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adrianmacneil

1,021 karma · joined July 23, 2013

contact: adrian@getcruise.com

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/am; my proof: https://keybase.io/am/sigs/JVwLEZKKEGoXRKS1PeXICIym9WK26Yby-BY4uZc1sPY ]

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adrianmacneil··on Microsoft completes GitHub acquisition
It's hard to Paint this as a bad thing.
adrianmacneil··on Solo Eye Drop Treatment in Development for Keratoconus
If you're in or near SF I recommend looking up optometrist Dr. David Stamper, he specializes in keratoconus and similar issues.
adrianmacneil··on Model predicts we're the only advanced civilization in the observable universe
Exactly. Thus far, all we can say for sure is that we have not yet been carelessly crushed to make room for some intergalactic freeway we do not understand.

That doesn't mean there isn't one right in front of our eyes though.

adrianmacneil··on Model predicts we're the only advanced civilization in the observable universe
An ant cannot "see" not comprehend the purpose of a freeway, no matter how hard we might try to explain it. It would walk right over it and not think it were any different than your average rock.
adrianmacneil··on Model predicts we're the only advanced civilization in the observable universe
The answer to this is very obvious:

For the same reason that humans have not "made contact" with ants.

Why do you assume a higher intelligence would even be capable of making contact with us on a level we understand? The discussion would be meaningless, in the same way that an ant would not comprehend our desire to build a freeway right next to their ant hill.

adrianmacneil··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2018)
Cruise Automation | Senior Software Engineer (Backend and/or Frontend), SRE | San Francisco | ONSITE

Interested in working on tools at the intersection of robotics and machine learning? Our engineering productivity team is responsible for web-based tools and infrastructure to support development and testing/simulation at scale of our Autonomous Vehicle software. We're also looking for a talented Engineering Manager to join our team.

https://boards.greenhouse.io/cruise/jobs/1138832

Many other roles are also available on our website: https://getcruise.com/all-careers

adrianmacneil··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2018)
Cruise Automation | Senior/Staff Infrastructure Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA | ONSITE

Cruise is building the world’s best autonomous vehicles to safely connect people to the places, things, and experiences they care about.

We're looking for experienced (5+ years) software engineers interested in Go, Docker, and Kubernetes, to build infrastructure running thousands of driving simulations every day. This simulation infrastructure is critical to our success, and helps us understand how changes to our code affect our company-wide performance metrics.

Apply via link below, or feel free to reach out via my HN profile.

https://boards.greenhouse.io/cruise/jobs/1096082

adrianmacneil··on Trump administration cracks down on H-1B visa abuse
Source?

Also, even if they verify you meet some minimum bar of being able to support yourself (which I was not asked about in my interview, other than turning up looking generally presentable), this is still a far cry from a more rigorous points-based immigration system. Per GP, DV immigrants are still basically chosen "at random".

adrianmacneil··on Trump administration cracks down on H-1B visa abuse
Not entirely true. For the diversity visa (green card lottery), there are (extensive) medical and background checks, but the US consulate does not consider skills and resources beyond verifying that you meet the minimum requirements (high school diploma). The consulate interview for this category is basically a rubber stamp.

However, as others pointed out, the DV is a small fraction of green cards granted, and the process for family based immigration may differ.

Source: I went through this process.

adrianmacneil··on Tensorflow 1.5.0
P3 instances have Volta (V100) GPUs.
adrianmacneil··on AWS Fargate – Run Containers Without Managing Infrastructure
With ECS and EKS you get a managed master, then you set up your own autoscaling groups etc to deploy nodes (which you manage) into the cluster.

With Fargate, you get access to AWS-managed multi-tenant nodes. So, Fargate connects to either your ECS or EKS cluster and avoids the need for you to worry about managing the nodes as well.

adrianmacneil··on The Bear Case for Crypto, Part II: The Great Bank Run
Agreed. I got about half way through the article before realizing the author does not understand how an exchange works.
adrianmacneil··on Warning Signs About Another Giant Bitcoin Exchange
Ultimately, because large traders care more about short term liquidity than long term solvency.
adrianmacneil··on Warning Signs About Another Giant Bitcoin Exchange
Completely unfounded nonsense. Their profit margin is much higher than the fraud rate (as others pointed out, if fraud was as high as you say, banks would have shut down the relationship years ago).
adrianmacneil··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2017)
Cruise Automation | Senior DevOps/SRE, Data Infrastructure | San Francisco | ONSITE

We're building self driving cars, and we're testing in the most difficult urban environments. We have a world class software team, plus a parent company with decades of manufacturing experience. All employees have access to free self driving car trips within SF.

We're hiring for many roles, including ML, C++, backend, frontend - check out our website for the full list.

I'm specifically interested in talking to any senior devops/SREs, or any senior data infrastructure engineers (spark, swift, jupyter, airflow, etc).

SRE: https://getcruise.com/careers/listing/708648

Data Infrastructure: https://getcruise.com/careers/listing/884957

Many other roles: https://getcruise.com/careers

Watch our cars navigate SF: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP1rvCYiruh4SDHyPqcxlJw

adrianmacneil··on Chevy Bolt: the First Practical, Mass-Market Electric Vehicle
Different car.
adrianmacneil··on Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car
Not damage control, just providing an alternate opinion.

Yes, it's entirely possible that the commenter is (or was) an employee in a department other than engineering. We all report to CEO eventually though, so I don't think that would result in a significantly different experience.

adrianmacneil··on Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car
Cruise employee here. I'm sorry to hear you feel that way. In my experience, Cruise is one of the most exciting companies to be working for today, and Kyle is easily the most intelligent, hard working, and reasonable CEO I have worked for.

For sure, there is still a lot of work to be done before we can launch a full L4/L5 vehicle, but I would say with high confidence our platform is ahead of most other players in the industry, and I'm confident that we will be one of the first companies to launch AVs at scale.

FWIW, Glassdoor seems to agree with me: https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Cruise-EI_IE97...

adrianmacneil··on Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF
Yes! I think we're kicking off 2018 intern hiring in the next few weeks. Keep an eye on the website :)
adrianmacneil··on Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF
Hi HN, engineer at Cruise here. I just wanted to point out that most people are surprised when I tell them we're hiring a ton of backend/full stack/android engineering positions (mostly go/node/react), and you don't need prior robotics or machine learning experience to apply (although we like those too).

So, if you're interested in working on AVs or the systems that support them, please take a look at our careers page: https://getcruise.com/careers (or feel free to reach out to me via HN profile).

adrianmacneil··on Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF
Our drivers always keep their hands on the steering wheel, even while in autonomous mode. There isn't really any way you could tell externally whether the car is engaged or not, other than some of the nuances of our driving behavior.

Source: I work at Cruise

adrianmacneil··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2017)
Cruise Automation | San Francisco | ONSITE

We're building the world's most reliable self driving car technology, and we have the right backing + partnerships in place for manufacturing at scale. We're hiring for a large number of software engineering roles. In particular, C++ engineers, experienced devops/SRE, and experienced backend or full stack engineers.

https://getcruise.com/careers

adrianmacneil··on A peek under Bitcoin’s hood: Writing a client that can create a transaction
You could, but it's simply not necessary. I have not verified the numbers, but I think this answer gives a better idea of the scale we are talking about:

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/3205

adrianmacneil··on A peek under Bitcoin’s hood: Writing a client that can create a transaction
Bitcoin addresses are basically a public key, so you can generate them offline the same way you can generate pgp keys, openssl keys, SSH keys you use to access GitHub etc.

The chances of a collision are so astronomically low that our sun will probably run out of fuel and explode before two identical keys are generated.

adrianmacneil··on Paul Allen's new rocket-launching plane
https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/
adrianmacneil··on Ask HN: How liquid is Bitcoin?
$1MM is nothing. At current prices that is ~500 BTC. Looking at just the Bitfinex order book[1], you could sell this in one trade with <5% slippage. If you split it out in say 10 trades over 24 hours you would probably not move the market at all.

Most other exchanges also publish their complete order book so you can fairly easily view their liquidity and answer this question.

[1] https://www.bitfinex.com/order_book

adrianmacneil··on Ask HN: How liquid is Bitcoin?
Side note: speaking from experience, you need to be very careful about tying your public identity to any statements about holding this amount of cryptocurrency. I've seen extremely well targeted (successful) spear phishing and identity theft attacks to steal bitcoin from people who posted online about holding much smaller bitcoin fortunes.

I realize your username says `anon...`, but you've already made HN comments about where you live and I only did a 30s glance.

adrianmacneil··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2017)
Cruise Automation | San Francisco | ONSITE

We're building the world's largest fleet of self driving cars, and we're testing in 3 cities across the US. We focus our testing on solving the hardest challenges first (e.g. city driving in SF). We have the software engineering skills, funding, and manufacturing ability to make self driving cars a reality!

We're looking for

* C++ engineers (prior robotics experience a plus, but not necessary)

* Backend/Frontend/Full Stack Engineers

* Site Reliability Engineers

* Senior Android Engineer

If you have 5+ years experience, and are interested in Cruise but not sure where you would fit, or which role to apply to, feel free to reach out to me via HN profile.

https://getcruise.com/careers

adrianmacneil··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2017)
Cruise Automation | San Francisco | ONSITE

We're building self driving cars. We operate as an independent startup, but we also have the funding and manufacturing capabilities of a large company (GM). We're hiring many roles, including C++ engineers, and backend/full stack engineers (go/node.js).

https://getcruise.com/careers

If you're an experienced backend or infrastructure (docker/k8s) engineer, and feel comfortable building systems from scratch (e.g. startup CTO or early employee) please send me your resume/github/linkedin via HN profile and I'll personally review it.

adrianmacneil··on Ask HN: How do I start my own consulting firm?
Decide whether you want to start a consulting firm or work on a product. Then do that. Don't start a consulting firm with the idea that you will work on products in your "spare" time.

If you want to work on product ideas, you are much better doing that while you still have a day job, rather than trying to do it while you are also worrying about where your next contract is going to come from.

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