afiodorov

5 ms·

1.
by afiodorov 5d ago
She was not offended but thought I could benefit from therapy. She didn’t share my opinion - she said it’d not bother her if AI could eventually solve problems for her. I later realised that my motivation depended heavily on believing I was
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by afiodorov 5d ago
I used to be a PhD student more than a decade ago, and I published a paper containing a solution to an open problem. Yet shortly after my first publication I became increasingly disillusioned, because I started to think that within my lifet
3.
by afiodorov 6d ago
I prefer getting rid of old devices that needing to store old cables ad-infinitum.
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by afiodorov 3mo ago
A RAG search accross all HackerNews comments is back online with a new design: https://hn.fiodorov.es/
5.
by afiodorov 10mo ago
The running costs are very low. Since posting it today we burned 30 cents in DeepSeek inference. Postgres instance though costs me $40 a month on Railway; mostly due to RAM usage during to HNSW incremental update.
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by afiodorov 10mo ago
Daily updates I do on my m4 mac air: takes about 5 minutes to process roughly 10k fresh comments. Historic backfill was done on an Nvidia GPU rented on vast.ai for a few dollars. If I recall correctly took about an hour or so. It’s mentione
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by afiodorov 10mo ago
I've been embedding all HN comments since 2023 from BigQuery and hosting at https://hn.fiodorov.es Source is at https://github.com/afiodorov/hn-search
8.
by afiodorov 11mo ago
Apparently Persian and Russian are close. Which is surprising to say the least. I know people keep getting confused about how Portuguese from Portugal and Russian sound close yet the Persian is new to me.
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by afiodorov 11mo ago
I've found that building my side projects to be "scalable" is a practical side effect of choosing the most cost-effective hosting. When a project has little to no traffic, the on-demand pricing of serverless is unbeatable. A
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by afiodorov 1y ago
RAG search that contains all HN comments since 2023 https://hn.fiodorov.es I treat it more like a homework exercise for a Coursera course but I like the result.
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by afiodorov 1y ago
> It was uncomfortable at first. I had to learn to let go of reading every line of PR code. I still read the tests pretty carefully, but the specs became our source of truth for what was being built and why. This is exactly right. Our ro
12.
by afiodorov 1y ago
sign of serious organizational disfunction. You're not wrong, but it's a "dysfunction" that many successful tech companies have learned to leverage. The reality is, most engineers spend far less than half their t
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by afiodorov 1y ago
I live next to an abandoned building from the Spanish property boom. It's now occupied illegally. Hype's over yet the consequence is staring at me every day. I am sure it'll eventually be knocked down or repurposed yet it&#x2
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by afiodorov 1y ago
The crux of the article is asking whether such a large investment is justified; downplaying the article saying it's only X% of the GDP compared to Y doesn't address the issue.
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by afiodorov 1y ago
Nice clip yet it does not make it clear why 9% is the good value of GDP. Why not 7%?
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by afiodorov 1y ago
My rule of the thumb is that Dataclasses are for compile-time type-checking, pydantic classes are for run time type checking.
17.
by afiodorov 1y ago
You're right, they can try to manipulate you on a thousand tiny things. My counter-argument is that at a certain point, it's not worth the mental energy to fight over what amounts to pennies on the dollar. Anecdotally, when I boug
18.
by afiodorov 1y ago
Let's be clear: it's entirely possible to leave the "herd". People can and do go completely off-grid and thus disengage from capitalism. The crucial point is that the vast majority of us choose not to. That choice is wha
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by afiodorov 1y ago
There's nothing an algorithm can do against disciplined, intentional engagement. If you know which car you want to buy it doesn't matter what the salesman has to say.
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by afiodorov 1y ago
We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement. This isn't theoretical, it's happening right now. The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people, the shift from p
21.
by afiodorov 1y ago
We've been visited by alien intelligence that is simultaneously fascinating and underwhelming. The real issue isn't the technology itself, but our complete inability to predict its competence. Our intuition for what should be hard
22.
by afiodorov 1y ago
If you're hiring 16 year olds just because of their ability to write code sounds like you're bottlenecked by writing code. Your comment doesn't clarify why you disagree.
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by afiodorov 1y ago
I think the "more capital than ideas" problem is highly contextual and largely a Silicon Valley-centric view. There is immense, unmet demand for good software in developing countries—for example, robust applications that work well
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by afiodorov 1y ago
Even without LLMs, we were approaching a point of saturation where software development was bottlenecked by market demand and funding, not by a shortage of code. Our tooling has become so powerful that the pure act of programming is seconda
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by afiodorov 1y ago
I heard that actors & singers don't necessarily manage to fix the accent in the natural speech so they can only recite extracts perfectly well.
26.
by afiodorov 1y ago
European Portuguese sounds very Slavic; I'm sure Russians have a blast with it. English is a phonetically isolated language, largely due to the Great Vowel Shift. Unlike English, most languages have a closer linguistic relative. This m
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by afiodorov 1y ago
When you spend some time transcribing live, impromptu speech, you'll notice that it often doesn't follow the rules of written grammar; speakers frequently abandon sentences midway through. For example, in the linked clip[^1], the
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by afiodorov 1y ago
The phonetic similarity between Russian and Spanish is a huge relief. As a Russian speaker, pronouncing English has always felt like a workout for my mouth; the sounds are completely alien. Spanish, on the other hand, is effortless. It just
29.
by afiodorov 1y ago
There's another level after fluency (C1), which is near-native fluency (C2). At the level of such mastery you don't feel the need to simplify just to be understood, your utterances now define the language itself as you've ach
30.
by afiodorov 1y ago
I use my third language, Spanish, every day, and my second, English, for work. On top of that, my partner is a native Portuguese speaker, so I'm passively soaking up a fourth. (I usually reply to her in Spanish, but we watch everything

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