HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

crubier

1,444 karma · joined May 26, 2014

Head of Engineering at Skydio for Drones as First Responders (DFR) Autonomous drones are becoming a crucial piece of infrastructure, just like wireless networks

https://www.skydio.com/

If you consider yourself a [Frontend|Backend|Infra|Robotics|Machine Learning|Computer Vision] Engineer please reach out!

https://twitter.com/crubier https://github.com/crubier

submissionscomments
crubier··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)
Skydio | Robotics / Drones / ML / Cloud / Web engineers | San Mateo CA, Zurich CH, or Hybrid | https://www.skydio.com/careers

Skydio is the leading U.S. drone company and world leader in autonomous flight. Our drones are responding to millions of 911 calls, de-escalate life and death scenarios in public safety, inspect the energy grid, giving soldiers better situational awareness on the battlefield, and more. We serve the core industries that our civilization runs on and have life-saving impact.

If you’re interested in being a core member of a 300+ person world-class engineering and research team that is defining the future of a major emerging industry,

We’re looking for a diverse combination of engineers, researchers, and managers with strong SW skills and experience across complex products. We’re particularly interested in people with robotics, web, deep learning, game dev, streaming or cloud experience.

I am a Senior Director of Engineering there and a YC S18 alumni, we're looking at all applications from the careers page. https://www.skydio.com/careers#job-listing

crubier··on A walk through of the DeltaNet family of linear attention variants
Longer to write: Don't care, that's kinda the point. I'd rather read a descriptive name in english than a greek letter with a tilda and a dot subscript.

Generally a numerical rather than symbolic representation: Meh https://docs.sympy.org/latest/modules/functions/elementary.h...

crubier··on A walk through of the DeltaNet family of linear attention variants
exp(x)
crubier··on A walk through of the DeltaNet family of linear attention variants
This 1,000%

Trying to read any math paper is basically like trying to read CodeGolf.

crubier··on China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
Came here to say that, my bet is that in 3-4 years you'll be able to run Fable-level of intelligence models on your laptop or maybe even on you phone
crubier··on The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes
It’s simple, informing implies taking screen space, expressing consent implies user action. So overall it HAS to be similarly annoying to a cookie banner.

Of course if your answer is “people should just stop using cookies” then I have bad news for you.

crubier··on The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes
> unless I get specific, informed, consent.

Explain how you'd do that without a banner or similarly annoying UX

crubier··on The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes
> Just make people click something every once in a while

But why? This is EU Cookies Banner level of state interference making UX worse for everyone just because some lawmaker doesn't like something.

crubier··on Waymo Premier
How do you fix this for public transport? You transform it into Waymo / Robotaxi.
crubier··on Waymo Premier
Walking to the station isn't even the bad part. The bad part is then walking 3min in tunnels smelling like piss to get to the platform, then waiting 7min more for the train to arrive, then walk 3min more to get out of another piss-filled station. That's 10-15 of absolutely-not-enjoyable subway station.
crubier··on Waymo Premier
Does the Subway arrive at my door?
crubier··on Waymo Premier
Absolutely not.

At the VERY least, the road blockers should be fined the cost they caused to society.

Block Golden gate bridge for 1h30min for 10,000 people (Avg salary $50/h)? That will be 1.5 * 10,000 * 50 = $750,000 damage.

crubier··on The perils of UUID primary keys in SQLite
No one ever got fired for using UUIDs
crubier··on OpenAI frontier models and Codex are now available on AWS
The hard part is not the CEO, it's the CISO
crubier··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2026)
Skydio | Robotics / Drones / Cloud / Web engineers | San Mateo CA, Zurich CH, or Hybrid | https://www.skydio.com/careers

Skydio is the leading U.S. drone company and world leader in autonomous flight. Our drones are used for inspecting the energy grid, de-escalating life and death scenarios in public safety, inspecting bridges, giving soldiers better situational awareness on the battlefield, search and rescue missions, and more. We serve the core industries that our civilization runs on and have life-saving impact.

If you’re interested in being a core member of a 250+ person world-class engineering and research team that is defining the future of a major emerging industry,

We’re looking for a diverse combination of engineers, researchers, and managers with strong SW skills and experience across complex products. We’re particularly interested in people with robotics, web, deep learning, game dev, streaming or cloud experience.

I am a Senior Director of Engineering there and a YC S18 alumni, we're looking at all applications from the careers page. https://www.skydio.com/careers#job-listing

crubier··on I am worried about Bun
The Bun DX is infinitely better than Node's, especially for Typescript projects
crubier··on GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry
Come on, do you actually think "corporate engineers" care about what you are doing individually? Do you think they look specifically for you and make fun at your individual usage pattern? Do you think it gives them interesting information about your private life?

No one cares, there are millions of users, no one is going to look at your data, and even less be able to actually know which person a given user is.

We legit just want to know aggregated and objective information about how people use our products so we can make it better for you.

"Why do all corporate try to spy on our usage patterns?" Because the ones who don't have a crap product and all died long ago.

crubier··on Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone
Blame your engineering culture not AI if metrics such as Github stats, number of nitpick reviews and token usage is what is used to judge one's performance.

In a sane engineering culture, actual customer-visible impact is what is measured, and AI is just a tool to improve that metric, but to improve it massively.

crubier··on Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone
> somethings can be one-shotted and some things cant

True but my point is that people vastly underestimate what is one-shottable.

In my experience, 80% of the times an average "non-believer" SW engineer with 7 years experience says something is not one-shottable, I, with my 15 years of experience, think it is fact one-shottable. And 20% of the time, I do verify that by one-shotting it on my free time.

crubier··on Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone
I'm not talking about coding in domains I know nothing about. I'm talking about coding in domains I've worked in for 15 years
crubier··on Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone
I see your point, but

1. I am also on the receiving end of this. My boss often codes and vibecodes, and no one feels like they have to merge their stuff. We only merge it if it meets the high quality standard we have. And there is no drama for blocking a PR in our culture. 2. I am fairly deep in the trenches myself and I know when my PRs are high quality and when they are not. And that does not correlate with use of AI in my experience.

crubier··on Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone
Are you European by any chance? I left Europe to avoid your mentality
crubier··on Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone
I get it, but as a "AI expert and senior leader" myself in my 1,000 people organization (in relative terms), the disconnect I have is:

A lot of what non-believers say matches "enthusiasm on the ground is lacking as results rarely live up to the extremely rosy promises". They would then say they need 2 weeks to work on a specific project, the good old way, maybe with some light AI use along the way.

But then I'm like "hmm actually let me try this real quick" and I prompt Claude for 3 minutes, and 30 minutes later it has one-shotted the whole "two weeks project". It then gets reviewed and merged by the "non-believers". This happens repeatedly.

So overall, I think the lack of enthusiasm is largely a skill issue. Not having the skill is fine, but not being willing to learn the skill is the real issue.

I see things changing, as "non-believers" eventually start to realize that they need to evolve or be toast. But it's slower than I imagined.

crubier··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2026)
Skydio | Robotics / Drones / Cloud / Web engineers | San Mateo CA, Zurich CH, or Hybrid | https://www.skydio.com/careers

Skydio is the leading U.S. drone company and world leader in autonomous flight. Our drones are used for inspecting the energy grid, de-escalating life and death scenarios in public safety, inspecting bridges, giving soldiers better situational awareness on the battlefield, search and rescue missions, and more. We serve the core industries that our civilization runs on and have life-saving impact.

If you’re interested in being a core member of a 200+ person world-class engineering and research team that is defining the future of a major emerging industry,

We’re looking for a diverse combination of engineers, researchers, and managers with strong SW skills and experience across complex products. We’re particularly interested in people with robotics, web, deep learning, game dev, streaming or cloud experience.

Autonomy Engineer, Fixed Wing Planning & Controls https://www.skydio.com/jobs/20754382-05e7-4cb6-a0f9-0daf9338...

Autonomy Engineer, Deep Learning Model Acceleration https://www.skydio.com/jobs/cd6d8410-419b-4713-8d4d-7eb72b13...

Senior Software Engineer, Full Stack https://www.skydio.com/jobs/5655fbe3-66b0-4951-afdc-3b67f71e...

I am a Senior Director of Engineering there and a YC S18 alumni, you can reach me at { vincent dot lecrubier at skydio dot com } but please apply online first!

crubier··on Slovenia becomes first EU country to introduce fuel rationing
> If the clouds turns out to be a really bad storm, people will buckle down and sort it.

100% this. People need to understand this.

crubier··on We rewrote our Rust WASM parser in TypeScript and it got faster
In my experience Rust typically makes it a little bit harder to write the most efficient algo actually.
crubier··on Canopy Height Maps v2
This is really cool, I wonder how old the satellite data they used is, it’s a bit unclear
crubier··on Why Mathematica does not simplify sinh(arccosh(x))
sqrt(square(i)) != abs(i)

So no, it’s not unconditionally correct either.

crubier··on Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS
Dealing with broken Linux installs might be your definition of fun, but it's very possible to be a nerd and not find that particular thing fun, and prefering Macbooks
crubier··on JSON-render: LLM-based JSON-to-UI tool
OpenAPI, JsonSchema, GraphQL all describe *Data*.

This describes *User Interfaces*. The closest alternative would be to just return React JS code directly.

But this adds a layer of constraint and control, preventing LLMs to generate e.g. malicious React JS code.

Page 1 of 19Next →