HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

vhiremath4

1,289 karma · joined February 18, 2011

submissionscomments
vhiremath4··on My security camera shipped a GitHub admin token in its login page
What lights did you get? I have Oasis. Love them but same thing would rather control them through a central bot or something.
vhiremath4··on Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY actually scales
Nah this isn't mean at all. I think this is the correct takeaway. I actually felt like I understood how the system worked and it wasn't that difficult for me, but I also understood how, as we were adding engineers who were all very under water, the idea of learning our queueing system to modify a core feature it powered seemed like a big mental context switch (bigger than it actually was). I noted this in another comment, but I am likely discounting how big of an effect our scale/growth impacted peoples' ability to adapt this system. That said, I will pretty much always choose the simple/dumb/easy to understand thing from the start even if it adds another moving component.
vhiremath4··on Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY actually scales
Great point.

> It is so rare that a new moving part beats other factors

Fair! I will restate that we were growing very fast, so that's probably an outlier environmental factor that I am potentially overly discounting. If that's not the case (likely for most startups), then maybe this is less of a problem.

vhiremath4··on Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY actually scales
I once was the CTO of a company that serviced about 100k requests per day across all our services. We grew to millions and eventually 10's of millions, but, somewhere along the way, an engineer on our team decided he wanted to build a queue off LISTEN/NOTIFY semantics in order to take advantage of strong consistency with the rest of our data model, which seemed reasonable given LISTEN/NOTIFY is not that hard to understand and we did need consistency guarantees for this workflow and this would remove the need for yet another place data got stored and transfered.

In practice, this eventually ended up being very awkward because extending the functionality (since we had "built" it) and had to work around internal pg semantics (we should have just moved off much sooner). It also did not scale well. We ended up getting a ton of disk contention on our RDS instance in non-obvious ways, and the vacuum runs on that table was a nightmare. Additionally, it was hard to get other engineers to really debug and take ownership of the system because they automatically viewed a queue (very easy to understand) implemented in a foreign way (off pg internals) as something "scary". It was emotional, not rational, but we are emotional beings, and I do not blame them. These were good engineers with a lot of other things on their plates.

Obviously, this is all hand-wavy without discussing the internal schema, indeces, etc. that we had set up, but my main takeaway with core technology from this experience was to always reach for the dumb, expected, simple thing. Even if it adds another moving piece in the infra stack. Unless I need very strong data consistency guarantees, it's always better to use something like SQS, Redis queues, etc. where the understanding is that it is just a queue (or at least the API contract suggests simplicity), and then everything needs to work around it.

The fewer mechanistic responsibilities per core data store, the better in my experience.

vhiremath4··on Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters
So this is like branch prediction for operating systems? Except we have probability baked into the model itself so it’s even more reliable.
vhiremath4··on Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions
I hate to be negative but it feels like this is relevant to the article. I cannot bring myself to read articles that are so clearly spat out as AI slop. There’s a part of me that dies inside knowing the author did not take the time to actually write something but still demands I spend my time reading what they have written. It feels like I am betraying my own self respect.

I know this is dramatic but I genuinely fear a future where this is the default state of all writing and I still need to get information important to me.

vhiremath4··on Women are getting most of the new jobs. What's going on with men?
I don't really know how to word this, but it feels like we've lost a loving kind of wisdom as a society. In an effort to be better and provide access to women (a good thing), we have also pushed down men. I don't exactly know how we get back to lifting both up while evolving norms as a society. It seems so simple on the surface, but it doesn't seem to be happening in practice.
vhiremath4··on Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers
This looks really cool.

I have never colo'd my laptop, but I do work off my Windows laptop from my Mac via Parsec (remote viewing software for gaming) and by flipping system settings so my Windows machine never turns off when connected to the power bank and lid is closed. There are obviously hiccups (if internet goes out, if Windows decides to restart from an update, etc.), but it mostly just works and I think I've only had 2 instances in the past 3 months where it's gone offline. I use Tailscale on top to provide a universal mouse server for my 3d mouse, and I'm able to magically CAD from my Mac.

Highly recommend if you need to use one OS/machine for some specific software (especially if it's beefy/heavy) but prefer using another as your daily driver.

vhiremath4··on How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer
> “Along with physically redundant wires, we have logically redundant network planes. We have redundant flight computers. All this is in place to cover for a hardware failure.”

It would be really cool to see a visualization of redundancy measures/utilization over the course of the trip to get a more tangible feel for its importance. I'm hoping a bunch of interesting data is made public after this mission!

vhiremath4··on Inside the 'self-driving' lab revolution
> Eve independently screened some 1,600 chemicals and modelled how their structure related to their activity to predict which ones were worth testing. King and his group armed the robot with background knowledge and a machine-learning framework for developing hypotheses. Eve then used those elements to design experiments to test these hypotheses and, crucially, performed them itself.

> King plans to use the system — which occupies one-fifth of floor space than Eve does — to model how genes, proteins and small molecules interact in cells. Part of that will involve taking around 10,000 mass-spectrometry measurements each day.

The throughput here is astounding, especially when driven by researchers who really know how to chart a path. I feel every time a critical feedback loop is made both faster and cheaper, it makes everyone participating better. I wonder whether we will see many more "whiz kid" scientific researchers than we have today.

vhiremath4··on What fork() Actually Copies
Is it kosher to start flagging posts as AI slop?
vhiremath4··on Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’
This is an interesting perspective. What happens if there is a large global war? Do researchers who were previously against working with the DoD end up flipping out of duty? Does the war budget go up? Does the DoD decide to lift any ban on Anthropic for the sake of getting the best model and does Anthropic warm its stance on not working with autonomous weapons systems?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but if the answer is “yes” to at least 1 or 2, then I think the equation flips quite a bit. This is what I’m seeing in the world right now, and it’s disconcerting:

1. Ukraine and Russia have been in a skirmish that has been drawn out much longer than I would guess most people would have guessed. This has created a divide in political allegiance within the United States and Europe.

2. We captured the leader of Venezuela. Cuba is now scared they are next.

3. We just bombed Iran and killed their supreme leader.

4. China and the US are, of course, in a massive economic race for world power supremacy. The tensions have been steadily rising, and they are now feeling the pressure of oil exports from Iran grinding to a halt.

5. The past couple days Macron has been trying to quell tension between Israel and Lebanon.

I really do not hope we are not headed into war. I hope the fact that we all have nukes and rely on each others’ supply chains deters one. But man does it feel like the odds are increasing in favor of one, and man does that seem to throw a wrench in this whole thing with Anthropic vs. OpenAI.

vhiremath4··on IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup
I am on the same site. It’s trash and doesn’t even come close to detailing the internal dynamics.

People have no idea what’s actually going on inside, but I guess it’s simpler to just be upset and take sides. There are people associated with DOGE (Sam included) who are tirelessly doing unsexy and thankless work while not being sensational like Trump or Elon. But they still get trampled on by people who simply want to be upset and ignorant.

vhiremath4··on Soldering Prototypes with Enamel Magnet Wire (2020)
Might be a dumb question, but isn’t the risk of cold joints proportional to your skill in soldering in general? Important context: I am definitely a noob to soldering
vhiremath4··on Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
I will be honest. I love open source. But something that really annoys me about the open source community is that the developers take this holier-than-thou approach to backing up maintainers in circumstances like this, but obviously they are not paying with their own money. They are just complaining, and it feels a lot like virtue signaling at worst and pure naivety at best. It feels extremely disengenous at this point, and it's annoying.

What do we actually know?

1. People are inherently selfish. If you give me this shit for free, I'm gonna use it for free. Obviously everyone is doing this. Spare me the "but I go to this conference or that conference".

2. Code is cheap. Why would I ever pay for something that is not gated behind a service with API limits and costs?

3. Coding as we know it is getting commoditized. That's correct. We are all going to lose our jobs as we know it today. Clearly that's the future. Wake up!

But when making these points, open source devs (and honestly a lot of people on hacker news) whine and complain. I don't really know why I'm leaving this comment - I just feel like I'm at an annoyance breaking point. This guy is obviously struggling to pivot and all the grandstanding and virtue signaling just feels like additional noise and wanting to feel good with very little action.

vhiremath4··on Maybe you’re not trying
There are agentic ways to submit to the journey even if it’s going to suck for a while and there’s no apparent end in sight. Gratitude. God. Whatever. Lots of people submit by withering away and letting their emotions take them down a path of steady erosion. That is not high agency.
vhiremath4··on GPT-4.5
I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription today in favor of using Grok. It’s literally the difference between me never using ChatGPT to using Grok all the time, and the only way I can explain it is twofold:

1. The output from Grok doesn’t feel constrained. I don’t know how much of this is the marketing pitch of it “not being woke”, but I feel it in its answers. It never tells me it’s not going to return a result or sugarcoats some analysis it found from Reddit that’s less than savory.

2. Speed. Jesus Christ ChatGPT has gotten so slow.

Can’t wait to pay for Grok. Can’t believe I’m here. I’m usually a big proponent of just sticking with the thing that’s the most popular when it comes to technology, but that’s not panning out this time around.

vhiremath4··on Show HN: I made an open-source laptop from scratch
A seriously impressive piece of work, especially only in 6 months. Bravo! :)
vhiremath4··on I am rich and have no idea what to do
This gave me a good laugh. Thanks for that :)
vhiremath4··on Willow, Our Quantum Chip
Excellent thank you!
vhiremath4··on Willow, Our Quantum Chip
I really wish the release videos made things a ~tad~ bit less technical. I know quantum computers are still very early so the target audience is technical for this kind of release, but I can’t help wonder how many more people would be excited and pulled in if they made the main release video more approachable.
vhiremath4··on Physical Intelligence's first generalist policy AI can finally do your laundry
I don’t really understand what you’re proposing. How would we fix things to “not run away”. If we’re not trying to value fix to be more objective, what guiding principle should we follow?

On the wealth weighting, I’m a fan of a 100% inheritance tax tbh. I’m in the “top 1%” and I don’t plan on giving my kids more than a great upbringing and education. I’m not giving them any additional cash injection. I think that solves a lot of the wealth weighting problem by shortening the lifecycle of capital holds, but I don’t know if I’ll ever live to see it (or some form of it like inheritance caps).

vhiremath4··on Physical Intelligence's first generalist policy AI can finally do your laundry
> Is the solution really to replace even more workers by capital, or do we have an issue with how we measure value that we should fix first?

I have more faith in our ability to solve world peace and AGI than I do in us getting to a more objective way to measure value that everyone can agree and adhere to.

vhiremath4··on Norway to increase minimum age limit on social media to 15 to protect children
This is a far more even response than I would have expected. I have many questions, especially about which “modern philosophies” are needed to help curb addictive behaviors at a state level. I think we’d both agree to the fact that most behavior-curbing laws begin small and then incrementally increase control. I think we also critically agree that having a mechanism to remove legislature if it’s not working is so important.

Regardless of that, I don’t think prohibition or criminalization is a bad thing. The government is defined by their ability to monopolize violence. To say we should never wield that violence against certain behaviors as a vote of the culture, I just don’t buy.

That said thanks for the thoughtful response!

vhiremath4··on Developing with Docker
After going through a bunch of evolutions using Docker as co-founder/engineer #1 at a startup to > 100 engineers, hard agree on this take.

One other reason to not overbloat your images (besides physical storage cost and perf) is security considerations. If you find yourself in a place where you need to meet enterprise security standards, keeping more dependencies in your image and linked to your app code widens your risk vector for vulnerabilities.

vhiremath4··on Developing with Docker
You can inject keys into the running container by passing them as environment variables during the docker run command, ideally supplied via a secrets manager.
vhiremath4··on Norway to increase minimum age limit on social media to 15 to protect children
> If banning harmful behavior

Not a ban. A restriction. Which does have evidence of reducing use.

> There is no way to draw a boundary around any behavior other than theft without comparing outcomes to a subjectively valuable ideal

Isn’t this more to do with a society’s viewpoint on moral subjectivity vs. objectivity? And not the act itself?

> It's a costly systemic virus we wield out of desperation

Desperation or practicality? There is always going to be a downside to any prohibitive law put into effect. But should there be no prohibitive laws to curb self harm in a society? To reflect the values of that society? That seems extremely idealistic.

> Social media's most fundamental problem is… it creates an environment that allows people to sidestep existing restrictions

I think it’s pretty well understood that this is not social media’s most fundamental problem. I don’t think sidestepping porn guardrails (for instance) is anywhere near as damaging as ever-radicalizing echo chambers or exposure to ideas that accelerate depression and anxiety and contribute to low self worth and self harm.

I’m sorry but this whole post just comes off as overly idealistic and completely missing the point of how harmful social media is to everyone (but especially children). I actually sympathize with the war on drugs creating more issues around drug use, but I don’t think we should then conclude that all restrictions are bad and cause more harm.

vhiremath4··on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
Immigrating into the US is notoriously difficult. There is a ton of demand. The US does not do even a mediocre job of prioritizing this demand, but it feels like the argument “I’m a normal person so I didn’t think about this” is rooted in lala land. If I was trying to immigrate into any other country (let alone the US), I would immediately and primarily think about how marriage might impact the status of my application. It would literally be the first thing I’d think of.

Not saying it’s wrong to get married as you’re trying to immigrate into the most competitive country in the world, but you do assume responsibility that this might impact your application.

vhiremath4··on Show HN: I made a Smart Calendar – E-Paper Based, Useful AI, Firmware Access
This is cool. What’s the stack?
vhiremath4··on Things my girlfriend and I have argued about
I think this basically sums up a lot of our relationship. Lots of arguments. Usually over small stuff but some big things. I ultimately didn’t feel I wanted to invest this much energy into making the relationship work, but she did and felt like I was giving up and thought I was “stronger than that”. I totally understand where she’s coming from being the person who seems to have been less affected by the arguments, but I just had to make a call for myself at the end of the day.
← PreviousPage 2 of 10Next →