offbynull

Location: Boston, Providence, New York

Remote: Yes (or Hybrid)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, C++, Java, SQL, Docker, GitHub Actions

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UFsjc2By8YOtufwH1_3hPKFu6jg...

Email: offbynull@gmail.com

Software engineer and hands-on technical lead with 20 years of experience focused on data and backend engineering, with an emphasis on building dependable systems and improving how they’re developed and maintained. Recent efforts have included leading the development, launch, and ongoing ownership of a company-wide API; optimizing an insurance model to run over 20× faster through vectorization, algorithmic improvements, and moving performance-critical code to C++; and establishing engineering standards and practices such as CI/CD that meaningfully reduced the number of bugs reported.

Over the years, I’ve worked on data workflows, scientific automation and analytics, APIs and web applications, developer tooling, and software for resource-constrained devices. I’ve also built and contributed to open-source projects covering data exploration, bioinformatics, CAD, programming language extensions, and distributed peer networking.

If you're an engineer and want to go deeper into the core algorithms behind genomics, there's a book / course called Bioinformatics Algorithms. It was a punishing read when I was going through it a few years ago (but rewarding). It's probably much better now given the state of AI.

[1] https://cogniterra.org/course/64/info

That hasn't been my experience. Bambu's documentation, including the guides and wiki, is disjointed and inconsistent. You'll often find contradictions between pages or information that isn't appropriately fleshed out. Sometimes bits and pieces on a topic are spread across several wiki pages and guides. You'll also find that there's now an increase in AI slop in some of the introductory guides (e.g., tons of emdashes and sentences that don't seem to make sense).

Having the printer give you reminders to do something doesn't mean that maintenance is minimal.

> She had no desire to learn the ends and outs of 3d printers. She wanted something easy to use and reliable. The Bambu Labs printer I bought her has been just that.

Where is this coming from? You absolutely need to know the ins and outs of a 3D printer. Nozzles wear out, build plates wear out, components need to be regularly cleaned properly and lubricated, you have to keep filaments dry, certain filaments can only be used with certain components, you constantly tweak slicer and temperature settings, ... The list goes on.

3D printers, including Bambu Lab printers, are definitely not easy to use nor are they reliable. They're maintenance heavy. Sometimes you have to do a print multiple times because it'll fail for a myriad of reasons. Maybe you oriented it wrong, maybe your slicer settings are off, maybe it didn't have proper supports, maybe the filament is messed up, ...

I'm also in the same boat of regret, but for other reasons. Their support team is beyond awful. I purchased an H2S AMS combo just shy of two months ago (mostly because I saw it being praised by HNers a while back) and found out recently that the AMS they've sent me is defective. It's been truly a bizarre experience trying to deal with customer support. They told me to disassemble the AMS and swap a couple of modules that they mailed me. I did, provided them evidence that I did, and provided evidence that it didn't fix the problem. Their response was to claim that I didn't actually swap the modules and that because of that my warranty no longer applies, and then they said they'd give me a free roll of filament for my troubles (lol). At that point I began the process of invoking the consumer protections afforded to me. Called my credit card company and opened a dispute, invoked Massachusetts law M.G.L. c. 93A, and I'm about to contact my AG.

It's a shame they're going in such an anti-consumer direction, both with their gaslighting customer support and the lawfare against Orca.

This is such a strange take. Your words remind me of past crypto hype cycles, where people pushed web3.0 and NFT FOMO hysteria.

Engineering is the practical application of science and mathematics to solve problems. It sounds like you're maybe describing construction management instead. I'm not denying that there's value here, but what you're espousing seems divorced from reality. Good luck vibecoding a nontrivial actuarial model, then having it to pass the laundry list of reviews and having large firms actually pick it up.

I wonder if we'll reach a breaking point with public forges, where they'll simply reject hosting a repo if it isn't from someone with a vetted background or if it detects hallmarks of LLM slop (e.g., many commits over a short period of time or other LLM tells).

Location: Boston, MA / Providence, RI.

Remote: Open to either remote or hybrid.

Willing to relocate: Yes, for the right role.

Technologies: Python, C++, Java, Typescript, SQL, Docker, K8s, AWS, Git, GitHub.

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yHWoeeRSjT5OMD7ZmFwdr3bpfBz...

Email: Available in resume.

I've been a software engineer for over 15 years, working on everything from APIs and financial models to data pipelines and firmware. Beyond the technical stuff, I’ve led small, tightly-knit teams, managed projects, mentored and advocated for colleagues, and spent a lot of time communicating technical concepts to folks who aren't as tech-savvy.

Now that I'm authorized to work for any U.S. employer, I'm hoping to pivot to a smaller company where I can make a stronger impact. I'm open to any field, but particularly drawn to life sciences. It's been an area of interest for me ever since going through a bioinformatics algorithms textbook cover-to-cover, and the hope is that I can continue learning about the life sciences space while providing value with my existing skill set. Like many on HN, I have a heartfelt drive for learning, whether through books, courses, shadowing experts in the field, or jumping head-first into unfamiliar situations.

If you're doing anything in biopharma, computational biology, medical devices, synthetic biology, or anything along those lines, by all means please drop me an email. If you're working in some other unrelated field, still don't hesitate to reach out — I'm always interested to know what folks are working on and if I'd be able to help move things along in any way.

I program in modern C++ as well (C++23). I disagree with both "very safe" and "fun". Even with 23 there are an innumerable number of footguns throughout both the language and the standard library. Debugging code is also a mess. Good luck getting anything done without paying for an IDE, and even then it can be a struggle.

I took a crack at explaining the Viterbi algorithm after learning about HMMs from a bioinformatics book I was reading. You may find it helpful, but that's assuming my interpretation of it is correct.

https://offbynull.com/data/learn/Bioinformatics/output/outpu...

I thought about this and we have a backup problems in place if they don't feel comfortable sharing. The context will be the same, both the candidate and the team member will be working as equals to address the problem. Although, in this case, the team member is already familiar with the problem.

The commute is what does it for me. That and I hate open plan offices.

I structure my notes on a topic as if it were a book.

- There's a table of contents.

- There are prerequisites for each section (links to other sections within the notes).

- There's a terminology section at the bottom has short definitions for all the new terms I should remember (software automatically links each usage of a term to its entry in the terminology section).

Around the 3 minute mark at https://youtu.be/CHD1N9vtPlE

The entire interview is gold.

> to raise prices because of my browsing habits, IP, or CC used?

How would this work when most people get their flights through aggregators? I search for flights on Google Flights. I imagine Google Flights just hits a database somewhere to get times, prices, number of stops, etc.. rather than share my information with every airline.

Not directly related to the article, but the other day I saw the "camera in use" indicator in the Android status bar while WhatsApp was open. The camera usage history showed it was being used by WhatsApp at the time (not another app), but I wasn't making use of any feature that required a camera at that time (browsing contacts).

I doubt it was nefarious. Anyone know why something like this would happen? Is there some internal calibration going on or maybe a bug? I disabled WhatsApp's camera permission immediately afterwards.

I remember this from back in the day. It felt way ahead of it's time.

IIRC it originally had a single unified world, which was massive, and you could build stuff in it. It seemed almost endless. You'd just walk and walk and walk and keep seeing new things that people built.

Activeworlds is what I think about when people mention the metaverse. A cool concept with great execution that ultimately ends up going nowhere.

Had you or your grandparents thought about maybe first asking the owner to keep the dog off the property? Maybe conveying to the owner that your grandmother has been cleaning the wall and (I'm assuming) you and your family aren't a fan of dogs.

I use a CSS [0] to style the rendered output from markdown-it [1]. It works pretty well for me.

[0] https://github.com/sindresorhus/github-markdown-css

[1] https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it

I've written...

* a Java library to open up ports on your router, because at the time nothing existed for Java that handled all 3 major port mapping protocols.

* a Java library implementation of Kademlia, because I wanted to learn the protocol.

* a Java coroutines toolkit, because I needed the functionality but at the time Javaflow was dead but Project Loom wasn't yet a thing.

* a Node library that extends markdown-it with my own special flavour of Markdown that I use for taking long-form notes. It automatically links terms in the document and lets me call into container images to generate outputs (e.g. generate chemfig/tikz/svgbob/graphviz diagrams, run a block of python and spit the output, etc..). I built this one because, at the time, Google Docs just wasn't cutting it in terms of features and had some bugs when the doc was hitting the low hundreds of pages. A sample of the MD <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/offbynull/learn/master/Bio...> and its rendered output at <https://offbynull.com/data/learn/Bioinformatics/output/outpu...>.

They broke backwards compatibility when they moved from 8 to 9. If this is all we got out of it after all this time, IMO it wasn't worth the change.

Who is this for? Are they using it to attract interns / new grads?

First time I came across this was when I was reading a chapter on genome assembly in a bioinformatics algorithms book. It seemed like such a great solution until it got to the section about practical complications with DNA sequencing: sequencing errors, the fact that that their are 2 strings being assembled (double stranded DNA), repeats in the genome, etc..

Anyone else remember the ARM Jazelle DBX extension? I wonder if they'll end up dumping this in this the same way.

I don't remember very many phones supporting DBX, but IIRC the ones that did seemed to run J2ME apps much smoother.

Why don't they move to a P2P model? Something like BitTorrent DHT or IPFS? DockerHub itself can just be used if the image is scarce and to penalize free riders.

AFAIK Javaflow's been inactive for over a decade. Newer implementations for the same concept include https://github.com/offbynull/coroutines and https://github.com/vsilaev/tascalate-javaflow/.

Full disclosure: I'm the one who built / owns the first project.

It was a serious low point for me when all of this started. No friends or family in this city, long distance relationship collapsed, and my only sources of interaction with people (our physical office and my gym across the street) closed down.

Since then I've done a few things to help pull back some sanity...

* I took up running. Every day I try to run a little farther and take a new path. Last Saturday I was able to do a 20k fasted AM run. It was the first time in my life I was able to run that far without stopping.

* I filled my duffel bag with jugs of water and used that for weight training instead. It doesn't really take the place the gym but it's better than nothing.

* I started taking flights to the bay area to visit my family in 2 week cycles.

I'm physically fine right now, but like some of the other people here I wish I had some friends / co-workers / general people to hang around and talk with. If you're in a similar situation, in your 30s, and live around Boston, feel free to drop me a line at this username at gmail. I would be more than happy to come out and chill.