Hacker News: pvelagal

New comment by pvelagal in "I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of"

pvelagal — Tue, 19 May 2026 23:12:56 +0000

I loved those solaris machines in our department lab!

New comment by pvelagal in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

pvelagal — Tue, 12 May 2026 02:01:27 +0000

Nice perspective on languages in the AI era. I think AI should be used to build best performing and highly scalable software systems.

New comment by pvelagal in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

pvelagal — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:59:14 +0000

Imagine a situation where AI creates thousands of lines of code in a few repos and there is a Production issue and does get resolved by AI. How can humans jump in and resolve the bug without knowing anything about the code ?

New comment by pvelagal in "Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs"

pvelagal — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:57:46 +0000

He inflated the market on purpose for longer than needed. Every economist was screaming to stop and he also played games during elections by lowering interest rate when it was not needed. This only resulted in rates being higher for longer.

New comment by pvelagal in "Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs"

pvelagal — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:49:27 +0000

All H1B salaries are posted online. First of thats the law. Google , Facebook etc all post salaries of every H1B application. The salaries are always in top 5% of Software engineering salaries. You are making stuff up or ignorant of H1B process.

New comment by pvelagal in "Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs"

pvelagal — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:42:03 +0000

Trump’s EO - 100K H1B applies only to applicants from India, which is what Indian IT companies mainly focus on. Those who are in US or students on F1 visa are exempted and American companies like Amazon or FB or Google hire students or existing H1Bs.

New comment by pvelagal in "Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs"

pvelagal — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:37:20 +0000

Trump's EO is crafted to hurt only Indian IT companies like Infosys, Wipro etc. American companies are more or less excluded from the EO.

New comment by pvelagal in "Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs"

pvelagal — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:32:57 +0000

H1B is used to hire the best talent that gets paid big bucks as well as cheap talent that is paid less. Both are true. It depends on the company.

I haven't seen Google or FB or Amazon or other top tech companies pay H1B any less. They get paid pretty well.

But firing people (some might be on H1B too) and hiring H1B at the same time is meaningless.

Btw, if you want to stop people from getting fired, J Powell needs to be fired. He is keeping interest rates high for any sort of hiring. These same companies hired like crazy during 0% interest rate environment.

New comment by pvelagal in "Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?"

pvelagal — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 23:18:16 +0000

Kids make friends pretty easily when they go to school and later college. Only after graduating college it becomes very hard to make friends.

So one solution is have folks attend classes in schools and universities or even local libraries during weekends. Classes specifically designed for different age groups - 30s, 40s, 50s etc. Classes related music, personal finance, investing, art, sports, cooking etc

Govt should offer tax breaks for attending these classes. That would attract a lot of people.

New comment by pvelagal in "London–Calcutta bus service"

pvelagal — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 17:21:07 +0000

I didnt know this existed. Would be pretty cool if they restart the service.

New comment by pvelagal in "The Learning Loop and LLMs"

pvelagal — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 23:52:37 +0000

I totally agree. Trusting the LLM means, you are not thinking anymore and are happy with the high level ideas you had before you started coding, which may be incomplete. Missing pieces will be missed until you see issues in Production and I have seen this happen.

New comment by pvelagal in "The Learning Loop and LLMs"

pvelagal — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 23:47:30 +0000

LLMs are doing more than that. They are doing so much that I have seen bad ideas creeping into the code base. I used to trust some engineers code, but with introduction of LLMs, I am working more on code reviews and unable to trust significant portions of code checked in.

New comment by pvelagal in "Inside Amazon's engineering culture: Lessons from their senior principals"

pvelagal — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 23:21:11 +0000

A company's fiduciary duty is towards shareholders, which forces a mindset where Employees fiduciary duty should be towards themselves.

People will Unionize or create laws where companies's fiduciary duty should be towards both employees and shareholders.

Well, this is all until Elon's Robots will change everything :)

New comment by pvelagal in "Inside Amazon's engineering culture: Lessons from their senior principals"

pvelagal — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 23:18:08 +0000

They all want GPUs and they are all trading off engineers for GPUs. That seems to be the culture right now :)

New comment by pvelagal in "Receive push notifications from your rice cooker"

pvelagal — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 17:59:35 +0000

beep beep beep. They have alarms for that ! :) But nice fun project !

New comment by pvelagal in "Inko Programming Language"

pvelagal — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 01:21:41 +0000

Inko means “one more” in Telugu, a language spoken in South India (Satya Nadella’s mother tongue). So its one more programming language!

New comment by pvelagal in "BBC Modi Documentary Removal"

pvelagal — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 17:28:32 +0000

I am not a fan of Modi and I don’t want him to get re-elected. He is an autocrat and favors a select few. His party is as corrupt as any other party. But I suspect the timing of this ? Why now, when this happened so long ago. ( before he got elected twice in a row ?) Also, How many know that Modi was conferred the highest civilian award by Saudi Arabia ! Even UAE and Bahrain gave their highest civilian awards !

New comment by pvelagal in "Facebook Renames to Meta"

pvelagal — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 08:52:51 +0000

Meta’s goal seems to become a “3D-Internet” browser/platform. But unless the concept of a “3D-Internet” is widely adopted and the related standards/technologies are built/adopted by the major players it might be gargantuan task for one company to pull this off. IMHO the Vision is great and inevitable.. but needs Industry support.

New comment by pvelagal in "An interview with Mark Zuckerberg about the Metaverse"

pvelagal — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 01:34:43 +0000

New comment by pvelagal in "Reducing CO2 emissions by targeting the world’s hyper-polluting power plants"

pvelagal — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 04:56:21 +0000

Misleading title ? Its Global emissions caused by “electricity generation”. Power generation is 25% of overall global emissions.. so this is about 73% of the 25%.