Hacker News: farazbabar

New comment by farazbabar in "Adding a team was the wrong strategic decision"

farazbabar — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:56:08 +0000

This team does not report to me, I will ensure their demise and make sure their work is never adapted by anyone within my sphere of control. It is easy to justify such behavior behind snazzy terms but I have seen this so many times that it isn't funny. Sometimes leadership may make a decision you may not agree with or even understand but focusing on why it happened, what you can do to align yourself and how you can help product, customer and business succeed are more important than your walled garden of carefully controlled conway conventions. It is right there in your own terminology of tribes, how very tribal.

New comment by farazbabar in "uBlock filter list to hide all YouTube Shorts"

farazbabar — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 05:47:18 +0000

Oh this is great, any ideas on how to do this for Samsung and LG televisions?

New comment by farazbabar in "GPT-5.3-Codex"

farazbabar — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 01:00:59 +0000

I have wanted to hold back from answering comments that ask for proof of real work/productivity gains because everyone works differently, has different skill levels and frankly not everyone is working on world changing stuff. I really liked a comment someone made a few of these posts ago, these models are amazing! amazing! if you don't actually need them, but if you actually do need them, you are going to find yourself in a world of hurt. I cannot agree more, I (believe) I am a good software engineer, I have developed some interesting pieces of software over the decades and usually when I got passionate about a project, I could do really interesting things within weeks, sometimes months. I will say this, I am working on some really cool stuff, stuff I cannot tell you about, or else. And my velocity is for what used to take months is days and hours for what used to take weeks. I still review everything, I understand all the gotchas of distributed systems, performance, latency/throughput, C, java, SQL, data and infra costs, I get all of it so I am able to catch these mofos when they are about to stab me in the back but man! my productivity is through the roof. And I am loving it. Just so I can avoid saying I cannot tell you I am working on, I will start something that I can share soon (as soon as decades of pent up work is done, its probably less than a few months away!). Take it with a grain of salt, and know this, these things are not your friends, they WILL stab you in the back when you least expect them, cut a corner, take a short cut, so you have to be the PHB (dilbert reference!) with actual experience to catch them slacking. Good luck.

New comment by farazbabar in "The future of software development is software developers"

farazbabar — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 14:40:48 +0000

I am good at software. It turns out that isn’t sufficient, or alternatively stated, you have to be good at a number of other things than just churning code, even good code. So to me, the combination of being good at software, understanding complexity and ability articulate it concisely and precisely, when combined with the latest and greatest LLMs, is magic. I know people want to examples of success, I wish I could share what we are working on, but it is unbelievable how much more productive our team is, and I promise, we are solving novel problems, some that have not been tackled yet, at least not in any meaningful way. And I am having time of my life doing what I love, coding. This is not to downplay folks who are having a hard time with LLMs or agents, I think, it’s a skill that you can learn, if you are already good at software and the adjacencies.

New comment by farazbabar in "Here is the 15 sec coding test I used to instantly filter out most applicants"

farazbabar — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 22:16:37 +0000

I like it, a test so bad, it just might work! I think the trick is not the equal sign, trick is to keep it so simple and small that most qualified people will not try to short circuit it.

New comment by farazbabar in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

farazbabar — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:26:31 +0000

That it won't be a revenue generating tech in 10 years.

New comment by farazbabar in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

farazbabar — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:25:23 +0000

Us middle eastern/brown guys have been making a come back?

New comment by farazbabar in "Gemini 3"

farazbabar — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 18:23:45 +0000

https://ai.studio/apps/drive/1yAxMpwtD66vD5PdnOyISiTS2qFAyq1... <- this is very nice, I was able to make seconds smooth with three iterations (it used svg initially which was jittery, but eventually this).

New comment by farazbabar in "The Fancy Rug Dilemma"

farazbabar — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 15:55:59 +0000

Tax schemes are there to save taxes using legalism loopholes, these places are happy to pay the taxes on "cash" purchases to bank the proceeds. Nobody is buying 50K rugs is correct, most of the transactions are self reported for the purpose of paying taxes and depositing funds. IRS and fincen are not in it together, in fact IRS encourages people to pay taxes on ill gotten gains.

New comment by farazbabar in "The Fancy Rug Dilemma"

farazbabar — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 13:31:30 +0000

This is not really Veblen situation. A lot of these are primarily money laundering outfits, the artificially high prices, are simply a means of converting cash into bank deposits. Similar schemes exist in art, sculptures, and jewelry. There are some mom and pop type stores that are legit and some of the money goes to actual artists who make these but the ones in Palo Alto (or similarly unattainable rent neighborhood rug shops), are not that.

New comment by farazbabar in "What went wrong for Yahoo"

farazbabar — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 05:23:29 +0000

I interviewed at yahoo during the tenure of Marissa Meyer and decided not to join after noticing a strange lack of diversity in my interviewers (I saw a similar lack of diversity at Apple Pay much more recently), anytime top level organizations become infested by monocultures, it becomes impossible for progress, new ideas and innovation to take foot. It doesn’t matter which clique or group has infected the organization by giving priority to conformity over diversity, it all ends the same way. This is not a call for institutional DEI, this is about being on the lookout for monocultures in innovative organizations.

New comment by farazbabar in "LLMs should not replace therapists"

farazbabar — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 22:43:45 +0000

They were trained in a large and not insignificant part on reddit content. You only need to look at the kind of advice reddit gives for any kind of relationship questions to know this is asking for trouble.

New comment by farazbabar in "Ask HN: Is ageism in tech still a problem?"

farazbabar — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 16:50:08 +0000

I am a software engineer in his 50s, with stints in big tech, big bank and fintech with domain expertise in payments, risk, performance engineering, and data. In addition I have led global teams of hundreds of engineers with outcomes that have transformed multiple Fortune 500. I have been unemployed for a year and a half with no light at the end of the tunnel. Most of my network of similarly older professionals and C level executives has either retired or suffering similarly. Thankfully I am rich and still getting deferred executive compensation checks from multiple Fortune 500 companies but I am bored and think I have more to offer. I am working on a couple things to allay my boredom, we shall see if something comes of it.

New comment by farazbabar in "Waiting for Postgres 18: Accelerating Disk Reads with Asynchronous I/O"

farazbabar — Wed, 07 May 2025 17:57:17 +0000

Don't forget high speed committed writes to append only tables (the opposite of scans), postgres approach is better here as well.

New comment by farazbabar in "Ask HN: I'm an MIT senior and still unemployed – and so are most of my friends"

farazbabar — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 17:11:17 +0000

I am seeing this in my community as well, it has become nearly impossible for early career folks to find opportunities and it is due to a number of factors. In addition to economy, the fast ramp up of hiring in covid and of course AI, we now have geo-political headwinds in the mix. If you are in this situation, or if you would like to help make a difference, please reach out to me, email is in profile. @Dang, if this is not appropriate, please let me know.

New comment by farazbabar in "War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged"

farazbabar — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 18:17:55 +0000

One of the interesting ones we encountered was in the JDBC driver of our chosen database at the time. Under load, the application core dumped. Mind you this is java, running a native jdbc driver, no JNI in sight. It took some gdb stepping to figure out that under load, the JIT compiler got a little aggressive and inlined a little more code than there was room in the JIT buffer - result? a completely random core dump. Once I did find it, it was a simple matter of increasing JIT buffer size and adding more heap and ram. Tracing assembler generated from byte code generated from java was just part of the issue, the fact that the code itself had nothing to do with the issue is what made it interesting as the buffer size is set in a completely different area by the jvm. Fun times.

New comment by farazbabar in "Purely Functional Sliding Window Aggregation Algorithm"

farazbabar — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 05:11:55 +0000

This is similar to an approach I use but instead of a queue, I accomplish this using a ring buffer that wraps around and overwrites entries older than window size. We maintain a global window aggregate, subtract ring buffer slot aggregate for entries dropping out and accumulate new entries into new slot aggregate while adding it to the global aggregate. Everything is o(1) including reads, which just returns the global window aggregate.

New comment by farazbabar in "A reawakening of systems programming meetups"

farazbabar — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 23:29:02 +0000

I am in phoenix, it is summer right now so things are double dead but even in fall to spring months, I have tried to find tech meetups (my interests are c++, c99, java, distributed systems, data engineering and non generative AIML/infra) and I can’t find any activity in the 5th largest city in US. I have tried to host things myself but only my friends or coworkers showed up, where are my fellow passionates?

New comment by farazbabar in "ASU: The New American University (2021)"

farazbabar — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 07:55:59 +0000

Have you been around lately? There is a safeway on rural road (basically scottsdale rd in tempe).

New comment by farazbabar in "Smartphones wiped out 97% of the compact camera market"

farazbabar — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 18:51:14 +0000

Agree with bokeh: This was taken with a Leica m9 using f0.95 50mm noctilux lens: https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/rennlist.com-vbulletin/2000x133...