Hacker News: tarunkotia

New comment by tarunkotia in "Vibe engineering"

tarunkotia — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 16:49:44 +0000

This has been experience as well. If there is a hard problem which needs to be addressed, generative code helps me break the inertia by generating the first draft and then I get really curious to poke holes in the generated code. I tend to procrastinate when I come across a gnarly issue or something I am not really familiar with, justifying by saying I need a big block of time to work on it. I use generative code as a pushy "mom/boss/coworker/spouse" to get stuff done.

New comment by tarunkotia in "Why I Wrote the BEAM Book"

tarunkotia — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 16:13:40 +0000

If you have something interesting to say then people will figure a way to understand it. Early in my career I remember coming across “Essential .Net” by Don Box and I don’t think Don Box had a particular audience in mind. He just unwrapped what’s under the hood in Common Language Runtime (CLR). It took me multiple times to really understand “essential .net”.

New comment by tarunkotia in "Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon from same cancer as Joe Biden"

tarunkotia — Mon, 19 May 2025 20:46:45 +0000

I am a big fan of Dilbert and really liked one of his books "how to fail at everything and still win big".

New comment by tarunkotia in "The A.I. Radiologist Will Not Be with You Soon"

tarunkotia — Wed, 14 May 2025 15:15:59 +0000

I worked on an autocontouring model but we could not get very high accuracy for it to be adopted commercially. The algorithm would work for some organs but would totally freak-out on the others. And if the anatomy was out of norm then it would not work at all. This was 5 years ago, I see Siemens [0] has a similar tool. I remember shadowing a dosimetrist contouring all the Organs-At-Risk (OAR) and it took about 3-4 hours to contour one CT image of thoracic region. Do you know how much better the autocontouring tools have become?

[0] https://www.siemens-healthineers.com/en-us/radiotherapy/soft...

New comment by tarunkotia in "Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)"

tarunkotia — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 17:40:39 +0000

Great point, to me it feels more like running barefoot versus with padded shoes. Barefoot running will build your foot muscle based on your natural form over time, whereas padded shoes may interfere with your natural form and at worst encourage bad form which may lead to injuries as your mileage increases.

Over the years in building software, I tend to spend more time thinking about how all the pieces (i.e. from package manager) fit together rather than building them from scratch and fitting two pieces together require deeper understanding of both the pieces and how the combination of the two behaves in the environment.

New comment by tarunkotia in "Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today"

tarunkotia — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 05:48:22 +0000

Congratulations!

New comment by tarunkotia in "I've acquired a new superpower"

tarunkotia — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 19:28:38 +0000

Image worked but when I tried with text it did not work. Is there some trick to it?

New comment by tarunkotia in "Software is eating the world, all right (2024)"

tarunkotia — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 19:54:47 +0000

I will not be surprised if there is call for startup to build this exact thing :P

New comment by tarunkotia in "Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers"

tarunkotia — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 17:13:41 +0000

This is how I assume one of the ways an expert system would play out:

1. A system which understands not just the language but the meaning behind it and the cultural context around it.

2. Let's assume it's multi-model and have all the senses having the same level of technical maturity.

3. It has read all the text available for all the major sciences and understood the meaning behind it including the possible applications of it.

To that end, having the above conditions satisfied I am assuming there should be major breakthroughs in all sciences. So far what I have seen is that the AI system is able to selectively brute-force it's way in finding a solution. Maybe I am just being impatient.

New comment by tarunkotia in "Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years"

tarunkotia — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 17:53:29 +0000

Hey Matt,

Firstly, congratulations! This is very inspiring and I love the pragmatic approach to starting a startup. You wrote about converting to a contractor with Help Scout from being a full-time employee. How did it help you free-up your time?

New comment by tarunkotia in "DoorDash lays off 1250 employees"

tarunkotia — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 17:52:56 +0000

Implication is that you get a strike against you which is publicly documented. This also serves a purpose of sending a message to middle-management that we should not repeat this strategic mistake of over-hiring when things are hot and then when things slowdown going through this painful process of separation. I am hopeful that this public admission will inculcate a culture of holding everyone accountable rather than "emperor has no clothes" culture where people live in denial.

New comment by tarunkotia in "Federal Reserve to increase interest rates by 75 basis points for the third time"

tarunkotia — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 18:37:13 +0000

I guess you meant QT and not QE.

New comment by tarunkotia in "Rolls Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership"

tarunkotia — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 19:07:11 +0000

Also known as Innovator's Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

Most established players don't want to cannibalize their existing market by launching a product in a niche segment. Sales and Marketing $$$ eat into the profits which is not easy to justify when you are profitable. If you are fighting for your survival then it's easy to reallocate resources to fight.

New comment by tarunkotia in "AirPods Pro (2nd Generation)"

tarunkotia — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 19:59:28 +0000

I am just curious how are people dealing with EMF radiations emitted by AirPods? I have 2 sets of AirPods and Bose QC35 but I stopped using AirPods altogether and I use QC35 using the wire.

NIH study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6701402/

New comment by tarunkotia in "Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking"

tarunkotia — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 20:03:05 +0000

Obligatory mention: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/

New comment by tarunkotia in "Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades"

tarunkotia — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 21:30:39 +0000

This happens to me every time I enter my car while on a Zoom call; the bluetooth or even the hardwired headset would switch to the car speakers and the call gets unmuted. I need to scramble to mute the call while my daughter is screaming at the back. Can't get it to work.

New comment by tarunkotia in "Render: a Zero DevOps Cloud Platform"

tarunkotia — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 16:34:36 +0000

With Platform as a Service (PaaS) you are paying a premium for isolating the problem to an individual component which is down. You can either spend a few hours going through the logs or have PaaS vendor let you know that problem is not at their end so that you can spend time isolating the issue.

Tumblr Is Everything

tarunkotia — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 18:44:09 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/02/tumblr-internet-legacy-survival/621419/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30196739

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by tarunkotia in "AirPods don't “just work”"

tarunkotia — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 16:59:47 +0000

I love the AirPods but stopped using it because of what I have been reading about EMF radiation emitted constantly even when not in use by AirPods. I still need to read-up more about it till then I am using the wired headphones.

https://www.macintoshhowto.com/hardware/extreme-emf-exposure...

New comment by tarunkotia in "Show HN: Appsolite – Take the pain out of software evaluation"

tarunkotia — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 16:07:00 +0000

Hello HN community,

I am founder of Appsolite to answer any questions or comments.

After multiple iterations with product positioning and messaging, I feel this one may resonate with users. I am looking for feedback and would love to hear from the community if the pain-point resonates with you.

Some background around the pain-point:

Software evaluation and selection process is laborious, time consuming and riddled with a lot of guess-work. To add to that, the SaaS industry has seen an explosive growth since 2015 and IDC (a market research firm) released a report stating that the number of "apps" are expected to grow up-to 500 million by 2023 with the popularity of low-code/no-code platforms introducing new crop of "app" creators.

To that end, I've built a solution to take the pain out of software evaluation. We are leveraging data to make it easy for the users to go from searching for a solution to shortlisting without going on dozens of vendor sites. We provide software recommendations tailored to your business needs. Using Appsolite, you go from searching to shortlisting in a matter of minutes sifting through thousands of product data-point across a category of software.

Having the right tool for the job has proven to have higher adoption & utilization rate in a team, maximizing your ROI in technology spend.

The core features are:

1. Market Research: Using AI/ML algorithms we provide a visual snapshot of the whole category keeping you informed about the emerging technologies and trends in the market . Make the most informed decision and maximize the value of your investment using our in-depth market research & analytics available right to your fingertips.

2. Requirements Management: We use our research data to analyze the business process for each individual software category and then map those to corresponding business functions. Using our machine learning algorithms and simplified user interface, you are able to sift through thousands of product data-points spanning across the category.

3. Traceability Matrix: The traceability matrix provides you apples-to-apples comparison of solutions across the whole category which matches your business needs. You have the ability to align your technology stack with your business strategy and are able to benchmark your existing solutions with what's available out there.

You can check it out here: https://appsolite.com