet were things like IRC, MSN, AOL. Never was a big ICQ person, but I guess that counts. Adium was always on. I don't quite remember how I met these fleeting, ephemeral, personal contacts. Mostly through web rings, PHPbb forums, personal reference. We talked so much, about everything. "how's your day". "what do you think about Bush", "hey I saw your del.icio.us link". Of course that faded, to make place for Twitter and Facebook. And at first, that was great. But it feels different now. So different, that I've removed myself from all social media. "social media". It's all influencers (a word my dictionary doesn't even recognize), bots, hate speech, bickering, identity politics, and what have you. What happened?<p>I miss those days sometimes. Maybe it's just rose colored glasses of my puberty years. But you know, nothing fundamentally changed about my lifestyle. The internet changed. I'm still self employed, child-free ... what do you call it these days: geek, nerd? you know the slightly overweight guy with a telescope that won't shut up about how great Babylon 5 was. Where do these people hang out these days? If they just want to have a nice chat, unrelated to work, about the stuff that interests them? Seems like a Silly Valley opportunity. But what do I know. I miss the old internet.<p>Maybe this should just be named "how to make friends in your 30s" instead. It's different world out there, but I miss talking to people I've never met. Learn about their lives, be part of it somehow. And they, part of mine in return. I guess there's no turning back from the bots.
Upvote: | 391 |
Title: The book you read over and over for whatever reason. Mine is "Money: A Suicide Note" by Martin Amis, a book I listened to and re-read several times.
Upvote: | 51 |
Title: Enlisting the help of friends and family can only get you so far, so how do you gather quality feedback pre/post-launch, without shelling out for a professional agency to do the testing?
Upvote: | 262 |
Title: You find something you love (coding, in my case), you get a "decent" job in the industry. You hate your job. You get depressed.<p>Then, you quit your job. Just to find out the next one is as meaningless as the previous one - with a company and colleagues who don't share your values.<p>You aren't good enough to land a job in one of the cool companies you admire. You think about improving your skills but, then, your life is basically spending 20 hours per day just for work, sleeping, and commute. You have 4 hours left for cooking, family, friends, house cleaning, improving your skills. People tell you aren't trying hard enough. You feel shitty, guilty, and even more depressed.<p>You think about quitting your job, create your own company, do something you're passionate about and that will help other people. But you realize your savings would be enough to cover only two months without working.<p>You spend nights without sleep, develop simple prototypes, show them to investors. They praise your idea but tell you the prototype is too simplistic and, if you really believe in your idea, you should work full-time on it.<p>You make a whole plan for quitting your job. Thinking about becoming a homeless for a few months but you give up. You aren't strong enough.<p>You ask your friends for help. But they don't understand how a software engineer doesn't have some savings. You look back to all the money spent helping your family (who is poor and live in a developing country). You could ignore them but you're too weak, too soft. You feel shitty - and more depressed again.<p>Then, you tell how you feel to other people. They whine about your whining reminding you how shitty you're for complaining about life, reminding you how weak you are. And, guess what, you get more depressed again.<p>This cycle keeps repeating itself until you see yourself sitting on your bed with a bunch of pills thinking about killing yourself.<p>Is anyone else living this same depression cycle?
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>I am a worrier. I worry about things that I should worry about, but I also worry deeply about hypothetical situations that will probably never happen. These can be to do with work, money, personal, life, you name it. You could even call it paranoia.<p>I am capable of idenfting the real threats from the fake ones, the ones that are extreme worst case scenarios - but I'm very bad at controlling them and letting go of them. Sometimes they can haunt me for weeks at a time.<p>This is of course deeply unpleasant and massively instrusive to the extent where I don't really enjoy daily life anymore.<p>I was wondering if anyone here has experienced these challenges and how they worked to overcome them.<p>All the best
Upvote: | 82 |
Title: For job-hoppers and contractors. If you arrive at a company, what is the first thing you push for?<p>For instance, I usually implement a good feature-branch flow with branch pipelines and a strict merge-to-develop etiquette with mandatory merge requests. It makes my work easier and once the team is used to it, they also really like it. No more messy development branches.<p>I also request a small office stool next to my desk to make code reviews, three amigos and pair programming easier. It is a small thing but I noticed that people are more eager to discuss things if they have a place to sit.
Upvote: | 331 |
Title: I've noticed over the last few months that things submitted to HN that reach the front page have been staying there for a day or two. It seems (maybe it is just my perception) that a year ago a submission would only stay on the front page for a few hours and at max a day. Am I imagining things? If I'm not imagining it, what is causing things to stay on the front page? An influx of users, maybe?
Upvote: | 66 |
Title: Has Google search become particularly bad in last few months? Nowadays, if I want to do deep research on any topic I filter it with site:news.ycombinator.com or site:medium.com. Top results without any filters mostly return content marketing articles with no value. Is it because of high SEO optimization by content marketing sites?
Upvote: | 85 |
Title: I have recently purchased a home. I have my own business making great money. I have a great work from home engineering job.<p>Now I have all of this income flowing in and I'm not sure what to do with it. What are some good resources to learn how to best take advantage of this situation?
Upvote: | 80 |
Title: I was offered a job as a contractor by a big company in Canada. The pay is good, around $100,000 CAD ($55/h). But so far I have only worked as permenant employees. What are your experiences working as contractor? What are to be expected?
Upvote: | 119 |
Title: I was taught four languages growing up and despite me being fluent in speaking almost of them, when I try to present or argue a point in writing, I find it hard to come up with a clear structure that conveys that point well. I tried reading a lot, especially in English, but I can't seem to remember the structures prolific writers use.
Upvote: | 170 |
Title: "Everyone has a price", I've heard this multiple times from the management.<p>Please share your experience which validates this point.
Upvote: | 95 |
Title: Back in 2010 and in 2012, YC organized a "Work at a Startup" event,
for founders of YC companies and prospective hires to meet each other
in person. It got great feedback and we wanted to keep doing it, but
we got stretched too thin for a while. This year, a bunch of us
revived the project. Our goal is to fundamentally improve the
experience both of joining a YC startup and of being an early employee
in general. You may have seen some of the recent discussions about
this, including a big discussion last week about concrete ways to
improve things for early startup employees (see links below). As part
of this, we've decided to bring back an expanded version of the
original "Work at a Startup" event. That's what we're announcing today.<p>On Saturday July 28, we'll host our third Work at a Startup Expo:
<a href="https://workatastartup.com/expo" rel="nofollow">https://workatastartup.com/expo</a>. We'll begin with a talk answering the
most common questions about working at a startup. Then we'll have a
series of rapid-fire presentations by 35 YC companies currently hiring
engineers. After the event, we'll have an open house where you can
talk one-on-one with the founders of any company that interested you.<p>New this time: we'll have a hardware demo area where companies
building physical products can show them off. YC has more hardware
companies than ever now, building everything from satellites to
industrial robots.<p>For those not in the Bay Area, we will live stream all the videos, and
if people are interested we can have an ongoing HN thread to discuss
them as well.<p>If you're interested in attending, please apply at
<a href="https://workatastartup.com/expo" rel="nofollow">https://workatastartup.com/expo</a>. Any questions or ideas, please comment below!<p>Links to previous discussions:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17286939" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17286939</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15916350" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15916350</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3676578" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3676578</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1346103" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1346103</a><p>p.s. That recent thread about the pros and cons of working at a startup
was one of the best discussions I've ever seen on Hacker News. I went
through it carefully, tried to make sure that every comment got
attention, and compiled a list of the main points, which got a thorough
discussion at the last YC partner meeting. We're going to develop some
substantive programs in response. It will take some time to responsibly make
changes that affect the whole ecosystem, but we're going to work hard
on it; it's an opportunity to make things better for everyone. Please
stay tuned!
Upvote: | 125 |
Title: Between layoffs and resignations, I am now the only remaining engineer at a tech startup. Just curious if anyone else has been in this position before and how you handled it. Bail on the company asap? Stick it out to the end and try to turn things around?
Upvote: | 49 |
Title: I am trying to start recording the day-to-day flow of my money as part of a larger goal of implementing some in my life.<p>I have done some research and some self-hosted software solutions that interest me include [Firefly III], [Transity], [Ledger]. Maybe I'll write my own personal finance record keeping software.<p>Since this will be the first time keeping track of my own finances, I'd like to hear what has worked for others members of the Hacker News community.<p>[Firefly III]: https://firefly-iii.org/
[Transity]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17242136
[Ledger]: https://www.ledger-cli.org/
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Hey HN! We're Leif, Erin, and Aidan, founders of FREY (<a href="https://livefrey.com" rel="nofollow">https://livefrey.com</a>), a line of awesome laundry and clothing care products tailored towards men (with a sustainable and philanthropic bent).<p>We started this out of a college apartment without the intention of it ever being a full-time job. We noticed that, although we were buying plenty of men’s shampoos, deodorants, fragrances, etc, we were still buying the same detergent our mom had kept at our house growing up.<p>A very small kickstarter rolled into a small appearance on Good Morning America, at which point we picked our heads up and realized we may have stumbled on a pretty big opportunity.<p>The laundry industry is outdated and commodified. There’s a massive ($430B) menswear industry and massive ($130B) laundry industry, and there’s a growing number of U.S. men doing laundry (55 million, up 23% from 2013). The laundry industry still seems to be missing this male demographic (and we feel this is also perpetuating this stereotype that only women do/should be doing laundry, something we want to help break down).<p>There are striking similarities between this industry and other consumer packaged goods industries that have recently underdone large changes (like mattresses, eyeglasses, razors, contacts, etc), and we hope to bring the same change to laundry.<p>We focus a lot on giving back as well, both for personal reasons (we always wanted to create a company that made a positive impact) and also because it resonates with our demographic. Our products are safer for the environment, we're a certified B-Corporation (meaning we meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency), and have a bunch of other positive initiatives we can talk about if anyone's interested.<p>We're excited to hear your thoughts on our idea!
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: I've been watching the rise and maturing of AWS lambda and similar offerings with excitement. I've also shipped several microservices in both node and Java that are entirely serverless, making use of API gateway, lambda, dynamo db, sqs, kinesis, and others.<p>For the simple case, I found the experience to be great. Deployment was simple and made use of shell scripts and the excellent AWS CLI.<p>I've been hesitant to build anything serious with it tho. The primary concern has been visibility into the app. The app's operation can be quite opaque when deployed that way.
Further exacerbating the issue, we've a few times lost Cloudwatch logs and other reporting due to both configuration issues and improper error handling, but these are things that would have been much easier to identify and diagnose on a real server.<p>Have you shipped anything serious with a serverless architecture? Has scaling and cost been favorable? Did you run into any challenges? Would you do it again?
Upvote: | 329 |
Title: From novels, to nonfiction, to the art of leisure.
Upvote: | 165 |
Title: A manager in this context is one that has direct reports and does not directly contribute to the work.<p>It is not to say that what managers do is not important. But, I am not yet convinced that as a manager you should get paid more because you have direct reports and have people management responsibilities.
Upvote: | 74 |
Title: I am active and known in a certain small industry in my home country ("developing world" kinda place) after 15+ years of online presence.<p>Over the past years I've been feeling constrained and unhappy with that identity. I also felt very alien in my home country and culture, both afk and online. Even my mother tongue and given name are not something I like. They all associate with the world I don't enjoy nor support.<p>While I'm obviously not a native English speaker, I feel more "at home" while communicating in and consuming English and living in the Western society.<p>I moved to a western country, but online I was still "there". Now I want to ditch my established identity and start afresh, under a new name. Distance myself from the culture I grew up in.<p>Of course, I could do all that without changing my name, but I feel like the old world would leak and haunt me.<p>Recently I came across the "ex Muslim" subreddit, and felt a weird familiarity. My troubles are nothing compared to those who grew up in a religious world and found the courage to leave and be vocal about it. But I could relate in a way. They feel like "the old life" is constantly trying to leak in and poke them.<p>It worries me, and I thought maybe we could discuss this type of cyber-rebirth, its caveats. Maybe someone has relevant experience and wouldn't mind sharing.<p>- How do you make sure the old identity doesn't leak into the new one? (apart from obvious technical non-contamination policy)<p>- Feels like starting from scratch in 2018 is harder than it was 15 years ago. Maybe it's the other way around. I guess I'm getting cold feet.<p>- I want to write and create, but I'm worried that being this weird person who magically appeared on the internet just a few months ago would make people wary. Google my new name: the guy never existed before 2018. Where the hell was he?<p>- Will changing full legal name (first and last) bring lots of problems for years to come?<p>- Am I being silly?
Upvote: | 62 |
Title: Hi HN! I’m Deepak, founder of The Lobby, from YC’s W18 batch. We’re building a marketplace where you can buy mock interviews, resume reviews, and coaching calls from company insiders, starting with top finance roles. (<a href="https://www.thelobby.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.thelobby.io/</a>)<p>I went to a school where the big banks, consulting shops, and tech companies didn’t come to recruit on campus. As a result, it was really hard not only to get interviews and job offers, but also to figure out what these companies were looking for in candidates in the first place.<p>I got lucky and landed jobs at big banks and it was always because I somehow found someone on the inside who was willing to coach and mentor me in a very personalized way. I used that experience to help 50+ friends from similar backgrounds land jobs at top firms, and that’s what inspired the idea for The Lobby.<p>We have some incredibly happy users who’ve already landed jobs, and a very high repeat purchase rate both amongst students and career switchers because of the value in speaking to people in the specific teams and companies they're interested in vs. generic company-wide advice.<p>It has, however, been challenging to get everyone receptive to our new approach. Even though people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on college (to ultimately land a good job), it's controversial to build a recruiting-focused company that charges job seekers instead of just the companies.<p>We’ve had 2 schools buy packages of calls where they subsidize the costs for their students, and are thinking through ideas to pass the cost away from students, even though this service is not just meant for college (our best users are career switchers). We’ve also received a lot of interest from companies who are interested in getting access to our best-rated candidates because they’ve been pre-screened by real humans who’ve done the job, vs. recruiters who have not.<p>Any feedback and ideas from the HN community on how to convey the cost/benefit of what we’re offering to students, recent grads, career switchers, parents, and even schools is much appreciated.
Upvote: | 208 |
Title: I love HN. It's my only news source. But I'm finding that more often than not, I'm not taking the time to `fully` read articles. I spend most of my time identifying interesting posts, reading the intro, skimming a bit, looking for the bold section headers, getting some quick brain stimulation and the moving on to the next article. I want to focus and read the whole article but I feel like I'm using HN as a brain stimulating dopamine hit instead.<p>I find myself overwhelmed the sheer number of interesting concepts. Most of these articles are written by sheer experts in their fields. How does one spend the time to learn it all? I wish I could get a PhD in everything. Anyone else have this feeling/problem? How do you deal with it?
Upvote: | 82 |
Title: I work for a company that's been looking at moving to a service mesh style architecture. They run a few dozen micro-services which are currently Dockerized and deployed on an ECS cluster.<p>We are considering moving to Kubernetes, as ECS has a lot of limitations in the deployment/resiliency area that come more or less standard with Kube. As part of this move we are looking at using a service mesh to enable easier cross region routing on AWS and more dynamic load on various clusters.<p>We were looking into Linkerd as a possible solution, but just noticed that Consul latest release has a service mesh feature now. So for those who've run a service mesh before, what sort of things should I be considering as we evaluate our options? Pros/Cons of specific tools, or service mesh in general are welcome.
Upvote: | 41 |
Title: We have been building a DeepSpeech model with our data for the past year and we have recently hit 95% accuracy on the LibriSpeech dataset. That puts us close to the published results for DeepSpeech 2. However our dataset is conversational audio and we do much better with our own internal dataset compared to PaddlePaddle. Here's a blog post on the method we followed to build our models.<p><a href="https://scribie.com/blog/2018/03/continual-learning-for-speech-to-text/" rel="nofollow">https://scribie.com/blog/2018/03/continual-learning-for-spee...</a><p>We have been using this internally in our service and it saves a ton of time and effort during the typing stage. It is nowhere near to the accuracy which our transcribers can achieve, but we are getting close. We are offering automated transcripts free for a limited time. Please do try it out.<p><a href="https://scribie.com/transcription/free" rel="nofollow">https://scribie.com/transcription/free</a><p>Thanks in advance!
Upvote: | 67 |
Title: Hi HN –<p>We are Henrique and Pedro of Brex (<a href="https://brex.com/" rel="nofollow">https://brex.com/</a>). We've built a corporate credit card for startups that has high limits, an instant online application and no personal guarantees.<p>Pedro and I built our first payments business in Brazil, Pagar.me, when we were teenagers. We came to the U.S. to attend Stanford. We joined YC W17 and realized quickly – even with a seed round in the millions – that we could not get a corporate credit card. We are Brazilian, young, and do not have U.S. credit. Even if we did have credit – we know that personally guaranteeing a credit card makes no sense for a business (more on that later).<p>In Brazil, we raised $300K initially (when we were 16) from an investor that was willing to take a chance on us. In Brazil, even though there are 200 million people, there is very little venture capital financing and limited startup infrastructure (accelerators, resources, technical talent, executives experienced with high growth). We knew that $300K was all we were getting, so we had to find a business that could be cash flow positive quickly. It was easier to do that accepting payments online (which naturally generates cash), but it was an operational challenge for sure. We were able to grow quickly in Brazil because we hit the market at the right time, as ecommerce was transitioning to online payments and because we, better than any of the foreign competitors, understood the nuance of Brazil. Specifically on that point, in Brazil the consumer has the option to pay for any card transaction in installments, and that requires a cash outflow for the merchant. Pagar.me figured out how to productize that best to the online market there.<p>When we got to the U.S., we assumed that the payments system here would be significantly more mature and sophisticated than it was in Brazil, however that was not the case. Particularly on the issuing side (banks extending credit cards), there has been very little innovation or using technology to innovate on features. That is how Brex was born. Over the past year we’ve been incubating and improving and just launched with an online self-signup that lets you get access to a virtual card in minutes. We waited to launch until we had this feature, as we know how much of a pain it is to go through the back and forth of online and paper-based applications. Brex underwrites by connecting directly with your bank account, which means we can offer higher limits than other cards, often 10x-20x more.<p>From a software perspective, we rebuilt all of the payments tech from scratch, which we learned how to do in our last business. Even then, to build Brex it was still grueling having to deal with the obscure regulations surrounding Know Your Customer (KYC), heavy oversight from banking partners, and complexities associated with interacting directly with Visa. In doing so, we built awesome features like instant virtual cards issued to you and your team and we solved something this time that has been bugging us forever – the fact that you can never tell what a credit card charge is on your statement! We changed the data to give you the actual merchant / vendor and a link to the website. When we did this, we also realized we could do something really unique with receipts – because we know the actual vendor / merchant, we can match any receipt sent to us via SMS or email to your transaction immediately. No need to save receipts or deal with other integrations that have a huge delay between matching a receipt to a transaction, we do it in real time.<p>Interestingly, from a technical standpoint, we did all this in Elixir. We thought it would be a good choice (and so far we are happy with our decision) because of the distributed nature of the systems that we built and we could rely on the Erlang VM to provide that infrastructure out-of-the-box. Our domain knowledge from Pagar.me allowed us to anticipate the system boundaries and therefore we could build our backend as a distributed system from day one.
Another unusual feature about the Brex launch is that we are launching relatively late in our history and with a pretty significant amount of capital from our Series B. We launched the business at YC, but based on our background with Pagar.me and that we were focused on payments again, we raised a ~$7M seed round in Spring 2017. That round was led by Ribbit Capital – which we liked given our connection to Micky there and their expertise in Fintech. YC Continuity led our Series B. In both rounds, for us, it’s all about the relationship with the partner and firm, and we have been huge beneficiaries of the YC ecosystem.<p>On a personal note, for us the non-personal guarantee aspect of our product is most salient. As I mentioned, we are foreign entrepreneurs who don’t have access to banking products in the U.S. It was demoralizing to come to the U.S. after being successful in Brazil and not be able to get a card – especially given how much activity, particularly online, requires a credit card. Personal guarantees mean an entrepreneur who has already taken a ton of risk has to further put their personal financials on the line, which even if the company pays on time, can hurt his or her credit.<p>One aspect of the product that we’d love HN feedback on is the signup flow. We gathered great feedback from our beta, and we waited to launch until we had an instant signup product. In financial services, signup flows have meaningfully more constraints than do many consumer signup flows – particularly compared to those with freemium models. For example, we need to collect business information to comply with regulations around anti-money laundering and Know Your Customer standards, as well as ensure the customer’s ability to pay and set up autopay. These constraints mean not only a longer signup flow, but also one that integrates many third party vendors to do compliance, fraud and credit checks. The more integrations and data to handle, the more edge cases we need to be able to support seamlessly. It took a ton of engineering effort to get here, plus a lot of time enhancing our compliance processes and credit framework. In light of those constraints, we’re specifically looking for user feedback on whether or not the flow feels logical, intuitive and simple – and if there are adjustments to the order, text or design that could improve the UI. But we're interested to hear any of your ideas and experiences and discuss the Fintech space generally too. Thanks for taking the time to read this, we’re really happy to be posting here :)<p>Henrique and Pedro
Upvote: | 183 |
Title: I read this article on Signifyd and HotelTonight on this website (BabyUnicorns.com). The whole website advocates for mid-sized high growth companies as places to work for, rather than large companies such as Google and Facebook. I am conflicted on this. Google is consistently ranked as one of the most desirable employers year after year. They will continue to dominate the world in the near future, and it's a super cool brand to have on your resume. But am I missing out on the big upside provided by these smaller but fast growing companies? Sure they are much more risky than Google/FB, but it's not like HotelTonight or Udemy are startups and can go out of business any minute. It seems like they much a lot of upside through employee ownerships.<p>What do you think? If you are a 25 year old engineer who wants a corporate career, would you rather go to Google or a HotelTonight/Signifyd/Asana?
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: My company has around 1000 CS reps and 200 engineers. The CS reps very often need to ask the engineers questions, report bugs heard about from customers, etc. Us engineers also get bug reports about the internal tools we've developed for CS.<p>Currently, all this is handled via a simple Slack channel. This is actually great, since there's no bureaucratic cost to getting in touch, unlike with a proper ticketing system, and having actual public conversations is the fastest way to resolve issues.<p>But of course, we started seeing inefficiencies in other aspects. The same questions keep being asked over and over again. There's an FAQ linked in the channel topic and it's automatically posted in the channel every 12 hours, but it's still not enough, we still get tons of questions that could be self-solved without engineers' intervention.<p>So, that made me curious, how are other companies handling this? Could we somehow maybe auto-respond to Slack messages with the correct answer with some bot, or just come up with something that actually makes people check the FAQs before posting? Or is there some way better solution to replace all this?
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: I've made a small Python library, designed for quick-and-easy prototyping of machine learning models. It's built on top of scikit-learn, to serialize and deserialize data from the forms you're likely to have, to the format used in scikit-learn.<p><a href="https://github.com/madman-bob/Smart-Fruit" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/madman-bob/Smart-Fruit</a><p>It's pretty bare-bones at the moment, but I thought I'd see if there was any interest before spending too much time on it.<p>Let me know what you think.
Upvote: | 44 |
Title: Hey HN,<p>We recently recorded a podcast (https://blog.ycombinator.com/scott-aaronson-on-computational-complexity-theory-and-quantum-computers/) where I discussed my research, AI, and advice for nerds in general or people who want careers in science.<p>We covered many but not all of the questions submitted over the internet so AMA!
Upvote: | 649 |
Title: I uninstalled all Google's apps from my iPhone and reinstalled them. Even after re-installation, Google Maps still knows the Google account you previously signed into. How do they persist identity on your device? Doesn't iOS remove data when you delete the app?<p>How can you force-remove the sticky identity whether or not an app allows you to?
Upvote: | 45 |
Title: It's probably the fifth time this week that I've gotten the message in gmail:<p>"Unusual Usage - Account Temporarily Locked Down"<p>"To keep our systems healthy, Google has temporarily disabled your account. This primarily occurs when we detect unusually high levels of activity on your account. In most cases, it should take one hour to regain access. In rare cases, it can take up to 24 hours for access to be reinstated."<p>This is not just annoying, it's disruptive and catastrophic for someone like me, who, runs my business through email. Which, unsuspiciously, involves sending maybe a dozen or so emails a day through gmail. And nothing more. It's been a few hours now, and there's never any knowing when I'll get my account back.<p>How is this acceptable? I can't possibly move away from gmail, all my consulting gigs use google for work, i've disseminated my gmail address too far across the web.. But, this happens over and over, and I've begun to feel really helpless.<p>Are there any people at Google that can be contacted about something like this? Or this machine is really running itself and there's nothing that can be done?
Upvote: | 40 |
Title: I am 61, with an academic background in computer science, and many years in industry, mostly startups. I taught many years ago, and have resumed teaching, a database course: data modeling, relational algebra, SQL, application programming and architecture (e.g. 2-tier vs. 3-tier, web & mobile), database internals.<p>Student evaluations were pretty good for the most part, but quite a few students found the presentation a bit dry: I prepared every lecture as HTML ahead of time, made it available online, and presented it in class. A couple of times, I would do interactive things, e.g. tuning queries using EXPLAIN and playing with indexes. That proved pretty popular, but of course, it's difficult to capture this material, (I recorded a log of the session, but extemperaneous discussion was not captured).<p>Looking for advice on how to balance prepared material and more spontaneous things. Also, any other advice on how to make material of this sort (theory + practice) easier to absorb.
Upvote: | 392 |
Title: I've just read this article by Randall Degges on how ipify.org scaled to 30 billion API calls a month on a few Heroku dynamos after the app was re-written in Go.<p>Have you re-written any of your applications in Go and experienced significantly higher performance?
Upvote: | 102 |
Title: I want to build an online course on graph algorithms for my university. I've tried to find a solution which would let submit, execute and test student's code (implement an online judge), but have had no success. There are a lot of complex LMS and none of them seem to have this feature as a basic functionality.<p>Are there any good out-of-box solutions? I'm sure I can build a course using Moodle or another popular LMS with some plugin, but I don't want to spend my time customizing things.<p>I'm interested both in platforms and self-hosted solutions. Thanks!
Upvote: | 68 |
Title: I know some apps that are partly using RN or Flutter. But I'm interested to know what app can be made fully by RN or Flutter.
Upvote: | 82 |
Title: Share your information if you are looking for work. Please use this format:<p><pre><code> Location:
Remote:
Willing to relocate:
Technologies:
Résumé/CV:
Email:
</code></pre>
Readers: please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities.
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: Please state the job location and include the keywords
REMOTE, INTERNS and/or VISA when the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome.
When remote work is not an option, include ONSITE.<p>Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no
recruiting firms or job boards. Only one post per month, please. If it
isn't a household name, explain what your company does.<p>Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about
something. It's off topic here.<p>Readers: please only email submitters if you personally are interested
in the job—no recruiters or sales calls.<p>To search the thread, try kennytilton's WhoIsHiring browser at <a href="https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/" rel="nofollow">https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/</a> or
kristopolous' console script at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519</a>.
Upvote: | 425 |
Title: Hello<p>I've always relied on the comfort of having Google handle my mails, properly configure a mail server and keep it safe from hackers. OTOH I always felt a little uncomfortable sharing such private information with them, and those news about people who have their accounts banned for no reason and can't get them back gives me nightmares. Recent news made me think about this problem yet again.<p>I even do have my own domain and an unused mail account for it on a certain popular hosting service (they manage the mail server, I pay shared web hosting), but I'm not sure if trusting them instead of google is actually a win here. The possibility of someone hacking this host is probably higher than hacking gmail. At least I have a human to talk to if they decide to simply ban me.<p>I also thought about upgrading to a private server instance so I would have my own mail server, but maintaining a mail server seems like a hassle that would eat even more of my free time, and I'd probably forget an update and be hacked anyway or have my domain accidentally registered in the spam lists.<p>What is your opinion about this? Is there some magical solution where I can just throw some money and feel safe and not worry about having my information being read by third parties or parsed for whatever reason, or getting my account unilaterally banned, or having phone apps reading all my email, etc?<p>Thanks a lot.
Upvote: | 151 |
Title: As a team we have many scripts for doing various internal tasks - domain-specific things, checks for questions like "what's in prod?" and "how far along is this commit?", etc. ad nauseam.<p>The problem is that, with a few exceptions, the person who wrote the script knows it exists and how to use it; and might be around to chime-up with "hey, I wrote a script for that!" when someone has a problem.<p>But discoverability is hard, even if they're in the repo not everyone will have seen or reviewed the PR that added them.<p>Does anyone have some good tips to share on how to (or not to) organise such scripts or tools, and allow colleagues to better discover them?
Upvote: | 76 |
Title: Chris, Dan, and the team at Goodcover here. Goodcover is building a new home and renters insurance co that tries to fix the insurance incentives by returning any unclaimed premium back to customers, keeping a fee instead. Goodcover was YC S17, but off the record due to discussions with the CA government. And we’re still “pre-launch” - starting a new insurance co is hard as it turns out!<p>Part of the technical challenge we deal with is, how do we build software that can scale what an agent does? Although we can’t offer a full insurance experience yet, we thought we’d roll out an advice app (<a href="https://app.goodcover.com/advice" rel="nofollow">https://app.goodcover.com/advice</a>) that makes a stab at giving advice like an agent might, but using software. By analyzing your current insurance docs, we can:<p>- Benchmark the coverage you have against what is “normal”.<p>- Provide advice about some specific things that you can fix or at least consider fixing.<p>- Arm you with information on things you can push back on with your insurer.<p>Technically, the way it works is we’ve generalized some gotchas, manually looked over a bunch of Home/Renters policies, and built a workflow for us to select where we think you are in the homeowners/renters spectrum. So it’s really just workflow automation, however, it requires obviously being able to translate insurance constructs to user things, but most of it is pretty simple from an automation standpoint. Most of our time is generally spent on building out insurance functions, but it’s been a great experiment in information hierarchy to try and reduce complex concepts and insurance-speak down to actionable pieces of information for customers.<p>No obligation, and feel free to take our advice back to your current provider and get stuff fixed. Goodcover Insurance Solutions LLC is licensed in California (0M20813) so if you are not in CA we can still have a look, but you should definitely review our advice with a pro in your state.
Upvote: | 97 |
Title: I want to learn JavaScript as my next language. I have been observing JS community for some time and it seems like there is too much noise out there with dozens of frameworks and language variations (e.g. CoffeeScript, TypeScript, JSX, etc). I plan to go through Mozilla's JS docs and Vue tutorial, but not sure if it is enough to get up to speed with the modern JS ecosystem. Which resources would you recommend? Which framework should I stick with? What are some things that you wish you had known before getting into JS? Note: I am comfortable with Python (including Flask/Django), Java, HTML and CSS, so picking up JS as a language won't be a problem. Interested in your thoughts.
Upvote: | 79 |
Title: I’ll be here for the next 2 hours and then again at around 1 pm for another 2 hours. As usual, there are countless possible topics and I'll be guided by whatever you're concerned with. Please remember that I can't provide legal advice on specific cases for obvious liability reasons because I won’t have access to all the facts. Please stick to a factual discussion in your questions and comments and I'll try to do the same in my answers!<p>Previous threads are here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=proberts" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=proberts</a>. Email is in my profile and you are welcome to get in touch!
Upvote: | 257 |
Title: I took stats in undergrad, but it was a very rudimentary "push x sequence of buttons on your calculator in y situation" ordeal and left me with less applicable knowledge than I'd like.<p>Since sometime after graduation, I've taken up serious study of higher-level maths as a hobby. I think it will be most useful in my career if I also have a strong grasp on probability and statistics.<p>[edit] The suggestions so far have been great, but it occured to me to add that I'm working through Spivak and Apostol right now with Dedekind's essays on the side. Hopefully that gives an idea of the tone/rigor I'm after. Answers to problems is also ideal.
Upvote: | 452 |
Title: Imagine Jeff Bezos offered you 100 of his top people (engineers, designers, product ...) for 100 days and told you that you could work on whatever you wanted.
The only condition is that at the end of the 100 days you need to start paying salaries in order to retain these people.<p>What would you work on?
Upvote: | 57 |
Title: I know there are tons and tons of PM apps. I wanna know if any of those drive your daily project management activities as (Engineering) Manager.
Upvote: | 50 |
Title: 1. It's Saturday morning.<p>2. You start coding in your side-project.<p>3. A couple of hours go by.<p>4. You feel like, "I'm tired. Let's do this tomorrow.".<p>5. You also would like to ship it ASAP too.<p>What do you do?
Upvote: | 59 |
Title: I recently graduated with a computer science degree in a top 50 school and have been grinding leetcode in preparation of applying to a job. I have no work experience and had a lot of help to get through the degree. About half of the coding assignments required for my degree I either didn’t do or was carried. I also got generous accommodations due to a disability. My in major GPA is 3.0.<p>I take an extremely long time to come up with solutions to any problems. I enjoy trying to solve problems and coming up with a high level solution, but I get stuck for hours on details or miss vital parts of the algorithm so often it becomes a drag. Personal projects take me an extreme amount of time too and I haven’t made any of note. I’m not good at organizing code and I am not detail orientated which means I tend to get a lot of one off type errors and can take hours to find them. Even problems I’ve seen before, I’ll likely forget the solution or fail to recreate it.<p>To give a concrete example of some of the above, just this morning I tried to code the brute force solution following problem: Give two sorted arrays return the median. I spent over an hour trying to implement the brute force solution involving linearly going through each array and couldn’t code it in Python. The entire time I was struggling to figure out how to increase the respective index variables given different cases, how I would ensure one of the numbers the indices landed was the median, how to differentiate which of the array indices I was keeping track of was the actual median and finally how to determine the next number I needed if the lengths of both arrays were even.<p>Many problems go the same way. I don’t know what the difference between the normal struggle associated with coding is and the sort of struggle that means it’s just not for me. I'm not looking for encouragement per se, but objective feedback on which group I belong to and practical advice on how to move forward.
Upvote: | 46 |
Title: Hi HN,<p>We are Sergiy, Davit and Jason, founders of Snark AI (<a href="https://snark.ai" rel="nofollow">https://snark.ai</a>). We provide low-cost GPUs for Deep Learning training and deployment on semi-decentralized servers.<p>We started Snark AI during our PhD programs at Princeton University. As deep learning researchers we always experienced lack of GPU resources. Renting out GPUs on the cloud didn't fit in our budget, and purchasing GPU cards was difficult -- at that time, so many GPUs were being taken away by the crypto-miners. Then we found out that GPU mining profits lag far behind public cloud GPU prices.<p>On top of that, we figured out that there's a way to run Neural Network inference and crypto-mining simultaneously without hurting mining hash rate. This observation is a little counterintuitive, but it turns out that anti-asic hashing algorithms are designed to be extremely memory intensive, which leaves a good chunk of the CUDA cores idle. We can utilize the leftover compute power to run Neural Network inference extremely cost efficiently, which could be a life savior for large-scale inference tasks. <a href="http://snark.ai/blog" rel="nofollow">http://snark.ai/blog</a><p>At the same time, we provide low cost raw hardware access for Neural Network training. We aim to be up to 10 times cheaper than on-demand instances on public cloud, undercutting preempteble/spot instance by up to 2x. When the GPU is idle our algorithms efficiently switch to mining to reduce costs. Try it out at <a href="https://lab.snark.ai" rel="nofollow">https://lab.snark.ai</a>, with 10 hours of free GPU time. We made it very simple to access the hardware through a single command line after `pip3 install snark`. More information on usage here <a href="https://github.com/snarkai/snark-doc" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/snarkai/snark-doc</a>. We are also working on creating a hub for NNs, similar to docker hub. It is still work in progress but you can take a look at couple examples at <a href="https://hub.snark.ai/explore" rel="nofollow">https://hub.snark.ai/explore</a>.<p>We would love to get your feedback, to understand how was the experience for training Deep Networks through our platform and then deploying.
Upvote: | 122 |
Title: The past 2 years seem to have been the death knell for Mongo and the "NoSQL" hype, with Mongo moving toward SQL parity and SQL databases supporting JSON storage, like Postgres with JSONB.<p>At this point it seems that there are very few workloads for which Mongo is the best option compared to Postgres+JSONB. I'm wondering...<p>1) Have you ever chosen Postgres over Mongo, and <i>regretted it</i>? Why? Did you end up switching to Mongo? Was it better?<p>2) Can anyone name a use case where Mongo is clearly a better choice than Postgres+JSONB?
Upvote: | 233 |
Title: Hi HN! I'm Saurabh, founder of Synthetic Minds (<a href="http://synthetic-minds.com" rel="nofollow">http://synthetic-minds.com</a>) in the current YC batch. We protect smart contracts by using formal methods to synthesize their adversaries.<p>Current use of web-app-like development practices for smart contracts is not working. People have lost over 4.1M ETH due to code bugs in these contracts, aka decentralized applications (Dapps). That equals $1.8B at current exchange rates, or $500M at the time of loss. The execution environment is "deploy once, change never", which resembles hardware and space applications. NASA/Airbus use formal methods to check this kind of software. Dapps need similar tools.<p>I have worked on formal methods since 2006. In my PhD on program synthesis, I reduced checking code properties to theorems that could be proven mechanically. Incidentally, a full program was not required. The program could have "holes" and the prover would “fill” the holes by synthesizing code. I took those ideas to synthetic biology in my postdoc and previous company.<p>In 2016 when I started to look at smart contracts, I realized those ideas could help build robust Dapps, and maybe prevent them from losing $100M+/year. In June 2016, a Solidity vulnerability was discussed (June 10), but the DAO was deemed immune (June 12), right before it was exploited (June 17), losing ~$150M. In 2017, another ~$300M was lost to the Parity multisig bug. This year, I built a system to help mitigate future failures.<p>The core insight requires some background: Imagine you wrote a lossless compression algorithm `K` (e.g., LZ77 or LZW). Would it not be amazing to synthesize the decompressor `D` automatically? The invariant for `K+D` is the identity function. So if we had a `D` with holes, we could use a prover to verify the identity invariant and “solve for D” simultaneously. Now, what if your `K` was a blockchain smart contract, and `D` an arbitrary user contract? If we want K to be immune to double spends, we could ask for `K+D` that violates the invariant “K’s balance at start >= K’s balance at end”. Not only would we formally verify properties, we would synthesize a specific `D` that helps explain any violations.<p>Here's how it works: Our tool has `prove` and `autocode` modes. For a smart contract, `prove` validates its properties while `autocode` will generate user contracts that break it—if any exist. Our servers will aim for turnaround times of minutes allowing use in CI, instead of weeks-long human audits. Two demo screencasts are online: <a href="http://synthetic-minds.com/pages/faq.html" rel="nofollow">http://synthetic-minds.com/pages/faq.html</a>.<p>There are 3 steps under the hood. The 1st step is a source-to-source compiler from Solidity to a shared-memory, non-object, explicit Blockchain-state Intermediate Representation (BIR). BIR is not Solidity specific, so we could compile Ethereum’s Vyper or Tezo’s Liquidity to it, but Solidity’s traction makes it a natural place to start. The 2nd step is a symbolic executor that converts BIR to an “equation”. Think of symbolic execution as execution that traverses <i>every path</i> and <i>without</i> explicit values. E.g., `func a(int x) { y = x + 1; z = y * y; return z; }` would translate to `a(x) = (x + 1).(x + 1)`. Symbolic execution allows us to convert entire programs into an SMT equation. SMT is a theorem proving language used by many automated solvers, e.g., Z3, CVC4. The most novel, 3rd step, augments a user contract with holes for function bodies. That encodes any arbitrary <i>future</i> user contract. The solver can fill holes that (dis)prove combined properties. This simultaneously validates global invariants, and provides readable code if problematic user contracts exist.<p>Formal methods are sometimes hard to use, but it turns out that for smart contracts we can bypass the major issues (false positives, esoteric bugs found, and difficult-to-explain findings). First, most false positives come from inevitable approximations that formal analyses have to make, so they can terminate while analyzing code that itself might not terminate, i.e., Undecidability of analyzing Turing-complete languages. Gas limits truncate executions, which means we get to skip those approximations. Second, when esoteric (weird and obscure) bugs cause failures in normal web services you have to weigh the time and cost of fixing it against the potential loss, which might be negligible. But because smart contracts are immutable, any esoteric code path can be fatal to the entire Dapp, so there is no such tradeoff. Lastly, in contrast with the infinite variability of interfaces for normal web services, the uniformity of blockchain actors provides a template, enabling us to synthesize code as developer-friendly explanations of behavior.<p>Over 12+ years of work, there is one question I have repeatedly asked: Can we trade off human insight at the expense of compute power? Current alternatives for securing contracts look for 10-20 anti-patterns, built from human insights observing past failures. In contrast, our approach asks for a functional invariant (e.g., no double spend), which might be 100x or more expensive to solve. Compute is cheap though, and our ability to find future failures is only limited by the amount we expend on `autocode`.<p>The first prototype is operational now, and I am sending out beta invites next week: <a href="http://synthetic-minds.com" rel="nofollow">http://synthetic-minds.com</a>. Excited to hear thoughts from the community!
Upvote: | 99 |
Title: How do you peers take it?
Upvote: | 84 |
Title: Question copied from Eric Jorgenson, who posted the same question on twitter: https://twitter.com/EricJorgenson/status/1016003656787857409
Upvote: | 48 |
Title: This is kind of a banal story. I'm the lead developer on a "modernization" project that's taking a lot longer than anticipated (you see where this is going). The team is great, it's just that the work is way outside their comfort zone. The business has been selling the new version pretty hard and we're not going to make the release (about 3 months to go).<p>Question is; as a lead how would you handle this? I think my direct manager has a healthy dose of skepticism about the timeline, but the product owner doesn't. At what point should I start sounding the alarm? I'd like to give it a couple of weeks and see if the team picks up pace but I'm not confident.
Upvote: | 325 |
Title: It become somewhat a tradition for YC to publish a reading list for the vacations months. This hasn't happen for a while. I have discovered some very intersting books there apreciate suggestions from similarly minded people.<p>I recently stumbuled upon this list [1] and the selection seems quite good. I read _The Oracle Year_ which I liked a lot.<p>My question for the community here is: Have you read somthing interesting recently?<p>[1] https://geekdad.com/2018/06/5-reasons-to-read-5-great-books-june-2018-edition/
Upvote: | 746 |
Title: If I were to work backwards from the goal of making a salary at $250K+, what would they be?<p>Given context, I'm an MS in computer science, about a decade of experience in software development (both in R&D and production systems, embedded to cloud). Currently, I'm $100K/yr shy of my goal.<p>In the end, my goal is to have a strong enough salary to raise a family in financial security, and be in a position such that my spouse works because she wants to, not has to. Look forward to the discussion!<p>(Note, Location is high-COL big-metro east coast city)
Upvote: | 43 |
Title: I've realised that I've built up a set of heuristics for deciding what to read on HN:<p>- don't click on anything with the word "quantum" in it — it's either too technical for me (physics or computing) or mainstream fluff with no substance<p>- don't click on very specific programming language links, unless they're about Python or frontend web stuff (just not interested in languages I don't use)<p>- will read anything from certain domains — danluu.com, stratechery.com, wikipedia.org, fermatslibrary.org<p>- won't click on the latest iteration of "ML tutorial for beginners" that makes it to the front page (not the right audience, but nice to see this stuff getting popular)<p>What are your heuristics?
Upvote: | 127 |
Title: I have a good job. It pays well. I work with intelligent people. It's programming in a trading company (which doesn't align with my values that much).<p>Lately I've been feeling depressed and overwhelmed and burnout from all the work that I have to do and some personal stuff in my life.<p>I wake up every morning feeling anxious, I am starting to have panick attacks at work and I have lost my concentration and the ability to think straight. The other day I started crying while talking to a collegue.<p>What should I do? Is quitting this job a good idea?<p>edit: i'm seeing a therapist lately and got some meds but I think this lifestyle is not for me anyways.
Upvote: | 60 |
Title: The civilizational trend seems to be more centralization. I'm curious if anyone has gone in the opposite direction. It seems that rural areas will become more and more of an opportunity for those able to capitalize on them.<p>Rather than a small apartment in a megacity, live in a restored farmhouse in the countryside. Theoretically, anyone with a remote job can work anywhere - so why not? Especially as a tech salary goes infinitely further in rural areas than it does in downtown SF/NYC/London/etc.
Upvote: | 86 |
Title: Currently these are projects I have started in some fashion (whether it only be planning stages, purchased materials but not built, or partially built):<p>- Bartending Robot
- 6 DOF Robotic Arm
- Custom Wifi controlled Lighting
- Foldable 1 Person Boat
- Home Server
- Custom Ergonomic Keyboard
- Basic FPGA modules
- RNN Chatbot<p>In addition I enjoy doing the following and have the equipment for it:<p>- Learning Guitar
- DJ Mixing (just for myself, not paid)
- Producing songs / Music Theory (FL Studio)
- Archery<p>That feels like a lot to me, and although some are things that have no "finish" date, some definitely do and i have trouble finishing them because i am distracted by my other hobbies and always seem to be picking new stuff up. As a result i feel like i never make a ton of headway into any one thing.<p>Is there any advice you have for how to manage this so that I can feel like i'm actually accomplishing something
Upvote: | 41 |
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