New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: How to switch software engineering domains

Ask HN: How to switch software engineering domains
11 by SomeDaysBe | 7 comments on Hacker News.
Hi! I've been a Software Engineer at a medium sized Canadian company for almost 4 years now. It was my first job out of university. The work is backend application development for the company's platform. While the work can be interesting at times, I feel like I don't enjoy it anymore. I want to switch into a new software engineering domain that isn't as high-level. I'm fine with switching to any other field, I'm just don't know how to properly make that transition in a way that would allow me to get a job. Currently, I've been doing some personal projects in computer graphics, and I've always enjoyed C programming (I was a TA for my systems programming course in undergrad). I also just completed my Masters in Computer Science. Despite this, I'm having trouble applying for jobs. I usually don't meet any of the requirements, as I don't have actual work experience that the job description expects. And when I do apply, I get rejected before an interview. For those who have switched domains, any advice on how to go about this transition?

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: PFAS.report Measure the forever chemicals in your blood via Quest

Show HN: PFAS.report – Measure the forever chemicals in your blood via Quest
69 by mdrew | 44 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN We made a site that let's anyone measure the forever chemicals in their blood with the gold standard LC-MS/MS blood serum test at Quest Diagnostics. If you're a firefighter, plant worker, planning to become pregnant or just someone who lives in an area with contaminated drinking water, check it out. I live in Santa Cruz. Here are my results: My lab findings: https://ift.tt/lXqnDr9... My total PFAS calculation: https://ift.tt/ZvEorYf... NASEM clinical recommendations based on Total PFAS: https://ift.tt/4zJjRwa... The goal is to be under 2 ng/mL. I'm 10.86. Honestly I was a bit surprised by my result and am currently deciding what to do next. There's some research out of Australia indicating blood donation/phlebotomy is effective at removing it ( https://ift.tt/w1yOzTE... ) from the body. Fluorochemicals seem to bind to the albumin in the blood. I might try that. Right now the site only works at Quest locations in California, but we're looking to expand to other states soon. If you're local, the site is live and you can order the test right now. Results are currently taking between 11 and 18 days. Thanks for reading my post.

Tuesday, June 20, 2023

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Autolabel a Python library to label and enrich text data with LLMs

Show HN: Autolabel, a Python library to label and enrich text data with LLMs
20 by nihit-desai | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! I'm excited to share Autolabel, an open-source Python library to label and enrich text datasets with any Large Language Model (LLM) of your choice. We built Autolabel because access to clean, labeled data is a huge bottleneck for most ML/data science teams. The most capable LLMs are able to label data with high accuracy, and at a fraction of the cost and time compared to manual labeling. With Autolabel, you can leverage LLMs to label any text dataset with <5 lines of code. We’re eager for your feedback!

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: My first full stack project

Show HN: My first full stack project
13 by NoahECampbell | 12 comments on Hacker News.
Just finished my second year at college studying Computer Science, and wanted to try and gain experience as a full stack dev this summer, so I made a website that allows users to create stories using openai's API, using embeddings for custom terms users can define, and create short stories and chapters alike. I'm mainly just looking for some feedback on how I can improve it or make it more presentable, so any help/feedback is welcome and appreciated!

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Bloop – Answer questions about your code with an LLM agent

Show HN: Bloop – Answer questions about your code with an LLM agent
14 by louiskw | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! We launched bloop 10 weeks ago ( https://ift.tt/J2Lq8NP ) and received a huge amount of feedback (both positive + constructive). We've undertaken a rewrite of the core search framework, which now acts as an LLM agent, significantly improving the number of queries that can be successfully answered. There's a bunch of hype surrounding LLM agents, but we're positive this is one of the first implementations of an agent that can deliver immediate value for engineers working on existing projects, especially larger ones. We'll do a full write up of how the agent works and the tools it can use soon, but we wanted to share our progress, now that we've got a stable release. bloop is a developer assistant that uses GPT-4 to answer questions about your codebase. The agent searches both your local and remote repositories with natural language, regex and filtered queries. Some of the ways engineers use bloop to improve their efficiency when working on large codebases: - Summarise how large files work and how multiple files work together - Understand how to use open source libraries when documentation is lacking - Identify the origin of errors - Ask questions about English-language codebases in other languages - Reduce code duplication by checking for existing functionality - Write new code, taking into account existing codebase context (eg: "write a dockerfile for this project") bloop runs as a free desktop app on Mac, Windows and Linux: https://ift.tt/hRy36GD . On desktop, your code is indexed with a MiniLM embedding model and stored locally, meaning at index time your codebase stays private. 'Private' here means that no code is shared with us or OpenAI at index time, and when a search is made only relevant code snippets are shared to generate the response. (This is more or less the same data usage as Copilot). We also have a paid cloud offering for teams ($45 per user per month). Members of the same organisation can search a shared index hosted by us and will get access to enterprise only features down the line (currently there's no feature gap between desktop and cloud).