Hacker News: alex5207

What are vector databases, and why do we need them?

alex5207 — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 19:00:31 +0000

Article URL: https://substack.com/inbox/post/176909802

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45714353

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by alex5207 in "Replacing cron jobs with a centralized task scheduler"

alex5207 — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 06:58:08 +0000

This is exactly what we're doing. Works like a charm.

New comment by alex5207 in "A conceptual overview of asyncio"

alex5207 — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 19:44:50 +0000

[About the event loop]

> She's behind the scenes managing resources. Some power is explicitly granted to her, but a lot of her ability to get things done comes from the respect & cooperation of her subordinates.

What a wonderful paragraph. Playful, yet with a deep meaning. It makes the article a joy to read.

New comment by alex5207 in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)"

alex5207 — Mon, 26 May 2025 05:50:39 +0000

Those are cursed!

New comment by alex5207 in "Replacing Kubernetes with systemd (2024)"

alex5207 — Tue, 06 May 2025 05:39:37 +0000

> I'm stuck with manual docker compose up/down commands over SSH

Out of curiosity, what is so bad about this for smaller projects?

New comment by alex5207 in "What Is Entropy?"

alex5207 — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 05:51:11 +0000

Super read! Thanks for sharing

New comment by alex5207 in "Dice and Queues"

alex5207 — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 06:34:22 +0000

Enjoyed the read - thanks for sharing! Found a small typo here:

> For the service rate (λ), we can keep things simple and assume that our server can service 10 items per minute with zero variation.

I think it's supposed to be mu and not lambda

New comment by alex5207 in "Lines of code that will beat A/B testing every time (2012)"

alex5207 — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 07:07:31 +0000

Good point about fluctuating rates for e.g the sales period. But couldn't you then pick a metric that doesn't fluctuate?

Out of curiosity, where did you work? In the same space as you.

New comment by alex5207 in "Ask HN: Did AI make you a worse programmer?"

alex5207 — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 20:03:51 +0000

Obviously I didn't mean to imply that your merits as a programmer should be judged by your ability to recall specific syntax, like the equality operator in some language.

I'm wondering about the long term effects of not paying attention to such details. Do you miss out on picking up patterns used by a certain library, framework, language or whatever, that you could have used to write your own code better?

Ask HN: Did AI make you a worse programmer?

alex5207 — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 19:23:13 +0000

After a year or so using co-pilot and its cousins, I coincidentally tried a new editor and never got around to install any AI support there. I realized that AI had sneaked in on me: It had made me unlearn syntax that used to be second nature. Simple things I knew how to do before, I suddenly had to look up. That made me wonder:

Is the true cost of using AI, which, in its current form, I deem as "autocomplete on steroids", not the subscription you pay, but the decay of your skills?

And if AI decays part of your skillset, to what extent do you think that part of your skillset even matters given the trajectory of AI for coding?

Have any of your stopped using AI directly in your editor for similar reasons?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42614392

Points: 16

# Comments: 12

New comment by alex5207 in "SQL Tips and Tricks"

alex5207 — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 05:37:12 +0000

Never knew about QUALIFY. That's great

New comment by alex5207 in "Ask HN: Fast data structures for disjoint intervals?"

alex5207 — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 15:30:38 +0000

His explanations are great and just wanted to +1 on the idea of range trees. Adding a reference here to a very lightweight read on range trees:

https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.851/spring10/scribe/lec03.pd...