Hacker News: grandimam

New comment by grandimam in "Ask HN: How do you know if you have a product problem or a distribution one?"

grandimam — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 21:11:32 +0000

My heuristics is that the first 100 users are almost always a distribution problem. If you do not have 100 users using your product extensively, and you see a retention drop there is no way you can conclude anything else.

The reason why I take this approach is that - I have had personal experience building tools that didn't go anywhere, and same tools built by people with some online following gaining good traction. It could simply be a case of anecdotal experience, but distribution has always been harder for the tools I have built.

Ask HN: How to build an audience as a software engineer?

grandimam — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 22:02:27 +0000

I am a software engineer, and I have recently started writing more publicly about Python, backend systems, frameworks, and things I have learned while building open-source projects.

The problem I am trying to figure out is distribution.

I am building things, writing in public, but publishing them into the void, is not creating an audience of any kind. For someone who have successfully built an audience around their technical work:

- Which platforms have actually worked? X or LinkedIn or Youtube? - What would you do if you were starting today?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413063

Points: 1

# Comments: 4

New comment by grandimam in "Thinking in Python"

grandimam — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 07:31:24 +0000

I had created something along the same lines - a platform for devs to understand Python deeply, and was trying to see if there was a market for such content. The thing that I realised is that even with AI, there has to be distribution available for things like this to gain traction.

New comment by grandimam in "Does Python still need to be async-first?"

grandimam — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 07:23:28 +0000

> each thread has non-trivial overhead.

Agreed. But I am not proposing a thread-per request model. The model will most likely be a fixed pool of workers, potentially combined with multiple processes, an M x N model.

I also agree that co-routines are cheaper than OS threads if the application itself is mostly waiting for network I/O. My question is what happens the moment the workload isn't purely I/O bound.

Right now, the solution seems to be an escape hatch where CPU-bound work is executed behind a thread-pool - see FastAPI or Starlette for example.

With free-threaded Python, I am interested in whether a framework can instead own that complexity: application code remains synchronous or async-partially (at the main thread).

> Removing GIL has nothing to do with that

It doesn't make network I/O faster, agreed. But, the more interesting consequence of removing the GIL is that with threads we can actually parallelise for CPU-bound Python code which earlier required multi-processor.

> How is it different from Flask or Django

This is probably the most important question. It's still in beta, so a lot of things can change. But simply put that Flask/Django lets one write sync code but do not provide the execution model I am describing. Concurrency is supplied at the server layer - gunicorn workers, etc.

The thesis that I am proposing is a framework runtime where concurrency and parallelism are first-class primitives. Now, that free-threaded makes threads capable of CPU parallelism can the framework own the concurrency and parallelism while application code stays async.

Does Python still need to be async-first?

grandimam — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 15:23:52 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.grandimam.com/posts/does-python-still-need-to-be-async-first/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49400709

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by grandimam in "Ask HN: What is your favorite lightweight tool or CLI utility in 2026?"

grandimam — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:03:29 +0000

Suki - https://github.com/grandimam/suki

It's something that i built for myself. I am interested in the topic of building expertise, and spend a lot of time reading books. After a certain I realised that I needed resources that was very specific to my use case and current skill level rather than something that was static.

Suki allows me to build that curriculum, and probes progressively to help me build a real mental model.

Show HN: Personal AI tutor that builds and probes your understanding

grandimam — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:04:38 +0000

I used to learn from books and courses. But I kept realising I hadn't built a real mental model. I always needed an LLM on the side to fill in what the books skipped. So, I stopped using books as my direct source of truth and started using LLMs itself: to design the curriculum and probe whether I understood the topic.

Suki - it's opensource. Given a topic it builds a curriculum from beginner to advanced, then probes your understanding chapter by chapter.

Link - https://github.com/grandimam/suki

Let me know what you guys think about it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337613

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by grandimam in "Being a senior can get you fired early"

grandimam — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 23:04:59 +0000

Thank you. I updated the title. Apologies, it was something I didn't realise.

Being a senior can get you fired early

grandimam — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:35:19 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.grandimam.com/posts/distorted-reality/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49250821

Points: 4

# Comments: 3

New comment by grandimam in "Python Parallel Testing Library"

grandimam — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:38:07 +0000

Why not build it on free-threaded python?

Ask HN: When did we go from agentic loops to graphs?

grandimam — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 17:23:54 +0000

The AI engineering conversation seems to be shifting daily: from prompts, loops, to now graphs.

I’m curious whether there is genuine progress happening in the field that has given me so much or whether folks are creating terminology because they want to feel closer to action or be able to say they predicted the next big thing.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49136426

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

Ask HN: Stop Looking at Code?

grandimam — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 20:58:31 +0000

There is a recent trend in tech where software development is being done by not looking at code but merely the output.

Some of the recent examples include the Bun Rust migration, etc. I wanted to understand both from startup’s and experienced individuals how do you see the trend, are we really moving towards a workflow where we simply optimize the loop or graph and code is merely an artifact this is produced as part of this workflow similar to bytecode or something?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49102999

Points: 3

# Comments: 9

Show HN: Opensource resume evaluation LLM agents

grandimam — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:32:03 +0000

Hyre turns a resume PDF into markdown, runs it through an LLM pipeline for layout analysis, data extraction, and scoring. It then evaluates a score for the resume.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49072939

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Show HN: Experimental freshness-first caching library for FastAPI

grandimam — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:46:32 +0000

Hi folk,

I am working on a small experimental freshness-first caching library and wanted some design feedback. before i take it further.

Instead of wiring up invalidations by hand, the cache would watch your function by hand and cache should automatically infer the behavior and keep the data fresh.

Code: https://github.com/grandimam/zinda

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027808

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by grandimam in "Kimi Work"

grandimam — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:59:02 +0000

Is there an opensource version of such a tool. I would really like a desktop app and use different models instead of a CLI.

New comment by grandimam in "Ask HN: Are Rust migrations delivering any benefits?"

grandimam — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:31:57 +0000

> But you can get the most benefit by structuring your code in a way that forces its correctness to be validated at compile-time

Can you elaborate this more?

Ask HN: Are Rust migrations delivering any benefits?

grandimam — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:55:06 +0000

There seems to be a growing trend of rewriting everything to Rust. The common argument seems to be surrounding safety and better concurrency.

I wanted to understand if I am the only one that finds the language hard to understand (primarily it's time system). Am I missing out on something that everyone including junior engineers seems to have figured out.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48982318

Points: 4

# Comments: 4

New comment by grandimam in "6× faster batched binary search in Rust"

grandimam — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 18:01:09 +0000

Interesting! I wonder how much of this improvement is actually due to Rust. I suspect implementing the same approach in C would produce similar results. The speedup seems hardware-level optimizations than the language itself.

HackerRank's LLM-Based Hiring Agent

grandimam — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 16:55:18 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.grandimam.com/posts/how-hacker-rank-scores-engineers/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873620

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Inside HackerRank's LLM-based Hiring Agent

grandimam — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 07:43:55 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.grandimam.com/posts/how-hacker-rank-scores-engineers/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48869737

Points: 1

# Comments: 0