Hacker News Reader

aloukissason Jailbreaking my car's navigation system just so I can change the time

My buddy did something similar to his 2018 Mazda 3 to switch the AC controls from F to C.

aloukissason DoorDash to acquire Instacart

How much do you think the tip was?

aloukissason Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?

already getting poorer results today

aloukissason A no-brainer for protecting your brain

Non-paywalled version https://archive.ph/CNuJp

aloukissason Rust at Scale: An Added Layer of Security for WhatsApp

I love how Meta will do anything but prevent phishing and prepaid credit card scams in Whatsapp/Messenger

aloukissason How I estimate work

I love this - it's very similar to what the book Shape Up (https://basecamp.com/shapeup) calls "appetite". I've been using this method even before I came to read this book for years, it works great! Estimates otoh, really don't.

aloukissason Ask HN: What is the biggest problem LLMs solved in your life/work?

Similarly, my father had a delicate CV issue recently (he's fine now!). We were only able to do the best research on risks, best approaches, etc with the help of LLM deep research. We would be mostly flying blind-trusting the first doctor we talked to.

aloukissason Go is still not good

I also sing "Fade to Black" when I have to write go :D

aloukissason Go is still not good

Elixir, with types

aloukissason Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2025)

Topps.com (Fanatics) | Senior Engineering Manager | ONSITE (Los Angeles) | Full-time

We’re seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead and scale the engineering team behind Topps.com (https://topps.com), our global e-commerce platform built on Shopify. This high-impact role focuses on maintaining platform reliability, accelerating innovation, and delivering outstanding customer experiences to collectors worldwide.

[Key Responsibilities]

  - Site Reliability: Ensure 24/7 uptime, performance, and scalability of Topps.com for global users.
  - Product & Engineering Innovation: Lead the development of high-quality features with speed and rigor. Guide technical strategy, ensure system security and compliance, and champion engineering best practices.
  - Team Leadership: Manage and grow engineers and engineering managers. Foster a culture of accountability, mentorship, and rapid iteration. Use data to guide decision-making and continuous improvement.
  - Cross-Functional Collaboration: Align closely with product, design, operations, marketing, customer support, and external platform partners to drive business impact and streamline execution.
  - Strategic Roadmapping: Translate business needs into a long-term technical roadmap. Balance near-term priorities with future-facing innovation.
  - Platform Ownership: Own the technical health of our Shopify architecture and identify areas for optimization, extensibility, and performance improvements.

Link to JD: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4226041025/

aloukissason Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2025)

We're building the best experiences for collectors.

Hiring for Staff+ level roles across frontend, backend, and DevOps in our LA office:

1. Staff Frontend Engineer: https://fa-exki-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Can...

2. Staff Backend Engineer: https://fa-exki-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Can...

3. Staff DevOps Engineer: https://fa-exki-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Can...

aloukissason Launch HN: Pinch (YC W25) – Video conferencing with immersive translation

What does real-time mean here? Would it work e.g. in a live stream?

aloukissason Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS

This is fantastic! Interestingly, I was one of the early engineers at Maginatics [1], a company that built exactly this in 2011 - and Netflix was one of our earliest beta customers. We strived to be both SMB3 and POSIX compatible, but leaning into SMB3 semantics. We had some pretty great optimizations that gave almost local disk performance (e.g. using file and directory leases [2], async metadata ops, data and metadata caching, etc). EFS was just coming out at that point (Azure I think also had something similar in the works).

I'll be looking closely in what you're building!

[1] https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/welcoming-spanning-maginatic...

[2] https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/maginatics-sdcdwl/39257...

aloukissason Show HN: YourNextStore – an open-source Shopify with Stripe as the back end

I don't have a need at the moment just curious. It looks like Stripe Tax doesn't support all US states. Will probably be a good product when it's out of beta!

aloukissason Show HN: YourNextStore – an open-source Shopify with Stripe as the back end

How complete is Stripe's tax product? Typically I've seen ecommerce apps use something like Avalara for this.

aloukissason Google's new pipe syntax in SQL

This like Elixir's pipe operator [1]! I use it on the daily (with Ecto) and it's epic!

[1] https://elixirschool.com/en/lessons/basics/pipe_operator

aloukissason [dead]

Amazing news! So proud.

aloukissason In 2024, please switch to Firefox

I've never used it tbh

aloukissason In 2024, please switch to Firefox

Surprised nobody mentions this: Firefox DevTools are so, so much better than Chrome's, especially shining in two areas: (a) inspecting layouts with flex/grid; (b) inspecting websocket traffic.

Been using FF for 10+ years, never looked back.

aloukissason Almost half of Californians speak a non-English language at home

We're one of these households (Greek + Latvian at home). We love California :)

aloukissason On to Elixir

I’m surprised to see that the OP, as a Django user, does not call out the lack of an out of the box admin tool that’s not there in Phoenix. Django’s admin is amazing and super useful in production. I love phoenix but I miss an admin tool :(

aloukissason tRPC – Build and consume typesafe APIs without schemas or code generation

Can highly recommend over plain REST as an alternative to graphql. The iteration speed with instant feedback is incredible. Perfect pair with NextJS.

aloukissason Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

I built a thing that’s similar to supabase realtime or firebase, but for DynamoDB. It reads the DynamoDB kinesis stream and broadcasts the changes over Phoenix pubsub via a websocket connection, directly to the client.

aloukissason Ask HN: Why do many CS graduates lack foundational knowledge?

I had the same question when I was a TA for junior (3rd year) CS classes at UCSD, coming from an undergrad in Greece. I talked with a lot of my students and I was shocked to learn that only half of their courses were in CS. The rest were very "breath" courses, many unrelated to engineering altogether. Contrast that with my undergrad experience (which is also pretty typical for many non-US undergrad programs), where _all_ of the courses are engineering-related: math, physics, compilers, OS, etc. Perhaps there's merit to breath vs depth, but I have only experienced one side of the equation.

aloukissason Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners

Thanks for the pointers! Coming from Europe, I really love ductless split systems, so that's probably my preference.

aloukissason Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners

This is great to see. I have a question around the "a delightfully uniform temperature in each room". I live in a 3-story townhome, which has largely non-uniform temperature across floors (since warm air travels up). So, cold lower floors in the winter and hot upper floors in the summer. AFAICT, this is pretty common with central duct systems and the usual fix is to switch to split-unit systems. How does your product handle this?

aloukissason Benchmarks of JavaScript Package Managers

I'd love to see bun in this benchmark

[edit] I ran this experiment just for fun:

  bun install  1.09s user 3.68s system 80% cpu 5.898 total
  pnpm install  8.75s user 21.18s system 195% cpu 15.346 total
  yarn install  11.90s user 14.19s system 51% cpu 50.929 total
  npm install --force  15.58s user 8.27s system 50% cpu 47.140 total

  bun -v
  0.5.7

  pnpm -v
  7.27.1

  yarn -v
  1.22.19

  npm -v
  8.15.0

I had to run npm with --force flag, as it would fail out of the box:

aloukissason Why you should build side projects

OP here: definitely hear you. I have a toddler and work at an early-stage startup, so time is scarce. That’s why at some point I mention micro-tasks that seem to work for me. Sometimes 10 mins is all I have but I’m able to scratch one tiny thing off the list.

aloukissason Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2023)

Adim | Lead Frontend Engineer | Full-time | LA & Remote (US only) | adimverse.com

Adim is a web3 platform that brings together creators of all backgrounds and skills to collaborate, create, and own an entire narrative universe. Our team is multi-disciplinary, with backgrounds from media and consumer tech, entertainment and creativity, hard tech, and others. We are LA-based, with many remote folks across the US.

We are currently seeking a Lead Frontend Engineer to complement our engineering team and take ownership of our web app. Some of the technologies we use are NextJS /w TypeScript, DynamoDB, Lambda (NodeJS /w TypeScript), AWS CDK, zod, Infura, and Vercel. We are also exploring other technologies like tRPC.

Adim is backed by a16z crypto, with both Seed and Series A rounds led by Chris Dixon.

More info and application here: https://boards.greenhouse.io/adim/jobs/4018281005

aloukissason Launch HN: Needl (YC S22) – Simple search across all your apps

Got it. FWIW, the search experience with command-e has been fantastic and super powerful since the beta, so I'm not sure how much more powerful this is to require me to leak all my info to the cloud. It'd be hard to believe it's a 10x improvement e.g.