Hacker News: kolja005

New comment by kolja005 in "AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it"

kolja005 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:43:17 +0000

This is an interesting perspective I haven't heard before. Do you have links to anyone who has articulated this further?

New comment by kolja005 in "The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it"

kolja005 — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 21:50:42 +0000

Think about what the implication here is for people who answered no to that question. If I were to go up to my boss and say "I'm not interested using AI because I think it's bad for society" I would essentially be saying that I'm not interested in becoming more productive and thus making more money for the company. That's a very poor reputation to be carrying around and most people are going to avoid it. I believe that this, more than any specific actions by AI companies, has contributed to the sense of inevitability that this technology is taking over whether we want it or not.

New comment by kolja005 in "Google releases Gemma 4 open models"

kolja005 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 23:43:51 +0000

I would be inclined to agree with this except that my "most common needs" keeps expanding and increasing in difficulty each year. In 2023 and 2024, most of my needs were asking models simple questions and getting a response. They were a drop-in replacement for Stack Overflow. I think the best open source models today that I can run on my laptop serve that need.

Now that coding agents are a thing my frame of reference has shifted to where I now consider a model that can be that my most common need. And unfortunately open models today cannot do that reliably. They might, like you said, be able to in a year or two, but by then the cloud models will have a new capability that I will come to regard as a basic necessity for doing software development.

All that said this looks like a great release and I'm looking forward to playing around with it.

New comment by kolja005 in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

kolja005 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:19:22 +0000

I just refactored a bunch of our microservices into a monolith. Fortunately the business justification was pretty straightforward because it was clear to all of us that the service architecture was weighing us down.

Since one of microservice's benefits is solving a coordination problem, now that teams are getting smaller due to AI, I wonder if we will see monoliths make a resurgence in some cases.

New comment by kolja005 in "Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)"

kolja005 — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 03:38:30 +0000

>Since the database is used by everyone, it becomes cared for by no one. Startups don’t have the luxury of a DBA, and everything owned by no one is owned by infrastructure eventually.

This post was a great read.

Tangent to this, I've always found "best practices" to be a bit of a misnomer. In most cases in software and especially devops I have found it means "pay for this product that constrains the way that you do things so you don't shoot yourself in the foot". It's not really a "practice" if you're using a product that gives you one way to do something. That said my company uses a very similar tech stack and I would choose the same one if I was starting a company tomorrow, despite the fact that, as others have mentioned, it's a ton to keep in your head all at once.

New comment by kolja005 in "OpenClaw is changing my life"

kolja005 — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 07:51:09 +0000

My company has the github page for it blocked. They block lots of AI-related things but that's the only one I've seen where they straight up blocked viewing the source code for it at work.

New comment by kolja005 in "Show HN: difi – A Git diff TUI with Neovim integration (written in Go)"

kolja005 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:38:09 +0000

Hey pretty cool! I recently added a similar feature to my neovim setup. I can press a keymap and cycle through all of the unstaged git hunks with each shown in a preview window. I can also change the base branch to one that, say, I'm trying to merge into so that I can have the same workflow when doing code reviews.

New comment by kolja005 in "GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT"

kolja005 — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:31:33 +0000

People like to make fun of these models for sounding like a broken record, being over complementary, etc, but I'm actually starting to think that models having a very recognizable style is a good thing because it makes identifying AI-generated content in the wild really easy. Sure, the verbosity is annoying when I'm just trying to get a straightforward, simple answer from it. But I like that I can have a pretty good sense of when content on the Internet is low-effort AI spam. If models become too good at emulating the personality of a real human, then that gets lost.

New comment by kolja005 in "MinIO stops distributing free Docker images"

kolja005 — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 16:23:01 +0000

What are folks doing who were just using it for CI/test/dev environments? Just build the image yourself? Use Garage as some have suggested? I'm curious what people see as the pros and cons.

New comment by kolja005 in "Maru OS – Use your phone as your PC"

kolja005 — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 01:35:35 +0000

This is pretty neat. Similarly, I feel like we are really close to smartwatches being able to replace smartphones for all essential tasks. I try to rely on my apple watch with cellular as much as I can and leave my phone at home. I can't wait until agents get a bit better at navigating the web and someone makes a killer UI for the watch. I'll be able to do everything I need to do with a much more ambient device that doesn't suck attention the way a smartphone does.

New comment by kolja005 in "OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google"

kolja005 — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 23:58:17 +0000

Funny to see this today.

I'm a rank and file dev at a non-big tech company and I got a call from a Windsurf sales rep this week who I had connected with on LinkedIn the day before (I never gave them my number). They told me my company was in talks with Windsurf about a licensing deal but that they would give me a 30 day trial of an enterprise account for use on personal projects to let me try it in advance. I guess the idea for them is to build enthusiasm among devs in the company?

Is this a standard sales strategy for products like this? It seems pretty aggressive to me but I'm just an engineer so I wouldn't know.

New comment by kolja005 in "99 Bottles of OOP now available in Python"

kolja005 — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 07:20:08 +0000

As it pertains to Python in particular I think OOP is great for libraries but of limited usefulness at the application layer. Things like pytorch's nn.module IMO is a great abstraction, but every time I've tried to map some concrete business concept to an OOP construct I've regretted it.

New comment by kolja005 in "Non-elementary group-by aggregations in Polars vs pandas"

kolja005 — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 07:10:03 +0000

Do we work at the same company?

You put it much better than I could have. Do you know if polars at all solves the problem of having opaque, mutable objects everywhere? I feel like there's a good market for having a dataframe library that's easier to reason about in your editor. It could even be a wrapper around pandas that adds rich typing sort of the way FastAPI does with Pydantic for Starlette.

New comment by kolja005 in "Using uv with PyTorch"

kolja005 — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 06:55:53 +0000

I recently watched a talk by the author of uv that was surprisingly fascinating [1]. He goes into a few of the more notable hacks that they had to come up with to make it as fast as it is. The most interesting thing for me was that package resolution in python given constraints defined (eg. in requirements.txt) maps to a boolean satisfiability problem which is NP-complete. So uv uses a custom SAT solver to do this. I totally under-appreciated how much goes into this software and I'm bummed I have to use Poetry at work after having watched this talk.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSKTfG1GXYQ

edit: NP-complete not NP-hard

New comment by kolja005 in "Good Software Development Habits"

kolja005 — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 06:36:28 +0000

Unrelated but does anyone have any recommendations for good resources on learning how to write tests/testable software?

New comment by kolja005 in "Non-elementary group-by aggregations in Polars vs pandas"

kolja005 — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 02:01:59 +0000

Does anyone have a good heuristic for when a dataframe library is a good tool choice? I work on a team that has a lot of data scientists and a few engineers (including myself) and I often see the data scientists using dataframes when simple python classes would be much more appropriate so that you have a better sense of the object you're working with. I'm been having a hard time getting this idea across to people though.

New comment by kolja005 in "Evaluate Markdown code blocks within Vim"

kolja005 — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 05:00:59 +0000

Related: I found out about a vim/neovim plugin called Molten[1] that tries to be a replacement for Jupyter Notebooks in the terminal. It was a little rough around the edges ~5 months ago when I tried it, but looking at the repo it seems its still being actively developed, so maybe that's changed. IIRC it uses an ipynb server to keep track of each cell's outputs. I quite enjoyed using it as someone who doesn't need notebooks very often and loathes leaving my terminal setup.

[1] https://github.com/benlubas/molten-nvim

New comment by kolja005 in "Ask HN: What is happening in tech unrelated to AI?"

kolja005 — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 20:36:45 +0000

Is there a lot of innovation happening in this space for military applications? I ask this as someone totally unfamiliar with the technology in general. It seems like it could greatly benefit pilots, people on the battlefield, and anyone else who needs access to some kind of visual information while still having both of their hands.

New comment by kolja005 in "Some Go web dev notes"

kolja005 — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 17:46:06 +0000

I'm curious in what sense you find Python difficult to deploy? My company has tons of Python APIs internally and we never have much trouble with them. They are all pretty lightly used services so it it something about doing it on a larger scale?

New comment by kolja005 in "Is a 'slow' swimming pool impeding world records?"

kolja005 — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 05:11:34 +0000

You might find it interesting to know that for track cycling the penalty due to lower oxygen uptake is less than the advantage due to less air resistance. In other words track cyclists, at least in some of the longer disciplines, will go faster at higher altitudes despite there being less air to breathe.