Hacker News: sumanthvepa

New comment by sumanthvepa in "France pulls last gold held in US"

sumanthvepa — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 10:46:00 +0000

They purchased 129 tons of gold in Europe. Their asset position did not change: they converted cash to gold of the same value.

They then sold the 129 tons gold in the US vaults for $16 billion. That gold was originally purchased I'm guessing many decades ago for $1 billion. The have a book profit of $15 billion and still have 129 tons of gold.

They captured some of the appreciation in gold value as a realised profit on their books.

Their balance sheet did not change, just their income statement

New comment by sumanthvepa in "GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash"

sumanthvepa — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:54:44 +0000

Very true. We have a private git repository running on a server that serves as our master. Works fine for us. We backup to GitHub. But it isn't used in any way in the dev workflow

New comment by sumanthvepa in "Make macOS consistently bad (unironically)"

sumanthvepa — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 01:52:48 +0000

I rarely run my apps fullscreen. It's because I have multiple 4k monitors connected to the machine. Using an app even chrome or an IDE fullscreen would be too big.

But do use apps fullscreen when Im traveling. The laptop screen is too small to use chrome or vscode any other way.

New comment by sumanthvepa in "This time is different"

sumanthvepa — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:30:37 +0000

Not true. I'm a really heavy user of AI. And it's improved my productivity dramatically as a developer, but it doesn't work in every situation even in programming. I see it as an indispensible tool, but its not, right now, a tool that will replace me as a programmer or product manager or salesperson, or marketer. or (in my case) an owner and investor.

Will that happen in the future, maybe. but I don't have enough insight into how AI is evolving in the labs to make a judgement on that.

New comment by sumanthvepa in "The pitch deck is dead. Write a pitch.md instead"

sumanthvepa — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 11:05:53 +0000

Most VCs can't read markdown.

New comment by sumanthvepa in "Why users cannot create Issues directly"

sumanthvepa — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 08:34:07 +0000

Interesting. I required all my devs to use local VMs for development. We've saved a fair bit on cloud costs.

New comment by sumanthvepa in "What makes you senior"

sumanthvepa — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 10:46:25 +0000

Learn for yourself then. I run my own company and learning new stuff so I can use it in my business is one of the few joys of being the owner. No permission required to try the new hotness (And if you screw up -- you have only yourself to blame.)

New comment by sumanthvepa in "Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)"

sumanthvepa — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 03:13:11 +0000

Code is just ‘compiled’ intelligence.

New comment by sumanthvepa in "Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout"

sumanthvepa — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 02:06:13 +0000

There seems to be some sort imputation that, just because someone is on an H-1b, that they are not a good engineer.

I used to be on an H-1b and gladly came back home to India. I run my own business now. And yes. I'm ex-Anazon. It was a tough place to work, but circa mid-nineties, the stock options made it worth working for them.

I'm willing to bet I'll outcode a significant fraction of the audience on this site. And I'm not even close to the best developer around. Some of the smartest people I've met have been on an H-1b visa. Please consider not letting prejudice affect your view. You'll do yourself a disservice by underestimating your competition.

New comment by sumanthvepa in "Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?"

sumanthvepa — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 11:47:12 +0000

This. Right now the consumer surplus created by improved productivity is being captured by users and to a small extent their employers. But that may not remain the case in future.

New comment by sumanthvepa in "Java 25's new CPU-Time Profiler"

sumanthvepa — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 13:05:37 +0000

What benefit could one possibly get by farming karma on site like hacker news. It's not like one can gather followers or something. I'm always mystified by folks who do this. Would love to understand the motivation.

New comment by sumanthvepa in "Substack just killed the creator economy"

sumanthvepa — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 03:43:26 +0000

I've been wondering exacrtly this. Surely, its not hard to get setup with your own website. It's not like substack is giving you much distribution.

New comment by sumanthvepa in "US Intel"

sumanthvepa — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 05:15:37 +0000

The problem with predicting that China won't catch up on GDP per capita with the West is that the West too went through those growth phases about a century or two ago. It will take a 100-200 years, but China, and the rest of world will catch up. Just a matter of time. A long time no doubt. But it will happen.

New comment by sumanthvepa in "Researchers value null results, but struggle to publish them"

sumanthvepa — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 06:30:21 +0000

The Michelson-Morely experiment is probably one of the most famous null result in all of science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...

New comment by sumanthvepa in "A media company demanded a license fee for an Open Graph image I used"

sumanthvepa — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:52:00 +0000

I create most of my OpenGraph images using AI. As far as I can tell, there is no copyright on those images. They are in the public domain (I think?)

New comment by sumanthvepa in "Ask HN: How to combine work, entrepreneurship and having a life"

sumanthvepa — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 01:32:28 +0000

I've been working full time for myself for the last 13 years. Multiple projects clients etc. It becomes easier in terms of work pressure when you can afford to go full time on your project. (But of course, you have be careful with money)

Currently, I'm working on open-sourcing one of the devtools we built internally. Think of it as a self-hosted version of Vercel.

New comment by sumanthvepa in "Ask HN: How to combine work, entrepreneurship and having a life"

sumanthvepa — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 09:27:09 +0000

I struggled with it too, but one solution that works for me is blocking time for specific things. For example I will block 4hrs in the early morning to work on my project 5 days a week. I keep friday evening and Saturdays free for family and Sunday for chores.

You have to accept that it is not possible to be as fast as someone working full time on the same project. But you can get creative about how to build things more efficiently.

New comment by sumanthvepa in "Wrong ways to use the databases, when the pendulum swung too far"

sumanthvepa — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 03:41:50 +0000

The real cost is an opportunity cost. It doesn't show up in the financials. Your ability to react quickly to new business opportunities is hurt. Most CEOs and boards don't notice it, until it's too late.

New comment by sumanthvepa in "Why Koreans ask what year you were born"

sumanthvepa — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 08:11:51 +0000

It's interesting. My closest friends use my last name, while everyone else uses my first name at work. Apparently it was a hangover from the custom at old British public schools that some old Indian schools retained into the 70s/80s. I sort of like it.

New comment by sumanthvepa in "Maintaining an Android app in Google Play Store is a lot of work"

sumanthvepa — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 06:59:42 +0000

They probably mean that they installed the app, used it for a little while, and then, forgot about it.