Hacker News: sriram_sun

New comment by sriram_sun in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

sriram_sun — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 18:19:59 +0000

I wonder if Wodehouse ties together both types of heroes in Bertie and Jeeves! Though it's been decades since I read a Wodehouse book, I'm just uncontrollably laughing now just thinking about it! My grandfather had pretty much the whole collection.

New comment by sriram_sun in "We put Claude Code in Rollercoaster Tycoon"

sriram_sun — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 18:07:43 +0000

> "Where Claude excels:"

Am I reading a Claude generated summary here?

New comment by sriram_sun in "QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image"

sriram_sun — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 06:10:19 +0000

Good point! I was look at it from a users pov. Let's say I have a BPF script for monitoring a set of processes - their disk, network and CPU with some filters on specific messages. Now can I use it in qnx or what's the equivalent? It can run in userspace for all I care.

New comment by sriram_sun in "QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image"

sriram_sun — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 20:14:24 +0000

Is there an eBPF equivalent for QNX? Also, with the real-time linux patch (which has been mainlined now), I'm able to run C++ ROS2 control loops @ 1ms down to even 250us on commodity off the shelf i3 and i5 hardware with dedicated cores.

I've worked on vxWorks, QNX and Linux and I found the pace of development using Linux the fastest.

New comment by sriram_sun in "Arvind has died"

sriram_sun — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 18:44:20 +0000

This is about 25 yrs. back. As a grad student, I used to stumble into his papers pretty regularly. Later, I'd scan for author name and pay a lot more attention if it was by Arvind (also a few others). I'd always smile after looking at the author name. Growing up in India, your last name doesn't mean much.

New comment by sriram_sun in "Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home"

sriram_sun — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 17:31:54 +0000

I guess everything was "remote". My dad had to mail his code (punch cards) from (IIT) Madras to (IISc) Bangalore. He did say it was a pain though.

* IISc - Indian Institute of Science

* Madras, now Chennai was probably an overnight drive in the late 60s.

New comment by sriram_sun in "Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?"

sriram_sun — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 17:44:42 +0000

S-Corp, W-2 for myself. I do pretty mundane programming related stuff for safety critical systems (med device and am always looking for interesting stuff). Been remote consulting averaging 1-2 clients since mid 2017. Here's my profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sriramsundar/. Worked full time for about 15 years prior.

New comment by sriram_sun in "Lean4 helped Terence Tao discover a small bug in his recent paper"

sriram_sun — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 04:44:01 +0000

nit: Fields Medal (no apostrophe).

New comment by sriram_sun in "Free IRS-run tax filing pilot to be available in 13 states"

sriram_sun — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 20:14:23 +0000

Cost of policing is close to or possibly the highest expense for any city. That did not put security guards out of business.

New comment by sriram_sun in "X.org Alternatives? MicroXWin, Wayland, Y, DFB, Xynth, Fresco, etc. (2009)"

sriram_sun — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 15:44:12 +0000

There is some credence to the "make your own or shut up" argument here on HN.

If we reconsider your "criticize a restaurant" analogy, we are not random folks walking into a restaurant. We are professional chefs criticizing the output of other professional chefs.

In that context, "go start your own restaurant" does actually make sense.

New comment by sriram_sun in "Unpacking Elixir: Resilience"

sriram_sun — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 21:12:04 +0000

Nice article! FTA: "One for one indicates that if a child crashes it, it and only it should be considered when restarting." What is "it" in this context?

New comment by sriram_sun in "Linux 6.5"

sriram_sun — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 15:13:51 +0000

When Linus says, "let's give it one last round of testing", what happens?

New comment by sriram_sun in "Employees in Asia are spending most time looking busy at work, says Slack report"

sriram_sun — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 19:47:28 +0000

Well that's a great reason for ycombinator's existence! Acquisitions are a great way for established players to "develop" products.

New comment by sriram_sun in "I thought I wanted to be a professor, then I served on a hiring committee (2021)"

sriram_sun — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 17:19:56 +0000

Like I said above, it made me more empathetic, not envious. However, I'm pointing at instances like this so that hiring managers with a enough resources also consider other pipelines.

New comment by sriram_sun in "I thought I wanted to be a professor, then I served on a hiring committee (2021)"

sriram_sun — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 17:15:15 +0000

Not envy. Empathy.

New comment by sriram_sun in "I thought I wanted to be a professor, then I served on a hiring committee (2021)"

sriram_sun — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 15:30:42 +0000

The "room mate" network is pretty exclusionary and self selecting.

New comment by sriram_sun in "I thought I wanted to be a professor, then I served on a hiring committee (2021)"

sriram_sun — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 15:29:00 +0000

Noone within the team was a founder.

New comment by sriram_sun in "I thought I wanted to be a professor, then I served on a hiring committee (2021)"

sriram_sun — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 15:27:18 +0000

It was shocking to me that room mates could get hired that easily.

This was the bay area.

My comment is highlighting structural imbalances as they exist in society right now.

Even though networking as a way to grow, it is not an option for a lot of people until much later in their careers. That is because of social conditioning.

New comment by sriram_sun in "I thought I wanted to be a professor, then I served on a hiring committee (2021)"

sriram_sun — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 14:16:23 +0000

There is another dynamic that helps the recommended hire succeed in the workplace environment. They initially get help navigating the workplace. This is extremely important for career development. For e.g. If you know what to look for in a code base that might make a difference between a commit on day one versus messing around the code base for a week and trying to be really careful.

New comment by sriram_sun in "I thought I wanted to be a professor, then I served on a hiring committee (2021)"

sriram_sun — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 14:10:20 +0000

Here is my own experience of getting hired into a startup. The day I got hired the manager took the team out to lunch and I asked them how each one got hired. So results:

White male - Room mate of employee

White male - Knew early employee from college in Switzerland

White female - Recruited off of LinkedIn

Indian American - Recruited off of LinkedIn

Immigrant Indian American - Recruited off of LinkedIn.

There is a lot of favoritism that goes on in industry as well. However, it is so large that it can accommodate both merit-based and network based hiring. Hiring is a total crap shoot anyway and this is not to say that just because someone comes recommended by someone else they are automatically bad. They just look better in comparison because mentally we automatically lower the hiring bar as this person comes "recommended" from a known source.