Hacker News: Breza

New comment by Breza in "Agents don't need memory, they need documentation"

Breza — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 02:54:09 +0000

Some decisions are important to document. Some are utterly irrelevant. Knowing the difference is a skill.

On one project, we decided we didn't need mobile compatibility. That simplified things greatly.

You're going to want to document that somewhere. And if you also have a stakeholder register, you can link the decision to the person who made it.

New comment by Breza in "Agents don't need memory, they need documentation"

Breza — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 02:48:18 +0000

There are some things that can't be derived from the code and old school PMP documents are suddenly useful again.

Who are your stakeholders? How are you going to communicate with them? What kinds of approvals do you need to do certain things? Etc. Human devs have long struggled with this stuff and LLMs aren't at better.

New comment by Breza in "Polars 2.0"

Breza — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 02:37:07 +0000

I still use R almost every day. It's an amazing language for answering complex questions using data. But yeah, not a great choice for deploying a production system.

New comment by Breza in "Polars 2.0"

Breza — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 02:35:34 +0000

I also found myself reading the manual all the time.

I have a toy project I use for learning different tools. Given a CSV containing every MLB game ever played, calculate the win percentage for each team during its first season.

Pandas makes that kind of simple thing painfully unintuitive. Tools like Polars and dplyr and even SQL require code that's far closer to how people think.

New comment by Breza in "Polars 2.0"

Breza — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 02:18:11 +0000

Worth reminding readers that pandas stands for "PANel DAta" so it's not shocking it's still useful for non standard data

New comment by Breza in "Polars 2.0"

Breza — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 02:15:27 +0000

There are a few packages that still expect pandas inputs and return pandas outputs, so I just convert my Polars dataframes before and after passing them to such a function.

I almost never use pandas directly anymore. Polars is just too good.

New comment by Breza in "We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything"

Breza — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:23:38 +0000

This is why my first cloud provider when I was learning VMs was Verda. They let you prepay and everything would shut down the second you ran out of money.

It was a necessary feature when I was learning. I was amazed when I moved up to the big guys and this wasn't an easy option.

New comment by Breza in "We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything"

Breza — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 13:46:27 +0000

I completely agree with you. If I'm running a big VM for model training, I want to be absolutely sure that I can't accidentally leave it on over the weekend. If I'm a fast growing startup, maybe I'll prefer alerts so I can optimize a slow piece of my stack before getting a surprise bill.

New comment by Breza in "Ask HN: What are you reading?"

Breza — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 01:08:57 +0000

I've read all three of those in the past three years and I loved them all for wildly different reasons.

If you want a classic novel that's enjoyable to read and has a moral point to make, I'd add War and Peace. The story ends and then the author has a whole afterward dedicated to "In case you missed the point, let me spell it out for you."

New comment by Breza in "GLM-5.3 is now open-weight"

Breza — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 01:26:55 +0000

I agree that they are historically important, but if you want to query old thinking in 2070, you'd probably be better off having a modern model analyze archive.org. If that ever goes down, we're sunk.

New comment by Breza in "Get your Windows license refund"

Breza — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:58:58 +0000

In my experience as the head of data science in a corporation, everybody uses Windows on their local machines and Linux remotely.

New comment by Breza in "Dolly Parton has died"

Breza — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:52:12 +0000

When my daughter turned five and received her final book in the mail, it came with a letter that still makes me tear up.

New comment by Breza in "Choose Boring Technology (2015)"

Breza — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:28:09 +0000

At work I use a tech stack written years and years ago in .Net that runs on a server we own in a colo. We use a CDN for some latency-sensitive serving, but almost everything is self-hosted. It's amazing how cheap it is for us to run a reasonably sizeable application.

New comment by Breza in "Waymo in Dallas"

Breza — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:22:17 +0000

It wouldn't necessarily lower prices. Waymo could compete on quality instead of price. If you offer a better and safer service than the competition (human and AV) why lower prices at all? There's a reason Waymo often charges more than Uber+tip.

New comment by Breza in "Why Wall Street is ignoring big tech's debt [video]"

Breza — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:19:24 +0000

I agree with you. Look at railroads, cars, computers, and other technologies that really did end up being world-changing. How many of the original companies are still around?

Sometimes I feel like OpenAI will end up like Fairchild Semiconductor: an early innovator that quickly became an historical footnote.

New comment by Breza in "Waymo in Dallas"

Breza — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:27:50 +0000

Yup, every time I'm on a city bus they have a screen that cycles through the different cameras. They really have every angle covered. And some of our buses even have traffic enforcement cameras that issue tickets to cars.

New comment by Breza in "Waymo in Dallas"

Breza — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:25:33 +0000

> scheduling constraint

Honestly I think this is the only real advantage of a self-driving bus. Driving a bus is hard work and it doesn't pay well. Getting drivers to cover all the routes every day is an ongoing challenge.

I would honestly be nervous to ride a self-driving bus much of the time. Drivers limit the level of shenanigans that can happen. The subway has emergency intercoms and staff at every single station, but a bus could take you miles away from the nearest transit cop.

New comment by Breza in "Waymo in Dallas"

Breza — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:20:34 +0000

Bus drivers don't make much money, at least not here in the United States. I was shocked when I learned how low the average salary is, considering you might be tasked with navigating a massive vehicle carrying dozens of people through narrow streets during rush hour. And I'm not even considering the customer service aspects and public safety aspects of what they do.

All that to say, we are far from the point where a self-driving bus is cheaper than buying a regular bus and paying a driver.

New comment by Breza in "Waymo in Dallas"

Breza — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:15:44 +0000

Done. I grew up in suburban Michigan. I moved to Washington DC for college 20 years ago and I'm still here. When looking to buy a house, we only looked at options with public transit access.

I know it's not for everyone, but if you really do value being able to go out without driving, it's a great lifestyle.

New comment by Breza in "Waymo in Dallas"

Breza — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:13:56 +0000

I totally agree with you. Here in DC they use a public charger that's on one of my running routes, so I interact with them more often than the average Washingtonian. I feel more comfortable around them than I do around human drivers.