1,152 karma · joined May 21, 2015
https://www.thelis.org
We're seed-staged, 3 people, building an AI for cybersecurity, looking for a founding AI engineer who wants to learn/apply SOTA techniques for AI. Ideal background is experience building production agentic AI systems (by this I mean something like Simon's definition: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/18/agents/ definition) who also likes to think about WHAT to build and not just how.
We are a Golang/Python shop (although I'm not sure that matters so much any more).
Email jobs@polarsky.ai with subject HN.
In general, treating LLM outputs (no matter where) as untrusted, and ensuring classic cybersecurity guardrails (sandboxing, data permissioning, logging) is the current SOTA on mitigation. It'll be interesting to see how approaches evolve as we figure out more.
(To clarify, I meant that some engineers mostly use CC while others mostly use Codex, as opposed to engineers using both at the same time.)
It’s also interesting to see how instead of a plan mode like CC, Codex is implementing planning as a skill.
Generative AI is rewriting how organizations use data, and breaking traditional security models in the process. We’re a team of cybersecurity, AI, and systems experts building the foundation for secure, trustworthy AI in the enterprise.
We're looking for a Founding AI Engineer who loves building with AI -- crafting context pipelines, integrating and evaluating LLMs into production systems, and delivering AI-native product experiences. You'll work on all parts of Polar Sky, from the data and eval systems to the reasoning, retrieval, and orchestration systems.
Apply online here: https://ats.rippling.com/polar-sky/jobs/a04ed5b7-6202-45e6-b....
We're a well-funded, pre-seed cybersecurity startup focused on data security. I'm looking for a founding AI lead with experience in fine-tuning LLMs (expertise around RL + reasoning models a big plus). This person would own the full AI stack from data to training to eval to test-time compute.
Who's a good fit:
* If you've always thought about starting a company, but for whatever reason (funding, life, idea), this is a great opportunity to be part of the founding team. We're 2 people right now.
* You enjoy understanding customer problems and their use cases, and then figuring out the best solution (sometimes technical, sometimes not) to their problems.
* You want to help figure out what a company looks like in this AI era.
* You enjoy teaching and sharing knowledge.
Questions, interest, just email jobs@polarsky.ai.
We're a well-funded, pre-seed cybersecurity startup focused on data security. I'm looking for a founding AI lead with experience in fine-tuning LLMs (expertise around RL + reasoning models a big plus). This person would own the full AI stack from data to training to eval to test-time compute.
Who's a good fit:
* If you've always thought about starting a company, but for whatever reason (funding, life, idea), this is a great opportunity to be part of the founding team. We're 2 people right now.
* You enjoy understanding customer problems and their use cases, and then figuring out the best solution (sometimes technical, sometimes not) to their problems.
* You want to help figure out what a company looks like in this AI era.
* You enjoy teaching and sharing knowledge.
Questions, interest, just email jobs@polarsky.ai.
* The "stack-centric" approach such as vLLM production stack, AIBrix, etc. These set up an entire inference stack for you including KV cache, routing, etc.
* The "pipeline-centric" approach such as NVidia Dynamo, Ray, BentoML. These give you more of an SDK so you can define inference pipelines that you can then deploy on your specific hardware.
It seems like LLM-d is the former. Is that right? What prompted you to go down that direction, instead of the direction of Dynamo?
- They used QwQ to generate training data (with some cleanup using GPT-4o-mini)
- The training data was then used to FT Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct (non-reasoning model)
- Result was that Sky-T1 performs slightly worse than QwQ but much better than Qwen2.5 on reasoning tasks
There are a few dismissive comments here but I actually think this is pretty interesting as it shows how you can FT a foundation model to do better at reasoning.
And as to sidestepping inference, I can totally do that. But I think it's so much better to be able to ask the LLM a question, run a vector similarity search to pull relevant content, and then have the LLM summarize this all in a way that answers my question.
Here's a question for this crowd: Do we see domain/personalized RAG as the future of search? In other words, instead of Google, you go to your own personal LLM, which has indexed all of the content you care about (whether it's everything from HN, or an extra informative blog post, or ...)? I personally think this would be great. I would still use Google for general-purpose search, but a lot of my search needs are trying to remember that really interesting article someone posted to HN a year ago that is germane to what I'm doing now.
One of the things that confused me is that regression models can be predictive, just like time series forecasting — they just do so in a different way. I tried to make this clear in the article (or maybe I’m not understanding what you’re saying).
In a regression model, you’re predicting target variables from feature variables. In a time series, you’re predicting the same variable from its past behavior. This is a subtle but crucial difference.
(And then you can do time series with covariates, which combines the two.)
I set up my Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi Zero W. I have some brief notes here on my setup: https://www.thelis.org/blog/pi-hole. It works well.
Note that this is not the default! :-)
I’ve never used Pub/Sub or Cloud Run, but have been quite happy with BigQuery and GKE.
I’ve been an exec, founder, CEO, and board member at various stages of successful (IPO) /unsuccessful companies (acqui-hire) companies. And the common thread at every stage is that the most successful companies had management teams that worked well together to optimize for the business.
So instead of spending your energy on reading / learning more about tech, I’d recommend you spend your energy learning more about business (I’d probably start by asking the CEO & the rest of the mgmt team for advice on what to learn.)
- $0 - $1M-ish, hire a part-time bookkeeper
- $1M - $5M-ish, get a director of finance / controller, who can manage AR/AP, audit, ASC 606, basic financial modeling, and your key rev benchmarks.
- $5M+ is when I'd consider hiring a CFO, but it really depends on your growth rate. You can probably get to $10M+ with a good dir of finance if you get them to hire a good FP&A person.