Hacker News

Specifically, we are changing hiring across 3 dimensions:

> Tasks: Real-world tasks on code repositories vs standard algorithmic-style puzzles

> Evaluation: AI fluency, orchestration skills vs functional correctness

> Candidate experience: Agentic IDE vs a simple code editor

We are already live across many companies and it's exciting to see the world finally move away from the old-school Leetcode style puzzles.

Role

The role of the FDE will be to help our customers implement the new hiring process and serve as a bridge between the product & customer teams as we rapidly build the new HackerRank.

Being technically fluent and strong communication skills are critical. You will be working directly with engineering leaders at our customers to redesign how they evaluate talent.

Location

Santa Clara, New York, London, Bangalore (hybrid set up with 3 to 4 days/week in-office)

How to apply

Send me an email with evidence across these attributes: (a) Smart (b) Curiosity (c) Agency and (d) AI fluency

I built this because I wanted to see how far I could get with a voice-to-text app that used 100% local models so no data left my computer. I've been using a ton for coding and emails. Experimenting with using it as a voice interface for my other agents too. 100% open-source MIT license, would love feedback, PRs, and ideas on where to take it.

https://freestyle.sh). We’re building a cloud for Coding Agents.

For the first generation of agents it looked like workflows with minimal tools. 2 years ago we published a package to let AI work in SQL, at that time GPT-4 could write simple scripts. Soon after the first AI App Builders started using AI to make whole websites; we supported that with a serverless deploy system.

But the current generation is going much further, instead of minimal tools and basic serverless apps AI can utilize the full power of a computer (“sandbox”). We’re building sandboxes that are interchangeable with EC2s from your agents perspective, with bonus features:

1. We’ve figured out how to fork a sandbox horizontally without more than a 400ms pause in it. That's not forking the filesystem, we mean forking the whole memory of it. If you’re half way down a browser page with animations running, they’ll be in the same place in all the forks. If you’re running a minecraft server every block and player will be in the same place on the forks. If you’re running a local environment and an error comes up in process that error will be there in all the forks. This works for snapshotting as well, you can save your place and come back weeks later.

2. Our sandboxes start in ~500ms.

Demo: https://www.loom.com/share/8b3d294d515442f296aecde1f42f5524

Compared with other sandboxes, our goal is to be the most powerful. We support full Linux + hardware-virtualization, eBPF, Fuse, etc. We run full Debian with multiple users and we use a systemd init instead of runc. Whatever your AI expects to work on debian should work on these vms, and if it doesn’t send a bug report.

In order to make this possible, we’ve moved to our own bare metal racks. Early in our testing we realized that moving VMs across cloud nodes would not have acceptable performance properties. We asked Google Cloud and AWS for a quote on their bare metal nodes and found that the monthly cost was equivalent to the total cost of the hardware so we did that.

Our goal is to build the necessary infrastructure to replicate the human devloop on the massively multi-tenant scale of AI, so these VMs should be as powerful as the ones you’re used to, while also being available to provision in seconds.

It has historically been extremely tedious though: scanning dozens of janky sites which have interminable page loading times; back buttons take you all the way back to the homepage etc.

The site I built - GovAuctions - lets you search every government surplus auction at once. You can filter by location, category, and price, save items to a watchlist, and get alerts when new auctions match what you're looking for.

Let me know what you think, if you have any suggestions, and if you find any deals in your area!

By humanistic I mean a tool that stays out of your way, instead of requiring the user to learn both a complex UX surface as well as a complex theoretical basis before being able to model effectively. The GUI is uncrowded and the modeling affordances are only those which are intuitive to present to the user. Which is sort of backwards compared to most CAD packages where the technical complexity takes the front stage. Here the hierarchy is intentionally reversed.

This is still in alpha-stage, but the features are mature enough for feedback and experimentation.

TinkerCAD is actually what comes philosophically closest to this, but it's hobbled either by Autodesk's strategy or by technical limitation to be a really good tool beyond certain complexity.

The ambition here eventually is to provide a tool that has same intuitive capability as building Lego bricks, while not compromising on engineering qualities.

The main intent is to make extrusion based modeling operations super easy, to offer robust STL and STEP import and allow complex modeling via boolean operations.

The modeling logic is parametric and volume based - the surface presentation is always a discretized water tight triangle mesh.

This is the clearest philosophical differentiator to traditional CAD/CAM packages - or visual editors like Blender. Rather than force the user to nurse surface topology at every stage, the modeler will only permit those operations that result in a correct output.

This is not an SDF (signed distance field) modeler. The domain model is fully based on parametric analytic shapes. This means the tessellation is crisp and specific.

The modeling data is immutable and serialized to disk while modeling. For the user this gives a perfect undo and zero data loss.

It's built for efficiency first - my test workhorse is a Thinkpad T14 Gen 2 i5 with an integrated gpu.

It's not supposed to be a replacement for complex surface design tools like Fusion 360 or sculpting software like Nomad Sculpt or Z Brush.

You can find a review of current features in the youtube playlist linked below [0] and the link to the latest alpha 0.1.7 download from the homepage [1]. The test binary is provided via github release [2] but this is not an open source project.

I know some people hate videos over reading and I'm one of you but I don't really have bandwidth to both develop features and write good instruction copy.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCOf_M8a2MZJqgKXgjod2...

[1] https://adashape.com

[2] https://github.com/AdaShape/adashape-open-testing/releases/t...

LLMs (mostly Claude Code) have been used during development, but I learned early on that it's not _great_ at code at this level, so I've restricted its use to mostly documentation and tests. There's _a little_ AI code in the user space, but I have a strict "no AI code" rule in the kernel itself. I find this helps not only with the quality / functionality of the code, but also with learning - for example, even though I've written multiple kernels in the past, it wasn't until Anos that I _truly_ grokked pagetable management and what was possible with a good VMM interface, and if I'd outsourced that implementation to an LLM I probably wouldn't have learned any of that.

In terms of approach, Anos avoids legacy platform features and outdated wiki / tutorial resources, and instead tries to implement as much as possible from manuals and datasheets, and it's definitely worked out well so far. There's no support for legacy platform features or peripherals, with all IO being memory mapped and MSI/MSI-X interrupts (no PIC), for example, which has helped keep the codebase focused and easy to work on. The kernel compiles to about 100KiB on x86-64, with enough features to be able to support multitasking and device drivers in user space.

As a hobby project, progress ebbs and flows with pressures of my day job etc, and the main branch has been quiet for the last few months. I have however been working on a USB stack as time allows, and hopefully will soon have at least basic HID support to allow me to take the next step and make Anos interactive.

I don't know how useful projects like Anos are any more, given we now live in the age of AI coding, but it's a fun learning experience and helps keep me technically grounded, and I'll carry on with it for as long as those things remain true.