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garysieling

988 karma · joined July 20, 2010

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garysieling··on Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact
Certara - We have software products for accelerating the development of medicines.

https://www.certara.com/certara-careers/

https://www.certara.com/company/our-story/

garysieling··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2022)
Pinnacle 21 - Software & UX engineers - REMOTE Based in the Philadelphia area, Pinnacle 21 is a leader in clinical trial data software and services. Our vision is a clean data pipeline that ends in a successful regulatory submission. Come help us revolutionize clinical trials and streamline the drug approval process.

View jobs here: https://technical.ly/company/pinnacle-21/

Here are articles about a couple members of our team:

https://technical.ly/professional-development/pinnacle-21-so...

https://technical.ly/company-culture/pinnacle-21-hiring-saas...

garysieling··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2022)
Pinnacle 21 - Software & UX engineers - REMOTE

Based in the Philadelphia area, Pinnacle 21 is a leader in clinical trial data software and services. Our vision is a clean data pipeline that ends in a successful regulatory submission. Come help us revolutionize clinical trials and streamline the drug approval process.

View jobs here: https://technical.ly/company/pinnacle-21/

Here are articles about a couple members of our team:

https://technical.ly/professional-development/pinnacle-21-so...

https://technical.ly/company-culture/pinnacle-21-hiring-saas...

garysieling··on Zine machine: a compact 3D-printed block printing press
Wood is pretty common for type, especially poster sizes, and there are some hobbyists still who use it for engravings
garysieling··on Zine machine: a compact 3D-printed block printing press
You can get cool textures with alternative printing techniques. The inks used in printmaking are also very pigmented, so you get very rich colors/blacks, as well as some pigments you wouldn't get in a typewriter (e.g. dayglo colors)
garysieling··on Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?
Yeah, it's really satisfying, even for quick experiments
garysieling··on Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?
I've been doing woodblock printmaking - https://www.instagram.com/garyprints/
garysieling··on Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?
DevOps work for the Penn CHIME project (hospital capacity planning tool)

https://predictivehealthcare.pennmedicine.org/2020/03/14/acc...

garysieling··on Redwood: An integrated, full-stack, JavaScript web framework for the JAMstack
Do you intend to have built-in support for user management?

Setting up stuff like Oauth / Okta / etc and handling things like who can access admin screens seems to consume a lot of time on new projects - it'd make for an awesome app platform if some of that was well-supported out of the box.

garysieling··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2020)
US
garysieling··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2020)
Element 84 | Alexandria, VA | REMOTE or Local | Senior DevOps Engineer

Senior DevOps / Cloud Engineer (Remote Friendly!) to help us build large scale data pipelines with remote sensing and life sciences data in the cloud.

Job Description + Apply here: https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/Element84Inc/74399970673121...

Apply above, I'm not the hiring manager available if you have questions - gary @ company name . com.

garysieling··on Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
AWS
garysieling··on Amazon Kendra: Enterprise Search Service
From the demo it looked like an alternate way to search things like corporate portals. I.e. they're trying to improve the search that products like SharePoint provide with some ML integration.
garysieling··on Ask HN: Are Lucene/Solr/ES Still Used for Search?
I'm using Solr for https://www.findlectures.com, but I think Vespa looks interesting - lets you store feature vectors in the index, so you can do neat things to incorporate ML algorithms in ranking.
garysieling··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2019)
Element 84 | Software & DevOps Engineers | Alexandria| Full-time, REMOTE

https://www.element84.com/careers

We're taking on some of the biggest challenges in software: petabyte search, consumer streaming, and Earth science repositories, just to name a few. We are a team of gamers, musicians, artists, pitmasters, pilots, and tinkerers and we think you might have fun helping us solve some big problems.

Element 84 was founded by husband-and-wife engineers and has grown into a skilled group of developers, designers, project managers, and business team that build high performance systems for some of the biggest corporate and government clients in the world. Our main office is located in Alexandria, VA but we support a large remote workforce from Michigan to Texas and Pennsylvania to Colorado.

If you have questions, email me at gary@element84.com and I'll get reply quickly.

garysieling··on The cold start problem: how to build your machine learning portfolio
This is also a great way to become a better engineer - a lot of jobs are improving existing systems, so you get a different category of lessons building something from scratch to completion. Doing a write-up at the end is also teaches you to communicate better.
garysieling··on Ask HN: How to incorporate machine learning into day job?
If you explore the word2vec family of algorithms, you can improve text search by pulling in external datasets. E.g. use a model trained on Wikipedia to find synonyms, or build a neural network that maps user search terms to documents in your database.
garysieling··on Ask HN: How do you manage UI/UX for your side projects?
I use a framework - I like Semantic UI a lot, although I'm not sure it's being maintained. When selecting a framework, I like to resize the browser to see how responsive it is, and look for text overlap defects at different sizes as a sign of library quality.

Adobe XD is also a free prototyping tool - I would go through a tutorial or watch a few youtube videos of people working to get a feel for it.

garysieling··on Set up a production-ready realtime GraphQL backend
It's deliberate, and sometimes it's helpful to have a way to force the ordering of work in the database.

One potentially simple option is to have the database temp space stored in RAM, by registering a ramdisk. That also helps large sorts, which implicitly make temp tables.

You can also manually inline everything, but if you have a lot of joins, you may end up tuning queries by changing join order. By default, if there are >8 joins it uses the order you give it. If you set the 8 higher the planning step takes a little longer - fine if it's for ETL but not ideal for a web app.

garysieling··on Set up a production-ready realtime GraphQL backend
If you use Postgres, CTEs are optimization boundaries that make temp tables - you may end up inlining the CTEs or making them into regular temp tables so you can put indexes on them.
garysieling··on EuclidesDB: a multi-model machine learning feature database
Do you know if there are common tools people use as a search engine backend for this? Vespa.ai seems promising, although I can't tell if there are many people using it.
garysieling··on Show HN: Podflix – Like Netflix for Podcasts
I built a search engine for talks (http://findlectures.com/), and one of the explicit goals was not to collect user data for privacy.

The content is selected by recommendations - e.g. someone on HN say a speaker was good, so bring in all the conferences they spoke at, then there are some filters to exclude things (e.g. terrible audio).

There are also facets to explore different ways, and my experience has been that this approach works well for researching new technology, in that I can typically find a small number of highly relevant talks on a subject I'm researching.

garysieling··on Ask HN: What topics/subjects are worth learning for a new software engineer?
Two thing sthat really helped me with communication skills were technical blogging, and volunteering with Big Brothers, Big Sisters - trying to see the world through the eyes of a teenager is really illuminating.
garysieling··on Ask HN: What topics/subjects are worth learning for a new software engineer?
SQL is incredibly valuable, it also allows you to do a lot of analysis to triage tickets or to get business insights (how many users does this feature affect, etc)
garysieling··on Ask HN: What topics/subjects are worth learning for a new software engineer?
I found that blogging the steps as I do side projects made progress really helped with this - it makes it feel like I'm always completing something. It also allowed me to break a problem down into small steps (what be done in 30 minutes-1 hour before work).
garysieling··on Show HN: TechYaks – Best of 50k tech talks ranked by confidence intervals
Oops, back up now!
garysieling··on Show HN: TechYaks – Best of 50k tech talks ranked by confidence intervals
I built something with a broader dataset but a different ranking technique, basically a bunch of cruder custom ranking rules.

https://www.findlectures.com

garysieling··on YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
I got frustrated with the Youtube recommendation system, and built a search engine of videos I scraped: https://www.findlectures.com

I'm relying primarily on trusted recommendations - if someone I trust likes a speaker, I'll index channels where they speak. This doesn't scale well, but it has made for a tool that works really well for doing research.

garysieling··on Ask HN: Why do you keep a personal knowledge base?
A mix of Google Docs for larger research projects and notes on my blog - I use Google search to recover them.

The blog entries let me save time if I return to a problem and tell me at what point I stopped.

garysieling··on MLflow: An Open Source Machine Learning Platform
Does Zeppelin work naturally with git? I've been struggling to get the right setup with just Jupyter
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