Hacker News: nikhilsimha

New comment by nikhilsimha in "ATProto for Distributed Systems Engineers"

nikhilsimha — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:29:32 +0000

Shameless plug, we built Chronon to solve a very similar problem. Chronon is now open source (apache 2) and used at Netflix, OpenAI, Airbnb, Stripe etc.

It is used to serve features/context to ML/AI models and rule engines, along with app views.

We are more scale and perf oriented as project given the use-cases and less decentralization oriented.

We also ship with a dataframe / prql like declarative api.

[1] https://chronon.ai

New comment by nikhilsimha in "Andy Pavlo joins ClickHouse to establish ClickHouse Labs"

nikhilsimha — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:22:48 +0000

Congrats! Andy is incredible!

New comment by nikhilsimha in "Benchmarking Opus 5 on SlopCodeBench"

nikhilsimha — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:24:17 +0000

the last note about the agent sending emails without approvals is a very common problem!

New comment by nikhilsimha in "A way to exclude sensitive files issue still open for OpenAI Codex"

nikhilsimha — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 15:01:09 +0000

Files that codex and any other coding agent has access to, should be opt-in NOT opt-out. I think codex is not the right layer to solve this if you want a sane(one-click) UX. We built our own internal sandboxing-terminal around claude and codex. Where a user-configured base-folder with low-risk code and creds is COPIED into the sandbox BEFORE new session creation. There were many other UX related reasons to build our own terminal. Can share more if anyone is interested.

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

nikhilsimha — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 04:00:04 +0000

It is very common to find tables with 1000+ columns in machine learning training sets at e-commerce companies. The largest I have seen had over 10000 columns.

New comment by nikhilsimha in "Qwen3.5: Towards Native Multimodal Agents"

nikhilsimha — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 04:28:09 +0000

easily the most memorable comment i have ever seen on hackernews so far. kudos good sir!

New comment by nikhilsimha in "Meditation as Wakeful Relaxation: Unclenching Smooth Muscle"

nikhilsimha — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 20:47:40 +0000

usually when a sharp sensation arises in an area, there is a habitual tendency to counteract - unconsciously tense surrounding muscles or antagonistic muscles or switch posture etc.

the idea is to observe with clarity the counteraction and let the sharp sensation arise and pass without the counteraction/resistance.

New comment by nikhilsimha in "Some thoughts on autoregressive models"

nikhilsimha — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 02:28:25 +0000

Not saying that our current approaches will lead to intelligence. No one can know.

It could very well be that the internal mechanism of our thought has an auto-regressive reasoning component.

With the full system effectively "combining" short term memory (what just happened) and "pruned" long-term memory (what relevant things i know from the past) and pushing that into a RAW autoregressive reasoning component.

It is also possible that another specialized auto regressive reasoning component is driving the "prune" and "combine" operations. This whole system could be solely represented in the larger network.

The argument that "intelligence cannot be auto-regressive" seems to be without basis to me.

> there is strong evidence that not all thinking is linguistic or sequential.

It is possible that a system wrapping a core auto-regressive reasoner can produce non-sequential thinking - even if you don't allow for weight updates.

New comment by nikhilsimha in "F-strings for C++26 proposal [pdf]"

nikhilsimha — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 23:48:19 +0000

just skimmed the proposal, dont see how inline rendered f-strings are more complicated than the alternative.

New comment by nikhilsimha in "Feldera Incremental Compute Engine"

nikhilsimha — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 16:50:11 +0000

gotcha! thanks for the clarification

New comment by nikhilsimha in "Feldera Incremental Compute Engine"

nikhilsimha — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 16:12:09 +0000

So the writes are O(N) then - to keeps reads at O(1)?

New comment by nikhilsimha in "Feldera Incremental Compute Engine"

nikhilsimha — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 19:06:06 +0000

dumb question: how do z-sets or feldera deal with updates to values that were incorporated into the max already?

For example - max over {4, 5} is 5. Now I update the 5 to a 3, so the set becomes {4, 3} with a max of 4. This seems to imply that the z-sets would need to store ALL the values - again, in their internal state.

Also there needs to be some logic somewhere that says that the data structure for updating values in a max aggregation needs to be a heap. Is that all happening somewhere?

New comment by nikhilsimha in "Functional languages should be so much better at mutation than they are"

nikhilsimha — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 03:49:35 +0000

i personally like nim’s approach to memory management - implicitly refcounted, but exposes clean manual memory management when needed

New comment by nikhilsimha in "Maestro: Netflix's Workflow Orchestrator"

nikhilsimha — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 02:22:06 +0000

great job on open sourcing!

New comment by nikhilsimha in "Chinese AI stirs panic at European geoscience society"

nikhilsimha — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 02:05:08 +0000

publicly funded research, but behind paywalls, was scraped to build the chatbot - by “china” not open ai, causes “people” to lose their s**t.

i do think ip infringement is not cool in general - but it doesnt seem right that geo research is private property.

New comment by nikhilsimha in "Pg_lakehouse: A DuckDB Alternative in Postgres"

nikhilsimha — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 02:47:25 +0000

duckdb is mit licensed. [1]

datafusion is apache v2 licensed. [2]

pg_lakehouse built on top of data fusion is AGPL v3 + business licensed. [3]

[1] https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/blob/main/LICENSE

[2] https://github.com/apache/datafusion/blob/main/LICENSE.txt

[3] https://github.com/paradedb/paradedb/blob/dev/LICENSE

Most companies won't touch AGPL v3 license. Maybe not a bad thing, but FYI.

New comment by nikhilsimha in "The search for easier safe systems programming"

nikhilsimha — Wed, 08 May 2024 13:15:18 +0000

Nim?

New comment by nikhilsimha in "Chronon, Airbnb's ML feature platform, is now open source"

nikhilsimha — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 22:11:34 +0000

almost every button click is either powered by a model or guarded by a model.

New comment by nikhilsimha in "Chronon, Airbnb's ML feature platform, is now open source"

nikhilsimha — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 22:10:50 +0000

We don't accept hints yet - but we determine what to cache.

New comment by nikhilsimha in "Chronon, Airbnb's ML feature platform, is now open source"

nikhilsimha — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 22:10:16 +0000

To be pedantic, even in star schema - the dim tables are denormalized, fact tables are not.

I agree that my statement would be much better if used snowflake schema instead.