Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

grell.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 419 posts

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#141

Post by lan321 »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #108
UK-AL wrote: post #72

Being able to get hired at a company is often unrelated to being able to generate viable products. If you want to get hired don't focus on skills to build useful things. Focus on psychology and charisma.

Yeah, no. You have to pass tech interviews and generally know your shit

Not too often tbh. You either get dogshit LeetCode or, more often, just a general chat about what you've done and know. There, social skills play a massive role. Make simple projects sound like state-of-the-art, present everything cool that happened as something you were directly involved in, present the 2 most obscure bugs in the project as something you fixed every other Tuesday when you get bored...

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#142

Post by 0xpgm »

I'm with Luke Smith [1] when it comes to non-copyleft licenses like MIT.

Andrew Tanenbaum of the MINIX fame was similarly surprised to find that Intel had quietly included the OS he wrote in Intel chips, making it perhaps the most widely used OS in the world. He seemed disappointed no one ever reached out to him to tell him about it [2]

[1]: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc...

[2]: https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#143

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #124
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #41

I think that everyone should read this blog post "Overall I am overjoyed enigo is used in Claude Desktop and I tell everyone who listens to me about it :P. It's so cool to think that I metaphorically created the arms and legs for Claude AI, but I can't help but wonder if the rejection letter was written by a human or Claude AI. Did the very AI I helped equip with new capabilities just reject my application? On the br…

I think we need to compare our industry with other industries. No other industry relies on free labour from random people, which comes with no support or promises. I once told some non-techie folk about some code I wrote. It did something super simple and wasn't that big. They were all asking why I didn't sell it and thought it was crazy I would give it away for free with the BSD license. It was 900 lines of code...…

Ya I also believe it this way, Mostly I like to build stuff for my own problems or something that I just find fascinating.

I am still in high school, so I was doing some question sheet that our teachers provided and there was an answer key but it had answers of everything. Now I don't know how other people approached it but I am really impatient and so I just open up answer key side by side but it reveals every answer.

So I firstly created an AI to ocr to card generator but it was an hit or miss and so I discussed it with my friend and he said that he used to use paint and somehow in his convuluted manner basically have a slider which would reveal answer...

I found it incredible and so I just created a single index.html that can do it. (Although vibe coded), Now I can't even think of monetizing such ideas when I realize that there are creators of some really incredible stuff and long convulated stuff and even they aren't sponsored so I have always felt that the scripts that I write or projects around such ~.5-3k loc. I just don't think of monetization.

I just don't know.. I like hacking stuff, I just feel more comfortable rebuilding stuff even if its mediocre if I feel like I can change it to suit my purpose better

I think that the only other industry that is gives as much completely free stuff might be research/science related, but maybe its due to the fact that computer are computer science too and thus related to academics.

I really just love tinkering with software and just the aspect of freedom that it can provide , but sadly, I find it just hard to really make money without being a job and such stories on which we are discussing, just makes me feel like I am kinda right.

On one hand we have 100 million payouts to researchers and on the other we have this, such disparity is kinda sad I suppose.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#144

Post by riedel »

pentamassiv wrote: post #111
trueismywork wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that making your product AGPL would being you more money/recognition/jobs for your effort?

I don't know. I have no comparison but it is common for crates to be released under MIT. I took over the maintainership from the original author so the license was already there. I rewrote pretty much everything so I guess I could try changing the license now but that's not something I wanna think about. I do the work because I see it as payback for all the great open source software I use all the time.

I really like the copyleft idea, however, I think you did nothing wrong, IMHO, because if large corps like an idea, they will rather reimplement it rather than even bothering with ways to conform to AGPL or buy an alternative licence. Particular in the age of AI, all source available code has become pretty much public domain (value is still in maintenance, etc). License have mostly become a compliance/ideology game that alienates most people. However, changing the license on the main repo, with only a minor version bump, would be a nice asshole move to get their attention past HR (won't make a difference, but if you have nothing to lose).

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#145

Post by lores »

SalariedSlave wrote: post #119
snowfield wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was very courteous, no deaths on a hill to be found

Publishing anything about it, regardless of content, is already a hill. I like that people blog about these experiences and enjoy the insights, but I think it's never good for the authors..

Everyone should. The only way to balance corporate power is collective action by individuals, and sharing information is a requirement for that. Corporations can't get away with quite as much brazen sociopathy if their actions are transparent and reported without - or a different - spin.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#146

Post by notahacker »

captain_coffee wrote: post #53

Unfortunately, this seems on par with recruitment practices in the summer of 2025. I can almost guarantee that they didn't even read that application / cover letter and auto-magically rejected it. "the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications" Zero effort. They probably didn't even realize the relevance of that specific application for that role. Unbelievable, I swear!

Tbf the other summer recruitment practice in AI this summer is Zuck running round offering engineers with some sort of reputation $100m+ windfalls, so maybe all the OP needs to do is add "author of computer interaction library used by Anthropic" to his LinkedIn profile to acquire that garage full of Ferraris

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#148

Post by stopthe »

Unfortunately, the choice of license likely won't matter in the nearest future (if not already so). If a tech giant wants you open-source library, they will just point their agent to it and ask "to rewrite in the style of War and Peace". And more unscrupulous players won't even bother with a rewrite, as we've seen recently in the case of Cheatingdaddy/Pickle.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#149

Post by dirkc »

ArcHound wrote: post #11

I'll say it: why would they pay him if he's already doing the work for free from their PoV? Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.

I can't say for Anthropic, but I've seen Google hire people working on open source projects that were aligned with the skills they were looking for. Desktop search and collaborative editing comes to mind, although I might be mis-remembering?
Post reply on HN