Hacker News: smnscu

New comment by smnscu in "Coderbase Product Update: Unit Testing the Interview"

smnscu — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:11:02 +0000

Hey HN, wanted to share an early peek at what I've been building over the past few weeks.

I've spent the last 7 years conducting over 3,000 technical interviews. Along the way, I made the (utterly insightful) observation that most hiring processes are broken, often relying on vibes and ad-hoc trivia. Coderbase is in large part my attempt at treating hiring and interviewing as a rigorous systems engineering problem rather than a simple outsourcing of the thick side of the hiring funnel.

I'm essentially attempting to distill thousands of hours of interview data into sensible processes that can lead to meaningful improvements to hiring. The platform underneath it all is early, but we're getting close to being able to scale the system to e.g. 1000 interviews per week without (hopefully) breaking a sweat.

I plan to publish these weekly, as working on this technical challenge is exhilarating (I already have enough material for a second post but it's got to wait until next week). For now, let me know what you think of my attempt to weaponise AI slop (aka "synthetic interview benchmarking").

Coderbase Product Update: Unit Testing the Interview

smnscu — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:11:02 +0000

Article URL: https://coderba.se/blog/product-update-unit-testing-the-interview

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47350766

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by smnscu in "Ask HN: Would you use a job board where every listing is verified?"

smnscu — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:17:48 +0000

Otta in the UK (now eaten by the inexplicably-named Welcome to the Jungle) used to have a very involved vetting process during company onboarding, and I could verify that it was a great service as both a candidate and a hiring manager. To replicate what you want ("every listing is verified") there's no silver bullet but a good vetting process like that goes a long way.

Another site I like is cord.com, which seems to prioritise companies where recruiters are active on that website, I've had a good experience with that one as well, as you get to chat with an actual recruiter in a matter of hours or days.

New comment by smnscu in "gRPC: From service definition to wire format"

smnscu — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 05:49:15 +0000

Obligatory "this is why I love HN" but even for that standard, this is is an incredibly open account, thank you for the insight and sorry it hasn't seemed to pan out quite how you hoped. Still sounds like you got your bag, built something cool, and have your "micro" share of Internet legacy, so not too bad eh?

New comment by smnscu in "Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship"

smnscu — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 05:46:45 +0000

Quite chuffed someone else mentioned Djokovic, who is close to 39 and just played an Australian Open final. (Yes he got lucky with 2 freebies but he _did_ beat Sinner in the semifinal fair and square, and managed to win the first set before running out of juice)

New comment by smnscu in "gRPC: From service definition to wire format"

smnscu — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 11:47:02 +0000

> After go-micro‘s maintainer went off the rails

What do you mean by this? Genuinely curious, as someone who's followed that project in the past.

New comment by smnscu in "Targeted Bets: An alternative approach to the job hunt"

smnscu — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:52:48 +0000

I've interviewed 3k people with Karat as a professional interviewer, and several hundred more as a hiring manager. The very few times I received direct emails from candidates attempting to circumvent the normal process were met with unequivocally negative reactions. First, I find the Internet sleuthing they'd undergo to find my email address a bit creepy – for example, Karat would only show the first name and profile pic for your interviewer. But more importantly, the sheer audacity to go for such a stunt would firmly anchor them in the box of people I'd never want to work with. I'd still be polite and professional to a fault, of course, but I'd never seriously consider them past that point.

New comment by smnscu in "Just the Browser"

smnscu — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 13:52:06 +0000

This is a strong contender. Other candidates (hard to find links to the first editions):

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11177063-creating-cool-w... - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1097095.HTML_for_Dummies...

New comment by smnscu in "AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents"

smnscu — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 10:26:18 +0000

I've been calling this context.md in my projects (alongside a progress.md for TODOs and breaking down complex tasks). I don't care what we call it as long as we settle on a convention.

New comment by smnscu in "JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant"

smnscu — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 21:42:19 +0000

I use it mostly as smarter autocomplete and it's still absolutely worth it. I really tried having it write unit tests in Go, write simple Astro websites, etc, but I'm never satisfied with how dumb it is when "vibe coding", so I use it as Intellisense on steroids for now, but I don't doubt it will become even better soon. The chat feature is fantastic and between it and the contextual help I barely ever have to reach for actual (code) documentation.

New comment by smnscu in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

smnscu — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 19:13:56 +0000

Drama aside, I thought I'd share a fun fact with the youngins: John Gruber (yes, the Apple blog guy) is the creator of Markdown. Thanks, John!

Show HN: Ad-hoc LLM benchmark using NYT Connections

smnscu — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 23:33:43 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/andreis/connections

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43348839

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by smnscu in "The cost of Go's panic and recover"

smnscu — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 10:11:16 +0000

Having used Go professionally for over a decade, I can count on one hand the times I used recover(). I've actually just refactored some legacy code last week to remove a panic/recover that was bafflingly used to handle nil values. The only valid use case I can think of is gracefully shutting down a server, but that's usually addressed by some library.

New comment by smnscu in "Apple's Software Quality Crisis"

smnscu — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 09:57:24 +0000

I used to do thousands of interviews across the industry and I vividly remember Apple backend devs being almost always unmitigated disasters. They would always pick Java and could barely use it - to the point where a for loop would be challenging. Their Swift guys were fairly decent though IIRC.

New comment by smnscu in "1% Equity for Founding Engineers Is BS"

smnscu — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 18:58:13 +0000

Here's a potential starting point: https://tech-coops.xyz/

Fairly often you see service-focused small companies (i.e. agencies) being run as coops, e.g. my friend's NZ .NET shop http://iontech.nz/

New comment by smnscu in "Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week"

smnscu — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 23:13:20 +0000

Oof, must suck to work for a company who doesn't use technical design docs well. I quite like Oxide's RFD model, based off Joyent's I assume, given who their CTO is. https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/1

New comment by smnscu in "How French Drains Work"

smnscu — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 09:13:30 +0000

I've just recently this video on the engineering of Venice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77omYd0JOeA -- relevantly, it shows how they devised an "active" drainage system that relied on the tide movement (both vertical and horizontal). The timestamp for waste management is 7:45, but I recommend watching all the video.

New comment by smnscu in "Krazam OS"

smnscu — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 09:59:03 +0000

Enjoy https://www.srenity.online/

New comment by smnscu in "Show HN: I made an app to use local AI as daily driver"

smnscu — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 11:43:23 +0000

Nice, adding these to my list. Here's a list that I put together, it has active GitHub projects for LLM UIs, ordered by stars:

- https://github.com/nomic-ai/gpt4all

- https://github.com/imartinez/privateGPT

- https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui

- https://github.com/FlowiseAI/Flowise

- https://github.com/lobehub/lobe-chat

- https://github.com/PromtEngineer/localGPT

- https://github.com/h2oai/h2ogpt

- https://github.com/huggingface/chat-ui

- https://github.com/SillyTavern/SillyTavern

- https://github.com/ollama-webui/ollama-webui

- https://github.com/Chainlit/chainlit

- https://github.com/LostRuins/koboldcpp

- https://github.com/ParisNeo/lollms-webui/

New comment by smnscu in "$20k bounty was claimed"

smnscu — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 17:18:22 +0000

I feel like people complaining about Prettier being "heavily opinionated" are missing the point. Perhaps I'm biased by my decade of using Go, but not having to worry about superfluous stylistic choices is a welcome reduction in cognitive load. (Up to a point I guess, e.g. I'd never put up with K&R-style newline opening brackets).