Hacker News: elankart

New comment by elankart in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"

elankart — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 06:09:48 +0000

I've worked in Windows for many many years, no idea who this guy is. He is randomly name dropping. He wants attention.

New comment by elankart in "Five years of running a systems reading group at Microsoft"

elankart — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 02:05:11 +0000

What a buzzkill and a super negative comment.

New comment by elankart in "Microsoft denies rewriting Windows 11 in Rust using AI"

elankart — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 07:05:33 +0000

Can you give some concrete examples of “cheap young” contract workers being hired to work on product features? You seem to know a lot of things so maybe some concrete examples will help.

New comment by elankart in "The C++ programmer and educator Rainer Grimm has passed away"

elankart — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 16:22:49 +0000

Rest in peace, Rainer. Your updates to C++ core guidelines and blogs help many across the world.

New comment by elankart in "GCP automatically lowered our quota, caused an incident, and refused to upgrade"

elankart — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 21:14:44 +0000

In what world is AWS great? A world where they don’t have a clean way to group resources and clean them up? Their own twisted identity products in AWS that doesn’t integrate outside their cloud or their other products. A world where they leave lingering resources when you cleanup something.

AWS has to much hype riding behind it.

It’s not enterprise class and looks very incohesive.

New comment by elankart in "GCP automatically lowered our quota, caused an incident, and refused to upgrade"

elankart — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 21:12:01 +0000

This is certainly a troll post. I use all three cloud providers. GCP is the worst of all, just try their simple text to speech UI. It doesn’t work most of the times.

Don’t even get me started on a deployment story for GCP their deployment manager is deprecated and redirect you to use terraform.

I hate to swallow it but Azure was more usable and straightforward.

New comment by elankart in "Ask HN: Can someone ELI5 transformers and the “Attention is all we need” paper?"

elankart — Thu, 18 May 2023 03:03:10 +0000

This might be dumbing this down very very much but it all boils down to having some sort of a special lookup table and you give it a "query" and a bunch of "keys" and the "value" is the most likely next word. As you input something into the network, a network of these tables are consulted and you are given most likely next word.

The novelty in this paper is this "query-key-value" relation that gets learned. A lot of previous work in this area was focused on learning a rough state machine to which you input a set of state transitions and it will give you the most likely next state. This will also work but training such networks is very slow and you also don't have the capability to train the network to "attend" to certain part of the inputs. This lookup based technique lets you do that plus this is also very compute efficient (compared to previous techniques).

I'm missing a lot of details but that's basically the intuition behind this.

These are very excellent resources: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptuGllU5SQQ&list=PLoROMvodv4... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyFJWRnt_AY&pp=ygUfYXR0ZW50a...

New comment by elankart in "Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality"

elankart — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 07:04:02 +0000

I’m pretty sure bad outcomes out number good ones. Were there bad outcomes because of an incompetent provider or a test with high false positives? I’m pretty sure it’s the former.

New comment by elankart in "Experts warn yearly checkups carry risks and do not reduce mortality"

elankart — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 15:22:04 +0000

I call bullshit on this. I had a very rare heart condition that was discovered during one of my yearly check ups. Chasing the root cause led us to even more scarier findings.

New comment by elankart in "Some things to learn from the British East India Company's growth and demise"

elankart — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 13:33:35 +0000

You lost me there in calling Sankrit the mother language. Telugu has a different lineage and Sankrit is alien to Indian Sub-continent. Please stop using HN to subtly push your agenda.

New comment by elankart in "Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a code base you thought was well done?"

elankart — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 16:22:30 +0000

Windows NT

New comment by elankart in "Ask HN: Will I Ever Recover?"

elankart — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 00:41:43 +0000

"Everyone" who told you that you are late to start again are idiots. Don't listen to them. You are going to do great. It takes a great amount of resolve to step out of your comfort zone and work on your startup for 7 years. That tells me that you are going to succeed in whatever you are going to do next. Take a breath and focus on what's next.

New comment by elankart in "Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?"

elankart — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 06:43:50 +0000

We solve a different set of problems. But people here have different skillsets. Cadence of release is also faster.

I enjoyed my time in the Windows team the most.

New comment by elankart in "Ask HN: Has anyone here worked on the Windows kernel?"

elankart — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 05:34:10 +0000

I used to work in the Windows team before I moved onto a team in Azure. I’ve contributed to both user and kernel mode components. You’ll work with very smart people and they will be very technical. Hiring bar in the Windows kernel team is very high compared to other teams in the company. You learn a lot. Work life balance will also be great.

The other great part is the sheer amount of engineering that will go into every feature you will own. I say “engineering” because it’ll be different from any services work you have done.

Tools that are at your disposal as part of Windows Core team is top notch.

Good luck! You will not regret this.

New comment by elankart in "Fork() without exec() is dangerous in large programs (2016)"

elankart — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 15:46:02 +0000

Let’s also not forget to call our how APIs have to be “fork” aware. I’m surprised fork is still widely in used given all of these downsides

New comment by elankart in "Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?"

elankart — Sun, 07 Apr 2019 14:36:12 +0000

Unpopular opinion: Windows Phone?