Where to set the standard by Sarah Guo is an exhortation to move quickly. The biggest advantage startups have when trying to break into existing markets is the agility that larger, more established companies can not match. This short essay urges you to embrace that advantage, and not worry about high standards scaring people away. High performers embrace high standards.
Excuse me, is there a problem? by Jason Cohen is a great overview of analyzing the market for your potential startup. But the big contribution from this article is a quantitative framework for rating your business idea and classifying it as appropriate for high-growth, VC-funded scale up, a medium-growth bootstrapped business, or just something not worth pursuing.
Yesterday I wrote some notes on PostgreSQL Row Level Security and it ended up on HN. It got onto the front page, which resulted in this crazy graph on my Plausible stats.
If this happens more regularly I'll have to upgrade my plan! 😆
Building LLM Applications for Production is a bit light on the actual topic, but that's forgivable since the community as a whole is still figuring out best practices for using LLMs in production. Regardless, it is a good overview of the LLM landscape and various tools and methods around it. On the title topic, I did enjoy the discussion of unit testing.
One thing I’ve also found useful is to ask models to give examples for which it would give a certain label. For example, I can ask the model to give me examples of texts for which it’d give a score of 4. Then I’d input these examples into the LLM to see if it’ll indeed output 4.
Scott Alexander's review of a book about IRBs is a good read if you're interested in research practices and process. But this quote was too jaw-dropping to miss.
maybe it was unethical to do RCTs on ventilator settings at all. He asked whether they might be able to give every patient the right setting while still doing the study. The study team tried to explain to him that they didn’t know which was the right setting, that was why they had to do the study. He wouldn’t budge.
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About Me
Work
I'm a co-founder of
Carevoyance (acquired by
H1 Insights), a sales acceleration tool that
analyzes healthcare data and enables healthcare sellers to zero in on their
best prospects and generate custom reports and insights with just a few
clicks.
I spend most of my time there creating new data analyses, working on the
backend API and database systems, and developing tooling to research data
anomalies and automate repetitive tasks. Recently I've been active on the
front-end too, and have been enjoying the Svelte framework.
In the past I worked almost exclusively in C++ and various assembly
languages. Now that I'm more in the web ecosystem, I'm mostly writing
Javascript for work, but I'm using Rust more and more as well.
Before starting my own venture, I interfaced with advanced network switching
chips at
Arista Networks and worked on JTAG
hardware debuggers and embedded operating systems at
Green Hills Software. Running a small
startup feels very different from working at these companies, and it has its
ups and downs, but I love it.
Life
I usually have some sort of side project going on, and my most recent
obsession is Ergo, a low-code
workflow orchestrator that is still in early stages, but coming along well.
Sometimes I wish I could code all day and night, but when not hacking on
something or spending time with my family, I enjoy good coffee, nature
photography, reading nonfiction and sci-fi, and improving my nascent design
and UX skills. I'm also active in my church and run the sound board there
every few weeks.
Where to find me
Twitter is probably the best
way to contact me, and I'm trying out
Mastodon
as well. You can also email me at daniel at this domain or find me
on
Github.
