Hacker News: avilay

New comment by avilay in "Building a robotics research setup that lives next to my desk"

avilay — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 06:04:19 +0000

Thanks for your response! I totally get your point about the delay in getting the robot, I ordered mine from PartaBot and they did take a couple of weeks to get here. But when they did, they worked great out-of-the-box :-)

Will email you to compare notes.

New comment by avilay in "Building a robotics research setup that lives next to my desk"

avilay — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 05:53:02 +0000

> The author does explain his reasons for not using LeRobot in the post - although "I also use LeRobot for training and running baseline policies, and the vendor SDKs for the hardware.")

Ah! That is exactly what I use it for as well :-)

I am liking the SO101 - teleop and robot both work great. For sure, it is very easy to get started with. I was able to collect around 50 demos with them and train my first ACT policy within days of setting up the robots. Happy to share more detailed learnings from this if/when you get started with it. https://github.com/avilay/learn-robotics

New comment by avilay in "Building a robotics research setup that lives next to my desk"

avilay — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 03:52:27 +0000

Hey this is cool! I am doing something similar myself with the SO101 arm robot from Robot Studio using a patchwork of my own code and LeRobot. Would love to collaborate with you if you are open to it. You can find me on Discord as `.avilay`. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/avilay_lerobot-huggingface-ro...

Would like to know your reasoning on not going with LeRobot.

New comment by avilay in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

avilay — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:56:31 +0000

Two things semi-parallelly:

  * Robotics Hello World: Objective is to implement ACT model to train my arm robot on simple pick-and-place tasks. Leaning heavily on HuggingFace's LeRobot library, but stopping short of using their model implementation and training loop. https://github.com/avilay/learn-robotics

  * Designing a new programming language: This is when I want to escape the annoyances of coding in Python and start daydreaming about a new language :-) https://github.com/avilay/kulfi

New comment by avilay in "It's death"

avilay — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 01:23:32 +0000

Can a kind soul write down their interpretation of the story? I didn't quite get it.

[Edit]: Thanks for all the explanations!

New comment by avilay in "Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter"

avilay — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:32:35 +0000

The point about papercuts adding up so resonates with me! I loved Zed initially and did find it more responsive than VS Code, loved the Zed Agent autocomplete, etc. However, I eventually and reluctantly went back to VS Code. The papercut that finally did it for me was [this open bug](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/36516) because of which I was not able to step into a packaged library's code when I was debugging my own code, this was in Python.

New comment by avilay in "On The Need For Understanding"

avilay — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:50:45 +0000

The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. You can let the agent code and you review it, or vice versa. No different from being a team lead where you don’t write all the code, or even review each and every line of code, but you have a very firm grasp of the code base.

New comment by avilay in "I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me"

avilay — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 16:19:51 +0000

Totally agree with this! Being "kindly honest" is way better than being "brutally honest". Being honest and direct is important of course. I have often found that delivering constructive criticism in the so-called sandwich manner often obfuscates the message, so delivering it directly is much better. However, being kind to the receiver of the feedback by having empathy for them and supporting them as they process that feedback will help land that message far more effectively than being "brutal" about it.

New comment by avilay in "So you want to write an “app” (2025)"

avilay — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:09:57 +0000

This hit a nerve as I am in the middle of developing a webapp for myself using NiceGUI. I find CSS, especially its layout framework, pretty confusing and sometimes downright intimidating to work with. `inline`, `block`, `flex`, `grid` seem reasonable when you read about them. But when using it, especially within frameworks when flexboxes are nested within grids which are nested within flexboxes and so on, it becomes hard to reason about. And then you throw in media-queries in the mix and it becomes even more dense.

New comment by avilay in "Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President"

avilay — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 23:39:35 +0000

Lots of nostalgia in this thread. However, I recently started playing around with IBM's quantum computer cloud service and it has been by far the best experience compared to other players. Who knows, that might be their come back story!

New comment by avilay in "Building a personal website in 2021"

avilay — Sun, 16 May 2021 20:07:32 +0000

Surprised not to see ghost in here. They have a paid managed version at https://ghost.org and it is fairly easy to set up with any of the public cloud providers. I have set mine up with Digital Ocean (https://ghost.org/docs/install/digitalocean/).

New comment by avilay in "Ask HN: Which of the following ML topics do you wish had good tutorials?"

avilay — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 04:33:07 +0000

Cool, thanks for the response. Yes, I do find that the PyTorch tutorials on distributed training are a work-in-progress.

I was thinking of starting with a basic implementation of the original paper by Jeff Dean, et. al. on synchronized data parallelism, implement basic model parallelism, explain why async parallelism works, do a simple implementation of HOGWILD!, and finally do "hello world" training using existing distributed training systems like Horovod, Distributed PyTorch, RayLib, Microsoft DeepSpeed, etc.

Ask HN: Which of the following ML topics do you wish had good tutorials?

avilay — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 02:45:18 +0000

  1. Distributed Reinforcement Learning with RLLib
  2. Distributed Deep Learning with PyTorch
  3. Reinforcement Learning with PyTorch
  4. Linear Algebra for ML with numpy
  5. Other (please specify)

I like to teach what I learn and have a few tutorials up on YouTube. I need your help in figuring what should I put up next.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26499257

Points: 2

# Comments: 4

Show HN: Torchutils – a PyTorch library for quick and systematic experimentation

avilay — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 19:50:27 +0000

Hello HN community - for the past year or so I have been plugging away on a side project called torchutils (https://gitlab.com/avilay/torchutils). It'd be great if you could take it for a spin when training your next ML model and give me some feedback. Here are the detailed docs (https://avilay.gitlab.io/torchutils/)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25086589

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by avilay in "Buy on Google is now open and commission-free"

avilay — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 08:11:58 +0000

Does anybody else think this is in response to Apple's privacy crackdown on third party tracking data? If you buy on Buy, then you are still first party for Google and they can still get your signals.

New comment by avilay in "VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality"

avilay — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 21:01:58 +0000

And given that a majority of "Ex-Google" engineers are males, where does that leave a woman (or any under-represented group) founder?

She is not asking for money "just because" she is a woman. She is asking for a fair chance. And we need to give folks from under-represented communities a more than fair chance to combat inherent selection bias.

New comment by avilay in "VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality"

avilay — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 20:47:50 +0000

Even if her business idea was bad, or her app didn't have traction, or her LI profile was not impressive enough, she deserved, at the very least, the following:

  * Access to VCs, she had to use her husband's email to get access.
  * Some constructive and personalized feedback. This does not have to be very detailed, a couple of no-BS sentences will do the trick.

I get that VCs are too busy to respond to each and every email they get, but they, and every one of us in the tech sector who is in a position to do so, needs to walk the extra mile to pull in people from under-represented communities who are trying to get in.

New comment by avilay in "What Unity Is Getting Wrong"

avilay — Fri, 22 May 2020 21:41:45 +0000

What do folks here think of Panda3D (https://www.panda3d.org)?

Its just a game engine without any IDE. So the typical workflow would be to build your assets and scene in Blender (or Maya, etc.) and then code up the game mechanics in Python or C++. I am tinkering with it for non-gaming (Reinforcement Learning) use cases and I was curious what game devs think of it.

New comment by avilay in "Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]"

avilay — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 20:16:55 +0000

That was a pretty cool video! I loved how he used 3D Monte-Carlo and side-stepped all the complicated math. I wonder if he was using a Physics engine like Bullet or ODE to calculate the simulated trajectories. Also, a good intermediate step might've been to build the backboard in something like Unity and shoot some hoops to catch the radius error before actually machining it out.

New comment by avilay in "I still love programming – what's wrong with me?"

avilay — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 05:45:49 +0000

Spurred by a post on AskHN about a dev who has "fallen out of love" with programming, I wrote down my thoughts on being on the IC path as opposed to the management path. Would love to know your experiences around this issue.