
Launch HN: SharpestMinds (YC W18) – Online Community for AI Devs - edouard-harris
Hi HN! We&#x27;re Ed and Jeremie, the founders of SharpestMinds in YC&#x27;s W18 batch. We&#x27;re building a free online community for ML&#x2F;AI developers through which they can access job opportunities. (You can apply to join it at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sharpestminds.com&#x2F;members" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sharpestminds.com&#x2F;members</a>)<p>We&#x27;re ML developers from non traditional backgrounds. Ed did a PhD in biological physics, and Jeremie studied quantum optics before dropping out of grad school to work on SharpestMinds. We started looking for ML jobs after school, thinking it shouldn&#x27;t be too hard to get one. We found to our naive surprise that we fell short on a number of skills that are needed to do good work in industry. You just don&#x27;t learn much devops in grad school.<p>As a result we decided to build something that would make it easier for ML devs to develop (and discover!) skills they might be missing, and then get their first jobs or internships. From the outset we also wanted to build a community around the process, since looking for your first job is usually a pretty lonely experience. Because we monetize directly through hiring, we can afford to create a space for discussion without ads or algorithmic distractions :)<p>Our typical users so far have been grad students who know ML material well, but don&#x27;t yet have much, or any, practical experience. However, you don&#x27;t need a degree at all (a few of our users are self-taught high school dropouts), and anyone who knows the material is welcome. In fact, that&#x27;s one of the advantages of our system: we test directly for knowledge, so it doesn&#x27;t matter how you got that knowledge or how long it took you to get it. One of our goals is that by the time we present you as a candidate, things that would otherwise be holes in your resumé don&#x27;t matter so much, and we can make that case to companies that are hiring.<p>To qualify for joining, you do an online deep learning quiz (here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sharpestminds.com&#x2F;members&#x2F;apply" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sharpestminds.com&#x2F;members&#x2F;apply</a>), followed by a technical interview. If you pass both, we invite you aboard. It&#x27;s possible to retake the quiz a month later if you don&#x27;t pass it, and we&#x27;ll send you tips on what to study in the meantime.<p>Once you join you get access to a job board with exclusive (i.e., not scraped) internship and full-time opportunities on it. We&#x27;ve created an application system where your profile gets customized to the job you&#x27;re applying for, to maximize the odds that you&#x27;ll get an interview. We also have lists of common interview questions, mentors that you can practice interviewing with, and periodic AMAs with ML hiring managers from companies like Skydio and Airbnb.<p>The hardest part about building this has been figuring out the best way to present our users to employers. Early on we found that hiring managers were passing on qualified people, because their eyes would glaze over from reading too many CVs. We ended up building application profiles that let our users display their most relevant personal projects prominently in their application. The interview rate has increased significantly as a result.<p>If our approach works for the ML&#x2F;AI field, we&#x27;d like to build communities like this for other fields too.<p>We&#x27;re looking forward to getting feedback and hearing ideas from HN! We know there are lots of ML devs &#x2F; enthusiasts on here, and we&#x27;d also be very interested in hearing about your own experiences making the transition, or similar programs you might know about. We&#x27;d also be interested in hearing about what, in your experience, are the most important programming skills needed by someone with a good knowledge base but little practical experience to be a strong contributor at their first job or internship.
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esja
I recruit in this area and wish you all the best. One piece of advice: change
your name. In my experience the sharpest minds are intellectually honest to a
fault, and would rarely describe themselves that way.

~~~
edouard-harris
Thanks for the feedback! We're open to a change. Let me know if you have any
thoughts.

~~~
BryBran
The Neural Network

~~~
edouard-harris
Solid

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minimaxir
> However, you don't need a degree at all (a few of our users are self-taught
> high school dropouts), and anyone who knows the material is welcome.

> To qualify for joining, you do an online deep learning quiz (here:
> [https://www.sharpestminds.com/members/apply](https://www.sharpestminds.com/members/apply)),
> followed by a technical interview.

> Once you join you get access to a job board with exclusive (i.e., not
> scraped) internship and full-time opportunities on it.

These three constraints don't reconcile with each other.

Yes, new ML/AI resources like TensorFlow and MOOCs have made AI more
accessible, and that having a degree is no longer required to _implement_
ML/AI. I agree it's unnecessary gatekeeping to require a degree to be able to
play with ML/AI.

But what showy YouTube videos and Medium thought pieces don't teach is
_implementing ML /AI in practice to solve business problems_. The
stereotypical quiz + technical interview for the ability to join the service
won't account for that.

When I was looking for jobs last year, 100% of the job openings for ML/AI (as
opposed to Data Analyst/Data Scientist) _required_ a Masters/PhD. In that
case, I can't blame them, since there is a certain amount of experience and
_knowledge_ required to define problems and work up statistically sound
solutions that can't be done by simply adding layers to a neural network or
ensembling XGBoost models.

~~~
edouard-harris
You're right, but this is the same catch-22 for getting started in any
nontrivial field. How do I get experience if getting a job requires
experience?

Having an MSc / PhD in the field doesn't resolve this. HR departments use grad
degrees as first-pass filters, and thereby miss self-taught people who are
genuinely competent.

We try to solve for this by easing people into jobs with internships and work
terms first. The community is a key part of that since it supports them if
they get stuck on an implementation problem. And of course we're incentivized
to make sure members perform well in the internship phase, since we make money
when they're hired full time.

~~~
ujal
I completely agree. Machine Learning is on the way to become a field like Web
Development. There is a huge supply/demand gap that will only get wider.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
With the caveat that holding a PhD is positively correlated with success in
ML, and negatively correlated with success in web dev.

(I'm guessing.)

~~~
edouard-harris
Having done both with varying success, I definitely agree that your brain
needs to be wired differently for each.

In web dev, experimentation is cheap, so you make changes fast and see what
happens. In many ML applications, trying stuff is expensive in time and/or
money. So the best strategy is often to think hard about what could be going
wrong, and make and test explicit hypotheses.

The difference definitely came as a surprise to me when I was making the
transition.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
Yeah, web dev seems to favor the bold, whereas DL or other highly brainy
endeavors seem to favor the thorough / careful developer.

For a long time as a non-web dev, I reckoned that I was smarter than 99% of
the web devs. Then a web-dev friend of mine made his first few million $, and
I reached some humbling conclusions.

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donovanr
Some feedback on the quiz:

\- a few of the questions were very good, and either spoke to key high level
concepts, or were specific while being language agnostic. (e.g which one of
these layers wouldn't you need, why wouldn't this type of classifier work on
this data).

\- too many of the questions were hyper-focused on the minutiae of word
embeddings, tensor flow syntax, SQL queries, and recommender schemes.

\- many of the questions were constructed vaguely enough that "I don't know"
would be the technically correct answer even though I don't think that was
what you were going for.

metadata: recent PhD with serious grad courses in ML and working in DL/CV for
the past year using a non-tensorflow framework (PyTorch).

~~~
edouard-harris
This is great feedback. Thanks!

We're constantly iterating on the quiz and it would be great to get more
detailed thoughts on it.

If you'd like to do that, please get in touch! (Email in my profile)

~~~
donovanr
would be happy to, but I don't see your email there -- mine's in my profile (I
think!) if you'd like to get in touch

~~~
edouard-harris
Sorry, realized it wasn't public. Just updated, should be there now!

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TekMol
First thing my sharp mind noticed is that the page sends data to
connect.facebook.net

Why does Facebook have to know what I am doing jobwise?

~~~
edouard-harris
Good catch, this is a leftover facebook pixel from back when we were
experimenting with FB ads. Just created a GitHub issue to rip it out

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sharemywin
Why not create a tiered community. Beginner. Learning. Expert.

Beginner - Anyone with an interest similar HN. Maybe resource to get into the
Learning Area.

Learning - Place to find others learning the material. Maybe find other people
study with. or collaborate/reproduce projects.

Experts - people actively looking for employment(what you already have
planned).

~~~
edouard-harris
Great idea! We're actually in the process of doing this. Pilot version is 1
week away.

We're starting with 2 tiers instead of 3, but the goal is similar.

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dannytatom
Not to sound rude or anything, but the name is kinda douchey and outputting.

~~~
edouard-harris
Fair enough. Any suggestions?

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dannytatom
Not a clue, I'm bad at names lol. Sharp Minds would probably be fine, just
Sharpest Minds makes it sound like you're talking down to anyone who isn't
involved in AI (which is like 99.99999999% of people).

Or if it was a clever reference to something in AI that made you sound smart
but because it was a clever reference comes off more funny than rude.

~~~
dhimes
I actually took it as people who were _building_ the sharpest minds, not
necessarily those who had them.

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ianbicking
A couple bits of feedback:

1\. At least in the title of this post it is called an "Online Community" but
it really feels like a job board. Is it really a community at all? I expect to
feel disappointed.

2\. Wait... is it a job board, or an internship matching system?

3\. I got about 5 duplicate questions.

4\. The timed questions with a big code block and multiple choice were
stressful, in that there was some dense code to read and I couldn't decide
whether to understand the code first or read the questions first.

5\. It wasn't clear to me that the timer was actually a limit, and not just a
suggestion (i.e., something to pace yourself to do all the questions in the
time limit)

6\. The SQL questions felt like very normal SQL questions. They seemed easy
enough (assuming I got them right!) simply given past experience with database
driven websites.

~~~
edouard-harris
Thanks for the feedback here. Much appreciated.

1 & 2\. It's.. both. From the inside it feels like Slack + job board + GitHub-
like profiles

3\. Investigating this issue now, thanks for flagging

4-6. Noted, we'll keep updating the UI & question bank. Knowing this about how
the timer feels is especially useful

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mkagenius
Advice: Hold kaggle like contests -- ML/AI developers/enthusiasts come
flocking to these. When you are at it, please don't make it suck like Kaggle.

~~~
nlowell
What don't you like about Kaggle?

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nlowell
I have been out of college and working fulltime in software for two years. I
have been spending a large amount of my free time learning DL through fastai.
I really want to move to a job that involves deep learning, and I would like
to use your system, but I don't feel like I can responsibly switch to part
time or internship work given the stability and pay of my current job. Do you
have any option for people who want to go direct to fulltime?

~~~
edouard-harris
Yes.

You can either (1) keep going with your current job and do this on the side
assuming your employment contract allows it, or (2) apply to a company that
wants to do full time right away without a work term.

There may be other options depending on your situation, so email me if you
want to discuss further. Email address in my profile.

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gzeus
I had made a job board for machine learning jobs as well
[https://mljobslist.com/](https://mljobslist.com/)

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JJseiko
I like the idea! Very much actually. It's a real problem - the discrepancy
between actual skills and how your CV looks.

In that it reminded me of the way that Basecamp hires - which is that in the
"final rounds" they actually hire the candidates to do some small project that
is actually needed at Basecamp - just another way of getting at the bottom of
what a person can actually do rather than how they look on paper.

~~~
edouard-harris
You're right, this approach grew out of how we hire people ourselves. Give
them a chance to prove themselves on a real project.

Wasn't aware that Basecamp did this too. Thanks for sharing!

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lexalizer
I may have misread this, but would OP agree that ML/AI is not composed of just
DL. Currently, the quiz is perhaps too focused.

~~~
edouard-harris
Would agree.

Yep, quiz might still be a bit too focused. Trying to strike a balance between
breadth / depth / time spent answering questions, but still some fine tuning
to do

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Dawny33
>Submit a deep learning project. If your application isn't accepted at this
stage, we'll tell you why.

Why only 'Deep Learning'? When you call yourself an 'Online Community for AI
Devs', you need to consider projects from any domain in AI.

Deep Learning is just a sub-part of ML, to be precise, neural nets.

Please stop throwing keywords

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ghostbust555
Very interested in this, however I would prefer if it was more than just a
jobs board. Something like github+reddit in addition to a jobs board would
make this very cool (haven't tried it yet so this may already be the case and
I am wrong!).

~~~
edouard-harris
It's more like Slack + jobs board + GitHub-like profiles.

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ematvey
For such an exciting title, I was a bit disappointed to find another job board
in here. Should I apply if I’m not looking for a job but want to participate
in a professional community?

~~~
edouard-harris
Yes. While we make money by placing people, most of the day-to-day activity
involves sharing papers, open source collaboration, etc. (plus job-related
things like sharing interview tips)

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danvoell
I'm sure I am making an incorrect inference, but I'm probably not alone.
Average work term payment = $5K, average work term = 8 weeks = Below minimum
wage.

~~~
edouard-harris
Thanks for flagging! Embarrassingly I reread this stat and realized that (1)
it's way out of date and the true number is higher, and (2) it refers to part-
time work (20 hrs / week) but we don't actually say that anywhere.

We've never had a work term work out to less than $25 / hour, except possibly
in geographies like India where cost of living in USD is very low. This is
below market, but it's only for the work term before getting hired.

Will update this with the most recent stats and clarify part-time status.
Thanks again for catching this!

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ai_ia
This is great. Is it US only or available in India too?

~~~
edouard-harris
Available in India. We already have several users from there.

~~~
ai_ia
Awesome.

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fwdpropaganda
This website doesn't work on my computer.

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edouard-harris
Thanks for flagging. Do you mind sharing your OS / browser versions?

~~~
fwdpropaganda
Ubuntu / Firefox

My Firefox doesn't run JS though, so there's that.

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ggg9990
Mine isn’t working either. I also use Ubuntu / Firefox and also the computer
isn’t plugged in, so there’s that.

~~~
fwdpropaganda
I recommend you plug it in then. Common mistake.

