from Hacker News

Hiring tech lead to help solve major historical puzzle

by ealexhudson on 11/24/22, 7:52 PM with 48 comments

  • by ldx1024 on 11/24/22, 10:34 PM

    Kind of reminds me of the apocryphal Shackleton newspaper ad:

    “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success."

  • by LarsDu88 on 11/24/22, 9:08 PM

    What is this? Mississipi Mound builders? Lost Mayan Temples? The lost source code of Half-Life 3? Nicholas Cage's National Treasure 4?

    Whatever it is, its silly enough that Nat Friedman feels like people will ridicule him if he actually says it out loud. That, or JJ Abrams style mystery box storytelling is a skill mastered by tech founders.

  • by windowshopping on 11/24/22, 10:39 PM

    > Pay range is $120-250k/yr. Think of this as an adventurous interlude between your more lucrative commercial gigs.

    Is that not already pretty excellent pay? I'm aware FAANG engineers and high level technical leaders make $300k+ or double that or more when you include their stock value, but for at least 90% of engineers even in the US "$120-250k" is a pretty top tier rate.

  • by tomjohnneill on 11/24/22, 9:56 PM

  • by wpasc on 11/24/22, 8:41 PM

    Would I be reading into the timing too much, if I noted the timing of this post and how recently Ancient Apocalypse aired (and subsequent Rogan appearance)?

  • by teleforce on 11/25/22, 6:35 AM

    I really hope this historical puzzle is about cracking the elusive ancient Indus Script [1].

    The fact it's very difficult to crack because unlike other ancient scripts it does not have multiple languages reference or its own equivalent version of Rosetta Stone [2]. In order to crack it most probably massive datasets and AI are required.

    [1]Why Is Indus Script Language Still Undeciphered?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Rd0ssSmxGw

    [2] Rosetta Stone:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

  • by motohagiography on 11/25/22, 12:09 AM

    Oddly, I in a previous life I was a product manager for an significant ML pipeline, and I can state with some confidence that the key to this effort as described will be someone to keep everyone focused on the objective and mitigate the tendency to bikeshed and yak shave. The risk is that the team loses its focus and individual engineers think achieving some novel result in the discipline will be the sufficient (and then, necessary) condition, where "if only we solve this ML problem I can coincidentally speak at conferences about, we will succeed." The other risk is where you get into a fundraising death spiral, where you can't produce or admit concrete results because you need to keep the ball in the air and hope alive to get your next round of funding. The way to avoid this is to have someone leading the effort who DGAF about social climbing with investors, particularly the kind of family money who will be drawn to this, imo.

    I guarantee this project will not be solving new problems in ML, and everything they do will be implementing, scaling, and optimizing the compute required for existing methods. This is engineering problems applied to archeology, and not the need to solve computer/data science problems that require new science to achieve. Maaaybe you get some new IP for using ML to process lidar and gravimetry data (I know some people involved in doing this from space), but if I were pitching on this, I would lead with being open to new science, but demonstrate a track record on getting solved problems implemented. Make sure the incentives of your team are aligned and that they can commit to the mission, as side of the desk science projects are probably the main risk to this effort, I would speculate.

  • by ProjectArcturis on 11/24/22, 8:27 PM

    Any guesses on the puzzle? I'm not familiar with this guy at all. I hope it's not something dumb like finding Atlantis.

  • by AlotOfReading on 11/24/22, 8:50 PM

    Hah, this would be a fun marriage between my archaeologist past and robotics present.

    The qualifications unfortunately make it sound like yet another one of those "do CV to find relationships between probably unrelated objects" projects that have been so problematic in the past though.

  • by Gunax on 11/24/22, 8:25 PM

    This sounds like a dream job.

    Why not advertise the puzzle too? Isn't the point to get it solved?

  • by kalimanzaro on 11/25/22, 5:33 AM

    Lost treasure, a la <<Cryptonomicon>>, or King Solomon's mine?

  • by faxywaxy on 11/24/22, 10:56 PM

    Ah Nat Friedman the guy who was fired from GitHub for being a terrible manager and has been doubling down all over Twitter to circle the wagons with Paul Graham and Elon Musk:

    https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1589051044369420288

    Avoid this guy like the plague.

  • by johnnyo on 11/24/22, 8:26 PM

    What is the puzzle?