211–220 of 454 posts
I am the maintainer of a library to simulate keyboard and mouse input. I didn't start the project but took over the maintenance and have since rewritten pretty much all of the code. I recently found out that Anthropic is shipping it in Claude Desktop for some unreleased feature which is probably like "Computer Use". I noticed they had an open position in exactly the team responsible for the implementation and applied…
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Keep in mind that they probably use it or at least discovered it explicitly because it's open source. So either you don't release it and they use something else, or you release it and they use it. Option 2 sounds like giving you more exposure and more opportunities in the long run.
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If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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Isn’t this the thing AI is going to claim to solve? A project exists, a user writes a feature request, the AI codes up the changes, pushes a new release, and everyone is happy. That’s the sales pitch. The big issue with this, even if it works perfectly every time, is that there is no one at the core of the project with some vision and taste, who is willing to say “no” to bad ideas or things outside the scope of the p…
> there is no one at the core of the project with some vision and taste, who is willing to say “no” to bad ideas or things outside the scope of the project. That can literally be a system prompt. "Here are the core principles of this project [...]. Here is some literature (updated monthly?). Project aims to help in x area, but not sprawl in other areas. Address every issue/PR based on a careful read of the core princ…
I don't have any super popular repos but I do have a few with 500 to 1500 stars and while not necassarily regret, I don't think I've ever gotten a single pull request that I could just acccept as is. Even though the README links to live tests (browser JS libs), the person submitting the PR rarely includes tests so that's one issue. Sure I can say "I'll be happy to accept this if you could please add some tests?" but…
[ ] Added unit tests
[ ] Included a screenshot of the code working (this helps reviews go faster)
I am the maintainer of a library to simulate keyboard and mouse input. I didn't start the project but took over the maintenance and have since rewritten pretty much all of the code. I recently found out that Anthropic is shipping it in Claude Desktop for some unreleased feature which is probably like "Computer Use". I noticed they had an open position in exactly the team responsible for the implementation and applied…
Did you apply through the website/job posting? I’d strongly recommend trying again and reaching out to the friend of a friend who informed you of the role and asking for a more direct intro to the hiring manager. Unfortunately, it’s really really easy to slip through the cracks as a resume, and one feels no remorse rejecting a pdf file. Even without the warm contact, some way of directly reaching the hiring manager (…
Just look at the background of some of the names in this at these places. As always it’s “who you know and where you’ve been” not “what you know and what you’ve built”
edit: You can downvote if you like, but it doesn’t change the fact that high stakes tech has never been a meritocracy and AI companies are no different.
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Anthropic has a tough alignment interview. Like I aced the coding screener but got rejected after a chat about values. I think they want intense people on the value/safety side as well as the chops.
What does being "intense" on the safety side mean? High risk taking with AI safety or low?
When I was ~14 I open sourced a script to autoconfigure X11's xrandr. It was pretty lousy, had several bugs. I mentioned it on a KDE mailing list and a KDE core contributor told me it was embarrassing code and to kill myself. I took it pretty hard and didn't contribute to KDE or X11 ever again, probably took me about a year to build up the desire to code again. Everything else I've open-sourced has gone pretty well,…
And people wonder why Codes of Conduct became popular...
(The main example of these people was a guy named Erik Naggum, but a few still exist somewhere out there and I met one on a programming reddit yesterday. You can spot them because they won't stop telling you how great Lisp Machines are, can't explain why nobody uses them, and for some reason they insist on calling JavaScript "ECMAScript".)
That said, I also remember that codes of conduct were popularized about a decade ago by someone who was then fired from GitHub for harassing junior programmers (she claimed this was "mentoring" and seemed mentally incapable of noticing something could be wrong with her behavior.) So it seemed like an obvious case of reputation laundering at the time.
If you do that, you will eventually lose with depression or other heavily overfitted reactions.
I build open source for myself, and for myself first. Not for others, not for appreciation, not for "likes" or similar.
I don't expect anything in return. If you want to be part of it, start to contribute. But with everything in life, trust has to be earned slowly over time.
Having said that, I always believe in the good of people. Though I am pretty sad and disappointed how some parts of the internet made me their artificial enemy because I don't submit to social pressure and couldn't care less about the chan folks.
Always remember: The loudest on the internet are not the most.
As a result, I became network troubleshooting tech support for a large chunk of people trying to run kubernetes on bare metal. If you've not looked at k8s's networking, debugging even your own cluster's networking is a nightmare, never mind debugging someone else's over slack, while (usually) simultaneously having to give them a crash course in intermediate/advanced networking stuff like asymmetric routing and tracing packets through netfilter so that you can then tell them that networks can't do the thing they wanted and no amount of new features I can add will change that.
Meanwhile companies selling bare metal k8s services started bundling MetalLB, but kept sending their customers to my bugtracker instead of taking some of the load themselves.
The experience burned me out severely. It's been several years and I still have a visceral negative reaction to the idea of open-sourcing code I wrote, and when I infrequently do they come with a fairly blunt "contributions no welcome" message and a disabled issue tracker. I handed over the keys to MetalLB a long while back now. I hope the new maintainers and the project are doing okay.
I'll mention a positive of that time as well, to balance it out: as an experiment I opened a pinned issue asking happy users to drop me a note (https://github.com/metallb/metallb/issues/5), and many did. It was nice occasionally getting a notification that wasn't a complaint or demand for support. At one point someone left me a note that it was being used to support research projects at NASA JPL and DARPA. That was pretty neat.