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josh_cutler

29 karma · joined January 7, 2011

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josh_cutler··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2025)
Yardstik | https://www.yardstik.com/ | Staff Engineer | Minneapolis or San Francisco (remote possible)

Yardstik is on a mission to reduce workforce risk through tools like background checks, identity verification, fraud monitoring and more. We are a well capitalized fast growing company based in Minneapolis but with a distributed workforce.

We’re looking for a Staff Engineer to help us build a brand new line of Risk products.

This isn’t just a heads-down coding role. You’d be leading the technical direction for an entirely new product category — shaping the architecture, making key system decisions, and working closely with Product and Go-To-Market to bring it all to life.

We’re a Ruby on Rails shop, so if you’ve got deep experience with Rails (and opinions on how to scale it well), you’ll feel right at home. You’ll have a ton of ownership, real input into the roadmap, and the chance to build something from the ground up that truly helps our customers reduce risk in smarter ways.

Apply here: https://app.trinethire.com/companies/135023-yardstik/jobs/10...

josh_cutler··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2025)
Yardstik | Staff Engineer | Minneapolis or San Francisco | Ruby on Rails, React, Postgres, AWS

Yardstik is building the platform to reduce workforce risk. We are fast growing, doubling each of the past 3 years.

One aspect that will drive continued success is for our Technology organization to continue to build out the best Ruby on Rails Engineering team possible.

The "best" to us means we: - ship software that is trusted, used, and valued by our customers - focus our efforts on clear priorities - eliminate tech debt and do not allow it to hold us back

Looking for a Staff Engineer to join an already established/exceptional team to further drive our growth.

Learn more about the company at https://yardstik.com/

josh_cutler··on Mastercard DNS error went unnoticed for years
By who?
josh_cutler··on Feds help health insurers hide their dirty secret: denials on the rise
All large health insurers employ many physicians. You're not wrong that they may not have all of the evidence but there is a lot of licensed medical knowledge available to all Payors.
josh_cutler··on Niantic announces "Large Geospatial Model" trained on Pokémon Go player data
I worked on this and yes it was 100% related to the interest in Flickr. At the time Google Street had just become a thing and there was interest in effectively crowdsourcing the photography via Flickr and some of the technology behind Photosynth.
josh_cutler··on The Maker of Ozempic Is Trying to Block Compounded Versions of Its Drug
This is right. I worked in health insurance for a while. If you aren't in Medicare Advantage (which has relatively lower plan churn) it is very unclear that preventative spend on an employer based plan will benefit the payor that paid for it.
josh_cutler··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2024)
Yardstik (https://www.yardstik.com) | Senior Software Engineer (Ruby/Rails) | Minneapolis, MN | Hybrid | Full-Time

Yardstik is a fast growing Series A startup that is disrupting the background screening space. We are a 4 time winner of the TCBJ Best Places to Work award and just recently moved into awesome new offices in downtown Minneapolis.

We are currently looking for a Senior Software Engineer (Ruby/Rails) in the Twin Cities, MN area to join our growing team.

If you have any questions reach out to josh [dot] cutler {at} yardstik [dot] com

Please apply via: https://app.trinethire.com/companies/135023-yardstik/jobs/96...

josh_cutler··on Dean of Engineering at University of Nevada wrote a paper that’s bad
When you think about "research" like this in the context of LLMs, I worry that the source (a journal) will start codifying some of this nonsense as known fact that the ChatGPTs of the world start regurgitatiing...
josh_cutler··on Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)
Yes, but not all "scientific" disciplines adhere to this the same way that medicine does. Take for example Psychology, Political Science, or some of Economics where unreplicable studies in prestigious journals almost immediately become cannon for new grad student seminars.

N.B. I have direct experience with this in Political Science, the other disciplines I have just anecdotes about so apologies if they are mischaracterized.

josh_cutler··on The real engine behind "AI" is the bad tech economy
C3 IOT I'm guessing
josh_cutler··on PaLM 2 Technical Report [pdf]
Really? Interesting, my sequence of prompts was:

- Do you rely on Palm 1 to give me answers? - PaLM 1 is a large language model though - Which do you use more heavily, PaLM 1, PaLM 2 or PaLM 3?

I already get different answers today for the same prompts though.

josh_cutler··on PaLM 2 Technical Report [pdf]
It will tell you it uses PaLM 1, PaLM2, PaLM 3 or PaLM 540B depending on how you prompt. It will stop acknowledging incremental PaLM models at 5 it seems.
josh_cutler··on Deepmind is working on a rival to ChatGPT
I think it also depends on what you call AI and where you look. They have invested in computational photography, lots of audio work stuff, etc. But mostly in areas that are core to their hardware sales.
josh_cutler··on Amazon Is Running Out of Warehouse Workers. Cue the Robots
My understanding is that they literally just shut down some of their larger warehouse robotics teams. That doesn't seem to make sense in the context of this article.
josh_cutler··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2018)
Rambl | Minneapolis MN | Onsite

At Rambl we’re helping businesses grow by capturing, learning and training from spoken customer conversations. We’re utilizing a ubiquitous data source using cutting edge AI techniques and customers love our product.

You'll be joining one of the most successful teams to come out of the midwest. Our founders previously started Code42, the leader in enterprise endpoint data security and recovery, and have raised over $130M in funding.

We're looking for mission-minded team members who aren't afraid to say what should be done and have the talent plus tenacity to get it done.

We are hiring both a senior engineer (Ruby/JS) and a support engineer. Read more and apply here: https://rambl.workable.com/

josh_cutler··on [dead]
This is absolutely correct. Deep Learning techniques as applied to NLP have moved us forward -- but we are nowhere near human level
josh_cutler··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2015)
Optum - Minneapolis, MN - Software Engineer ONSITE

At Optum, we want to make health care work better for everyone. In doing so, we are changing a whole industry with our technology. If you are the kind of engineer that likes the idea of disrupting an industry with your technology, then we need you on our team.

We are currently building a team for a greenfield project that will provide some of the foundational services on which Optum applications are built. Think Facebook Graph API but for Healthcare. We are a small team with the ability to set our own agenda, select our own technologies and build software however we are most effective.

We are looking for rubyists, people that have experience building APIs, scalable systems, strong algorithmic and/or security backgrounds.

If you're interested in learning more please contact me at josh.cutler@optum.com

josh_cutler··on I’m a white guy in Silicon Valley and I’m done buying the meritocracy myth
I think it means that there are large firms whose partners are 100% male.
josh_cutler··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2015)
Optum - Minneapolis, MN - Software Engineer Onsite

At Optum, we want to make health care work better for everyone. In doing so, we are changing a whole industry with our technology. If you are the kind of engineer that likes the idea of disrupting an industry with your technology, then we need you on our team.

We are currently building a team for a greenfield project that will provide some of the foundational services on which Optum applications are built. Think Facebook Graph API but for Healthcare. We are a small team with the ability to set our own agenda, select our own technologies and build software however we are most effective.

We are looking for rubyists, people that have experience building APIs, scalable systems, and/or strong algorithmic or security backgrounds.

If you're interested in learning more please contact me at josh.cutler@optum.com

josh_cutler··on MongoDB, count() and the big O
I forked a version of Kaminari a few months ago to solve this problem for me that I just updated with the latest upstream: https://github.com/joshcutler/kaminari

I added a class method for Mongoid::Documents called limit_max_count_results_to that limits the size of Kaminari's total_count

josh_cutler··on Show HN: Chalkboard, a better way to plan/spec software projects
No worries, I'm looking forward to checking it out. Watching your videos I immediately thought that it would be cool if I could export the flows my team created into cucumber stories...
josh_cutler··on Show HN: Chalkboard, a better way to plan/spec software projects
I'm also having issues with hitting the Rails 404 page after submitting the Create a Project form