OpenAlex is an open index of the world's scholarly research: hundreds of millions of articles linked to authors, institutions, and topics, free via API and bulk download. Traffic runs about a billion API calls per month from universities, governments, and AI companies. The team behind it is a small nonprofit funded by grants and enterprise support.

We're hiring two engineers to work across the whole backend, which is SQL and PySpark on Databricks, Python/Flask APIs, Elasticsearch, and Cloudflare Workers. It's a small team with lots of autonomy. You'll notice what's missing, build it, ship it, and answer the tickets about it. We're AI-native, with agents writing all of our code.

Apply here: https://openalex.org/jobs/software-engineer

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36243580

Points: 13

# Comments: 8

However, I decided to try out copilot to see what it was doing and what the hell. I'm actually surprised how good it is. I'm use it for python within pycharm, and I'm surprised how often it's referencing patterns in other parts of my codebase. It's also autocompleting tons of patterns that I need for elasticsearch-dsl and some other python libraries.

I guess I've seen a lot of hate for copilot but maybe give it a try? I still don't know how to feel about the code reuse, but I'm surprised it works as well as it does.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33413583

Points: 5

# Comments: 6

People say it's underpaid or terrible, but part of that reputation comes from people doing one or two jobs and quitting. Plus, I've hired developers on UpWork and a lot of people suck at writing proposals. I have a lot of advice on that too.

When someone sees glowing reviews and completed jobs, you become the "easy button" and they will pay more to decrease their risk. When they see 10 completed jobs with 5 star reviews, all mentioning the exact type of work they need, they can be pretty sure the 11th will be successful. It's possible to charge $125 or more an hour on UpWork and have to keep your settings updated so that you are not spammed with invites.

That being said, they are very stagnant on features. A dyno has operated the same way, at the same size, at the same price for like 10 years now? The main features I would like to see are auto-scaling for all dynos and IPs that allow you to restrict database traffic. Render looks promising in that department and could likely get business from me if Heroku doesn't change in the next couple years.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27922762

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

1. Has three competing ways available to complete the 'undo'

2. Every way has a scary caveat that the user must be aware of

It would be awesome to simplify the process for new users.