sahn44

I'm also in the BirdTech scene. I detect birds and automatically spray them with a sprinkler to keep away from our pool area.

code: https://github.com/mattsahn/bird-away

writeup: https://mattsahn.github.io/bird-away-blog/

My sense has been that accuracy that I need is only possible with the pretty advanced AI models and that OpenCV type approach wouldn't be good enough. Birds are pretty small in the image of the overall pool that I am working with and discerning them accurately is hard. I think it would be possible for other use cases and basically depends on the image source you are working with and the difficulty of detection within that image.

If you had, say, a camera on the inside of a birdhouse and the whole scene was either empty of taken up by a bird, then that would be easy for an on-device model.

Deer would be easy and cheaper. You could run lower resolution and cheap model and not miss a deer.

I had been using gemma-4-31B-it llm for cost/accuracy and it was super cheap, about $0.65/month. I had also downscaled the size and back tested on bird/no-bird images from my camera.

But, then I noticed that it was missing birds that were at the back of the pool and I needed to use higher resolution and better models and cost went up 10x. Now, it's to high for my liking and I need to do more model testing to get it down to a few dollars a month that seems reasonable. I can also reduce frequency, I'm doing every 2 mins during daylight hours.

I'm glad it's not just me.

I have a few learnings.

Pigeons scram instantly. 7-bird takeout: https://pub-27e5170d67ab43d8a22019a94eac1572.r2.dev/events/2...

Ducks don't care: https://pub-27e5170d67ab43d8a22019a94eac1572.r2.dev/events/2...

Whatever these are, they just walk away: https://pub-27e5170d67ab43d8a22019a94eac1572.r2.dev/events/2...

I've been pleasantly surprised how well it has worked and how robust it is. It's installed at my parent's house and I am many states away so I was paranoid about making it resilient since i'm usually not there and have to fly to get there. So, i really tried to think of everything I could. I thought it might overheat the first afternoon or have other problems, but it's been running for months now uninterupted. Sometimes the OpenRouter credits run out and it stops catching birds , but it still runs normally and after I re-up the credits, it continues working normally. No need to restart even.

This is a lot more wholesome than my project. I detect birds and automatically spray them with a sprinkler to keep away from pool area.

code: https://github.com/mattsahn/bird-away

Writeup: https://mattsahn.github.io/bird-away-blog/

True. Simple prompt change to spray humans, instead.

I had a lot of nuisance birds hanging around my parents' pool

Blog for more detail: https://mattsahn.github.io/bird-away-blog/

I have it down to $0.60/month which is lower than I expected I could get it with good accuracy. That's ~10k images processed.

It doesn't have to only be money. In person waiting time is another mechanism to allocate a scarce resource. Back in the day when # of tickets exceeded demand at a fixed price, the tickets went to he/she who was willing to arrive early and wait in line longer (ie, die hard fans). Camping out for tickets was a thing and I somewhat miss it relative to scalpers and price being the only mechanism to drive demand/supply to equilibrium.

A mere .01% equity seems fair

I'm not a fulltime developer, but manage a large dev team now. So, this project is basically beyond my abilities to code myself by hand. Pre llm, I would expect in neighborhood of 1.5-2 months for a capable dev on my team to produce this and replicate all the features.

41 hours total of prompting, looking at code diffs, reverting, reprompting, and occasional direct code commits. I do review the full code changes nearly every step of the way and often iterate numerous times until I'm satisfied with the resulting code approach.

Here's mine fully deployed, https://hackernewsanalyzer.com/. I use it daily and have some users. ~99.7% LLM code. About 1 hour to first working prototype then another 40 hours to get it polished and complete to current state.

I taught English in Seoul for a year in '02/'03. bang = room. There was (maybe still is?) a PC bang on every block or two pretty much. I'm sure I went at least 100 times. Great way to kill some time playing counter-strike for me and dabbling in starcraft. It was maybe $1.50/hr at the time. For a much better PC, nice chair, pre-installed games and snacks available.

This article bummed me out. I think this analogy of popular digital content being the 'junk food' of the brain is correct and the negative effects will, yet again, accrue disproportionately to the poor and less privileged in society. Sadly, it looks inevitable with no mechanism to prevent or counter it.

Can you elaborate a little more on this? What's an example of how you do that in the prompt?

Great resource and very well written articles. I'm always curious how these come to be when done really well. I wish we could generate high quality, useful, correct, internal documentation like this at my company, but I've never figured out how to get that done in practice. The people that know the concepts are not natural/gifted writers, or at least wouldn't be motivated or prioritize doing this. Even if they did, the style/tone/depth would vary greatly. For these msft docs, they somehow achieve consistent tone, depth, and quality/correctness across so many domains and I just don't know how that's achieved.

BlackRock – Aladdin Wealth | New York, NY | Full-time ONSITE, VISA | Data Engineer Manager

I’m looking for the right person to lead a small data engineering team, which is part of a larger (50+ person) global engineering team building Aladdin Wealth (https://www.blackrock.com/aladdin/products/aladdin-wealth), a revenue-generating FinTech SaaS product for the wealth management industry. We apply BlackRock's sophisticated risk analytics to millions of individual investors' portfolios to help them and their financial advisors create better portfolios. We have live production clients in 15+ countries around the world and we process and analyze millions of real customer portfolios on a daily basis.

You will have the opportunity to dive deep into the business, learning Aladdin, portfolio management, investment analytics (factor risk models, VaR, tracking error, historical scenarios, etc), and the wealth management industry. I lead the global engineering team and this role will report directly to me. Full job descriptions and application instructions at the below link, but you can reach out to me directly if interested: msahn@blackrock.com

https://blackrock.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/BlackRock_Profession...

Role/responsibilities:

* Manage and lead a small team of Data Engineers working primarily in Python, but with some R and Perl, as well

* Be a hands-on engineer, developing and releasing code, yourself, and reviewing PRs from your team

* Work closely with Product Managers and Implementation team to build robust and efficient data pipelines through automation

* Work with other engineering team leads and partners to continuously improve operational processes and procedures

* Design and develop data analysis tools to generate actionable insights based on customer and team generated requirements

Note for VISA applicants: We can only consider applicants that are already in the US with existing work authorization (H1B transfers, OPT, etc).

On REMOTE work: We do not offer fully remote work, so you must be in the US already and able to work from our NYC office at least 3 days a week. You can work remotely from home up to 2 days per week.

BlackRock – Aladdin Wealth | New York, NY / San Francisco, CA | Full-time ONSITE, VISA | Front-end Software Engineer / Back-end Software Engineer

We have 4 positions available immediately on my team building Aladdin Wealth (https://www.blackrock.com/aladdin/products/aladdin-wealth), a revenue-generating FinTech SaaS product for the wealth management industry. We apply BlackRock's sophisticated risk analytics to millions of individual investors' portfolios to help them and their financial advisors create better portfolios. We have live production clients in countries around the world and we process and analyze millions of real customer portfolios using Spark on a daily basis.

The front-end roles are focused on our web apps building out new features and better user experiences in React framework. We're looking for people who are super proficient in React/ES6/TypeScript and want to work with and leverage modern tools and techniques to the fullest. Front-end team also works on and owns various Java-based application servers, so there is a full-stack component, as well, but it leans more to the frontend side.

The back-end roles are for experienced engineers to architect, develop, and deploy scalable services and APIs. We work with a wide array of technologies (Java, Scala, Kotlin, Spark, Hadoop, Cassandra, Solr, Python), but solid Java is the backbone.

In all of the roles, diving deep into the business, learning Aladdin, portfolio management, investment analytics (factor risk models, VaR, tracking error, historical scenarios, etc), and the wealth management industry, will be a big part of your success. I lead the global team that is hiring these roles. Full job descriptions and application instructions at below links, but you can reach out to me directly if interested: msahn@blackrock.com

https://careers.blackrock.com/job/13459993/associate-systems... https://careers.blackrock.com/job/12474827/software-engineer... https://careers.blackrock.com/job/12726474/associate-react-d... https://careers.blackrock.com/job/13436604/java-developer-as...

Note for VISA applicants: We can only consider applicants that are already in the US with existing work authorization (H1B transfers, OPT, etc).

On REMOTE work: We do not offer fully remote work, so you must be in the US already and able to work from NY or SF. Of course, we are working remotely during Covid, but expect to be at least partially in office this year.

BlackRock – Aladdin Wealth | New York, NY / San Francisco, CA / Atlanta, GA | Full-time ONSITE, VISA | Front-end Software Engineer / Senior Back-end Software Engineer / Data Engineer | We have 5-7 positions available immediately on my team building Aladdin Wealth (https://www.blackrock.com/aladdin/products/aladdin-wealth), a revenue-generating FinTech SaaS product for the wealth management industry. We apply BlackRock's sophisticated risk analytics to millions of individual investors' portfolios to help them and their financial advisors create better portfolios. We have live production clients in countries around the world and we process and analyze millions of real customer portfolios using Spark on a daily basis.

The front-end roles are focused on our web apps building out new features and better user experiences in React framework. We're looking for people who are super proficient in React/ES6/TypeScript and want to work with and leverage modern tools and techniques to the fullest. Front-end team also works on and owns various Java-based application servers, so there is a full-stack component, as well, but it leans more to the frontend side.

The back-end roles are for experienced engineers to architect, develop, and deploy scalable services and APIs. We work with a wide array of technologies (Java, Scala, Kotlin, Spark, Hadoop, Cassandra, Solr, Python), but solid Java is the backbone.

There is one Data Engineering role (3-5 years experience) available in NYC. This role is focused on building process automation, data ETL, and some data science & analysis, primarily in Python with occasional R and Perl.

In all of the roles, diving deep into the business, learning Aladdin, portfolio management, investment analytics (factor risk models, VaR, tracking error, historical scenarios, etc), and the wealth management industry, will be a big part of your success. Reach out to me directly if interested. I lead the global team that is hiring these roles: msahn@blackrock.com. Full job descriptions and application instructions at below links for some roles, but not all have been posted externally.

Note for VISA applicants: We can only consider applicants that are already in the US with existing work authorization (H1B transfers, OPT, etc).

On REMOTE work: We do not offer fully remote work, so you must be in the US already and able to work from NY, SF, or ATL area. Of course, we are working remotely during Covid, but expect to be at least partially in office this year.

Job listings (not all roles posted externally yet): https://careers.blackrock.com/job/12156096/java-software-eng... https://careers.blackrock.com/job/12742201/software-engineer... https://careers.blackrock.com/job/12474827/software-engineer...

BlackRock – Aladdin Wealth | New York, NY | Full-time ONSITE, VISA | Front-end Software Engineer, Senior Back-end Software Engineer |

We have two positions available immediately on my team building Aladdin Wealth, a revenue-generating SaaS product for the wealth management industry. We apply BlackRock's sophisticated risk analytics, which are used to manage over $20 trillion of institutional money, to millions of individual investors' portfolios to help them and their Financial Advisors create better portfolios. We have live production clients in countries around the world who are servicing millions of end customers aided by our product. The front-end role will be focused immediately on our web apps building out new features and better user experience in React framework. We're looking for someone who is really proficient in React/ES6/TypeScript and wants to work with and leverage modern tools and techniques to the fullest. The back-end role is for a senior engineer to architect, develop, and deploy scalable services and APIs. We work with a wide array of technologies (Java, Scala, Spark, Hadoop, Cassandra, Solr, Python), but solid Java is definitely a must. In either role, diving into the business, learning Aladdin, investment analytics, the wealth management industry, etc will be a big part of your success, as well.

Reach out to me directly if interested. I lead the team that is hiring these roles: msahn@blackrock.com. Full job descriptions and application instructions at below links.

Front-end: https://careers.blackrock.com/job/9492034/aladdin-wealth-ent...

Back-end: https://careers.blackrock.com/job/9492033/aladdin-wealth-ent...

Or this one: "Bodyguard of Lies: The Extraordinary True Story Behind D-Day" by Anthony Cave Brown. Still my all time favorite WWII book.

https://www.amazon.com/Bodyguard-Lies-Extraordinary-Story-Be...

BlackRock | New York, NY | Full-time ONSITE, VISA | Front-end Web Developer | React We have a position available immediately to work on my team building a specific, revenue-generating product. We're applying BlackRock's sophisticated risk analytics, which are used to manage over $20 trillion of institutional money, to millions of individual investors' portfolios to help them and their Financial Advisors create better portfolios. This role will be focused immediately on our front-end web apps building out new features and better user experience in React framework. We're looking for someone who is really proficient in React and wants to work with and leverage modern tools and techniques to the fullest.

Direct link: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/419526548/

Reach out to me directly if interested. I lead the team that is hiring this role: msahn@blackrock.com. We’re looking for junior (1-2 years exp.) and mid-level (3-6 years exp.) roles.

Job Description and Responsibilities:

* Work beside Analytics and Product experts to build innovative analytics tools for users both inside and outside our firm.

* Architecting and developing web apps, prototypes, and proofs of concepts

* Demonstrate a passion for developing well architected, elegant web applications that delight users

* Help continually improve our application reliability, performance, and software infrastructure

* Beyond coding, a successful candidate will strive to learn the business context of their projects and users’ needs to quickly play a leading role in solving problems and driving decisions

Qualifications:

* Experience with React.js in building applications a must

* Very strong front-end web programming skills in JavaScript/ES6/HTML5/CSS

* Experience in at least one server-side language - Java, C++, Python, Ruby, Node.js

* Passion for agile, test-driven development, and automated testing

* Passion for user experience and a strong interest/demonstrated experience in design, across all devices

* Experience with Angular 2.0, AngularJS a plus

* Involvement/authoring of open source software a plus

BlackRock | New York, NY | Full-time ONSITE, VISA | Front-end Web Developer | React

We have a position available immediately to work on my team building a specific, revenue-generating product. We're applying BlackRock's sophisticated risk analytics, which are used to manage over $20 trillion of institutional money, to millions of individual investors' portfolios to help them and their Financial Advisors create better portfolios. This role will be focused immediately on our front-end web apps building out new features and better user experience in React framework. We're looking for someone who is really proficient in React and wants to work with and leverage modern tools and techniques to the fullest.

Direct link: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/409018504/

Reach out to me directly if interested. I lead the team that is hiring this role: msahn@blackrock.com

Job Description and Responsibilities:

* Work beside Analytics and Product experts to build innovative analytics tools for users both inside and outside our firm.

* Architecting and developing web apps, prototypes, and proofs of concepts

* Demonstrate a passion for developing well architected, elegant web applications that delight users

* Help continually improve our application reliability, performance, and software infrastructure

* Beyond coding, a successful candidate will strive to learn the business context of their projects and users’ needs to quickly play a leading role in solving problems and driving decisions

Qualifications:

* Experience with React.js in building applications a must

* Very strong front-end web programming skills in JavaScript/ES6/HTML5/CSS

* Experience in at least one server-side language - Java, C++, Python, Ruby, Node.js

* Passion for agile, test-driven development, and automated testing

* Passion for user experience and a strong interest/demonstrated experience in design, across all devices

* Experience with Angular 2.0, AngularJS a plus

* Involvement/authoring of open source software a plus

BlackRock | New York, NY | Full-time ONSITE, VISA | Front-end Web Developer | React

We have an position available immediately to work on my team building a direct revenue generating product. We're applying BlackRock's sophisticated risk analytics to millions of individual investors' portfolios to help them and their Financial Advisors create better portfolios.

This role will be focused immediately on our front-end web apps building out new features and better user experience in React framework. We're looking for someone who is really proficient in React and wants to work with and leverage modern tools and techniques to the fullest.

Direct link: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/301856515/

Reach out to me directly if interested. I lead the team that is hiring this role: msahn@blackrock.com

Totally right. I've been building a skill and you quickly learn how un-magical Alexa is. Most of the effort is engineering in fine detail to achieve some degree of natural interaction for your users. For example, adding in state and awareness of what the user said before to influence the skill's behavior and response. It feels like I'm inventing all that from scratch rather than the alexa platform helping achieve that.

If you want to see how well I've done, enable "NextSubway" :)

https://www.amazon.com/Matt-Sahn-NextSubway/dp/B01N9MO4DT/

This headline got me excited that MTA would have real time, official data. But, it's just in the Transit app. It's a clever solution to a real problem. If Transit was really nice, they would expose this datafeed to developers. I created the only Alexa app that uses the official MTA feed for arrival times of the numbered lines (plus the L and S). I'd love to add the lettered lines to it if I could tap into Transit's feed. I presume they won't expose this data, though, since it's thier app's key value add :(

NextSubway skill link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01N9MO4DT/