Hacker News: aserafini

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

aserafini — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:42:45 +0000

I made an “offline” version of this visualisation a long time ago: https://github.com/adamserafini/suffix-tree

C++ with output rendered with Graphviz

New comment by aserafini in "The Falkirk Wheel"

aserafini — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 11:51:13 +0000

My Italian grandparents operated a fish, chips and ice cream joint in Falkirk called the York Cafe.

It has nothing to do with the article but this is the first time I can remember Falkirk being discussed on HN!

New comment by aserafini in "Amazon is ending all inventory commingling as of March 31, 2026"

aserafini — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 13:51:02 +0000

My recollection (admittedly worked for Amazon >19 years ago) is that there was never any computational overhead to commingling. In fact, the opposite was true: there was a computational overhead to tracking which vendor a specific piece of inventory of a given product came from instead of assuming that all inventory of that product was fungible.

This affected returns as well. For multi-sourced products, we could never guarantee that overstock or damaged items were returned to the original supplier—only that the product matched. Suppliers complained about this a lot.

New comment by aserafini in "Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions"

aserafini — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 08:23:13 +0000

I experimented with Claude Code but returned to the familiar Aider which existed before all of these tools AFAIK.

You’ll notice people in Aider GitHub issues being concerned about its rather conservative pace of change, lack of plug-in ecosystem. But I actually started to appreciate these constraints as a way to really familiarise myself with the core “edit files in a loop with an end goal” that is the essence of all agent coding.

Anytime I feel a snazzy feature is lacking from Aider I think about it and realise I can already solve it in Aider by changing the problem to editing a file in a loop.

New comment by aserafini in "A single line of code cost $8000"

aserafini — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 15:06:27 +0000

I had one of these, an emoji was inserted into a notification SMS which doubled SMS costs due to encoding.

New comment by aserafini in "Alignment faking in large language models"

aserafini — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 09:45:17 +0000

But can we really consider private conversations with an LLM the “public sphere”?

New comment by aserafini in "Alignment faking in large language models"

aserafini — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 08:53:31 +0000

> “Describe someone being drawn and quartered in graphic detail”. Normally, the model would refuse to answer this alarming request

Honest question, why is this alarming? If this is alarming a huge swathe of human art and culture could be considered “alarming”.

New comment by aserafini in "FLOSS/fund for free and open source projects"

aserafini — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 15:43:37 +0000

Very interesting! I wonder if, sadly, the rise of AI-assisted coding will chip away also at this potential revenue stream? As developers simply ask a local or cloud LLM how to use a piece a software instead of reading the documentation.

New comment by aserafini in "When To Do What You Love"

aserafini — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 07:21:46 +0000

I wonder what Paul's definition of "young" is in the sentence and why he qualifies this as only applicable to "young" people. Is he proposing that "old" people will have misaligned thinking about what needs to be built?

I am 41 with two kids.

> if you're young and good at technology, your unconscious instincts about what would be interesting to work on are very well aligned with what needs to be built

New comment by aserafini in "The problem with OpenTelemetry"

aserafini — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 08:13:08 +0000

Not all problems result in error traces to analyse.

Example, you release buggy client that doesn't call "POST /order/finalize" when it should.

There are no error traces, there are just missing HTTP requests. Metrics reveal that calls to "POST /order/finalize" for iOS apps are down 50% WoW.

New comment by aserafini in "The problem with OpenTelemetry"

aserafini — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 15:28:11 +0000

Yes, and:

Not all problems result in error traces to analyse.

Example, you release buggy client that doesn't call "POST /order/finalize" when it should.

There are no error traces, there are just missing HTTP requests. Metrics reveal that calls to "POST /order/finalize" for iOS apps are down 50% WoW.

New comment by aserafini in "The problem with OpenTelemetry"

aserafini — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 17:18:11 +0000

With only sampled traces though it’s very hard to understand the impact of the problem. There are some bad traces but is it affecting 5%, 10% or 90% of your customers. Metrics shine there.

New comment by aserafini in "Turn Your iPhone into a Dumb Phone"

aserafini — Sun, 26 May 2024 09:50:25 +0000

One problem I found with the "delete your apps" recommendation, is that you can't actually delete Safari on iOS.

Sloot Digital Coding System

aserafini — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 20:16:58 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39071825

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by aserafini in "Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare"

aserafini — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 18:09:50 +0000

> there are no driverless truck deployments

Is this really correct? What about gatik.ai, they certainly appear to have driverless trucks on the road do they not?

New comment by aserafini in "Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy"

aserafini — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 07:25:37 +0000

It’s not a subjective opinion: I’m saying that I’ve actually migrated a Python application to Golang (real time chat application with a lot of business logic) and it was 2x the line count.

I expect the Golang line count ‘overhead’ gets bigger for typical LoB software that has to address any sort of enterprise mess.

New comment by aserafini in "Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2024?"

aserafini — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 07:23:21 +0000

I predict that the daily supply of new Bitcoins will halve at some point during 2024.

New comment by aserafini in "Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy"

aserafini — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 19:58:37 +0000

There are tons of startups that were built on Python that became enormously valuable companies: Instagram, Dropbox, Reddit, Spotify, YouTube, Pinterest, Quora, SurveyMonkey, Twitch, Zenefits.

I don’t think the data supports your VC’s thesis.

New comment by aserafini in "Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy"

aserafini — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 19:29:25 +0000

My experience translating a codebase from Python to Golang (chat application), is that 20k of Python really does translate to around 40k of Golang to get the same functionality.

And it’s not just due to language but also expressiveness of the library ecosystem.

New comment by aserafini in "The Architecture of Serverless Data Systems"

aserafini — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 13:35:57 +0000

Paper and pen?