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andreybaskov

81 karma · joined March 23, 2018

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andreybaskov··on Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?
In my opinion going to the gym for one bench press is better than sitting at home watching tv.

Would love to hear your suggestions on how to stay in ”mental” shape in the AI age.

andreybaskov··on Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?
I’ve learned for myself that I need to write code just to keep my brain in shape - same as going to the gym to be healthy.

Even though agents are building all of my code now, I’m starting every morning with a LeetCode problem. There is no practical use, but it make me feel good and sharp for the rest of the day.

For anyone coping with AI I suggest to give it a try, and stick to it for some time, just like with a gym.

andreybaskov··on The minimum viable unit of saleable software
As someone who built a niche SaaS I can see both sides of this.

If you are looking to replicate the exact same feature set of an existing product - buying would almost always be a better choice.

But it's rare for avg customer needs to perfectly match product features. Most often they need 20-40% of the product + some custom, business specific logic that's missing and is later fixed with spreadsheets/integrations. In that case it depends on how mission critical this software is.

I'd say investing into the core software that runs your business might very well be worth the effort, even if it's 10x between build vs buy.

andreybaskov··on 3.4M Solar Panels
Curious, how did you deal with inspections and building codes? Or is it in a county with no building codes?
andreybaskov··on Filing the Corners Off MacBooks
Finally, now I know I'm not the only one! These sharp edges constantly cut into my wrists to the point I was thinking of doing the same, or glueing some kind of kind soft padding to the edges. Great someone did it. I wonder how far can you cut them?
andreybaskov··on Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
Sadly, memory bandwidth is abysmal compared to Apple chips - 273 GB/s vs 614 GB/s on M5 Max for similar price. Even though fp4 compute is faster, it doesn't help for all the decode heavy agentic workflows.
andreybaskov··on Warranty Void If Regenerated
Reading this was a roller coaster for me.

Because of a bad habit reading comments before the link I knew it was AI. I read it regardless, and... I still enjoyed it!

I'm very much not a writer or a critic, so my definition of good writing is likely very low. Yet I can't shake off this weird feeling that I truly enjoyed the writing and felt the emotions, _while_ knowing it's LLM.

I'm guessing that human after touch is what made it pleasant to read. I'd love to see the commit history of the process. Fun times we live in!

andreybaskov··on Warranty Void If Regenerated
Just wanted to say that I've felt the same about the images. To me it's likely was the text that for some reason had AI-feel to it. Great story though, I was in awe learning it was AI generated.
andreybaskov··on Show HN: The Mog Programming Language
In basic scenarios agree it’s possible. I’ve similarly toyed with building a small language and LLM picks it up. But that’s an additional context and it’s never felt like it worked “out of the box” vs say Typescript. Just saying that it’s an adoption barrier established languages don’t have.
andreybaskov··on Show HN: The Mog Programming Language
Synthetic codebases are certainly an option, but if top models remain closed I don’t see them building datasets for every new language.
andreybaskov··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
That's cool! Do you have any info on how manufacturing is done in the US?
andreybaskov··on Show HN: The Mog Programming Language
It's a legitimate question to ask about any new language post AI - given there is no training dataset, any other language would work better with AI.

The bigger problem is maintainability over the long term, Deno is built by Node.js creator and is maintained for half a decade now, that's hard to compete with. In a way it's much more about social trust rather than particular syntax.

andreybaskov··on Chris Lattner on what the Claude C compiler reveals about the future of software
Great summary of the current state of AI coding, without all the hype.

I wonder though if we are fundamentally limited by LLMs architecture to come up with some novel architecture. Or is it just a limitation of current prompting and tools?

E.g. could your brute force the problem by asking "come up with 100 innovative, not yet tried ideas in compiler architecture" and run 100s of this experiments.

I feel like the answer to that is basically that "spark" that we have as human intelligence, but also... sometimes you get it by trying and failing many many times.

andreybaskov··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
I'm testing ground heat rejection system that dumps heat into the ground. It needs a lot of space, but you need it for panels anyways.
andreybaskov··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
Solar-powered data center in a desert.

Fully off-grid using solar, batteries and Starlink for uplink. Focusing on AI inference at the beginning. Currently building our first prototype and testing cooling solutions.

https://solarcube.com

andreybaskov··on Ask HN: Books to learn 6502 ASM and the Apple II
Original Apple II manuals written by Chris Espinosa and Jef Raskin are a treat to read. Would highly recommend, just to get a sense of what it was like to get onboarded on Apple II back in the day.

And then obviously Programming the 6502 by Rodnay Zaks.

andreybaskov··on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free
Out of all things I'm actually surprised they went straight to custom silicon, but gotta respect that decision. It's likely the only way to compete with Tesla right now.
andreybaskov··on Datacenters in space aren't going to work
Thank you for saying this. It's almost like others are saying we should stop trying things because they are hard and challenging.

I wish we could dream a bit bigger rather than coming up with reasons something will fail.

andreybaskov··on Ilya Sutskever, Yann LeCun and the End of “Just Add GPUs”
I don't think we need that for 1,000x. We can building more solar, nuclear and there is still room for at least 10x improvement in efficiency for the chips. We are far far away from maxing out our compute capability as civilization before we start shooting satellites into the sun.
andreybaskov··on Ilya Sutskever, Yann LeCun and the End of “Just Add GPUs”
I agree scaling alone is not enough, and transformers itself is a proof of that - it was an iteration on the attention mechanism and a few other changes.

But no matter what the next big thing is, I'm sure it would immediately fill all available compute to maximize its potential. It's not like intelligence has a ceiling beyond which you don't need more intelligence.

andreybaskov··on Ilya Sutskever, Yann LeCun and the End of “Just Add GPUs”
> What high quality data sources are not already tapped? Synthetic data? Video?

> Where does the next 1000x flops come from? Even with Moore's law dead, we can easily build 1,000x more computers. And for arguments about lack of power - we have sun.

andreybaskov··on Ilya Sutskever, Yann LeCun and the End of “Just Add GPUs”
I see LLMs in a similar way - a new UI paradigm that "clicks the right buttons" when you know what you need, but don't know exact names of the buttons to click.

And from my experience there are lots and lots of jobs that are just "clicking the right buttons".

andreybaskov··on Ilya Sutskever, Yann LeCun and the End of “Just Add GPUs”
Say we discover a new architecture breakthrough like Yann LeCun's proposed JEPA. Won't scaling laws apply to it anyway?

Suppose training is so efficient that you can train state of the art AGI on a few GPUs. If it's better than current LLMs, there will be more demand/inference, which will require more GPUs and we are back at the same "add more gpus".

I find it hard to believe that we, as a humanity, will hit the wall of "we don't need more compute", no matter what the algorithms are.

andreybaskov··on Claude Opus 4.5
Thanks! That's a great way to analyze it by comparing to open source models. Though I wonder if they use the same hardware for gpt-oss-120b and Claude Opus.
andreybaskov··on Claude Opus 4.5
Does anyone know or have a guess on the size of this latest thinking models and what hardware they use to run inference? As in how much memory and what quantization it uses and if it's "theoretically" possible to run it on something like Mac Studio M3 Ultra with 512GB RAM. Just curious from theoretical perspective.
andreybaskov··on Amazon Demands Perplexity Stop AI Agent from Making Purchases
Exactly. It's software - `curl` or LLM. It's a function that accepts input and produces output. One is much more sophisticated that the other, but it's made out of the same machine instructions, there is no magic.

What's the criteria that makes one function "autonomous" and the other one "manual"? I feel it really boils down to this.

andreybaskov··on Bullying Is Not Innovation
Apologies, I didn't mean to spam, haven't seen the other thread that picked up more votes and was really curious about where the line is.

I completely understand private businesses having a right to refuse a service without a cause. But as others pointed, the question is to what degree "delegation" is acceptable if I'm acting in a good faith?

I'm guessing the answer is "to a degree it doesn't impact our business".

andreybaskov··on Amazon Demands Perplexity Stop AI Agent from Making Purchases
I know its there. But we _prefer_ to have a single account to simplify tracking and picking up packages. I'm curious if from their point of view (or their ToS) I'm even allowed to share my credentials with anyone else.

1Password shared vaults are there for a reason - people share credentials all the time, business or personal.

andreybaskov··on Amazon Demands Perplexity Stop AI Agent from Making Purchases
Interesting. Amazon ToS actually has a section about agents - https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

And they even provide a definition of what an Agent is:

"Agent” means any software or service that takes autonomous or semi-autonomous action on behalf of, or at the instruction of, any person or entity.

Though to me it raises even more questions. What is a software that takes "autonomous" action on my behalf. Is curl "autonomous"?

andreybaskov··on Amazon Demands Perplexity Stop AI Agent from Making Purchases
Me and my wife share the same Amazon account. Should I open a business account to do grocery shopping?
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