xtracto

I hated asking Qs in SO, it felt terribly snobby. However, I used it a lot to search for answers. The alternatives were crap.

First, there was some DevX? or similar site (either Indian or used by Indians a lot), the quality was pretty bad. At some point medium had good SnR , but then it got enshittified. Then a bunch of SEO crap sites came in (geeks4geeks and whatnot) and it was the end of it. Only S.O maintained certain quality, for existing info. Asking was still pretty terrible.

The "web" [http] is currently in a deplorable state, ads are horrible and rampant, the majority of content is pure SEO crap [now AI generated]. So LLMs are a breath of air to get answers.

Ive said it before but, the internet is really dead, for a lot of different reasons [death internet theory and public services automated hacking is the nail in the coffin].

Hey hey, i called it!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50189092

So much this. I grew up in the 80s and 90s playing Dangerous Dave, Prince.exe , TDCGA.exe, and installing all the amazing jungle of applications in DOS , Win3 and later [anybody remembers the Win3 program, that made your icons move? the logo was a rabbit in a hat]. Winamp, Musicmatch, SoundForge, all the CADs for more or less professional work, etc.

Now it's all websites.. or horrible android apps. Open source is the only thing remaining.

The good thing is that with LLMs, it is more and more possible to add all sort of cool functionality to existing code. And soon we will be able to add functionality also to compiled programs [like adding line numbers to windows note pad as a "cracking" tutorial, that was so cool].

Just yesterday I added the functionality of "show all unread" to an open source C++ low resource Slack desktop app [the official one is so bad]. And also I added VIM bindings to a text editor.

Yes sure, I'll move my mortage, tell my employer to move my deposit account and go through all automatic payments I have setup.

Thanks for the suggestion, how didn't I think about that!

This. Today is this, tomorrow is people doing car turns where it's not allowed, the day after tomorrow there's chaos like in Mexico (my country) because nobody gives a fuck about crap.

I have huge respect for cultures/countries where the rule of law is observed by its citizens just because it is the right thing to do. If other societies were more like that, every thing would be better.

[I visited Finland, Sweden and Denmark some months ago.]

The Gmail man!

https://youtu.be/oR4jTvxPruw?si=CMtmM5_irok8qUBe

My bank application doesn't run if it detects developer mode enabled.

I remember in 2013 the first time someone showed me Docker [im in Mexico]. My first thought is that we already had Vagrant for setting up and running virtual machines through console.

I didnt get it at that time haha.

For me, it depended on the price.

Several years ago, I had to take a very early flight so wanted to stay near the airport. I rented an Airbnb VERY cheaply. This was a room within an apartment of an old lady who was renting his son's (gone to university) bedroom.

It was a great experience, very kind, comfy and she even made me breakfast.

But nowadays, prices are crazy. A hotel room is usually only 10% higher (if higher). And I have also been victim of last minute cancelations.

If the room is unavailable, the hotel makes it its problem. But in the case of AirBnB, they make it YOUR problem. So that's worth 10% or more for me now. After they ruined a new year's eve vacation.

I no longer rent Airbnb. I might try if they hardened host's rules and gave me a cancelation guarantee of 'we will put you in the closest hotel if necessary ' . Kind of like car rentals: if the car is unavailable, we give you a better one.

The internet is over. We are going back to static htmls for public pages, and Point to Point VPN bases connections for B2B service provision.

B2C? too risky to publish services online haha.

That's a big problem with western so ieties. You know The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman? (Mexican prefers to take it easy)

There may be sone cultural truth to that. I'm a 44yo Mexican tech-bro; I've love coding/tech since i was around 10yo, to the point of getting a PhD and have worked in the industry for 25+ years.

But... i dont give a crap about my job. I mean, I am VERY professional and give my best, but I work to live, not live to work.

Right now I'm on the edge of retiring, if machines come and take all the jobs, it's fine, I'll go grow chickens and sell all my stuff to live on a small house in an extremely cheap village.

I come from modest roots, and those were some of the best years of my life. My wife also is pretty aligned. We in some way are what Americans would label "conformists", but darn, we are happy with little things, so when we happen to get big things, they taste amazing! (I just experienced my first American Football game in the Colts stadium, so cool!).

Westerners societies have to learn to be less overachieving

This is something I don't understand of the US and other "developed" countries health systems.

Here in Mexico, i can get to doctoralia and make an appointment with a high specialist , like a Vascular Neurosurgeon. All by myself. The first visit will to maybe $200 usd (and that's very high) and normally it's a week away at most. No waiting on the private health option.

Of course if you go with public health, it's a disaster and a shame.

A couple of days ago we had these flow of Rust based "reimplementation" of Adobe and Microsoft applications. A lot of people couldn't get past the "yeah but it's full of bugs, it's just SlopWare" opinion.

These people couldn't see the forest. The writing is on the wall, that Slopware is the WORST it will ever be. 1 year ago that was unimaginable. Next year, the quality of the developed software will be way better.

Selling "code" or "apps" is dead. My wife works in Workday and I've told her to sell as much stock as she can, because there will be an "inflection point" where ALL software based companies will collapse. The same way as Silicon Graphics, Sun , DEC and similar companies collapsed (along with a bit of IBM and HP, who pivoted) with the rise of PC power. Salesforce, SAP, Workday and all smaller companies that sell generic software will fall down.

Tangential to this, but I've found asking models to generate Origami instructions way more interesting:

"Write an svg with graphical instructions on how to make a pelican riding a bicycle in Origami using any number of A4 paper sheets."

All models struggle a lot. Most current models all get a "basic airplane that really floats" pretty well.

It's sad that you are being downvoted, for what you say it's pretty correct.

A lot of people don't understand the reason why financial markets were created and why they continue to exist.

There's a really good book called "Against the Gods, the remarkable history of Risk" which gives a good account on an aspect of why financial markets exist.

Basically, parts of society want to advance things (technology, arts, medicine, etc) but that same part doesn't have to carry the risk of doing their project. Financial markets are there to transfer the risk to people willing [able] to take on it.

Credit and Risk are two tools that have influenced the progress of civilization so much, its crazy.

Sure, there are people that abuse financial markets, the same way there are abusive people in Tech, Arts, or any other human endeavor. But that should not disqualify the whole system.

I think Apple was found to slow down old iPhones at some point no?

Edit: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-paying-113-million-law...

It's like Americans thinking thar what their president is doing is right. Nobody in there is doing anything to stop it.

I think that because the majority of people in HN work building SaaS, they tend to do Linux server related work heavily. The ones that dont, do iPhone work, so they are in a worst place (with Windows).

Other than that, I believe the productivity tooling is better on Windows.

I myself fall in the SaaS category, so Windows doesn't give me anything. On the contrary for whatever reason after mainly using Linux/OSX for 15 years, Windows just feels clunky and like it "gets in the way". WSL is a good hack/workaround, but unless I MUST have Windows as OS (because of a work provided Laptop that cannot be Linux), i dont see a point of using WSL.

I am building a mostly autonomous coding agent [1] that takes a task from jira/github/gdocs and codes it to a PR autonomously.

It works pretty well with Opus/Sol or better types of models. But with Sonnet/Terra level, it chases its tail and is pretty crappy.

I'm just waiting until Chinese models get to the required level, its going to be great for the cost.

[1] https://github.com/obaqueiro/coderbot

Bitcoin FTW.

Lots of stuff:

- my blog (ghost)

- an open source recipe saas

- a web based epub reader that saves current page and other state among browsers/devices

- A multi-player mexican-train domino in rust/Yjs

- A self made app i call "auto-SaaS": postgREST+empty page+AI Agent (clippy chat animation and all) that allows me to build ANY personal saas i need:

* simple aisle based supermarket shopping list (shared with my wife)

* note taking app that auto groups notes by date

* auto-scrolling news web page that I can read while stationary cycling in my tablet (AI summarized to de-editorialize)

* a battleship game! To play with someone when bored.

Among other minor stuff.

The worst thing is that, whatever they "save" in the hybrid part, is offsetted by the amount of pollution of flying all people and machines around the world.

Someone on reddit showed a graph comparing both, and it's just ridiculous.

I'm an avid F1 fan since 1990s, and think hybrid engines is the wrong way to do it.

>You said "for me they are the same". Not in reply to someone saying "to me they're different"

You are arguing with another user; it was I who said it.

They have some differences, yet they are the same in a lot of ways. Some people cannot see it because they have been educated a certain way. Lots of people in China really believe they are right and the US is wrong. Same in Korea, Same in Rusia. Similary, a lot of people in the US are educated to believe the US is "the best country in the world", "the good guys", "always right"; they are not.

    Location:  Mexico, UTC-6
    Remote: Yes. 
    Willing to relocate: No

Technologies:

    Core: Python, TypeScript, SQL
    AI/ML/LLM: LLM pipelines, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), LLM fine-tuning (open-source and closed models), llama.cpp, Scikit-learn, Spark, FastText, NLTK, Word2Vec, anomaly detection, graph-based fraud detection
    Cloud/infra: AWS (ECS, EKS, Lambda, RDS, Neptune, EMR, S3, WAF, GuardDuty, Inspector), Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, WireGuard
    Data: PostgreSQL, Cassandra, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, AWS Neptune/Gremlin, Airflow, Hadoop, custom OLAP on GB-scale datasets
    Architecture: microservices, event-driven systems, RabbitMQ, high-availability and autoscaling design
    Blockchain: Liquid Network, Ethereum, Solidity smart contracts, node operation and hot wallet custody
    Security/compliance: SOC 2, PCI-DSS Level 1, ISO 27001
    Also some Ruby, Java, C++, R, Node.js, React Native, Angular, Ionic

  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/obaqueiro/
  Website: https://baqueiro.com
  Email: omar _at_ baqueiro _dot_ com

Principal AI/ML Engineer and hands-on engineering leader (CTO, VP, Head of Engineering), 20+ years in software, PhD in Computer Science. The last 8 years have been remote fintech roles where I stayed in the code while building and running teams.

Currently at Aloi.tech (AI tax assistance): LLM pipeline for invoice analysis with RAG, fine-tuning of open-source and closed LLMs, and a custom OLAP framework for GB-scale invoicing data. Before that, CTO at Bax Blockchain Services: architected a B2B crypto exchange from scratch (event-driven microservices, RabbitMQ, AWS ECS, Terraform, multi-environment IaC), owned security (WAF, GuardDuty, Inspector, WireGuard), operated a Liquid Network node and hot wallet, and led a 20+ person engineering team. At PrimeTrust, VP of AI/ML & Lead Architect: built the AI/ML team for fraud detection (graph analysis on AWS Neptune, K-NN anomaly detection), designed a Cassandra ledger that took transaction processing from hundreds to tens of thousands per second, and drove the monolith-to-microservices migration. At Paystand, Head of Engineering & Product: led SOC 2 and PCI-DSS Level 1 compliance, cut AWS costs 30%, and grew the Mexico engineering office from 1 to 15. Earlier: Head of Engineering & Data Science at Kueski (ML credit risk models in production, ISO 27001), Ooyala, and academic research.

Looking for: Principal/Staff AI/ML Engineer, ML/LLM infrastructure, CTO / VP / Head of Engineering at an early-to-growth-stage startup, fractional CTO or technical advisor, or founding engineer on a small technical team. Fintech, legaltech, and data-heavy products preferred but not required.

Open to full-time, contracting, and advisory.

Available: Immediately

Compensation Range: $200,000+ USD yearly

For someone (as me) in Mexico, they are exactly the same.

Third world societies are not "brainwashed" one way or another with respect to that.

We just see those governments throwing shade at each other. And bullying us ina similar way.

This. We use both opus 5.5 and 6 Sol in a way that allows us to compare their performance. Opus is considerably better.

Imagine the first time electric calculators calculated the square root of 5. I'm sure people would verify again and again if what the circuits calculated was right.

Then in the 80s, you presses 2 buttons and there you had it in your classroom without thinking twice if the electricity arrived correctly at the transistors.

How crazy will the world be once our [current gen] ANN are like that!

What an amazing thought.

I don't understand why there isn't something as simple as PopcornTime (open source, nobody owns it, nobody hosts it, you run it and creates a server you can use, simple), which includes TV stuff (like EZTV.it had it ten years ago) and sport streams (even with info from Rojadirecta stuff, "cleaned") now.

It's something that a good weekend with a local abliterated Qwen 3.8 local model could cook.

Lol

Bimbo

Femsa

Grupo Salinas

There's plenty more: https://es.tradingeconomics.com/bimboa:mm:employees

That's the problem with these things. Personal preference plays a huge role. And these discussions bring so many people setting their preferences as THE TRUTH.

we should strive and push to keep having these a alternatives. Which the industry is trying to remove.