allencheng

Shortform | REMOTE | Full-stack Engineer | Full-time / Part-time | $120-200k

https://www.shortform.com/

Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to learn? Do you have hundreds of books and articles in your to-read list, but wish you could extract the main ideas faster?

The goal of Shortform is to make the world's best ideas more accessible. We started by creating the world's best book guides, with in-depth chapter-by-chapter summaries, original insights building on the book, and distillation of ideas into actionables. They're like superpowered book summaries.

Our ultimate goal is to index every idea on Earth and make sense of it. Specifically, we want to summarize and contextualize every meaningful idea published each day, in every form of media (books, articles, podcasts, videos, news, research papers). Illustrative ideas include a news summarizer that shows the entire spectrum of opinions on a topic to help avoid polarization, and mini-courses that draw from the best sources across media to teach a topic (eg to learn negotiation, start with this book, then listen to this interview, then see these news articles for the principles at work, do these exercises).

If ideas like these interest you, please apply.

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Company status: We launched 6 years ago. Shortform was funded by the founder (who has built multiple bootstrapped profitable companies in the past) and has taken on no outside investment. Our financials allow us to be profitable, but currently we're reinvesting in growth. Engineering team consists of 10 full-stack engineers.

Technology: Vue.js on frontend, Flask / Python on backend, with heavy R&D in AI / LLM / GPT. (Keywords for searchers with tech flexibility: Angular, React, Django | BERT, LLaMA, Natural Language Processing / NLP, Large Language Models, ML)

About the role: Ideally you're fullstack on the web, and comfortable on both front-end and back-end. Position is remote (current team is worldwide). Fulltime roles preferred; hours negotiable for strong candidates. We're able to pay competitive market salaries (i.e. not decreased by equity).

Email jobs+engineerhn@shortform.com to get more details about the company, what we're building, and the application process. In your email, please discuss your experience for our stack, and also your favorite non-fiction book (to help us screen spam emails).

Hey there - email us and we'll send you more info about our upcoming projects. Our bread and butter engineering work is full-stack, but we're starting to look into how specalists can complement our team. So to everyone reading - even if you feel under-performant in one part of the stack, don't let that hold you back from applying!

I encourage you to apply! In our experience most students don't have the time to make a part-time role at 20 hours/week really work, but students near graduation have a better shot. If you're interested in what we're doing, I suggest contacting us anyway so we can stay in touch.

Time - We typically ask 20 hours per week as a minimum. Below this we've found that not enough gets done for the relationship to be worthwhile for either party.

Availability - we try to be as async as possible. Right now the only live meeting is a daily standup at a time that supports very different time zones. Otherwise, we keep trying to cut live meetings down to the bone.

Shortform | REMOTE | Full-stack Engineer | Full-time / Part-time | $100-200k

https://www.shortform.com/

Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to learn? Do you have hundreds of books and articles in your to-read list, but wish you could extract the main ideas faster?

The goal of Shortform is to make the world's best ideas more accessible. We started by creating the world's best book guides, with in-depth chapter-by-chapter summaries, original insights building on the book, and distillation of ideas into actionables. They're like superpowered book summaries.

Our next goal is to index every idea on Earth and make sense of it. Specifically, we want to summarize and contextualize every meaningful idea published each day, in every form of media (books, articles, podcasts, videos, news, research papers).

Our first step was to build a Chrome extension that summarizes any page in your browser (https://extension.shortform.com/). Next, we're building content products to comprehend the world's information - for example, an idea explorer lets you see how a specific idea has been expressed throughout human history; a news summarizer shows the entire spectrum of opinions on a topic to help avoid groupthink. If ideas like these interest you, please apply.

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Company status: We launched 4 years ago. Shortform was funded by the founder (who has built multiple bootstrapped profitable companies in the past) and has taken on no outside investment. Our financials allow us to be profitable, but currently we're reinvesting in growth. Engineering team consists of 8 full-stack engineers.

Technology: Vue.js on frontend, Flask / Python on backend, with heavy R&D in AI / LLM / GPT. (Keywords for searchers with tech flexibility: Angular, React, Django | BERT, LLaMA, Natural Language Processing / NLP, Large Language Models, ML)

About the role: Ideally you're fullstack on the web, and comfortable on both front-end and back-end. Position is remote (current team is worldwide). Fulltime / parttime roles available. We're able to pay competitive market salaries (i.e. not decreased by equity).

Email jobs+engineerhn@shortform.com to get more details about the company, what we're building, and the application process. In your email, please discuss your experience for our stack, and also your favorite non-fiction book (to help us screen spam emails).

Shortform | REMOTE | Full-stack Engineer | Full-time / Part-time | $100-200k

https://www.shortform.com/

Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to learn? Do you have hundreds of books in your to-read list and articles saved in Pocket, but wish you could extract the main ideas faster?

The goal of Shortform is to make the world's best ideas more accessible. Right now we create the world's best book guides, with in-depth chapter-by-chapter summaries, original insights building on the book's ideas, and distillation of the book into actionables. They're like superpowered book summaries.

Eventually, we want to summarize and contextualize every meaningful idea published each day, in every form of media (books, articles, podcasts, videos). Imagine you had a magical Chrome extension that takes any page you're viewing (like a top HN article) and gives you a high-quality summary, along with summaries of alternative viewpoints. That's a vision of what we're building.

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Company status: We launched 2.5 years ago. Shortform was funded by the founder (who has built multiple bootstrapped profitable companies in the past) and has taken on no outside investment. Our financials allow us to be profitable, but currently we're reinvesting in growth. Engineering team consists of 7 full-stack engineers.

Technology: Vue.js on frontend, Flask / Python on backend. (Keywords for searchers with tech flexibility: Angular, React, Django)

About the role: Ideally you're fullstack on the web, and comfortable on both front-end and back-end. Position is remote (current team is worldwide). Fulltime / parttime roles available. We're able to pay competitive market salaries (i.e. not decreased by equity).

Email jobs+engineerhn@shortform.com to get more details about the company, what we're building, and the application process. In your email, please discuss your experience for our stack, and also your favorite non-fiction book (to help us screen out spam emails).

Shortform | REMOTE | Full-stack Engineer | Full-time / Part-time | $100-200k

https://www.shortform.com/

Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to learn? Do you have hundreds of books in your to-read list and articles saved in Pocket, but wish you could extract the main ideas faster?

The goal of Shortform is to make the world's best ideas more accessible. Right now we create the world's best book guides, with in-depth chapter-by-chapter summaries, original insights building on the book's ideas, and distillation of the book into actionables. They're like superpowered book summaries.

Eventually, we want to summarize and contextualize every meaningful idea published each day, in every form of media (books, articles, podcasts, videos). Imagine you had a magical Chrome extension that takes any page you're viewing (like a top HN article) and gives you a high-quality summary, along with summaries of alternative viewpoints. That's a vision of what we're building.

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Company status: We launched 2.5 years ago. Shortform was funded by the founder (who has built multiple bootstrapped profitable companies in the past) and has taken on no outside investment. Our financials allow us to be profitable, but currently we're reinvesting in growth. Engineering team consists of 7 full-stack engineers.

Technology: Vue.js on frontend, Flask / Python on backend. (Keywords for searchers with tech flexibility: Angular, React, Django)

About the role: Ideally you're fullstack on the web, and comfortable on both front-end and back-end. Position is remote (current team is worldwide). Fulltime / parttime roles available. We're able to pay competitive market salaries (i.e. not decreased by equity).

Email jobs+engineerhn@shortform.com to get more details about the company, what we're building, and the application process. In your email, please discuss your experience for our stack, and also your favorite non-fiction book (to help us screen out spam emails).

Shortform | REMOTE | Full-stack Engineer | Full-time / Part-time | $100-200k

https://www.shortform.com/

Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to learn? Do you have hundreds of books in your to-read list and articles saved in Pocket, but wish you could extract the main ideas faster?

The goal of Shortform is to make the world's best ideas more accessible. Right now we create the world's best book guides, with in-depth chapter-by-chapter summaries, original insights building on the book's ideas, and distillation of the book into actionables. They're like superpowered book summaries.

Eventually, we want to summarize and contextualize every meaningful idea published each day, in every form of media (books, articles, podcasts, videos). Imagine you had a magical Chrome extension that takes any page you're viewing (like a top HN article) and gives you a high-quality summary, along with summaries of alternative viewpoints. That's a vision of what we're building.

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Company status: We launched 2.5 years ago. Shortform was funded by the founder (who has built multiple bootstrapped profitable companies in the past) and has taken on no outside investment. Our financials allow us to be profitable, but currently we're reinvesting in growth. Engineering team consists of 7 full-stack engineers.

Technology: Vue.js on frontend, Flask / Python on backend. (Keywords for searchers with tech flexibility: Angular, React, Django)

About the role: Ideally you're fullstack on the web, and comfortable on both front-end and back-end. Position is remote (current team is worldwide). Fulltime / parttime roles available. We're able to pay competitive market salaries (i.e. not decreased by equity).

Email jobs+engineerhn@shortform.com to get more details about the company, what we're building, and the application process. In your email, please discuss your experience for our stack, and also your favorite non-fiction book (to help us screen out spam emails).

Shortform | REMOTE | Full-stack Engineer | Full-time / Part-time | $100-200k

https://www.shortform.com/

Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to learn? Do you have hundreds of books in your to-read list and articles saved in Pocket, but wish you could extract the main ideas faster?

The goal of Shortform is to make the world's best ideas more accessible. Right now we create the world's best book guides, with in-depth chapter-by-chapter summaries, original insights building on the book's ideas, and distillation of the book into actionables. They're like superpowered book summaries.

Eventually, we want to summarize and contextualize every meaningful idea published each day, in every form of media (books, articles, podcasts, videos). Imagine you had a magical Chrome extension that takes any page you're viewing (like a top HN article) and gives you a high-quality summary, along with summaries of alternative viewpoints. That's a vision of what we're building.

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Company status: We launched 2.5 years ago. Shortform was funded by the founder (who has built multiple bootstrapped profitable companies in the past) and has taken on no outside investment. Our financials allow us to be profitable, but currently we're reinvesting in growth. Engineering team consists of 6 full-stack engineers.

Technology: Vue.js on frontend, Flask / Python on backend. (Keywords for searchers with tech flexibility: Angular, React, Django)

About the role: Ideally you're fullstack on the web, and comfortable on both front-end and back-end. Position is remote (current team is worldwide). Fulltime / parttime roles available. We're able to pay competitive market salaries (i.e. not decreased by equity).

Email jobs+engineerhn@shortform.com to get more details about the company, what we're building, and the application process. In your email, please discuss your experience for our stack, and also your favorite non-fiction book (to help us screen out spam emails).

Shortform | REMOTE | Full-stack Engineer | Full-time / Part-time | $100-200k

https://www.shortform.com/

Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to learn? Do you have hundreds of books in your to-read list and articles saved in Pocket, but wish you could extract the main ideas faster?

The goal of Shortform is to make the world's best ideas more accessible. Right now we create the world's best book guides, with in-depth chapter-by-chapter summaries, original insights building on the book's ideas, and distillation of the book into actionables. They're like superpowered book summaries.

Eventually, we want to summarize and contextualize every meaningful idea published each day, in every form of media (books, articles, podcasts, videos). Imagine you had a magical Chrome extension that takes any page you're viewing (like a top HN article) and gives you a high-quality summary, along with summaries of alternative viewpoints. That's a vision of what we're building.

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Company status: We launched 2.5 years ago. Shortform was funded by the founder (who has built multiple bootstrapped profitable companies in the past) and has taken on no outside investment. Our financials allow us to be profitable, but currently we're reinvesting in growth. Engineering team consists of 5 full-stack engineers.

Technology: Vue.js on frontend, Flask / Python on backend. (Keywords for searchers with tech flexibility: Angular, React, Django)

About the role: Ideally you're fullstack on the web, and comfortable on both front-end and back-end. Position is remote (current team is worldwide). Fulltime / parttime roles available. We're able to pay competitive market salaries (i.e. not decreased by equity).

Email jobs+engineerhn@shortform.com to get more details about the company, what we're building, and the application process. In your email, please discuss your experience for our stack, and also your favorite non-fiction book (to help us screen out spam emails).

Shortform | REMOTE | Full-stack Engineer | Full-time / Part-time | $100-200k

https://www.shortform.com/

Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to learn? Do you have hundreds of books in your to-read list and articles saved in Pocket, but wish you could extract the main ideas faster?

The goal of Shortform is to make the world's best ideas more accessible. Right now we create the world's best book guides, with in-depth chapter-by-chapter summaries, original insights building on the book's ideas, and distillation of the book into actionables. They're like superpowered book summaries.

Eventually, we want to summarize and contextualize every meaningful idea published each day, in every form of media (books, articles, podcasts, videos). Imagine you had a magical Chrome extension that takes any page you're viewing (like a top HN article) and gives you a high-quality summary, along with summaries of alternative viewpoints. That's a vision of what we're building.

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Company status: We launched 2.5 years ago. Shortform was funded by the founder (who has built multiple bootstrapped profitable companies in the past) and has taken on no outside investment. We "could be profitable" but are reinvesting in growth. Engineering team consists of 5 full-stack engineers.

Technology: Vue.js on frontend, Flask/Python on backend. (Keywords for searchers with tech flexibility: Angular, React, Django)

About the role: Ideally you're fullstack on the web, and comfortable on both front-end and back-end. Position is remote (current team is worldwide). Fulltime / parttime roles available. We're able to pay competitive market salaries (i.e. not decreased by equity).

Email jobs+engineerhn@shortform.com to get more details about the company, what we're building, and the application process. In your email, please discuss your experience for our stack, and also your favorite non-fiction book (to help us screen out spam emails).

Shortform | REMOTE | Full-stack Engineer | Full-time / Part-time | $100-200k

https://www.shortform.com/

Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to learn? Do you have hundreds of books in your to-read list and articles saved in Pocket, but wish you could extract the main ideas faster?

The goal of Shortform is to make the world's best ideas more accessible. Right now we create the world's best book guides, with in-depth chapter-by-chapter summaries, original insights building on the book's ideas, and distillation of the book into actionables. They're like superpowered book summaries.

Eventually, we want to summarize and contextualize every meaningful idea published each day, in every form of media (books, articles, podcasts, videos). Imagine you had a magical Chrome extension that takes any page you're viewing (like a top HN article) and gives you a high-quality summary, along with summaries of alternative viewpoints. That's a vision of what we're building.

--------

Company status: We launched 2.5 years ago. Shortform was funded by the founder (who has built multiple bootstrapped profitable companies in the past) and has taken on no outside investment. We "could be profitable" but are reinvesting in growth. Engineering team consists of 5 full-stack engineers.

Technology: Vue.js on frontend, Flask/Python on backend. (Keywords for searchers with tech flexibility: Angular, React, Django)

About the role: Ideally you're fullstack on the web, and comfortable on both front-end and back-end. Position is remote (current team is worldwide). Fulltime / parttime roles available. We're able to pay competitive market salaries (i.e. not decreased by equity).

Email jobs+engineerhn@shortform.com to get more details about the company, what we're building, and the application process. In your email, please discuss your experience for our stack, and also your favorite non-fiction book (to help us screen out spam emails).

Shortform | REMOTE | Full-stack Engineer | Full-time / Part-time | $100-200k

https://www.shortform.com/

Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff to learn? Do you have hundreds of books in your to-read list and articles saved in Pocket, but wish you could extract the main ideas faster?

The goal of Shortform is to make the world's best ideas more accessible. Right now we create the world's best book guides, with in-depth chapter-by-chapter summaries, original insights building on the book's ideas, and distillation of the book into actionables. They're like superpowered book summaries.

Eventually, we want to summarize and contextualize every meaningful idea published each day, in every form of media (books, articles, podcasts, videos). Imagine you had a magical Chrome extension that takes any page you're viewing (like a top HN article) and gives you a high-quality summary, along with summaries of alternative viewpoints. That's a vision of what we're building.

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Company status: We launched 2.5 years ago. Shortform was funded by the founder (who has built multiple bootstrapped profitable companies in the past) and has taken on no outside investment. We "could be profitable" but are reinvesting in growth. Engineering team consists of 4 full-stack engineers.

Technology: Vue.js on frontend, Flask/Python on backend. (Keywords for searchers with tech flexibility: Angular, React, Django)

About the role: Ideally you're fullstack on the web, and comfortable on both front-end and back-end. Position is remote (current team is worldwide). Fulltime / parttime roles available. We're able to pay competitive market salaries (i.e. not decreased by equity).

Email jobs+engineerhn@shortform.com to get more details about the company, what we're building, and the application process.

I agree, any morally conscious founder should build in extra safeguards to stifle the bad edge cases and launch only after pretty thorough testing. Even an immoral founder who wants to avoid bad PR would do so.

Ideally all creators to be as thoughtful and careful as you. But we all know 1) there will be plenty of builders will build and launch regardless of how ready the app is, 2) users happily use whatever's engaging, convenient, and low-cost, while ignoring problems with privacy, security, and whether the product is net negative for a % of users (see TikTok, Twitter, Whisper).

If the technology is here, then the products will exist, and regulation isn't going to come in time to stop it.

Agree - if it becomes known AI Dungeon 3 makes $500,000 in profit a year, expect plenty of competitors to pop up and conduct a pricing war down to the bottom.

Author here. I agree it's early and we'll have to wait until real products hit the ground to see the full extent of its capabilities and limitations.

I was a skeptic of the performance too ("surely all these demos are cherrypicked") but having played with the beta for a dozen hours and gotten better at prompts, the performance is real, and it's good enough to build the mentioned products around that people are willing to pay money for.

Will these be good, airtight products at the same level as human-designed performance? No. But we're not talking about "self-driving car needs six 9's of reliability to meet regulations or face a PR nightmare" performance.

We're talking about "is this AI therapy bot fun to chat to and better than paying $200 per hour for a therapist?" performance.

We're talking about "is is cheaper to pay a writer $200 per news article or $0.05 for a good enough article?"

Interesting analogy, though not perfect. The key question is to what % of the user experience the core technology provides.

For software, the programming language plays a small %, from the user's perspective - it's what is done with it that matters. Thus, "building a Python startup is a bad idea because everyone else has Python" doesn't make sense.

For online mattress companies, the mattress is really 95% of the experience (with minor points for delivery and customer support). Thus, "building an online mattress company is a bad idea because everyone sells the same mattresses and no one has a product edge" does make sense.

Video startups are more like programming languages, IMO. The key of the user experience is less the video technology and more what videos are actually accessible. Here, the network effects of user-generated content (Youtube, Tiktok) or proprietary videos (Netflix) are the real secret sauce.

For GPT-3 startups, the question is whether GPT-3 forms the vast majority of the value or just a small % of it. The lower the % it takes up in your product, the more likely you can build a competitive advantage in technology.

I agree, AI Dungeon is a fantastic idea and right now has first mover advantage. Once it's clear it's a viable business, AI Dungeon will spawn a lot of competitors. Outside of GPT-3, their proprietary tech doesn't seem like anything fancy. From here, there are a few main outcomes:

-AI Dungeon has first mover advantage in branding and reputation, and new customers stay loyal to it. Its competitors end up seizing just a small % of market share in the niche automated AI text game market.

-five viable competitors to AI Dungeon pop up. They all compete with each other with very similar products, and it becomes a pricing war, sapping earnings from everyone.

-API pricing will kill the economics of AI Dungeon and similar projects. This is what happened to Geoguessr and related games, which relied on Google Maps API for years until the pricing became prohibitive.

Agreed - companies can compete by adding on services and focus on verticals. It might be a different type of company than the founder originally envisioned, though.

Here's a good take on this article: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2020/02/21/andreessen-hor...

Author here, I discuss aspects of this in the "Economies of Scale" section - if you're existentially dependent on a supplier, that supplier has leverage to squeeze you hard.

The counterforce will be development of similar algos by AWS, Google, and others; and OpenAI's personal balance of volume vs prices. OpenAI has a monopoly now but it won't in a year or two; I'm sure they're planning for this.

I agree prompts make a huge difference in how well GPT-3 performs. The relevant questions are:

1) how easy is it to replicate best practices? If it's simple reformatting and everyone knows how to do it, then the playing field levels off quickly.

2) what does the improvement curve look like - how far can you push performance through better prompts before you get diminishing marginal returns?

It's too early to tell and we'll need more samples to figure this out.

Author here. I think about it this way - some tools are more like programming languages, and some are like can openers. Programming languages have a high skill ceiling and a big variation in performance - a great programmer is 10x more effective than a mediocre programmer.

In contrast, can openers have a low skill ceiling and low variation in performance.

iPhone apps I'd argue were more like a programming language. The App Store was more of a platform everyone had to be on to play, rather than the core technology that drove every app's value prop. The best app developers still had a big advantage over the median app developer - their products were more performant, easier to use. e.g. Candy Crush was 5x more fun and addictive than the next match-3 game.

The question I ask is, can a great GPT-3 developer have a 10x advantage over the median GPT-3 developer? Or does everyone's performance taper off quickly because of how powerful it already is, and how little any user can tweak under the hood?

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I agree it's still early and there's room for exceptions:

-there will be brand new markets with applications that no one has thought of yet. My applications listed here are 'obvious' in the same way 1995 observers for the Internet had 'obvious' ideas - namely, wrong and not imaginative enough.

-even if you have to compete with incumbents, there will still be big winners. Even among all the meal kit companies, there was still one big winner - Hello Fresh. I just think it's going to be hyper-competitive, and founders will find it's less about technology and product (what they set out to focus on) and more about marketing/distribution.

We'll see! I think it takes two people of a willing type to buy into a system like this (people who believe explicit expectations lead to smoother relationships, instead of expecting other people to read their mind). I understand it won't work at all for others.

Thanks ignasl. Your vision is very closely aligned with what we're building. Stay tuned - join our mailing list at https://www.shortform.io/ to get updates (subscribe at bottom of page)

Shortform | REMOTE | Full-stack Engineer | Full-time / Part-time | $120-200k

https://www.shortform.io/

Do you like reading non-fiction books? Do you find yourself forgetting what you read days later, and feeling like you never absorbed the book's lessons?

Shortform is a book summary product that aims to make ideas actionable. It differs from existing book summary products in 3 major ways:

1) an emphasis on applying the lessons from books, through interactive exercises 2) high-quality summaries, with in-depth chapter by chapter summaries 3) building a community of learners who support each other to apply the lessons from books

Company status: We're in early development. The product roadmap is clear and we're building our engineering team. Shortform is seed-funded by the founder, who has built multiple bootstrapped and profitable companies.

Technology: We haven't finalized the stack but are circulating around Angular/Vue.js/React on frontend, Django/Node.js/Rails on backend. You can help contribute to this decision.

About the role: Ideally you're fullstack on the web, and comfortable on both front-end and back-end. Experience building mobile apps is a plus. Position is remote (current team is in Boston and Chicago). Fulltime / parttime roles available. We're able to pay competitive market salaries (i.e. not decreased by equity).

Email hiring@shortform.io to get more details about the company, our product roadmap, and the role.