arandr0x (u/arandr0x)

arandr0x commented on You don't want to hire "the best engineers" otherbranch.com/shared/bl... · Posted by u/rachofsunshine

VirusNewbie · 7 days ago

I suspect part of the reason big tech has an arduous interview process is it approximates both intelligence and hunger/drive.

Even very smart people aren't going to waltz in and be able to code fast enough to solve harder interview problems without practicing.

So, people who can pass algorithmic interviews are smart people who also had the hunger/drive to study up/practice some.

arandr0x · 6 days ago

It is possible to do leetcode without practicing, even before AI. That said the structure of the Big Tech process is also quite long/multi-step with many opportunities to give up during, which helps select for drive. It's hard to do this effectively with shorter processes. It is however always a good practice to 1) design very hard interviews but 2) give a lot of preparation to candidates beforehand, even for non-leetcode interviews, as it helps filter who can efficiently and diligently use provided information to increase their performance.

arandr0x commented on You are a good person if geohot.github.io//blog/je... · Posted by u/galfarragem

squigz · 8 days ago

> But at the end of your life, total it all up. You should have produced more than you consumed. That’s what it means to be a good person.

Summing up one's life in terms of "production" and "consumption" is such a broken way of looking at things.

I will be kind to people. I will be patient with them. I will try to help them. I'll try to make the world a better place in all the little ways I can. How much or how little I "produce" has no bearing on whether my life will be weighed as good or bad.

And since we're quoting incredible TV shows...

"The success or failure of your deeds does not add up to the sum of your life. Your spirit cannot be weighed. Judge yourself by the intentions of your actions, and by the strength with which you faced the challenges that have stood in your way. The Universe is vast and we are so small. There is really only one thing we can ever truly control... whether we are good or evil." - Oma Desala, Stargate SG-1

arandr0x · 7 days ago

There is a reason religions tend to agree on 1) the worth of your life is not your own to judge and 2) what makes humans moral is they have free will - good or evil is found in the places you can control, even and maybe especially when it's hard.

Because otherwise you make morality a game and people are distracted from the deeds by the point system (The Good Place is another good TV show that has a funny satire of this).

arandr0x commented on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2025) · Posted by u/whoishiring

sarrma · 9 days ago

Stealth Solar Tech Startup | Remote (EU-friendly) | Full-time or Contract

We are a well-funded stealth startup building a B2C platform to radically reform the U.S. residential solar industry. Our mission is to combat pervasive consumer distrust and inefficiencies by empowering homeowners with a transparent, high-fidelity, and interactive 3D solar design tool. We are a small, dedicated team working closely with an established industry partner for rapid, real-world testing and iteration.

We are looking for a Senior 2D/3D Computer Vision Engineer to build the core technology that makes our platform possible. The central challenge is to automatically generate clean, geometrically accurate, and simplified 3D roof models from raw aerial Digital Surface Models (DSM) and RGB data. Your work will be the foundation of our user experience, replacing the opaque and slow manual processes that dominate the solar industry today.

As the owner of this domain, you will ideally:

• Define the Process: Take charge of the entire ML pipeline, from R&D to production. This includes refining the annotation process and enhancing our existing Three.js-based 3D annotation tool to build a high-quality, large-scale dataset.

• Build the Models: Research, develop, and train a suite of models to handle roofprint segmentation, structured prediction of planar roof wireframes from point clouds, and detection/classification of roof obstructions (chimneys, pipes, windows, etc.).

• Ship to Production: Engineer a scalable and robust inference pipeline that can process new properties on demand.

Our stack is Python, PyTorch, FastAPI, Rasterio/GDAL, and JavaScript/Three.js for the annotation tool. We are looking for a pragmatic and experienced engineer who loves tackling complex 3D vision problems. You should be comfortable with both 2D and 3D data (especially point clouds and geospatial imagery) and have a proven track record of delivering end-to-end ML solutions.

To apply, please email vlad@design.solar.

arandr0x · 8 days ago

Does EU-friendly mean timezones (GMT-4 to +3 I suppose), citizenship, or current residence? With this including contract roles it's a bit hard to infer. Asking because I really like the tech stack and there aren't a lot of point cloud roles around.

arandr0x commented on You don't want to hire "the best engineers" otherbranch.com/shared/bl... · Posted by u/rachofsunshine

chaboud · 8 days ago

I was prepared to straight up fight with this author until I actually read what they were saying:

1. Don't hold infeasibly high standards when you're starting up. Time is more precious than than anything (you can't spell "scrappy" without "crappy").

2. Be more intentional than a lottery-ticket financial plan when it comes to evaluating what traits matter and at what priority order. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

3. Recognize market dynamics. If you pay shit for shit hours to do shit work, you'll get shit unless you just get lucky.

4. Hire great people now, rather than waiting for the "best" (read: naively idealized) people.

To this, I'd probably want to see the author add another essay on the perils of hiring mediocre people (Jobs: bozo explosion, Rumsfeld: "A's hire A's, B's hire C's..."), because that's the very common company-killing pit that people are trying to avoid.

Mediocrity drives away talent, and a small team of talented people will absolutely smoke a large team of mediocre people. And therein lies the conundrum of startup hiring: what's the right balance?

arandr0x · 8 days ago

I think the post is getting at the idea that pedigree is not a reliable predictor of talent, but because it's a convenient and standard one, everyone uses it (which in turns reduces its usefulness). It's harder for a recruiter to fully experience the perils of hiring mediocre people, but they're definitely at ground zero for "what's on a resume is mostly not representative of actual talent".

arandr0x commented on You don't want to hire "the best engineers" otherbranch.com/shared/bl... · Posted by u/rachofsunshine

ospehlivano · 8 days ago

The irony: while you're waiting 4 months for the perfect engineer, your competitor shipped with a good-enough one who's now senior-level from the experience.

arandr0x · 8 days ago

That's definitely a valuable take, but it's worth noting that not everyone will make better decisions just by sitting through enough fires, and it's also possible that your good enough person will fail to notice some larger risk or market shift that the person you could've waited for would have, because they'd have seen it before.

Hiring decisions tend to be a hindsight is 20/20 proposition.

arandr0x commented on You don't want to hire "the best engineers" otherbranch.com/shared/bl... · Posted by u/rachofsunshine

arandr0x · 8 days ago

A more generalizable approach might be to consider - what are you looking for that most other companies either are actively putting off or passively neglecting, and what's the best way to identify the best engineers in that group. To use examples in the post, if you're remote then you can get "startup experience - hard worker - impressive project - aces your 20 ridiculous interviews" by getting in front of people who live in Ohio and people who live in the Bay Area and low key hate Caltrain. If you're willing to pay top of band salary all cash, ala Netflix, then you can be a Bay Area Only Senior Elites Need Apply type startup.

What about other things? What if you are, in fact, willing to let engineers decide whether they address tech debt, like the post calls out? Or, you don't overvalue confidence and talking and can appeal to female engineers, quiet engineers, or in general less competitive types? What if you want hard worker startup experience passes pseudo-IQ tests, but they don't need actual coding experience measured in years and you think AI and training can bridge the gap?

Note, I'm not saying any of these companies will necessarily be more successful with their hires, but they're being intentional with who they hire and how that fits the company's advantage in a way that the "you and everyone else" profiled in the post do not. Like, figure out what makes you different. Figure out how that will make your people different. Then write it in the job description, black text on white background (or the reverse in dark mode), plain language, so it's obvious.

arandr0x commented on Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder rolepad.com... · Posted by u/romanhn

bee_rider · 2 years ago

As a currently not employed person, one interesting thing to note about me is that I have no income, which means not much money to pay for things.

arandr0x · 2 years ago

I have thought about this because I've wanted such a platform as a candidate, and I think an interesting angle would be having the jobseeker's loved ones buy it for them as a gift. Many times, I've been sad that I wanted to "help someone " with their search but I did not myself have a role and didn't feel effective. Friends who are unemployed usually won't accept cash from you but they might accept a subscription to a job search service.

arandr0x commented on Ask HN: What are some easy ways to earn some side money? · Posted by u/ferennag

arandr0x · 2 years ago

If you're good at 3d graphics or game programming I have a lead on a contract that could work (it's too much work to do by myself, client wants people in Canada, my network won't do it for less than 5 figures). If not your skill set, my point is reach out to other contractors, they may have overflow work or e.g. design/front-end contractors might need someone to refer for backend/devops work.

arandr0x commented on Ask HN: Any hardware startups here? · Posted by u/guzik

godelski · 2 years ago

> it's to counter an economic incentive they have.

I think economists would call that a feature and not a bug. It is essentially an auction (something economists LOVE). You could instead take that money that you're spending on surveillance and instead spend it on giving the contractors a bonus to show up to your place instead.

I really don't buy that this would "shame" them into coming to your place first. Everyone already is aware that they don't always show up because you got out bid. You're "solving" the problem the wrong way because you're not addressing the actual problem.

arandr0x · 2 years ago

I would imagine shaming doesn't work because I think residential GCs have higher demand for workers than there is supply, but the cameras still solve the problems of making it easier for the GC to react when it happens (and the reaction could be offer to pay that sub more if the project is late or all the other subs have been showing up, realizing the work from the earlier stage wasn't done, and going home, or it could be lengthening their project schedule).

arandr0x commented on Ask HN: Any hardware startups here? · Posted by u/guzik

scyzoryk_xyz · 2 years ago

I don't run the show and it's not my company, but I work on simulation devices for developing surgical skills. We have these MEMS and laser sensors for tracking surgical tool movements that the founder came up with.

My impression after 3 years in a product role is that it is amazing what a ~5 engineer team is capable of achieving over a couple of years. However, we're located in Poland so employees are cheap, we're heavily subsidized by huge grants and funding. Our offices/facility is in the middle of nowhere.

The engineers are quite stressed out because their work depends on many external factors that they don't have much control over (shipping, ordering components, manual assembly etc.). They literally run a workshop - they argue about who's using the tools, what the 3D printer schedule is like.

It's so many things at the same time - it's super slow, production and QA is a comedy, design changes are challenging to implement. Product certification and patenting is an enormous challenge. Business is super slow (our customers take years to make up their mind and they buy with public tenders).

But on the other hand... they do also seem happy and proud. I mean I love the product, and I love showing it off, UX testing, etc. And there are few competitors on the market, so it's also quite stable.

I think hardware is more accessible and doable than it used to be - 'hardware is hard' is something my industrial designer dad would repeat in the 90's.

arandr0x · 2 years ago

> we're heavily subsidized by huge grants and funding

this is how it is in Canada too! My city has a huge manufacturing sector so a lot of these little startups with super niche products that take lots of R&D are found there. But no one talks about us because engineers aren't paid doctor money here (the grants aren't THAT good, which I think in the US defense sector they are).