Hacker News Reader

jmccarthyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)

Diffusion | All | SF Bay (Redwood City) | On site (office!), full-time

Justin here, founder @ Diffusion. Formerly co-founder & CTO @ StrongDM.

We're finding the steepest gradients in the economy between model capability and deployed practice. A large part of that work is currently related to software factory construction.

All career stages welcome (including new grads). We are particularly interested in:

* Current/former founders

* High consequence / high criticality technical backgrounds

* Top decile communicators (writing, speech, video) who also make computer go brrr

Roles:

AI Eng - Factory Architect, AI Eng - Commercial, AI Eng - Compounding Leverage, Applied AI Researcher

Please expect satisfying, dignifying intensity.

Email hello@diffusion.io

jmccarthyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2026)

Diffusion | All | SF Bay (Peninsula) | On site, full-time

Justin here, founder @ Diffusion. Formerly co-founder & CTO @ StrongDM.

We're finding the steepest gradients in the economy between model capability and deployed practice. A large part of that work is currently related to software factory construction.

All career stages welcome (including new grads). We are particularly interested in:

* Current/former founders

* High consequence / high criticality technical backgrounds

* Top decile communicators (writing, speech, video) who also make computer go brrr

Please expect satisfying, dignifying intensity.

Email hello@diffusion.io

jmccarthyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2026)

Diffusion | All | SF Bay (Peninsula) | On site, full-time

Justin here, founder @ Diffusion. Formerly co-founder & CTO @ StrongDM.

Diffusion is a factory for building software factories.

All career stages welcome (including new grads). Please expect satisfying, dignifying intensity.

Email hello@diffusion.io / Read more https://diffusion.io

jmccarthyon Om Malik has died

Thank you Om

jmccarthyon Making peace with your unlived dreams (2023)

not Kes though right?

jmccarthyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2026)

Diffusion | All | SF Bay (Peninsula) | On site, full-time

Justin here, founder @ Diffusion. Formerly co-founder & CTO @ StrongDM.

Diffusion is a factory for building software factories, and today is launch day :)

All career stages welcome (including new grads). Please expect satisfying, dignifying intensity.

Email hello@diffusion.io / Read more https://diffusion.io

jmccarthyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2025)

StrongDM applies deep tech to hard problems for demanding cybersecurity customers. Our embrace of large language models continues that tradition, achieving useful and reliable outputs from ambiguous and non-deterministic inputs.

Join me (Justin, co-founder & CTO) and our AI Agent team to help our global customers secure their most critical systems.

Ideally: if you've already decided you need to be working on the frontier of this technology wave & you're open to doing so in person at a physical whiteboard, e-mail me a few words to that effect (justin@strongdm.com).

Optionally: read more at http://strongdm.com/careers

Finally: on a personal note - a mix of awe, ambition, anxiety, and confusion are inevitable at this moment. Our small team has found a flow, and we're successfully metabolizing the daily changes in the gradient. Come on a run with us; see what we see.

jmccarthyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2025)

StrongDM | [Staff, Senior, Junior] AI Agent Engineer | San Francisco Bay Area (Palo Alto) | Full-Time | ONSITE

StrongDM applies deep tech to hard problems for demanding cybersecurity customers. Our embrace of large language models continues that tradition, achieving useful and reliable outputs from ambiguous and non-deterministic inputs.

Join me (Justin, co-founder & CTO) and our newly-formed AI Agent team to help our global customers secure their most critical systems.

Ideally: if you've already decided you need to be working on the edge of this technology wave & you're open to doing so in person at a physical whiteboard, e-mail me a few words to that effect (justin@strongdm.com).

Optionally: read more at http://strongdm.com/careers

jmccarthyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2025)

StrongDM | [Staff, Senior, Junior] AI Agent Engineer | San Francisco Bay Area (Palo Alto) | Full-Time | ONSITE StrongDM applies deep tech to hard problems for demanding cybersecurity customers. Our embrace of large language models continues that tradition, achieving useful and reliable outputs from ambiguous and non-deterministic inputs.

Join me (Justin, co-founder & CTO) and our newly-formed AI Agent team to help our global customers secure their most critical systems.

Ideally: if you've already decided you need to be working on the edge of this technology wave & you're open to doing so in person at a physical whiteboard, e-mail me a few words to that effect (justin@strongdm.com).

Optionally: read more at http://strongdm.com/careers

jmccarthyon Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

very prompt burrito delivery?

jmccarthyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2025)

StrongDM | [Staff, Senior, Junior] AI Agent Engineer | San Francisco Bay Area (Palo Alto) | Full-Time | ONSITE

StrongDM applies deep tech to hard problems for demanding cybersecurity customers. Our embrace of large language models continues that tradition, achieving useful and reliable outputs from ambiguous and non-deterministic inputs.

Join me (Justin, co-founder & CTO) and our newly-formed AI Agent team to help our global customers secure their most critical systems.

Ideally: if you've already decided you need to be working on the edge of this technology wave & you're open to doing so in person at a physical whiteboard, e-mail me a few words to that effect (justin@strongdm.com).

Optionally: read more at http://strongdm.com/careers

jmccarthyon Systems Correctness Practices at AWS: Leveraging Formal and Semi-Formal Methods

https://aws.amazon.com/verified-permissions/ (AVP) is a team and product which uses the formally verified Cedar language. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04651

jmccarthyon Trae: An AI Powered IDE by ByteDance

0:01.39 /Applications/Trae.app/Contents/MacOS/Electron

jmccarthyon Show HN: I built an open-source data pipeline tool in Go

Burak - one wish I've had recently is for a "py data ecosystem compiler", specifically one which allows me to express structures and transformations in dbt and Ibis, but not rely on Python at runtime. [Go|Rust]+[DuckDB|chDB|DataFusion] for the runtime. Bruin seems very close to the mark! Following.

jmccarthyon OpenAI slashes the cost of using its AI with a "mini" model

Sonnet is great, but also suggest exploiting custom instructions in the ChatGPT UI. Here's a snippet from mine:

Extremely concise, formal. As short as possible. Assume I am an industry expert in any topic we discuss. Answer assuming I have the highest level of intellect possible, and do not require explication regardless of the sophistication of the topic. In cases where one approach among many is superior, offer an opinionated argument in favor of that approach.

jmccarthyon Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds (2019)

I also finished Death's End this morning and have a similar afterglow re: scale (energy, space, time)!

jmccarthyon Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?

I've built a few games with my son over the years. The fun part for us was all about fast iteration, and then laughing at the bugs together.

There are some other recommendations here for how to approach 3d, and he is specifically asking for 3d -- but I want to put in one more pitch for 2d: the fun-to-tedium ratio can be much higher.

I wonder if you could spend some time prototyping some of his ideas in LÖVE https://love2d.org/ -- if you show him the smallest sketch of something working, he might have an idea about what to add next.

Many years ago, on a flight, we went from 0 to game before we landed (with no experience) using LÖVE.

jmccarthyon ChatGPT with voice is now available to all free users

On a computer, I'd paste in a corpus of some sort as a regular ChatGPT message - just because it's easier to accumulate a big string. Note with GPT4 Turbo and the recent UI upgrades, the context window is so large now that you can paste a sizable body of knowledge, possibly even as an attached file.

I'd then switch to the phone and retrieve the chat from History.

Here's an example prompt I just used to help my son prepare for a DMV written test:

``` I'm going to paste a large list of questions and answers and then switch to voice mode. Once I indicate that I'm ready, begin quizzing me on these questions. Feel free to rephrase slightly. My goal is to achieve complete retention of all of these questions through quizzing and spaced repetition. The questions are California DMV questions. I am preparing to take the written test. 1. *Q:* You may drive off of the paved roadway to pass another vehicle. *A:* Under no circumstances.

2. *Q:* You are approaching a railroad crossing with no warning devices and are unable to see 400 feet down the tracks in one direction. The speed limit is... *A:* 15 mph. ... ```

jmccarthyon ChatGPT with voice is now available to all free users

While walking the dog today, it talked me through some trade-offs between DBSCAN and isolation forests. Walking + verbalizing the problem is a very different and positive experience for me.

I've also used it several times on ~15-20min drives to memorize something I wanted to have available for immediate recall. I had it chunk & quiz me, and by the end of the drive I had it down pat. Fun use of drive time.

jmccarthyon Ask HN: Show me your half baked project

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w1DDwnFWLM

QR-powered home organization app! My family and friends use it constantly, but I never polished or promoted it further than that video :) If you're organizing your garage/shed/projects bench and want to give it a try, I'm happy to mail you a big stack of stickers!

jmccarthyon Pgroll: zero-downtime, reversible schema migrations for Postgres

Thank you for the project! I did a brief scan for an explanation of the PG 14+ version constraint. Which 14-specific features are you relying on?

jmccarthyon Hard stuff when building products with LLMs

Could be we're in a (short?) interregnum analogous to pre-Rails Ruby: there are lots of nascent frameworks, but the dominant one hasn't been born yet. FWIW - DIY is working well for me.

jmccarthyon Hard stuff when building products with LLMs

Very nice, thank you! Will give it a try.

jmccarthyon So this guy is now S3. All of S3

And later, how the semi became the dot: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/apps-discuss/j6KWTSTVC...

Fun bit of history!

jmccarthyon Introducing ChatGPT and Whisper APIs

I recently tried a number of options for streaming STT. Because my use case was very sensitive to latency, I ultimately went with https://deepgram.com/ - but https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp provided a great stepping stone while prototyping a streaming use case locally on a laptop.

jmccarthyon The Steve Jobs Archive

Looks official! Launched by family & friends: https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23342222/steve-jobs-archiv...

jmccarthyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2021)

strongDM | All Roles! Go / Golang | FULL REMOTE (core hours ~North American timezones) | Full-time | https://www.strongdm.com

strongDM is an identity-aware proxy for managing and auditing access to infrastructure: Kubernetes, databases, generic SSH destinations, internal web applications, Windows (RDP), cloud providers, and more. We build secure, high-throughput networking systems in Go.

We've been fully remote for years, building software to help people work remotely. We have high standards and high levels of respect for each other and our customers.

Recent financial news: September 2021 - $54M series B https://prn.to/3ipnEVw

Current roles:

* Senior Software Engineer (Golang, secure distributed systems)

* Senior Front End Engineer (React, TypeScript, GraphQL, Electron)

* Director, Infrastructure

* Product Management, All levels

* Sales Engineering & Solutions Architecture

* Sales, Marketing - All roles / All levels

* More roles here: https://www.strongdm.com/careers

If this sounds like the type of work and the type of environment that would suit you, send me (Justin, co-founder & CTO) a note at justin@strongdm.com

jmccarthyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2021)

strongDM | All Roles! Go / Golang | FULL REMOTE (core hours ~North American timezones) | Full-time | https://www.strongdm.com

strongDM is an identity-aware proxy for managing and auditing access to infrastructure: Kubernetes, databases, generic SSH destinations, internal web applications, Windows (RDP), cloud providers, and more. We build secure, high-throughput networking systems in Go.

We've been fully remote for years, building software to help people work remotely. We have high standards and high levels of respect for each other and our customers.

*Recent financial news*: September 2021 - $54M series B https://prn.to/3ipnEVw

Current roles:

* Senior Software Engineer (Golang, secure distributed systems)

* Senior Front End Engineer (React, TypeScript, GraphQL, Electron)

* Director, Infrastructure

* Product Management, All levels

* Sales Engineering & Solutions Architecture

* Sales, Marketing - All roles / All levels

* More roles here: https://www.strongdm.com/careers

If this sounds like the type of work and the type of environment that would suit you, send me (Justin, co-founder & CTO) a note at justin@strongdm.com

jmccarthyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2021)

strongDM | All Roles! Go / Golang | FULL REMOTE (core hours ~North American timezones) | Full-time | https://www.strongdm.com

strongDM is an identity-aware proxy for managing and auditing access to infrastructure: Kubernetes, databases, generic SSH destinations, internal web applications, Windows (RDP), cloud providers, and more. We build secure, high-throughput networking systems in Go.

We've been fully remote for years, building software to help people work remotely. We have high standards and high levels of respect for each other and our customers.

Current roles:

* Senior Software Engineer (Golang, secure distributed systems)

* Senior Front End Engineer (React, TypeScript, GraphQL, Electron)

* Engineering Leadership: All Levels (Manager, Director)

* Lead/Head of Data Engineering

* Sr. Product Manager

* Head of Developer Relations

* Devops/SecDevOps

* More roles here: https://www.strongdm.com/careers

If this sounds like the type of work and the type of environment that would suit you, send me (Justin, co-founder & CTO) a note at justin@strongdm.com

jmccarthyon Terraform 1.0

Our experience of building a provider: performance is fast with fast APIs, and slow with slow APIs. Haven't observed any of the core diffing, DAG, or apply scheduling to be problematic (but also haven't tried an apply at extremely high - 10^4? 10^5? - resource count)