Hacker News: jamesblonde

New comment by jamesblonde in "European AI. A playbook to own it"

jamesblonde — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 22:22:24 +0000

I lead a European owned and operated Data/AI company, Hopsworks. We are the only competitor to Databricks/Snowflake/etc based-in and from Europe. We can still compete, as we have a deep research/industry background (ex-MySQL and KTH folks). Crossing the chasm is harder from here. Even if you build a great product (we are best at real-time AI) - we had a paper at SIGMOD 2024 where we showed higher thoughput/lower latency by a factor of 4-40X Databricks, AWS Sagemaker, and GCP vertex - we lack the echo chamber. (Try the mental exercise where Databricks' peers acknowledge massive over-performance through a peer-reviewed paper and imagine how much noise it would generate). Still, we can replace our competitor at their largest European customer, Zalando, for real-time AI. But it's a much harder slog than it should be due to the 10X lower round sizes (due to 10X smaller VC fund sizes). European pension funds place way more money in US VC funds than in EU VC funds - that is self-defeating.

New comment by jamesblonde in "S3 Files"

jamesblonde — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:41:01 +0000

How could they release something that doesn't support atomic rename and has no prospect of supporting atomic rename? Lots of workloads will crash and burn on this layer.

New comment by jamesblonde in "S3 Files"

jamesblonde — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 05:59:35 +0000

Files can be immutable if you have mutable metadata - but S3 does not have mutable metadata, so you can't rename a directory without a full copy of all its contents.

Immutable files can be solved by chunking them, allowing files to be opened and appended to - we do this in HopsFS. However, random writes are typically not supported in scaleout metadata file systems - but rarely used by POSIX clients, thankfully.

New comment by jamesblonde in "S3 Files"

jamesblonde — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 05:45:41 +0000

We have advanced to building S3 stores with claude code - impressive:

https://github.com/fractalbits-labs/fractalbits-main/graphs/...

New comment by jamesblonde in "S3 Files"

jamesblonde — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 05:06:56 +0000

S3 Files was launched today without support for atomic rename. This is not something you can bolt on. Can you imagine running Claude Code on your S3 Files and it just wants to do a little house cleaning, renaming a directory and suddenly a full copy is needed for every file in that directory?

The hardest part in building a distributed filesystem is atomic rename. It's always rename. Scalable metadata file systems, like Collosus/Tectonic/ADLSv2/HopsFS, are either designed around how to make rename work at scale* or how work around it at higher levels in the stack.

* https://www.hopsworks.ai/post/scalable-metadata-the-new-bree...

New comment by jamesblonde in "The revenge of the data scientist"

jamesblonde — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:56:29 +0000

I say this quite a lot to data scientists who are now building agents:

1. think of the context data as training data for your requests (the LLM performs in-context learning based on your provided context data)

2. think of evals as test data to evaluate the performance of your agents. Collect them from agent traces and label them manually. If you want to "train" a LLM to act as a judge to label traces, then again, you will need lots of good quality examples (training data) as the LLM-as-a-Judge does in-context learning as well.

From my book - https://www.amazon.com/Building-Machine-Learning-Systems-Fea...

Real-Time AI Needs Rolling Aggregations

jamesblonde — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 06:27:10 +0000

Article URL: https://www.hopsworks.ai/post/rolling-aggregations-for-real-time-ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47409302

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

"Open" Data/AI Platforms for Increasingly Specialized Compute Engines

jamesblonde — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:59:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.hopsworks.ai/post/data-ai-platforms-should-be-open-for-use-by-increasingly-specialized-compute-engines

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47363893

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jamesblonde in "Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)"

jamesblonde — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:51:00 +0000

There has been a lot of proposals to dam up massive unpopulated sea-facing valleys in Mayo and Donegal and use pumped hydro with seawater. Was a bit topic 15 years ago, but never happened. All that happened was the silvermines pump hydro plant that seems behind schedule.

Prof Igor Shvets was behind this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_Ireland

New comment by jamesblonde in "LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first"

jamesblonde — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 05:39:05 +0000

The reference in the text to Anthropic’s “Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models” is related to RLHF (reinforcement learning with human feedback).

Claude code uses primarily different "pathways" in Anthropic LLMs that were not post-trained with RLHF, but rather with RLVF (reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards).

So, his point about code being produced to please the user isn't valid from where I am sitting.

New comment by jamesblonde in "Nobody ever got fired for using a struct"

jamesblonde — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 07:44:15 +0000

Here is an article I wrote this week with a section on Feldera - how it uses its incremental compute engine to compute "rolling aggregates" (the most important real-time feature for detecting changes in user behavior/pricing/anamalies).

https://www.hopsworks.ai/post/rolling-aggregations-for-real-...

Real-AI needs rolling aggregations and AI won't build them for you

jamesblonde — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:17:57 +0000

Article URL: https://www.hopsworks.ai/post/rolling-aggregations-for-real-time-ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47245009

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jamesblonde in "Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play"

jamesblonde — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 08:09:45 +0000

Another headline would be: Founder saves 10X operational costs by investing time (and with Claude's help) to migrate off AWS.

Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play

jamesblonde — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 08:08:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/20/ditching_aws_euro_stack/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47109261

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by jamesblonde in "European Tech Alternatives"

jamesblonde — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:13:43 +0000

They need to fix the addresses. In Stockholm, all of the companies are placed in the old town. At Hopsworks, we are in Sodermalm (hipster) - we are not old school money.

New comment by jamesblonde in "TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe"

jamesblonde — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 19:19:25 +0000

That, too, and materialize. Feldera is my favourite, though.

New comment by jamesblonde in "TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe"

jamesblonde — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:27:26 +0000

I gave a talk at PyData Berlin on how to build your own TikTok recommendation algorithm. The TikTok personalized recommendation engine is the world's most valuable AI. It's TikTok's differentiation. It updates recommendations within 1 second of you clicking - at human perceivable latency. If your AI recommender has poor feature freshness, it will be perceived as slow, not intelligent - no matter how good the recommendations are.

TikTok's recommender is partly built on European Technology (Apache Flink for real-time feature computation), along with Kafka, and distributed model training infrastructure. The Monolith paper is misleading that the 'online training' is key. It is not. It is that your clicks are made available as features for predicitons in less than 1 second. You need a per-event stream processing architecture for this (like Flink - Feldera would be my modern choice as an incremental streaming engine).

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skZ1HcF7AsM

* Monolith paper - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.07663

Vibe Migrating off SaaS >1k Pages and Losing 80% of our traffic

jamesblonde — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:19:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.hopsworks.ai/post/vibe-migrating-1k-pages-and-losing-80-percent-of-our-traffic

Hacker News: jamesblonde

New comment by jamesblonde in "European AI. A playbook to own it"

New comment by jamesblonde in "S3 Files"

New comment by jamesblonde in "S3 Files"

New comment by jamesblonde in "S3 Files"

New comment by jamesblonde in "S3 Files"

New comment by jamesblonde in "The revenge of the data scientist"

Real-Time AI Needs Rolling Aggregations

"Open" Data/AI Platforms for Increasingly Specialized Compute Engines

New comment by jamesblonde in "Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)"

New comment by jamesblonde in "LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first"

New comment by jamesblonde in "Nobody ever got fired for using a struct"

Real-AI needs rolling aggregations and AI won't build them for you

New comment by jamesblonde in "Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play"

Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play

New comment by jamesblonde in "European Tech Alternatives"

New comment by jamesblonde in "TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe"

New comment by jamesblonde in "TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe"

Vibe Migrating off SaaS >1k Pages and Losing 80% of our traffic

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

Nukeproof: Manifesto for European Data Sovereignty