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peterlai

184 karma · joined December 16, 2008

Founder of crocodoc.com and emburse.com
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peterlai··on 3Blue1Brown Follow-Up: From Hypothetical Examples to LLM Circuit Visualization
About a year ago, I watched this 3Blue1Brown LLM tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMlx5fFNoYc&t=367s) on how a model’s self-attention mechanism is used to predict the next token in a sequence, and I was surprised by how little we know about what actually happens when processing the sentence “A fluffy blue creature roamed the verdant forest.”

A year later, the field of mechanistic interpretability has seen significant advancements, and we're now able to "decompose" models into interpretable circuits that help explain how LLMs produce predictions. Using the second iteration of an LLM "debugger" I've been working on, I compare the hypothetical representations used in the tutorial to the actual representations I see when extracting a circuit that describes the processing of this specific sentence. If you're into model interpretability, please take a look! https://peterlai.github.io/gpt-circuits/

peterlai··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2018)
Emburse (YC W16) | Software Engineer | Full Time | ONSITE preferred, REMOTE | https://www.emburse.com/

Emburse is a corporate credit card platform that generates virtual and physical credit cards with specific budget restrictions. We manage both traditional corporate card expenses like T&E as well as backend vendor payments.

Emburse is built using Python/Django and is deployed on Heroku for development and AWS for production. We're looking for someone to join us as one of the first few employees and who would be comfortable embracing sizable infrastructure responsibilities which include:

* Maintaining a PCI-compliant environment on AWS

* Augmenting our credit card transaction processing capabilities

* Designing new expense management features

Check out https://www.emburse.com/emburse-hiring/ for more information about our company and the role we're looking to fill.

peterlai··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2018)
Emburse (YC W16) | Software Engineer | Full Time | ONSITE | https://www.emburse.com/

Emburse is a corporate credit card platform that generates virtual and physical credit cards with specific budget restrictions. We manage both traditional corporate card expenses like T&E as well as backend vendor payments.

Emburse is built using Python/Django and is deployed on Heroku for development and AWS for production. We're looking for someone to join us as one of the first few employees and who would be comfortable embracing sizable infrastructure responsibilities which include:

* Maintaining a PCI-compliant environment on AWS

* Augmenting our credit card transaction processing capabilities

* Designing new expense management features

Check out https://www.emburse.com/emburse-hiring/ for more information about our company and the role we're looking to fill.

peterlai··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2018)
Emburse (YC W16) | Software Engineer | Full Time | ONSITE | https://www.emburse.com/

Emburse is a corporate credit card platform that generates virtual and physical credit cards with specific budget restrictions. We manage both traditional corporate card expenses like T&E as well as backend vendor payments.

Emburse is built using Python/Django and is deployed on Heroku for development and AWS for production. We're looking for someone to join us as one of the first few employees and who would be comfortable embracing sizable infrastructure responsibilities which include:

* Maintaining a PCI-compliant environment on AWS

* Augmenting our credit card transaction processing capabilities

* Designing new expense management features

Check out https://www.emburse.com/emburse-hiring/ for more information about our company and the role we're looking to fill.

peterlai··on A Final Farewell
Hi, check out Emburse (W16). We have virtual and physical cards that you can set for one-time or recurring.
peterlai··on Show HN: Emburse – Employee Debit Cards with Oversight
For some companies such as those in manufacturing, enhanced oversight and better spend control are necessary card program requirements. I agree that business credit would add significant value. Thanks for the suggestion.
peterlai··on Show HN: Emburse – Employee Debit Cards with Oversight
For now, we're starting with a debit card product because they're easier to launch. Eventually, as the product gains more traction, it will be easier to launch a credit product with the advantages you're looking for.

Which that said, there's plenty of opportunity as a debit card product. We believe that no financial product right now really prioritizes spend control and bookkeeping accuracy in the way we do within our product.

peterlai··on Show HN: Emburse – Employee Debit Cards with Oversight
Founder here - looking for feedback on the product. You can think of Emburse as being like AmEx with Expensify-like features built-in. If you're in the process of transitioning from having all spend on a shared corporate card to having cards for each department or employee, definitely take a look.
peterlai··on Box Acquires Crocodoc (YC W10)
Hi there, co-founder of Crocodoc here. Crocodoc will continue being the best platform for document viewing and collaboration. Box is investing heavily in our platform and will make sure we stay awesome. Any updates to the API going forward should be totally seamless, but if you run into any problems, just give me a ping (I'm Peter). I'll make sure the transition happens smoothly.
peterlai··on Box Acquires Crocodoc (YC W10)
Thanks!
peterlai··on Crocodoc (YC W10) Launches Preview of Revamped HTML5 Document Converter
Hey guys - Peter here from Crocodoc. In the official release, pages on mobile devices will be lazy-loaded to prevent the pages from using too much memory like it does on this demo here.
peterlai··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2012)
Crocodoc (YC W10)

San Francisco, CA | Full time | Director of Product

## Description

Crocodoc’s HTML5 document collaboration platform reaches tens of millions of users, and our business is profitable and growing fast. Our customers include Dropbox, LinkedIn, and Yammer, and we're funded by investors including YC, SV Angel, 500 Startups, and top angels from Silicon Valley.

Right now we're inundated with sales inquiries from SMB customers who want to embed documents within their web and mobile applications. We’re looking for a multifaceted candidate to take charge of our SMB product and blow it out of the water. This is a key leadership role with enormous growth potential.

## Responsibilities

- Talk to LOTS of prospective customers (both product managers and developers)

- Develop our SMB product offering

- Optimize our pricing plans and product tiers

- Develop a scalable sales process and design a self-service experience

- Develop user acquisition strategy (everything from inbound marketing to direct sales)

- Qualify leads, own our sales pipeline, and close lots of deals

TL;DR: you must be capable of growing our SMB product like crazy while wearing many hats in the process.

## Qualifications

- World-class ability to communicate with clients and develop customer relationships

- Experience with SaaS and/or B2B technology solutions

- Basic technical experience (you’ve written a web app) required

- Sales experience (you’ve closed deals before) strongly preferred

- Startup experience (you can set own agenda and thrive in a fast-paced environment) a plus

- Product experience (you understand principles of UI and UX) a plus

- Product marketing experience (you’ve been responsible for user acquisition) a plus

This is a tremendous opportunity to own an entire product from soup to nuts. If you think you'd be a great fit, please contact us at jobs@crocodoc.com or visit https://crocodoc.com/jobs/.

peterlai··on Crocodoc's HTML5 page flip
I haven't yet gotten it to work on mobile devices. Do try it again from Firefox or Chrome!
peterlai··on Crocodoc's HTML5 page flip
The focus of this experiment isn't so much proposing new UX that we think should be adopted. More so, this experiment is to showcase what is now possible using the newest HTML5 features - to provide inspiration for those trying to implement novel HTML5 animations. A page flip allowed us to show off some of my favorite new HTML5 effects.
peterlai··on Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (October 2012)
Crocodoc - San Francisco, CA | Web Developer, Biz Dev, Growth Hacker

Crocodoc converts documents to HTML5 for some of the largest web companies you use everyday: Dropbox, LinkedIn, Yammer. We have a small team, and yet business is growing fast (5x this year). We're looking for amazing early startup employees to help us grow the company even faster.

More info available here: https://crocodoc.com/jobs/

peterlai··on Pdf2htmlEX: A PDF to HTML converter
I'm flattered the author mentions Crocodoc. Crocodoc is hiring by the way if anyone wants to hack on stuff like this full time: https://crocodoc.com/jobs/
peterlai··on PDF Reader in JavaScript
IE7 - IE9, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari
peterlai··on Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
You could help people discover good comments by allowing them to collapse comment threads. A simple [-] button by each comment should do the trick.
peterlai··on Crocodoc (YC W10) launches online HTML5 document reader
I'm a dev at Crocodoc. For document assets, we're doing tremendously obscure things to our CSS and Javascript in order to optimize our document loading experience. The unconventional use of Javascript to embed resources relates our needing to work around a few browser quirks in order to load resources faster when fetching assets from our server.

But yes, we really could do a better job of merging the other browser resources mentioned.

peterlai··on Greplin (YC W10) open sources 10-15x faster protocol buffers for Python
I hope to see these changes incorporated within Google's official implementation.

As of right now, deserialization of json and xml are way faster in Python: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/499593/whats-the-best-ser...

peterlai··on Ask HN: Fun side project - what should I name it?
How about homepagehotness.com?

Even though it's a bit long, the name makes me smile, and it seems like it may be memorable.

peterlai··on Crocodoc (YC W10) Closes Angel Round, Launches New Document Collaboration Tools
Here's an example of what we mean by document collaboration: http://crocodoc.com/O3Za0.

This is a link a snapshot of our newest homepage. What do you guys think of it? Critics welcomed.

peterlai··on Thanks for the feedback: Crocodoc (YC W10) has a new look and improved tools
This has been done out of convenience. We're moving the blog to a crocodoc.com subdomain soon.
peterlai··on Crocodoc (YC W10) Makes It A Snap To Share And Mark Up Documents
Thanks for this idea! My Thesis adviser helped a few professors at MIT review chapters of their textbooks before they were set for publication. I'm going to email him asking if any of his peers are still in the review process. Do you have any suggestions yourself for who I should contact? I sit behind support@crocodoc.com if you do.
peterlai··on Ask HN: Solution for eye strain?
Even though I'm young, I'll occasionally wear reading glasses with a 1.00 prescription. I most need my glasses when working with CSS and pixel perfect layouts. For me, the use of reading glasses significantly reduces eye strain by the end of the day.
peterlai··on Dropbox Acquires The Domain Everyone Thought It Had: Dropbox.com
At MIT's Startup Bootcamp, Kyle noted a similar squatter on http://justintv.com/.
peterlai··on Django Debug Toolbar Screencast
Great screencast, but did anyone else zone out after 30 seconds because the music was so good? I had to play the screencast a second time to actually watch it.</digression>
peterlai··on Ask HN: What's the Browser Distribution for your site?
Why are such a high percentage of your users using Internet Explorer? And Playstation? What?
peterlai··on Do You have a viable startup idea?
With fair use, this service could become as interesting as 20 questions.

Some feedback: Perhaps hunch could handle the browser history more elegantly. After completing this questionnaire, my browser history becomes usable. (I had to click the back button about 10 times to get back to this page.)

peterlai··on [dead]
I don't think this name will troublesome at all in Mandarin-speaking countries. Bing also refers to bread http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_(Chinese_flatbread) or pastry http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Jian-Bing-Chinese-Crepes/Detail... or ice http://taiwandays.blogspot.com/2007/07/bing-ice.html. Bing means a bunch of things depending upon tone of voice. Bing(sickness) isn't an immediately obvious translation.
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