kyleschiller

Software Engineer | Zenysis (YC W16) | SF, NYC, Paris | Onsite, Fulltime

Zenysis is building analysis products humanitarian and global development challenges.

Our projects are embedded in health systems that provide services for over 100 million people. In the past year, we've helped governments fight epidemic outbreaks, respond to natural disasters, and allocate hundreds of millions of dollars in healthcare spending.

We're building early warning systems, automating data-quality checks, and developing tools to identify the most effective health interventions across entire countries.

We're looking for mission-driven engineers who care about seeing their impact in the world and are comfortable building complex, mission-critical systems.

Apply here: http://www.zenysis.com/#careers or email kyle@zenysis.com with questions!

Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, PM | Zenysis (YC W16) | SF, NYC | Onsite, Fulltime Zenysis is building a data analysis product for governments of developing countries. Our current projects focus on healthcare and affect over 100 million people. In the past year, we've helped governments fight epidemic outbreaks, combat food shortages, and allocate several hundred million dollars in healthcare spending.

We have a lot on our plate. We're building early warning systems for disease outbreaks, automatically detecting low-quality data, and running models to recommend the most effective health interventions across entire countries. The work we do is not always easy, but it's very rewarding. We're looking for other mission-focused engineers who care about seeing their impact in the world and are comfortable building complex, mission-critical systems.

More info: http://www.zenysis.com/careers.html, or kyle at zenysisdotcom

What determines a "path"?

"Philosophy" is connected to "Ethiopia" through "Sexism", but I couldn't find that phrase on either page.

https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Philosophy&tar...

You mean all articles that are 6 degrees away? That would be most if not all articles.

It's worth noting that Atrium's Series A had a mind-boggling 92 investors [0].

Read the article out of curiosity, but understand that this was in no way a normal process.

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/atrium-lts-series-a...

Yeah this is absolutely a large chunk of it. Especially when you consider how many jobs are filled through referrals [0]. At my last company, I only worked with male engineers, and so when I got a new job, I could only think of male engineers to refer to open positions.

I think this is also why inertia is so hard to offset here, we have a strong self-reinforcing cycle that's going to take a lot of external force to break out of.

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-survey-reveals-85-all-job...

Is it possible that your dating pool is subject to sampling bias?

Empirically speaking, about 1/4 of people in STEM are women, so if you've met 0 women interested in STEM, it seems like your experience simply aren't an accurate reflection of reality. [0]

I think it's incredibly ironic that you're highlighting your own relative interest in STEM while failing to apply any degree of scientific rigor to your own thinking.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

Yeah, you're absolutely right that by not taking into account things like STEM participating, the metric ignores exactly this kind of thing.

Having said that, if you just want to know how it was literally defined here, I found this comment helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408092

Here are three possible explanations for the observed behavior that don't require a belief in inherent biological differences:

1. Since countries with lower gender equality also tend to be poorer, STEM could be seen as a rare opportunity to escape poverty, and this motivation could outweighs any kind of societal bias agains female participation.

2. A quick glance at the graph of results in [0], shows that there's also a strong cultural division. Countries with more gender equality are mostly in Nordic Europe and Western Europe, while countries will less are mostly in the Middle East, Eastern Europe. It's possible for regions to develop cultural norms that reduce gender equality without also developing cultural norms that reduce female participation in STEM.

3. As a corollary to 1, and pulled directly from the article: "STEM careers are generally secure and well-paid but the risks of not following such a path can vary. In more affluent counties, where any choice of career feels relatively safe, women may feel able to make choices based on non-economic factors."

To be clear, I don't have strong evidence that any of these are necessarily true, but I think the existing of possible alternatives should at least force a reconsideration of the immediate conclusion that this correlation proves anything about biological difference.

I think it's troubling that as of writing this, none of the top comments do anything to suggest alternative explanations, and are quick to use this to confirm the existing narrative [1]. Again, I don't think I've done anything to disprove these claims, but it's indicative of a larger intellectual problem on HN if we would rather have discussions that confirm our beliefs than discussions that challenge and sharpen then.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... [1] https://imgur.com/a/1Diel

I don't know, I get how the whole survivalism might seem eccentric and even paranoid, but if I had a billion dollars I would absolutely be willing to spend a few million on preparing for worst case scenarios.

I know wealth doesn't really work in strict linear proportions, but as someone with a much lower net worth, I think it's reasonable to keep iodine tablets and canned food around, and can pretty easily imaging scaling that up a bit if I had drastically greater access to capital.

None of this is to say that I'm discounting the article, I actually liked it a lot.

It's not just a piece of land, he went through a fairly extensive process to gain citizenship as well.

I think Sam's original statement on this was from the New Yorker piece a while back [0], where Peter describes him as "not particularly religious, but he is culturally very Jewish—an optimist yet a survivalist, with a sense that things can always go deeply wrong”, I don't think preparing for collapse is just a joke. Earlier in the article, Sam says "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force"

As for the sheep farm, I don't know any more than you, but I'm sure a billionaire going to these lengths is also capable of preparing a decent shelter.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...

It's literally called "The long read", you can't really be surprised.

Software Engineer | Zenysis (YC W16) | SF | Onsite, Fulltime We build software for governments and international organizations to fight epidemics, combat food shortage, and allocate hundreds of millions of dollars in healthcare spending. We're working on early warning systems for disease outbreaks, automatically detecting low-quality data, and running models to recommend the most effective health interventions across entire countries.

Our software helps strengthen the delivery of essential public services, respond to large-scale humanitarian emergencies, and tackle complex challenges with unprecedented precision and speed.

We're looking for engineers comfortable building complex, mission-critical systems for some of the most demanding clients in the world.

http://www.zenysis.com/careers.html

Email kyle@zenysis.com with questions or applications.

Since this entire "product" launch is a partnership + landing page, I'm guessing 0 engineers were involved. Building a form isn't hard, but recruiting an engineer, convincing them that building a form is a good use of their time, and then actually getting it "shipped" takes 100x longer at large companies than just giving Typeform your credit card.

Also possible that bikes are more likely to survive a post-SDC world.

"once you go to sleep and catch up on those missed hours of sleep, you’ll have a 95% chance of relapse."

Unless you plan on spending the rest of your life severely sleep deprived, this doesn't seem like a great solution.

Totally anecdotally, I've had friends with undergraduate degrees in Math go straight into consulting and software engineering out of college with limited work experience.

I'm not an expert, but from what I've read it sounds like derivatives (i.e futures) might help.

https://qz.com/1144262/the-cftcs-green-light-for-bitcoin-fut...

2018: Is my career doomed if I don't become an blockchain/crypto developer? No.

Students who pay their own tuition (i.e. are not on financial aid) are almost by definition wealthy. That's why they don't have the "luxury" of lower taxes.

Original tweet from Dale: "I am questioning who she really is. Naomi is a persona, not a real person. She is several or many people. [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg

Hey sorry for the delay! We're open to NYC applicants.

Sr. Software Engineer | Zenysis (YC W16) | SF, NYC | Onsite, Fulltime

We build software for governments and international organizations to fight epidemics, combat food shortage, and allocate hundreds of millions of dollars in healthcare spending. We're working on early warning systems for disease outbreaks, automatically detecting low-quality data, and running models to recommend the most effective health interventions across entire countries.

Our software helps strengthen the delivery of essential public services, respond to large-scale humanitarian emergencies, and tackle complex challenges with unprecedented precision and speed.

We're looking for engineers comfortable building complex, mission-critical systems for some of the most demanding clients in the world.

http://www.zenysis.com/careers.html

Email kyle@zenysis.com with questions or applications.

Okay sure, Facebook was built by nerds, and historically nerds in America have been bullied.

Does that mean there can't be a legitimate criticism?

Poe's Law

Neural Networks are really good at identifying patterns in data. As a classic example, if you wanted to predict housing prices, you could build a data set that maps features about houses (square feet, location, proximity to Caltrain, etc) onto their actual price, and then train a network to recognize the complex relationship between features and pricing. Training happens by feeding the network features, letting it make a guess about the price, and then correcting the guess (backpropagation).

Convolutional Neural Networks work similarly, but with images. Instead of giving a CNN discrete features, you'll usually just use the pixels of the image itself. Through a series of layers, the CNN is able to build features itself (traditionally things like edges, corners) and learn patterns in image data. For example, a CNN might be trained on a dataset that maps images onto labels, and learn how to label new images on its own.

This video uses Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to actually generate new images. In this case, you have two networks "competing" against each other. One network is a traditional CNN trying to identify is an image is "real" or computer generated, and the second network tries to generate new images to trick the first network.

We've been able to generative fairly realistic small images before (usually 64x64), but doing it this well on high-resolution (1024x1024) images is unprecedented.

http://kvfrans.com/generative-adversial-networks-explained/

When actually hiring, you also have benchmarks that aren't purely relative, and past experience to fall back on.

"Y Combinator’s goal is to cause there to be more startups, by helping founders to start them."

Also interesting that they goal doesn't include helping startups be more of a good thing.

To be clear, I generally believe that YC will help there be more good startups, but it is kind of weird phrasing.

I'm glad someone else noticed this. The whole thing felt really strangely phrased.

It's possible that it was written by committee, (i.e. everyone editing a Google doc), which often leads to this kind of writing.

Alternatively, maybe they just didn't want it to sound too much like PG's writing style.

Still, phrases like "Y Combinator’s goal is to cause there to be more startups, by helping founders to start them." don't exactly flow.

Sort of, it uses Monto Carlo + a bunch of other things. [0]

[0] https://medium.com/@karpathy/alphago-in-context-c47718cb95a5