Hacker News: smnscu

New comment by smnscu in "Show HN: Zanagrams"

smnscu — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 23:59:04 +0000

This entered the daily rotation (currently dominated by NYT Games) for our wife and me, thank you!

New comment by smnscu in "How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s"

smnscu — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 22:47:06 +0000

Firecracker is fantastic technology. I'm using it for my interviewing startup to run isolated runtimes for coding interviews (and personal workspaces), and it's been rock solid and incredibly lightweight. Interfacing with it through the Go SDK has been a piece of cake, too.

New comment by smnscu in "Debug Project"

smnscu — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 23:17:27 +0000

Quick NPR Short Wave episode about this https://www.npr.org/2026/05/27/nx-s1-5806598/disease-science...

New comment by smnscu in "Gemini 3.5 Flash"

smnscu — Wed, 20 May 2026 05:59:35 +0000

Nice post! You piqued my curiosity, so after a bit of research it turns out that, with techniques like MTP/MLA/CSA, it's quite probable that these models are much more efficient (and maybe bigger? tho 400B sounds about right) than a simple RAM breakdown would suggest.

MTP - https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-...

MLA - https://machinelearningmastery.com/a-gentle-introduction-to-...

CSA - https://deepseek.ai/blog/deepseek-v4-compressed-attention

New comment by smnscu in "Cursor Introduces Composer 2.5"

smnscu — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:06:21 +0000

That's me with Google Antigravity. Switching back to vscode was such a breath of fresh air. Porting over my (extensive) settings/extensions/keyboard shortcuts was extremely easy too (just ask the agent to do it), and now I can use both Copilot models and Claude Code easily. More to your point though, the speed and stability is incomparable. I can't remember having many issues with Cursor last year when I used it at my last job, but still, vscode has been surprisingly pleasant for agentic use.

New comment by smnscu in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

smnscu — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:40:12 +0000

I'm working on Coderbase (https://coderba.se/), a platform for running technical interviews. It started with live interviews cuz that's what I know best, having run over 3,000 interviews in my career, but I made it easy af to run this yourself too. I initially pictured it as a tech-heavy product (and it is), but my second client is a large recruitment agency that's using it both for internal interviews (for recruiters) and external ones (for candidates they're presenting to clients).

I didn't set out to do this. After I got laid off in December, a client quickly fell in my lap: a small startup in the middle of a massive investment round that needed to hire 25 people immediately, with only a CTO available for interviews. I created their content and ran their interviews while building the software at the same time. It started as Google Meet + CoderPad + Calendly and gradually became an in-house system. Unlike Proton (lol), I'm not pretending I built my own video call solution from scratch, it's just an off-the-shelf 100ms integration.

The content is all versioned and structured, which makes it fast to iterate on and easy to reason about. We use major.minor versions and only bump the major for backwards-incompatible changes, or changes big enough that comparing interviews stops making sense. Otherwise, any combination of question versions inside an interview format is considered comparable if the major versions are identical.

The interview itself is highly structured: once you define a format from the content library and the various knobs you can adjust, you can schedule interviews and run them using our integrated "room" (video call + multiplayer code editor, both recorded, with transcripts and playback) and "rubric" (the tool the interviewer uses for content, scoring, and notes during the interview). Once you submit/publish the interview, a report is generated immediately. Example: https://coderba.se/sample

Two interesting AI bits:

- "AI linting": a way to benchmark interview questions by running a candidate model and an interviewer model against each other. The candidate closely follows a defined skills profile, then we compare actual vs expected performance. More here: https://coderba.se/blog/product-update-unit-testing-the-inte...

- "AI draft": once an interview ends, it takes ~30s for the video and transcript to become available. Then we use basically every relevant artifact from the interview, with a PII redaction pass first: questions, scoring, incomplete rubric, transcript, code editor history. We send that through our LLM gateway, currently mostly using DeepSeek because the quality/value is insane, though I may switch to Mistral to stay on the better side of privacy. It sends back recommended scoring + writeup, which we present as Cursor-like suggestions you can accept/reject/edit.

New comment by smnscu in "From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth"

smnscu — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:54:24 +0000

I've been through the exact same migration path and I'm so incredibly happy with Better Auth. Good reminder that I should contribute: https://better-auth.com/docs/reference/contributing

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.