paladin314159

I echo this sentiment. Even though I'm having Claude Code write 100% of the code for a personal project as an experiment, the need for thinking hard is very present.

In fact, since I don't need to do low-thinking tasks like writing boilerplate or repetitive tests, I find my thinking ratio is actually higher than when I write code normally.

I've been doing this a fair amount recently, and way I manage it is: first, give the LLM the PDF and ask it to summarize + provide high-level reading points. Then read the paper with that context to verify details, and while doing so, ask the LLM follow-up questions (very helpful for topics I'm less familiar with). Typically, everything is either directly in the original paper or verifiable on the internet, so if something feels off then I'll dig into it. Through the course of ~20 papers, I've run into one or two erroneous statements made by the LLM.

To your point, it would be easy to accidentally accept things as true (especially the more subjective "why" things), but the hit rate is good enough that I'm still getting tons of value through this approach. With respect to mistakes, it's honestly not that different from learning something wrong from a friend or a teacher, which, frankly, happens all the time. So it pretty much comes down to the individual person's skepticism and desire for deep understanding, which usually will reveal such falsehoods.

> I think that, if you gave me the ability to search the pre-contest Internet and a week to prepare my submissions, I would be kind of embarrassed if I didn't get gold, and I'd find the contest to be rather less interesting than I would find the real thing.

I don't know what your personal experience with competitive programming is, so your statement may be true for yourself, but I can confidently state that this is not true for the VAST majority of programmers and software engineers.

Much like trying to do IMO problems without tons of training/practice, the mid-to-hard problems in the ICPC are completely unapproachable to the average computer science student (who already has a better chance than the average software engineer) in the course of a week.

In the same way that LLMs have memorized tons of stuff, the top competitors capable of achieving a gold medal at the ICPC know algorithms, data structures, and how to pattern match them to problems to an extreme degree.

If you need world knowledge, then bigger models. If you need problem-solving, then more reasoning.

But the specific nuance of picking nano/mini/main and minimal/low/medium/high comes down to experimentation and what your cost/latency constraints are.

I love it! I'm the one who recreated Kung Fu Chess at kfchess.com. Very impressed at you bringing it to life -- definitely at least 100x harder to do :)

Dan Boneh is amazing. I took his Cryptography course at Stanford and loved it so much that I ended up having him advise me on my senior thesis. Would highly recommend stuff that he puts out.

Although I empathize with the struggle of the journey, having gone through a similar path of math team -> Stanford (where I briefly ran into the author), I think this is a particularly uncharitable characterization of math competitions.

Yes, there are many students (even more these days) that are in the grind for the accolades and college admissions, but math competitions were genuinely my favorite part of high school. They helped hone my problem solving, grit (!), work ethic, social skills, and leadership skills in a way that I continue to see pay off 15 years later. I am forever grateful for my high school teacher who supported me during this time.

It helped that I was actually passionate about it, which I think is the underlying point here. Weird constructs like math competitions that help kids channel their passions? Incredible. Forced hoop-jumping for the purpose of college admissions? Horrible.

We switched from LZ4 to Zstd in almost all of our compression use cases to great effect. Reducing the data on disk or over the network is a huge win with only a minor loss in decompression speed (using the appropriate level of Zstd). E.g. data in Kafka: https://amplitude.engineering/reducing-kafka-costs-with-z-ta...

Amplitude | San Francisco, Vancouver | https://amplitude.com

We're building the analytics infrastructure for digital products and looking for people passionate about distributed systems, machine learning, dev tooling, and/or data visualization. Anyone who has a website, mobile app, or even IoT device is a potential customer.

We're 500 people now (85 engineers) and growing incredibly quickly as a business. We're 22nd on YC's top companies list (https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/) and still climbing. We know that people are the most important part of the business and think a lot about how to create and scale a culture of humility, ownership, and growth mindset.

Whether you're interested in building scalable infrastructure, prototyping new products and UX, making analytics instrumentation easier for engineers, or doing machine learning research, you can do that at Amplitude.

Tech stack: TypeScript, React, Java, Python, AWS, Spinnaker, K8s

I'm one of the founders, so feel free to reach out to learn more (jeffrey at amplitude). Otherwise check out our openings and apply here: https://boards.greenhouse.io/amplitude

Amplitude Analytics | San Francisco, CA (SOMA) | https://amplitude.com

We help companies build better products by providing analytics for understanding user behavior. We believe that the future of product development is in smart, easy-to-use analytics that helps you make good decisions and invest in the right areas. We're a 400-person company (60 engineers), and we raised our Series E last year. We've gotten incredible traction helping customers like Square, Atlassian, Dropbox, Twitter, Twitch, and Capital One change the way they build products. We were recognized in Wealthfront's Career-Launching Companies (https://blog.wealthfront.com/career-launching-companies-list...), Forbes' Cloud 100 (https://www.forbes.com/cloud100/list/), and YC's top companies (https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/).

We have many open positions that can be found here (we're growing fast!): https://boards.greenhouse.io/amplitude. In particular, we're looking to expand the engineering team with the following positions:

* Engineer Manager, Infrastructure Analytics

* Software Engineer, All Levels (React, Full Stack, Infra, Query, Data Pipeline, Integrations)

* Senior Devops Engineer

Our tech stack consists of Java, Python, Redis, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Docker, SaltStack, Terraform, Kubernetes on the backend and TypeScript, React, Redux, Highcharts, d3, Node on the frontend. We've got a ton of challenging technical problems to solve thanks to being in the analytics space (we've processed tens of trillions of data points!), and we're looking for people who are passionate about the intersection of technology and product to help us take the next step. You can find more examples of the work we do on our blog: https://amplitude.engineering/

If this sounds exciting to you, please message me directly (email in profile) or apply through https://boards.greenhouse.io/amplitude.

We've used Gather for a few company events and it's been super helpful for recreating as much of an in-person interaction style as possible. It outshines Zoom when you have more than 10 people in the same meeting and in more casual settings. Especially for office cultures that were heavily in-person like ours, it helps bolster the sense of team and collaboration that isn't the same over Slack/Zoom.

Japanese. I took a year of Japanese in college 10 years ago, but never really followed up on it (other than watching anime). I started up again about 6 months ago and have been impressed by the number of online resources that are available now to the extent that self-study is easy (motivation aside).

I built kfchess.com (https://github.com/paladin8/kfchess), which might be a helpful reference. It's by no means amazing code (I hacked it together quickly in my spare time), but it uses https://github.com/socketio/socket.io for real-time client-server communication. It's a relatively simple library to build on top of.

As for the backend, I would recommend whatever you're most familiar with. It doesn't make that much of a difference and you'll be way more productive in a language you know.

Love the idea of a Shogi site by the way!

Amplitude Analytics | San Francisco, CA (SOMA) | https://amplitude.com | ONSITE

We help companies build better products by providing analytics for understanding user behavior. We believe that the future of product development is in smart, easy-to-use analytics that helps you make good decisions and invest in the right areas. We're a 300-person company (40 engineers), and we raised our Series D in 2018. We've gotten incredible traction helping customers like Square, Atlassian, Dropbox, Twitter, Twitch, and Capital One change the way they build products. We were recognized in Wealthfront's Career-Launching Companies (https://blog.wealthfront.com/career-launching-companies-list...) and Forbes' Cloud 100 (https://www.forbes.com/cloud100/list/).

We have many open positions that can be found here (we're growing fast!): https://boards.greenhouse.io/amplitude. In particular, we're looking to expand the engineering team with the following positions:

* Engineer Manager, Product Engineering

* Senior/Staff Product Engineer (React)

* Staff DevSecOps Engineer

* Senior Data Scientist - Causal Inference

* Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Our tech stack consists of Java, Python, Redis, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Docker, SaltStack, Terraform, Kubernetes on the backend and JavaScript, React, Redux, Flow, Highcharts, d3 on the frontend. We've got a number of challenging technical problems to solve thanks to being in the analytics space, and we're looking for people who are passionate about the intersection of technology and product to help us take the next step. You can find more examples of the work we do on our blog: https://amplitude.engineering/

Also, we don't do whiteboard interviews! Bring your laptop, and be prepared to write code the way you expect to on the job -- in a familiar working environment with access to the internet. If this sounds exciting to you, please message me directly (email in profile) or apply through https://boards.greenhouse.io/amplitude.

Amplitude Analytics | San Francisco, CA (SOMA) | https://amplitude.com | ONSITE

We help companies build better products by providing analytics for understanding user behavior. We believe that the future of product development is in smart, easy-to-use analytics that helps you make good decisions and invest in the right areas. We're a 300-person company (40 engineers), and we raised our Series D in 2018. We've gotten incredible traction helping customers like Square, Atlassian, Dropbox, Twitter, Twitch, and Capital One change the way they build products. We were recognized in Wealthfront's Career-Launching Companies (https://blog.wealthfront.com/career-launching-companies-list...) and Forbes' Cloud 100 (https://www.forbes.com/cloud100/list/).

We have many open positions that can be found here (we're growing fast!): https://boards.greenhouse.io/amplitude. In particular, we're looking to expand the engineering team with the following positions:

* Engineer Manager, Product Engineering

* Senior/Staff Product Engineer (React)

* Staff DevSecOps Engineer

* Senior Data Scientist - Causal Inference

* Senior Software Engineer, Backend

Our tech stack consists of Java, Python, Redis, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Docker, SaltStack, Terraform, Kubernetes on the backend and JavaScript, React, Redux, Highcharts, d3 on the frontend. We've got a number of challenging technical problems to solve thanks to being in the analytics space, and we're looking for people who are passionate about the intersection of technology and product to help us take the next step. You can find more examples of the work we do on our blog: https://amplitude.engineering/

Also, we don't do whiteboard interviews! Bring your laptop, and be prepared to write code the way you expect to on the job -- in a familiar working environment with access to the internet. If this sounds exciting to you, please message me directly (email in profile) or apply through https://boards.greenhouse.io/amplitude.

Amplitude Analytics | San Francisco, CA (SOMA) | https://amplitude.com | ONSITE

We help companies build better products by providing analytics for understanding user behavior. We believe that the future of product development is in smart, easy-to-use analytics that helps you make good decisions and invest in the right areas. We're a 300-person company (40 engineers), and we raised our Series D last year. We've gotten incredible traction helping customers like Square, Atlassian, Dropbox, Twitter, Twitch, and Capital One change the way they build products. We were recognized in Wealthfront's Career-Launching Companies (https://blog.wealthfront.com/2018-wealthfront-career-launchi...) and Forbes' Cloud 100 (https://www.forbes.com/cloud100/list/).

We have many open positions that can be found here (we're growing fast!): https://boards.greenhouse.io/amplitude. In particular, we're looking to expand the engineering team with the following positions:

* Director, Product Engineering

* Engineer Manager, Product Engineering

* Senior/Staff Product Engineer (React)

* Staff DevSecOps Engineer

* Senior Data Scientist - Causal Inference

* Senior Software Engineer, Backend

Our tech stack consists of Java, Python, Redis, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Docker, SaltStack, Terraform, Kubernetes on the backend and JavaScript, React, Redux, Highcharts, d3 on the frontend. We've got a number of challenging technical problems to solve thanks to being in the analytics space, and we're looking for people who are passionate about the intersection of technology and product to help us take the next step. You can find more examples of the work we do on our blog: https://amplitude.engineering/

Also, we don't do whiteboard interviews! Bring your laptop, and be prepared to write code the way you expect to on the job -- in a familiar working environment with access to the internet. If this sounds exciting to you, please message me directly (email in profile) or apply through https://boards.greenhouse.io/amplitude.

Thanks for the feedback!

Are you playing on your phone? I never really solved the UX problem on mobile because of the necessary speed/accuracy of moves. The original game was only on PC.

Amplitude Analytics | San Francisco, CA (SOMA) | https://amplitude.com | ONSITE

We help companies build better products by providing analytics for understanding user behavior. We believe that the future of product development is in smart, easy-to-use analytics that helps you make good decisions and invest in the right areas. We're a 300-person company (40 engineers), and we raised our Series D last year. We've gotten incredible traction helping customers like Square, Atlassian, Dropbox, Twitter, Twitch, and Capital One change the way they build products. We were recognized in Wealthfront's Career-Launching Companies (https://blog.wealthfront.com/2018-wealthfront-career-launchi...) and Forbes' Next Billion-Dollar Startups (https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2018/12/05/amplitude...).

We have many open positions that can be found here (we're growing fast!): https://boards.greenhouse.io/amplitude. In particular, we're looking to expand the engineering team with the following positions:

* Engineer Manager, Product Engineering

* Senior/Staff Product Engineer

* Staff DevSecOps Engineer

* Senior Data Scientist - Causal Inference

* Senior SDK Engineer

* Senior Software Engineer, Backend

Our tech stack consists of Java, Python, Redis, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Docker, SaltStack on the backend and JavaScript, React, Redux, Highcharts, d3 on the frontend. We've got a number of challenging technical problems to solve thanks to being in the analytics space, and we're looking for people who are passionate about the intersection of technology and product to help us take the next step. You can find more examples of the work we do on our blog: https://amplitude.engineering/

Also, we don't do whiteboard interviews! Bring your laptop, and be prepared to write code the way you expect to on the job -- in a familiar working environment with access to the internet. If this sounds exciting to you, please message me directly (email in profile) or apply through https://boards.greenhouse.io/amplitude.

FAANG interviews aside, I find the idea of having a mental model before you write code extremely helpful. It's a lot easier to understand the purpose of individual functions and how things should interface with each other if you do. It won't be perfect at first, but the more you can get right in the first stab the better.

Your ability to build that mental model depends on both your experience/skill and the complexity of the problem. For simple problems, a more senior engineer might be able to come up with a mental model instantly because it's similar to lots of things they've done before. For really complex problems, it probably takes everyone a long time to build the correct mental model and you'd want to balance that with what you can figure out by diving into the implementation.

My guess would be that the interviewers' line of thinking is that if you couldn't build a mental model for a problem quickly, that means you're not proficient with problems like that. Which is probably true, but opens up the question of whether the interview is testing the right type of problem, of course.

I don't think we have the most enterprise version of Slack, but as an admin the data available to me is # of days active of the last 30 days and # of messages sent over the last 30 days.

This is a really thoughtful and indeed unorthodox list of questions. It gets at some of the under-appreciated aspects of what makes a startup a good environment to work in: humility, alignment, customer focus.

Depends a lot on the situation. If the two of you bust your asses and the company is on a great track to liquidity for the employees, I'm sure people would feel fine (though in that case, why not just pay yourself enough salary?). If there's still massive risk that employee equity goes to zero, as an employee I would be pretty turned off by the fact that the founders want to cash out.

Amplitude Analytics | San Francisco, CA (SOMA) | https://www.amplitude.com | ONSITE

We help companies build better products by providing analytics for understanding user behavior. We believe that the future of product development is in smart, easy-to-use analytics that helps you make good decisions and invest in the right areas. We're a 200-person company (30 engineers), and we raised our Series C last summer. We've gotten incredible traction helping customers like Square, Capital One, Dropbox, Twitter, Twitch, and Adidas change the way they build products. We were recognized in Wealthfront's Career-Launching Companies (https://blog.wealthfront.com/2018-wealthfront-career-launchi...) and Forbes' Next Billion-Dollar Startups (https://www.forbes.com/next-billion-dollar-startups/).

We have many open positions that can be found here (we're growing fast!): https://jobs.lever.co/amplitude. In particular, we're looking to expand the engineering team with the following positions:

* Senior Product Engineer

* Senior Software Engineer, DevOps

* Senior Software Engineer, DevSecOps

* Senior Data Scientist - Causal Inference

* Director of Product Engineering

* Senior Performance Engineer

Our tech stack consists of Java, Python, Redis, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Docker, SaltStack on the backend and JavaScript, React, Flux, Highcharts, d3 on the frontend. We've got a number of challenging technical problems to solve thanks to being in the analytics space, and we're looking for people who are passionate about the intersection of technology and product to help us take the next step. You can find more examples of the work we do on our blog: https://amplitude.engineering/

Also, we don't do whiteboard interviews! Bring your laptop, and be prepared to write code the way you expect to on the job -- in a familiar working environment with access to the internet. If this sounds exciting to you, please reach out to us at careers@amplitude.com or apply directly through https://jobs.lever.co/amplitude.

Amplitude Analytics | San Francisco, CA (SOMA) | https://www.amplitude.com | ONSITE

We help companies build better products by providing analytics for understanding user behavior. We believe that the future of product development is in smart, easy-to-use analytics that helps you make good decisions and invest in the right areas. We're a 200-person company (30 engineers), and we raised our Series C last summer. We've gotten incredible traction helping customers like Square, Capital One, Dropbox, Twitter, Twitch, and Adidas change the way they build products. We were recognized in Wealthfront's Career-Launching Companies (https://blog.wealthfront.com/2018-wealthfront-career-launchi...) and Forbes' Next Billion-Dollar Startups (https://www.forbes.com/next-billion-dollar-startups/).

We have many open positions that can be found here (we're growing fast!): https://jobs.lever.co/amplitude. In particular, we're looking to expand the engineering team with the following positions:

* Senior Product Engineer

* Senior Software Engineer, DevOps

* Senior Software Engineer, DevSecOps

* Senior Data Scientist - Causal Inference

Our tech stack consists of Java, Python, Redis, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Docker, SaltStack on the backend and JavaScript, React, Flux, Highcharts, d3 on the frontend. We've got a number of challenging technical problems to solve thanks to being in the analytics space, and we're looking for people who are passionate about the intersection of technology and product to help us take the next step. You can find more examples of the work we do on our blog: https://amplitude.engineering/

Also, we don't do whiteboard interviews! Bring your laptop, and be prepared to write code the way you expect to on the job -- in a familiar working environment with access to the internet. If this sounds exciting to you, please reach out to us at careers@amplitude.com or apply directly through https://jobs.lever.co/amplitude.

Amplitude Analytics | San Francisco, CA (SOMA) | https://www.amplitude.com | ONSITE

We help companies build better products by providing analytics for understanding user behavior. We believe that the future of product development is in smart and easy-to-use analytics, not the complex data science stacks or surface-level vanity metrics of today. We're a 180-person company (30 engineers), and we raised our Series C last summer. We've gotten incredible traction helping customers like Square, Capital One, Dropbox, Twitter, Twitch, and Adidas change the way they build products. We were recognized in Wealthfront's 2018 Career-Launching Companies List: https://blog.wealthfront.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2018...

We have many open positions that can be found here (we're growing fast!): https://jobs.lever.co/amplitude. In particular, we're looking to grow out the engineering team with the following positions:

* Director of Quality Engineering

* Senior Growth Engineer

* Senior Product Engineer

* Senior Software Engineer, Backend

* Senior Software Engineer, DevOps

* Senior Software Engineer, DevSecOps

Our tech stack consists of Java, Python, Redis, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Docker, SaltStack on the backend and JavaScript, React, Flux, Highcharts, d3 on the frontend. We've got a number of extremely challenging technical problems to solve thanks to being in the analytics space, and we're looking for talented people who are passionate about the intersection of technology and product to help us take the next step. You can find more examples of the work we do on our blog: https://amplitude.engineering/

We only hire the best engineers and pay very competitive salaries. Also, we don't do whiteboard interviews! Bring your laptop, and be prepared to write code the way you expect to on the job -- in a familiar working environment with access to the internet.

If this sounds exciting to you, please reach out to us at careers@amplitude.com or apply directly through https://www.amplitude.com/careers.

The last thing you want is a slow trickle of people being let go. Then the only thing on everyone's mind is whether they're next.

Amplitude Analytics | Backend Engineer | San Francisco Bay Area

At Amplitude, we’re building analytics that helps our customers use data to build better products and drive growth. We area a Series C, $56 million funded leader in product analytics, backed by top VCs -IVP, Battery Ventures, Benchmark, and YCombinator. We are the #1 product analytics company with over 20,000 teams around the world using us to grow their businesses by building product experiences that customers love. Our clients include product and engineering teams at Microsoft, Square, PayPal, Adidas, Dropbox, Twitter, and Twitch.

One of Amplitude's biggest investments has been a proprietary query architecture, Nova, to support advanced analytics across >4 Trillion user actions with <0.7s median response time. As we are growing fast, we are looking for engineers who can help us scale this complex infrastructure . We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help build out our analytics offering and aren't afraid to tackle the challenges of a growing data company. As a member of the Backend team, you will be responsible for designing, building, and deploying the features and underlying systems that power our core analytics product. You will interact with everything from our data ingestion pipeline to our in-house query infrastructure written in Java and Python. Our product sits on top of many modern technologies, including Kafka, Redis, Amazon S3, DynamoDB, and Elasticsearch. You will share your ideas with a group of similarly innovative and curious engineers.

Apply on career site - https://www.amplitude.com/careers Check out our engineering page - https://amplitude.engineering/

Amplitude Analytics | San Francisco, CA (SOMA) | https://www.amplitude.com | ONSITE

We help companies build better products by providing analytics for understanding user behavior. We believe that the future of product development is in smart and easy-to-use analytics, not the complex data science stacks or surface-level vanity metrics of today. We're a 150-person company (20 engineers), and we raised our Series C last summer. We've gotten incredible traction helping customers like PayPal, IBM, Capital One, Twitter, Microsoft, and Square Enix change the way they build products.

We have many open positions that can be found here (we're growing fast!): https://www.amplitude.com/careers. In particular, we're looking to grow out the engineering team with the following positions:

* Head of Cloud Engineering

* Head of Information Technology

* Senior Software Engineer, Applications

* Senior Software Engineer, Backend

* Senior Software Engineer, DevOps

* Senior Software Engineer, Frontend

Our tech stack consists of Java, Python, Redis, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Docker, SaltStack on the backend and JavaScript, React, Flux, Highcharts, d3 on the frontend. We've got a number of extremely challenging technical problems to solve thanks to being in the analytics space, and we're looking for talented people who are passionate about the intersection of technology and product to help us take the next step.

We only hire the best engineers and pay very competitive salaries. Also, we don't do whiteboard interviews! Bring your laptop, and be prepared to write code the way you expect to on the job -- in a familiar working environment with access to the internet.

If this sounds interesting to you, please reach out to us at careers@amplitude.com or apply directly through https://www.amplitude.com/careers.

He intends to step away from Tesla, but he doesn't think now is the right time. His vision and leadership are necessary to get Tesla to the point where the Model 3 has taken off -- after that, he'll hand over the reigns and focus on other stuff (SpaceX, Neuralink).