Hacker News: abahgat

New comment by abahgat in "AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford"

abahgat — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 18:22:22 +0000

To be fair, shipping these guidelines as AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md in the repo that contains the assignments will make it so that agents will pick this up without needing students to opt in explicitly. Seems like a reasonable first step to me

New comment by abahgat in "Visualizing Ukkonen's Suffix Tree Algorithm"

abahgat — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 05:41:42 +0000

I totally fell for the "obscene memory" trap myself. My first encounter with suffix trees outside of a textbook was for an ITA Software 'Instant Search' puzzle. The requirement was sub-0.1ms search on a large string database, I went straight for a generalized suffix tree. Then I realized they had asked for the solution to fit within a 1GB heap. :(

I wrote up the full 'war story' of how I had to profile the heap and optimize the node representation (shaving bytes off the edge storage) just to get it to boot without an OOM error: https://www.abahgat.com/blog/the-programming-puzzle-that-got...

It’s the most tangible example I've run into of where theoretical O(n) space complexity meets the reality of object pointer overhead.

New comment by abahgat in "Visualizing Ukkonen's Suffix Tree Algorithm"

abahgat — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 05:21:06 +0000

Author here. It’s a very hopeful time for interactive learning. Coincidentally, it is inspiring that both OpenAI and Anthropic released these improved visualization capabilities just this week.

Using Gemini's canvas for chord progressions is a great example of this. When I was building this suffix tree visualizer, I kept thinking about how much "spatial" intuition is required to understand the algorithm; having these live, interactive environments available to students is a massive step forward.

https://openai.com/index/new-ways-to-learn-math-and-science-... https://claude.com/blog/claude-builds-visuals

New comment by abahgat in "The Velocity Paradox: Why 100x faster code doesn't mean 10x faster shipping"

abahgat — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 14:21:37 +0000

Hi HN, I wrote this post after an experiment over the holidays. I had Claude write a cross-stack feature touching our database, cloud infra, mobile app, and the embedded application running on our hardware devices at work. What would usually take me a week took an afternoon to generate.

But it still took weeks to test and merge.

The takeaway for me was that for teams operating with legacy debt, or teams where verification requires physical interaction (you can't throw prompt engineering at a hardware test bench), AI doesn't solve the bottleneck; it just shifts it. We are making code generation incredibly cheap, but the cost of verification and code review isn't shrinking, and the burden is falling on our most senior engineers.

I’d be curious to hear how others managing complex or non-standard codebases are adapting their CI/CD and review processes to keep up with the volume of AI-generated code.

The Velocity Paradox: Why 100x faster code doesn't mean 10x faster shipping

abahgat — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 14:17:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.abahgat.com/blog/the-velocity-paradox/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47137447

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by abahgat in "Cloud Solutions Reference Architectures"

abahgat — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 14:17:48 +0000

The original architectures are based on Google's offering by many of them generalize well beyond GCP.

Cloud Solutions Reference Architectures

abahgat — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 14:17:17 +0000

Article URL: https://showcase.withgoogle.com/solutions-architecture

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24271562

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by abahgat in "Show HN: Our alternative to recruiter spam"

abahgat — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:00:24 +0000

I was asking because if you optimize for pitches response rate, you end up with better pitches but not necessarily good matches between candidates/companies.

New comment by abahgat in "Show HN: Our alternative to recruiter spam"

abahgat — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 20:44:56 +0000

I'm curious: in

"Every pitch received improves our personalized matching algorithm, making pitches get even better over time."

how would you distinguish a "good" pitch from a "bad" one?

How Facebook Finds The Best Design Talent, And Keeps Them Happy

abahgat — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:34:53 +0000

Article URL: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669445/how-facebook-finds-the-best-design-talent-and-keeps-them-happy

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3797750

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by abahgat in "CSS Hexagon Tutorial"

abahgat — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:21:39 +0000

That's neat. Too bad it doesn't work on Windows, though.

New comment by abahgat in "Github is my resume"

abahgat — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:12:11 +0000

I tend to agree with this point of view: whiteboard interviews fail to predict how you will write real code once you are hired, your actual code is definitely a better indicator.

Asking candidates their github usernames is starting to seem a common trend, in my experience.

New comment by abahgat in "Wat"

abahgat — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:08:05 +0000

That is exactly what I was wondering: what you say must be true, but I could not find any equivalent of what you see here for any other profession.

But maybe it is just because I write code for a living...

Wat

abahgat — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:32:12 +0000

Article URL: http://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3515845

Points: 512

# Comments: 98

New comment by abahgat in "Introducing the HUD. Say hello to the future of the menu"

abahgat — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:32:14 +0000

Sounds like a smart idea, to me. Since I started using Alfred on my Mac I'm able to control almost everything from the keyword and I'm faster at almost everything.

Being able to guess the user intentions from the context would be a great advantage, but the challenge would be balancing context-dependent commands from the most general ones, in my opinion.

Darpa uses competitive crowdsourcing to revive destroyed documents

abahgat — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:39:41 +0000

Article URL: http://blog.microtask.com/2012/01/better-shred-than-read-darpa-uses-competitive-crowdsourcing-to-revive-destroyed-documents/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3456247

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Twitter Hedge Fund Beat Market In Its First Month

abahgat — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:46:18 +0000

Article URL: http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-hedge-fund-beat-market-in-its-first-month_b12786

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3451697

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by abahgat in "The way people copy each other's linguistic style reveals their pecking order"

abahgat — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 10:09:05 +0000

I'd be curious to know how much of this applies to non-native English speakers. I guess their native language can shape the way they build sentences and influence the way they communicate in different way. Or, maybe, they just attempt to correlate more with native English speakers.

You Create Bluebrain’s Landscape Soundtracks - location-aware music albums

abahgat — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:25:30 +0000

Article URL: http://dirt.asla.org/2011/12/21/you-create-bluebrains-landscape-soundtracks/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3378005

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by abahgat in "How to get hired (or, 'The silly story of interviewing in the valley')"

abahgat — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:37:23 +0000

I guess that one of the advantages of such an approach is standardization, in particular if your company is big. Once you get a significant number of candidates, it may become more important to have some "objective" and quantitative way to rank your candidates by performance than to get a true understanding about how likely they are to get things done (how would you "measure" that?). At that point, it becomes more important to ensure uniformity of judgement across the pool of interviewers. Isn't that why they often ask programming puzzles: so that they can compare performance. If the price to pay for that is that some valuable candidate won't get an offer, they can live with that. At least, that's how I see it.

Of course the argument for startups will be different :)