Ask HN: How to switch software engineering domains
19 by SomeDaysBe | 10 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?
Show HN: Discuit – A Reddit alternative with a clean UI and a sensible vision
15 by previnder | 18 comments on Hacker News. Hi HN, this is a platform (Discuit, pronounced "diskette") I've been working on for about two years. I initially built it for a niche demographic (my native country). But now with Reddit going dark and people looking for a new place to migrate to, I'm doing a quick launch today. A few quick things: 1. I don't believe federated platforms will ever become mainstream. They have a whole host of problems, not the least of which is that they're too complicated for most people to use. This platform is not, therefore, federated. 2. I don't know what the best way of monetizing a thing like this is. I see only two options: the Wikipedia model of running on donations, or being advertising supported (along with a paid ad-free tier). The Wikipedia model works quite well for small-scale and bandwidth light projects, but I don't think a large social media platform can ever be funded that way. 3. Whichever option of monetization I take (if this takes off, that is) what I can say with certainty is that this will not go down the path of previous platforms. I don't believe the SV grow-fast model has worked very well for the end users. I have no interest in chasing growth for its own sake, or in chasing valuations, or in capturing as much attention from the users as possible. On this platform, therefore, there never will be any dark UI patterns. Avoiding enshittification is a primary goal of mine. 4. My vision for this platform, and for social media in general, is about giving users agency; the freedom to choose their social experience to their liking. What this would mean in practice are things like: ability to customize the UI; ability to filter content as one wants; ability to tweak recommendation algorithms; ability to turn on and off things like infinite scroll and suggested posts; and so on. I hate how all the current platforms want to tightly control my experience for me. I go into all this in a bit more detail in my introductory blog post: https://ift.tt/1uJsqwW I know many HN users hate the New Reddit layout, which is what I've based this site on, but don't be bothered by it too much, I will be adding a much more compact layout sometime later.
Show HN: Bloop – Answer questions about your code with an LLM agent
17 by louiskw | 2 comments on Hacker News. Hi HN! We launched bloop 10 weeks ago ( https://ift.tt/ftYbeWJ ) 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/IGcs9fP . 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).