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nikhizzleon How does AI impact my job as a programmer?

I work alot of hours, and aim to solve organizational issues at the root cause with systematic solutions. This way, I minimize hands on management time.

nikhizzleon How does AI impact my job as a programmer?

Multi startup CTO/CPO (including one yc, and one growth stage high growth). So AI has been interesting for me across the three businesses I am working on. For two of them, it has enabled us to do things which were not possible at high fidelity before (eg. unstructured data entry). For the third growth stage place, it is allowing us to increase the net margin as we scale by reducing the number of operators we need to hire.

I see the biggest impact in more traditional startups which involve a lot of manual labour. For us, LLMs are letting us scale much faster than we could before.

For the dev teams I manage, LLMs provide a lot of shortcuts whereas before we spent extensive time hand tuning parsers and simple automations.

nikhizzleon Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]

A possible endgame of this quest for growth is just mixing unlabeled ads directly in with search content. Effectively pay for ranking with some quality filter. I'm pretty sure it won't come to that, but worse things have happened.

nikhizzleon Go's Error Handling Is Perfect

Much more in the camp of exhaustive pattern matching such as in Scala or Elixir. Makes my code much cleaner, and I avoid if statements and loops.

nikhizzleon Gemini 1.5 Pro model Access

https://developers.googleblog.com/2024/02/gemini-15-availabl...

The sign up link is in this post.

nikhizzleon Ask HN: Do you have any good Job search Tools/Platforms?

Thanks for the shoutout!

nikhizzleon Ask HN: What is one thing that has improved your energy the most?

Having something small to look forward to. Right now it is an Arnold Palmer (half ice-tea, half lemonade). I have one per day.

nikhizzleon Ask HN: Why can't I get interviews or offers anymore?

So for me getting interviews has been a numbers game. I tried customizing my resume, and gave up after a few hundred tries and no responses.

Now I’ve built https://tangerinefeed.net and am using to it to apply to tons of jobs every day. No offers yet, but a handful of interviews at least.

nikhizzleon Predictive policing software terrible at predicting crimes

Just want to say that your comments in this thread are excellent synthesis of a quality I rarely find. You should blog if you don’t already.

nikhizzleon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2023)

Go work with James. Verified awesome leadership.

nikhizzleon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2023)

Go work with Rob, he is awesome!!!

nikhizzleon Ask HN: Are there positions that an autistic software engineer can hold?

Honestly, to me there is no difference in how I see AS employees. Every engineer has their own needs to be productive, and it’s my job to deeply understand them and give them a great environment.

nikhizzleon Ask HN: Are there positions that an autistic software engineer can hold?

I’m an engineering manager who has formerly had autistic employees. The single most important thing is finding an engineering manager who understands the trade offs of hiring someone like you and is willing to support you.

I would consider trying a hedge fund such as two sigma which is know to have a supportive environment for people whose brains are wired differently.

nikhizzleon Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

It was not a deliberate choice, just it was what the site was built in, so people like Evan and Marcel (Laverdet) made php beautiful for us.

nikhizzleon Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

Six week boot camp, you are pretty fluent by week 4. Notably though this was before mega tech days, we had under 100 engineers.

nikhizzleon Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10

Earlyish facebook engineer here. Early days FB php was nothing like the php used to template websites. All kinds of specialized libraries to enable a much more sophisticated programming style. Think functional helpers, and asynchronous execution on thousands of cores, spanning trees across data centers using ssh etc. As a tangent a lot of the good stuff I used was written by Evan Priestley, who also did Phabricator and lots of other strong systems.

nikhizzleon Ask HN: How to Break into AI Engineering

The goal here is to actually understand the mechanics of the model and begin the process of intuitively understanding the space. I would put the effort here at a few weekends of focus.

Also will add the models turned out to be a lot simpler to understand than I expected going in.

nikhizzleon Ask HN: How to Break into AI Engineering

Assuming you have the math and algorithmic background, I would start by reading the “attention is all you need” paper. After reading, attempt to build a baby transformer model in PyTorch. After that, consider constructing some of the building blocks without libraries to understand how they work.

nikhizzleon [dead]

Mental health of myself and my team. A well directed, happy and motivated team solves all other problems by itself.

nikhizzleon Conversation with Larry Masinter about standardizing Common Lisp

How strange, I met Larry about two decades ago at a research conference and we stayed in touch by email for a little while. I had no idea he was this prominent or influential, and he never mentioned anything other than his current work. Super good guy, very kind to a grad student who was a nobody in the world.

nikhizzleon Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me?

Four startups in. One break even, one still going (micro vc fund). Two failed.

Not sure if I’m up for it at this moment.

nikhizzleon What powers artists who reach old age? The work

So this is not in regards to art, but instead with regards to building software. In my 40s I feel like my brain is finally working. Things which seemed extremely difficult a few years, I can now build with clarity and simplicity. People and political issues which seemed so difficult are now child's play. Consequently, the type of opportunities I am getting are very different from before, and much more interesting.

What have I lost - outside of my most favorite areas, my taste for theoretical CS which previously drove is completely gone. I'm now looking for work that is it's own reward.

nikhizzleon Indian Air Force inducts natively developed light combat helicopter ‘Prachanda’

Do you have evidence? India was one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement, and I believe their current stance is a result of their fidelity to the movements ideals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement

nikhizzleon RTX 4090 review: Spend at least $1,599 for Nvidia’s biggest bargain in years

Can anyone speak to how fast this card for inference on diffusion models?

nikhizzleon Two research teams grew synthetic mouse embryos using stem cells

Is this a basis for explaining immaculate conception?

nikhizzleon American Airlines agrees to purchase Boom Supersonic Overture aircraft

Interesting that this is slower that the Concord which cruised at Mach 2. I wonder if a slightly lower speed makes the economics more sustainable.

nikhizzleon Ask HN: I'm disabled and out of money. Now what?

Please get in touch if you are interested. I think there is definitely enough work, but I think you need very talented managers to enable this kind of work mode. I would argue there is a shortage of high enough quality managers, and no clear incentive to train up managers to this quality.

nikhizzleon Ask HN: I'm disabled and out of money. Now what?

First of all, I’m very sorry to hear about your situation. My wife has chronic pain and had to give up a career she loved so I have some second hand experience with this.

Can you code? If so please email me and I may be able to give you some work paid per deliverable. You can work on your own schedule without pressure. Nothing huge, just enough to get you started.

Email in profile

nikhizzleon I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)

I’ve had this happen to me before and disclosed it during the interview. Consistently, the response was the interviewer telling me they were impressed that I was well prepared, and to go ahead with the answer.

nikhizzleon Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work

I think the confusion for people outside of industry is between a director of the company (eg. board member) and a director-level employee.

When I was there, Apple had 1 director for about 50 engineers (though certain people like Jordan Hubbard were director just because). 12,000 engineers gives us 240 directors of engineering. I'd say given the breadth of the software and hardware needed at Apple, maybe five of these are in ML.