Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

news.ycombinator.com

311–320 of 583 posts

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#311
CPU INFOrmation library: a cross-platform library to discover supported instruction sets, microarchitecture, and cache parameters of the CPU. Started as a "oh, I can do it over the weekend" project at first, took close to a year to get to production quality.

https://github.com/Maratyszcza/cpuinfo

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#312

Lambda School - a rigorous, live online computer science education that’s free until you’re hired. https://LambdaSchool.com/computer-science Started as a side project in January, and I had no idea it would take off like this. We now have 20 employees, including instructors from Google, Apple, Blizzard, etc. and our first graduating students are getting hired for great salaries all over the US. (Average is $85,000 in…

> Started as a side project in January, and I had no idea it would take off like this Would be interested in learning about the backstory. Did you blog about it somewhere?

It was on HN early into its life, I recall seeing it posted here. I also recall being solidly impressed by the quality of the presentation for what it was and how it worked. The value proposition clicked immediately. I think they did a pretty good job of hooking people on the concept quickly (ultimately it's pay for results, which can be a potent offer when education is increasingly expensive).

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#313

Trying to be the world's first person to be cured from autism. I believe my autism is caused by the shape of my forehead, which puts too much pressure on my muscles. Evidence is here: https://corticalchauvinism.com/2017/11/13/yuval-levental-cra... Also, I have prepared for a potential surgery by getting botox injections in my forehead muscle. So far, my focus at work has dramatically improved: https://corticalchauvin…

This sounds cool! You seem high functioning. I know someone who's low functioning, about grade 2-3 mentality and can't keep conversations going for long. No savant level skills either. How does your work affect people on that end of the spectrum? Do you see any of your work applying to them? Sorry if you've answered any of this in your research. I'll check your site out more tomorrow.

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#314
post #281

Left $150k software engineering job (well got fired for making video called "9 Ways to cope with having a boring 9-5 job" which somebody found and sent to HR) to make videos about stuff I think is interesting ( https://www.youtube.com/c/JDiculous1 https://www.facebook.com/HonestLogic ), with a slant towards addressing wage slavery, basic income, student loans, capitalism, etc. Still in the early stages, but I'll be h…

Wow, is it even legal in your country? What was the official reason mentioned? Maybe you can sue them?

In the US this would be 100% legal. For almost all jobs, you can fire someone for any reason (I don't like your shirt, your jokes weren't funny, it's a Tuesday) or literally no reason at all. The exceptions are few and far between - unions provide additional protection via collective bargaining agreements; you can't fire someone for being in a protected class (i.e. because of their race or gender); and you can't fire someone in retaliation for something like a wage complaint. You could almost certainly fire someone for making a video you don't like (unless they're in a union, which is very few tech employees.)

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#315

I left a very good SW Engineering job in London, travelled for 3 months, pimped up my 2013's side project for 3 months and started selling it. Now I have created a company around it, been profitable for months. Now I carry my boss-less/office-less job around the world as a Digital Nomad. Happy new year from Mexico! My side project that became my job: https://readonlyrest.com

Where did you travel? About to set off on a trip of roughly the same length in Europe. Any recommendations?

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#316

Trying to be the world's first person to be cured from autism. I believe my autism is caused by the shape of my forehead, which puts too much pressure on my muscles. Evidence is here: https://corticalchauvinism.com/2017/11/13/yuval-levental-cra... Also, I have prepared for a potential surgery by getting botox injections in my forehead muscle. So far, my focus at work has dramatically improved: https://corticalchauvin…

From all of the research I've read, autism seems to be a neurological disorder. Is this not the case? Genuinely curious what led you down this road rather than others as I've been struggling to reason about similar issues and tendencies I've had.

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#317
I'm happy with 2 open source projects I've published:

- ssrf_filter (https://github.com/arkadiyt/ssrf_filter): a ruby gem for preventing server side request forgery attacks

- bounty-targets-data (https://github.com/arkadiyt/bounty-targets-data): an automatically updating repository of all Hackerone/Bugcrowd in-scope domains (for use in scripted bug hunting)

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#319
In my free time I've been coding a TCP/IP stack in C++(14): https://github.com/ambrop72/aipstack . It uses a single-threaded event-driven architecture, is usable on embedded system (no mallocs), and is header-only.

Much work is yet to me done including docs (lots of Doxygen-based docs exist but introductory and TCP API docs are generally missing). However the TCP implementation should actually be pretty solid.

Re: Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

#320
I quit my job as a software engineer at Google early this year to teach people how to code. I started paying people $15/hr to learn so they can make ends meet while learning instead of working at Walmart.

I thought about all the missing pieces in my engineering growth and created a curriculum that welcomes students from 0 engineering background and plugs in all the holes that were black boxed to me in my engineering growth: We host our own servers, allowing students configure nginx and create ssl certs themselves for the apps they build. Our projects mimick existing well known companies (netflix, dropbox, gmail, google docs clones).

Our curriculum is largely project based, so students work together on projects that they would be using themselves: building their own email client, chat client, filestorage/backups, firebase, etc. From day 1 of a students journey, their code is thoroughly code reviewed by other students.

2 months ago, Calworks, a local government assistance program, offered to send students to us and pay each students $13/hr for up to 6 months. Unfortunately, to make this deal work, we needed a commercial office (my wife and I teach out of our apartment) and we did not have the financial resources.

Last month, we finally got approved as a tax exempt non-profit so I can reach out to my friends for donations (but donations take time, I have to set up a bunch of fundraising tools first). My savings ran out so I started applying for jobs and landed a full-time position at Paypal starting in January.

Moving forward into 2018, a few of the senior students are going to be leading the non profit. 100% of my salary and equity is going into the non-profit so existing students would not only continue to be paid, but we now also have the financial resources to get an office and push the Calworks deal through to help more people! 2018 is looking to be a great year.

We do not have any internet presence at the moment because this year our focus had largely been testing and iterating our curriculum as well as our financial model. 2018 will be different and if you want to help, our non-profit is called GarageScript.

https://www.facebook.com/garagescript/

Post reply on HN