<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: nicodjimenez</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nicodjimenez</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:26:03 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=nicodjimenez" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Part of what makes Hendrix's live performances so great is how completely unreproducible they are. Even Jimi himself could never recreate that one note sustain when he begins the solo on Machine Gun. To re-create it, you'd have to set the room up exactly the same, tune the guitar exactly the same, position the guitar relative to amps exactly the same, etc. So Hendrix being very sensitive and connected to the room was able to harness that energy into something unique that stands the test of time. Machine Gun is well known, but his Red House performance at Randall's Island also stands out to me as exceptional, those are the 2 key Hendrix performances. I read somewhere that Miles Davis was really impressed by Machine Gun and you can see why.<p>One thing I learned after buying some gear at home to try to record electric guitar at low volume is how important the physics of the speakers are. You can plug a tube amp into a cabinet simulator and you'll lose a lot more than using solid state electronics on a good but not great Fender amp, especially if you use fuzz / distortion pedals.<p>I'm not sure Hendrix was a systems engineer, but he was a transcendent blues artist, that's for sure.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Feb 2026 16:39:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47168410</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47168410</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47168410</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>great article and many great points here</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 28 Jan 2026 16:18:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46797348</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46797348</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46797348</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "Welcome to Gas Town"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What I dislike about Claude code and vibe coding in general is that I haven’t seen Claude code users learn a whole lot about how to do their jobs better. A terminal pane is just too small to be a good place to learn.<p>With vibe coding you just give the code some constraints and then system will try to work within those constraints, but what if those constraints are wrong? What if you’re asking the wrong question? Then you’ll end up with over complicated slop.<p>It’s a shame that vibe coded slop seems to be a new standard, when in fact you can use AI tools to produce much higher quality code if you actually care to engage in thoughtful conversations with the AIs and take a growth mindset.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2026 11:02:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46510918</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46510918</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46510918</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "Microservices should form a polytree"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My main take on microservices at this point is that you only want microservices to isolate failure modes and for independent scaling. Most IO bound logic can live in a single monolith.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2025 17:35:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46246426</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46246426</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46246426</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "Microservices should form a polytree"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This seems completely wrong. In an RPC call you have a trivial loop, for example.<p>It would make more sense to say that the event tree should not have any cycles, but anyway this seems like a silly point to make.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2025 17:33:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46246406</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46246406</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46246406</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "Go's Sweet 16"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Microservices in Golang are definitely related to classes due to the ergonomic aspects of a language. It takes a lot of discipline in Golang not to end up with huge flat functions. Golang services are easier to reason about when they are small due to the lack of abstractions, also Golang is very quick to compile, so its natural to just add services to extend functionality. Code re-use is just a lot of work in Golang. Golang is not monolith friendly IMO.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Nov 2025 23:43:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45941496</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45941496</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45941496</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "Go's Sweet 16"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The solution to bad abstractions it not to make it very difficult to create abstractions at all. For systems code I think it's fine but for application code you probably want some abstractions or else it's very hard to scale a codebase.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Nov 2025 17:23:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938966</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938966</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938966</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "Go's Sweet 16"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Golang to me is a great runtime and very poor language. I could maybe get used to the C pointer-like syntax and to half of my code checking if err != nil, but the lack of classes is a step too far. The Golang idiomatic approach is to have a sprawling set of microservices talking to each other over the network, to manage complexity instead of having classes. This makes sense for things like systems agents (eg K8) but doesn't make sense for most applications because it complicates the development experience unnecessarily and monoliths are also easier to debug.<p>I would not use Golang for a big codebase with lots of business logic. Golang has not made a dent in Java usage at big companies, no large company is going to try replacing their Java codebases with Golang because there's no benefit, Java is almost as fast as Golang and has classes and actually has a richer set of concurrency primitives.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Nov 2025 02:14:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45934461</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45934461</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45934461</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "I hate screenshots of text"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Note that Mathpix Snip can quickly convert such screen shots to markdown code via keyboard shortcut. Disclaimer: I’m the founder.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Nov 2025 02:13:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45883384</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45883384</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45883384</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "Populism Fast and Slow"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are only two political systems at the end of the day: authoritarianism (everyone knows who is in charge) and oligarchy. Populism, in a liberal democracy, is basically authoritarianism-lite representing the interests of a particular faction of oligarchs. There's no "populism" in China, that's an American & European invention. Populism is ugly but it's a useful tool that can get things done in an oligarchy.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Oct 2025 01:26:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45689676</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45689676</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45689676</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What kind of codebases do you work on if you don't mind me asking?<p>I've found a huge boost from using AI to deal with APIs (databases, k8s, aws, ...) but less so on large codebases that needed conceptual improvements. But at worst, i'm getting more than 10% benefit, just cause the AI's can read files so quickly and answer questions and propose reasonable ideas.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Sep 2025 02:05:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45088793</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45088793</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45088793</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "Do Things That Don't Scale (2013)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The most important piece ever written about startups, probably. Applicable to doing anything new.<p>For startups, the devil's in the details though. The goal is to scale but you get there by doing things that don't scale successively.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 15 Aug 2025 18:26:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44915844</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44915844</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44915844</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "Launch HN: Reducto Studio (YC W24) – Build accurate document pipelines, fast"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For accurate and easy PDF to Markdown / LaTeX / JSON check out:<p><a href="https://github.com/mathpix/mpxpy">https://github.com/mathpix/mpxpy</a><p>Disclaimer: I'm the founder. Reducto does cool stuff on post processing (and other input formats), but some people have told me Mathpix is better at just getting data out of PDFs accurately.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Jun 2025 18:43:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44358742</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44358742</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44358742</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I tend to agree with this. These days I usually use LLMs to learn about something new or to help me generate client code for common APIs (especially boto3 these days). I tried Windsurf to help me make basic changes to my docker compose files, but when it couldn't even do that correctly, I lost a little enthusiasm. I'm sure it can build a working prototype of a small web app but that's not enough for me.<p>For me LLMs are a game changer for devops (API knowledge is way less important now that it's even been) but I'm still doing copy pasting from ChatGPT, however primitive it may seem.<p>Fundamentally I don't think it's a good idea to outsource your thinking to a bot unless it's truly better than you at long term decision making.  If you're still the decision maker, then you probably want to make the final call as to what the interfaces should look like. I've definitely had good experiences carefully defining object oriented interfaces (eg for interfacing with AWS) and having LLMs fill in the implementation details but I'm not sure that's "vibe coding" per se.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 May 2025 11:25:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44004040</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44004040</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44004040</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "PDF to Text, a challenging problem"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Check out mathpix.com. We handle complex tables, complex math, diagrams, rotated tables, and much more, extremely accurately.<p>Disclaimer: I'm the founder.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 13 May 2025 18:48:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43976281</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43976281</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43976281</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "Mistral OCR"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks for the kind words. What are some of the annoying issues?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Mar 2025 21:22:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43285190</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43285190</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43285190</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "Mistral OCR"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can get bounding boxes from our pdf api at Mathpix.com<p>Disclaimer, I’m the founder</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Mar 2025 18:28:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43283420</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43283420</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43283420</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "Why LLMs still have problems with OCR"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Check out mathpix.com we have a hybrid approach towards OCR that features accurate layout understanding (with accurate bounding boxes) plus accurate OCR outputs.<p>Disclaimer: I'm the founder and CEO.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Feb 2025 21:14:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42977562</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42977562</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42977562</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "How to scale your model: A systems view of LLMs on TPUs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Shameless request for help: if anybody has experience with seq2seq on TPU, and you want to do a cool project to deploy a world class Pytorch image parsing model to TPU (and do this quickly), please contact me immediately for a well paid and interesting job opportunity at nico [at] mathpix.com.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Feb 2025 21:43:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42939260</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42939260</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42939260</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nicodjimenez in "Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Agreed, something simpler than Nomad as well hopefully.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 24 Nov 2024 21:46:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42230914</link><dc:creator>nicodjimenez</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42230914</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42230914</guid></item></channel></rss>