Hacker News: amir_karbasi

New comment by amir_karbasi in "Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)"

amir_karbasi — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 22:53:16 +0000

My pleasure! I also find languages very interesting and have had the opportunity to grow up in a bilingual home and learn French and German.

One more fun fact is that potato is a direct translation of the French “Pomme de terre” (“sib zamani” or “ground apple”).

Back to the actual topic, this is a recipe that’s definitely worth trying. Persian shallots are actually more garlicky than oniony. A great addition to lamb dishes and yogurt.

New comment by amir_karbasi in "Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)"

amir_karbasi — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 22:03:36 +0000

Actually, in Persian, tomato is literally translated as “western plum”. This is common in our language as we usually say “western” or “foreign” as a prefix to many things that were introduced to Iran (strawberries, sit-style toilets, etc)

New comment by amir_karbasi in "Launch HN: Drafted (YC P26) – Models for residential architecture"

amir_karbasi — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:13:19 +0000

Doesn't look like it. From their FAQ: "Drafted is focused on single-level floor plans today. Multi-story homes, second floors, and basements are in progress and expected to become available soon."

I'd love to see a two storey use case in the future! I have a few designs for a small plot of land in Toronto (2500 sqft lot) and would love to try and make alterations based on my zoning constraints.

New comment by amir_karbasi in "Launch HN: Voygr (YC W26) – A better maps API for agents and AI apps"

amir_karbasi — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:31:08 +0000

Let me rephrase my question. How exact must the address input be? Do I need to include unit numbers? What if the street number is off by a few due to the layout of a plaza?

Using Maps or Web Search APIs, I can find approximate locations for certain businesses based on my input. Can your API work in a similar manner?

New comment by amir_karbasi in "Launch HN: Voygr (YC W26) – A better maps API for agents and AI apps"

amir_karbasi — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 17:21:39 +0000

Really cool! We're currently using map and web searches in our agent to gather this info for our tool. Does it support an approximate address? For example, if a plaza can have multiple street numbers, do I need to make a request for each possible address or would it find a certain business with an approximate address?

New comment by amir_karbasi in "Ask HN: What's your preferred Python tool to convert Markdown to print ready PDF"

amir_karbasi — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 21:21:00 +0000

I looked into this and nothing worked well for me. I ended up just using Pandoc: https://pandoc.org/

New comment by amir_karbasi in "Launch HN: Chonkie (YC X25) – Open-Source Library for Advanced Chunking"

amir_karbasi — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 17:56:07 +0000

Looks great! I had looked at Chonkie a few months back, but didn't need it in our pipelines. I was just writing a POC for an agentic chunker this week to handle various formatting and chunking requirements. I'll give Chonkie a shot!

New comment by amir_karbasi in "Show HN: TextQuery – Query CSV, JSON, XLSX Files with SQL"

amir_karbasi — Tue, 06 May 2025 00:41:53 +0000

Your tool has been awesome! Seeing what it can do inspired me to write a POC that connected to an enterprise IBM application that I used to implement: https://github.com/karbasia/tririga-data-workbench (also uses DuckDB and Perspective with some additional hacks to make it work with IBM's tool).

New comment by amir_karbasi in "Ask HN: Is AG Grid worth it?"

amir_karbasi — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 21:06:50 +0000

I've used AG Grid at many of my companies and found it worth the price.

I've also dabbled in Perspective (https://github.com/finos/perspective), but it may be overkill for you. It was a fun project similar to SQL Workbench where data can be uploaded and consumed from a specific IWMS API for client-side analysis. It's quite powerful and open source.

New comment by amir_karbasi in "Ask HN: How do services like make.com, pipedream,zapier integrations work?"

amir_karbasi — Thu, 30 May 2024 14:42:05 +0000

From my experience working with IBM products at an enterprise level, a lot of the integrations only provide basic functionality or they are used to demonstrate a happy path for the sales team. Once you go into the implementation phase, you run into multiple issues and require substantial development to actually make it work within a client's environment.

New comment by amir_karbasi in "PyTorch Library for Running LLM on Intel CPU and GPU"

amir_karbasi — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 14:16:30 +0000

I believe that the issue is that graphic cards require really fast memory. This requires close memory placement (that's why the memory is so close to the core on the board). expandable memory will not be able to provide the required bandwidth here.

New comment by amir_karbasi in "Ask HN: What non-AI products are you working on?"

amir_karbasi — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 16:38:01 +0000

I'm personally working on a specialized system monitor software to address deficiencies with a popular enterprise IWMS. It is aimed at companies that do not want to splurge for Splunk and require some specific system admin controls and metrics. There is a forwarder and backend API which will be completely self-hosted. I'm using this project to build some expertise in Go :)

New comment by amir_karbasi in "Ask HN: What alternatives exist to a Mac mini but for Windows?"

amir_karbasi — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 15:18:42 +0000

The minisforum UM790 Pro is something I've looked at too.

https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-um790-pro

It can handle many games at good settings already. It also has USB 4.0 which will allow you to connect it to an eGPU for higher end gaming.

EDIT: Today, I'm running a Lenovo P14s AMD Gen 4 which is slightly slower. For the price, the performance has been amazing.

New comment by amir_karbasi in "Ask HN: Where do you live? What's good or bad about it?"

amir_karbasi — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 13:30:17 +0000

East end of Toronto (East York)

Pros: - Great variety of foods around here (I love Hakka!) - Relatively "affordable" where you can afford a semi or detached home (albeit it'll be 100 years old with a smaller backyard) - Great walkability to small markets, restaurants, breweries and Lake Ontario - Sense of community - Pretty good transit for North America (24 hour street car, subway line and a local rail within a 5 min walk) - Bike lanes becoming more common

Cons: - Generally cold climate means a short growing season for my victory garden - Our salaries lag our southern neighbours - The health care system is showing signs of failing under pressure

New comment by amir_karbasi in "Django 5.0"

amir_karbasi — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 17:05:33 +0000

How was the effort to migrate from DRF to Django-Ninja? I saw Django-Ninja mentioned in another post and am thinking of switching one of my projects over from DRF. After skimming their documentation, it looks very pleasant and simple and perfect for my use case.

New comment by amir_karbasi in "A real case of Bobby Tables?"

amir_karbasi — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 17:02:12 +0000

I actually had an external integration beak because someone's last name contained "null". The integration failed with an invalid JSON error. After debugging the payload with one of their developers, we narrowed it down to one record. Apparently, they had a hardcoded rule where they replaced null with "" and it caused two double quotes on the property :|. I had to filter out this one record for a couple weeks until they received all of the approvals to push their fix to prod...