Hacker News: oldsj

New comment by oldsj in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2026)"

oldsj — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 19:53:18 +0000

Location: Remote (US)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Go, TypeScript, Terraform, Kubernetes, GCP, AWS, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Dagster, LLMs/AI tooling (Pydantic AI, Langfuse, Qdrant)

Résumé/CV: https://blog.jamesolds.me/james-olds-resume.pdf

Email: james + hn @ oldsmail . com

GitHub: https://github.com/oldsj

Blog: https://blog.jamesolds.me/

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Full Stack / Platform Engineer, previously at Trail of Bits.

Recent focus: Designed entire K8s infrastructure with secure best practices and Tailscale for intranet connectivity to self hosted services - supporting the team that placed 2nd at AIxCC DEF CON 2025. Built out multiple full-stack apps with Svelte, Tailwind CSS, Typescript, Python.

Currently building https://github.com/oldsj/mainloop so that I can more quickly build https://understanding.news, a reasoning layer for political news and comments.

Looking for: Full-stack AI native product development roles or Platform Engineering roles. Full time or contract

New comment by oldsj in "Build Software. Build Users"

oldsj — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 22:18:20 +0000

I think we’re slightly better than random at this point

New comment by oldsj in "Build Software. Build Users"

oldsj — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 14:38:03 +0000

I like the idea. As a solo dev I've experimented with creating Claude subagents for multiple perspectives for "team leads" and will run ideas through them (in parallel). The subagents are just simple markdown explaining the various perspectives that are usually in contention when designing stuff. And a 'decider' that gives me an executive summary.

  agents/
    |-- customer-expert.md - validates problem assumptions, customer reality
    |-- design-lead.md - shapes solution concepts, ensures UX quality
    |-- growth-expert.md - competitive landscape, positioning, distribution
    |-- technical-expert.md - assesses feasibility, identifies technical risks
    |-- decider-advisor.md - synthesizes perspectives, executive analysis

New comment by oldsj in "Kubernetes egress control with squid proxy"

oldsj — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:07:05 +0000

I’ve been working on running agents (Claude agent sdk) on k8s this looks great to control their egress

New comment by oldsj in "I am a factory worker now"

oldsj — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:54:12 +0000

I'm just glad it can run async of my main thread now, so I can spawn other agents for more interesting things

I am a factory worker now

oldsj — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 15:37:32 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.jamesolds.me/post/factory-worker/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46326952

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

Building a (useful) voice assistant I can call from my watch

oldsj — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 18:52:24 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.jamesolds.me/post/voice-assistant-watch/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45685380

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

You Are the Main Thread

oldsj — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 14:40:02 +0000

Article URL: https://claudelog.com/mechanics/you-are-the-main-thread/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44377889

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by oldsj in "Show HN: Poozle – open-source Plaid for LLMs"

oldsj — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 16:03:54 +0000

This looks excellent and very timely. We just started hand rolling our own ETL process with Python and Github Actions to ingest from various SaaS sources to a central DB for context to LLM(s) and traditional BI tools.

Speaking of Plaid, would love to see an integration there for personal finance

Evaluating Kubernetes Development Tooling

oldsj — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 17:50:27 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.jamesolds.me/post/evaluating-kubernetes-dev-tooling/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32359478

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by oldsj in "Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation"

oldsj — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 15:09:55 +0000

> Imagine spending a lot of time and money picking out the best possible gear for a hobby before actually starting the hobby.

Are you kidding me that's my favorite part!

New comment by oldsj in "Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?"

oldsj — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 14:49:15 +0000

I think there's something to this and have been thinking about this for a while too. Just today tried to see if diff.me was available, sadly it's not.

I was thinking something like a git repo with a flat file in it. You list your beliefs / opinions / things you think are facts in a structured way (maybe a tree like structure) going all the way back to some "root". Then you can easily diff this file with someone else and see where you agree and differ. Changing someone's mind could just be a pull request :)

New comment by oldsj in "Show HN: Dockerized – Run CLI tools without installation"

oldsj — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 19:45:06 +0000

You can pass in the current user’s uid/gid as an environment variable check out linuxserver images for an example https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/unifi-controller

New comment by oldsj in "My smart home 2021: A Home Assistant love story"

oldsj — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 20:12:05 +0000

Same setup here. Love using z-wave as a standard and then bridging everything over to Homekit for siri / phone control center access

New comment by oldsj in "Exploiting IndexedDB API information leaks in Safari 15"

oldsj — Sat, 15 Jan 2022 17:22:25 +0000

Edge is just Chromium now https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-edge-chrome-chromiu...

Test-Driven Management [pdf]

oldsj — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 13:58:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.industriallogic.com/papers/tdm.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25645542

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by oldsj in "Did Apple build MagSafe so that cases can “stick” to the new iPhones?"

oldsj — Sun, 18 Oct 2020 00:30:57 +0000

Same with the Smart Cover! I recently just found this out too, I can stick my iPad on the side of the fridge and plug it in and have a nice smart screen for family calendars, Siri / whatever

New comment by oldsj in "Literate DevOps"

oldsj — Sun, 30 Aug 2020 18:01:37 +0000

It depends on your scale of course. It’s not like “the industry” just wants to make things complicated for the fun of it. There comes a point where you’ll need more than one server to host your web app and when you do Kubernetes provides a nice abstraction in addition to providing a ton of other useful things at scale like infrastructure as code to zero downtime, continuous deployments.

New comment by oldsj in "Show HN: Using Rust to write shell-script like tasks"

oldsj — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 18:34:45 +0000

I’ve been playing with xonsh lately and really liking it so far! From what I can tell it’s pretty close to feature parity with fish shell which has a lot of nice things like command auto completion but you don’t have to learn yet another shell syntax it’s just python. Wrote up a quick trip report at https://blog.jamesolds.me/post/xonsh-aws-example/

New comment by oldsj in "US Border Patrol says they can create central repository of traveler emails"

oldsj — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 17:35:04 +0000

This is the present day experience of wiping an iPhone and restoring it from iCloud. It’s really that simple, but in general it’s unencrypted