Readit Newscivicsquid commented on Ask HN: What has helped you transitioning from a technical to a team lead role? · Posted by u/annnoo
I think one of the biggest challenges for a team lead is understanding the team's priorities, followed by identifying and acting on the leading indicators of success towards those priorities.
By understanding priorities I mean: the tech lead has to be in sync with management (of the team and often other leaders of the org) about what needs to get done and what can be cut if there isn't enough bandwidth. Weak tech leads in my experience don't have a sufficient grasp on changing priorities, which results in the team working on things that don't get rewarded properly / don't pay off and/or loading up the team with work that could have been deferred. Some of this is the manager's job, but often it falls to the tech lead to estimate the true technical 'size' of what is being asked.
By acting on leading indicators of success, I mean: the tech lead will ideally not be doing the majority of execution on a well-staffed team. They should be doing some execution work to ensure the codebase is sufficiently easy to work in etc, but most importantly they need to know how to figure out whether or not something is on track without sinking too much of their time to do so. Setting up milestones and some target date helps with this, but it's often uncomfortable to do that with folks that were recently your peers (it still needs to be done).
I don't have books or other resources, but this has been my experience as I transitioned into similar roles. I also think my experience may skew more towards a 'manager-tech-lead' than a pure tech lead, so take that with a grain of salt. Good luck!
civicsquid commented on Ask HN: Is distributed systems research slowing down? · Posted by u/civicsquid
No, AI has nothing to do with this. The late 1990s to early 2010s were a massive period for distributed systems research, but that surge was driven by advancements in computing infrastructure and the growing needs of industry giants—not AI. From theoretical frameworks like Chord to practical implementations like BigTable, Spanner, Cassandra, and TAO, the focus was on solving complex problems in scalability, consistency, and fault tolerance. The efforts to properly implement Paxos were part of that journey. AI had little to do with the sheer volume of breakthroughs that came from this time; it was all about improving distributed systems, not artificial intelligence. Not everything needs to loop back to AI.
Hm, I’m not sure what you saw in the post before my edits, but I think this answers “did AI motivate / help discover the breakthroughs we saw 20 years ago?” which I definitely agree would be a “no”.
Either way, before and after my edits the intent was to identify areas in which distributed systems researchers moved their focus to support areas such as (but not exclusively) AI.
The question comes from me supposing that “pure” distributed systems research has slowed.
civicsquid commented on Ask HN: Is distributed systems research slowing down? · Posted by u/civicsquid
Regarding AI and distributed systems, this might not be what you have in mind, but take a look at federated learning. I'm currently a computer science PhD candidate at a small school, and a couple of our graduates in the past year worked on the fundamentals and applications of federated learning.
I came into this PhD program thinking that I wanted to work on stuff like the distributed databases that you listed, or the stuff they're built on like clock synchronization. I did my master's degree in 2017-2018 and I was fascinated by an "advanced databases" class that covered these things. Unfortunately, nobody in my department works on such things, and I agree with you that I don't hear much about that area anymore.
Good suggestion! I’ve seen federated learning come up before but have not explored it much.
This seems like a good direction for sure.
'"I hate to say this, because it sounds so arrogant, before OpenAI, what was the last really great scientific breakthrough that came out of a Silicon Valley company?" he said.'
Where does he think they got the Transformer paper from, or even the PyTorch and H100 GPU's they use?
This is the sort of trivialization attitude that I’ve come to associate with people who only care about the “big picture”. It is really irksome if you work on the lower-level stuff that (in some sense) makes the big picture possible.
I think there is a point here that user-facing innovation stagnated and OpenAI helped break that, but it’s wild to me that there is no acknowledgement at all of the giants whose shoulders they stand on. Although I guess that’s what he meant about the arrogance…
civicsquid commented on LLaMA 2 – Every Resource you need philschmid.de/llama-2... · Posted by u/mariuz
I would be curious to understand the "How to Prompt" section more. As someone who does not interact with LLMs regularly I have no idea why this looks like a templating language.
Would anyone be able to explain what's going on in that section or point to resources that explain what the goal is / why this looks so programmatic?
I know you said you're involved in some retrogaming and were experimenting, but as someone who works in a world where hardware is pretty heavily abstracted away, even if I got into retrogaming I don't know that I'd consider that there may be a systems improvement lying around. Beyond the creative aspect, it feels like there is some systems and hardware background that helped put the idea together (and I'd be interested to go learn about of that systems/hardware knowledge myself).