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eajr

22 karma · joined October 3, 2018

Chief Architect @ meridian.coop Blog: eajr.tech GitHub: @eajr Email: me at ealfonso dot com
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eajr··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
An idle/incremental rpg for fun in my spare time (that doesn't really exist!)

https://darkspire.gg/

eajr··on Ask HN: How are you doing RAG locally?
Local LibreChat which bundles a vector db for docs.
eajr··on Riffrail: Browser-based music sequencer and synthesizer
This is super cool! Made a basic house loop: NQ9i61T3
eajr··on New Hacker News Client
dark mode pls
eajr··on Ask HN: Prepping my first open-source release, would you use this?
Sounds like BMAD, SuperClaude, Claude-Flow, etc.

I'd have comparisons to those popular ones: what makes yours different/sets it apart.

The goal of all this stuff is to be able to vibe code to a certain extent so you're right in line with that thought.

Definitely launch with a YouTube video linked from your GH where you walk thru how to start a new project from scratch with your kit.

eajr··on How do I get a paid internship as a 16yo developer?
Private externals for competitive games can rake in a LOT of money. Its also high stakes because of the kernel-level anticheats these days, but being private makes it slightly easier. Public externals bypass methods are patched pretty quickly. Make something that's interesting to you, and if you like that side of engineering (reversing, bypassing ac's, etc), it's definitely a way to make a lot of money. I know some people doing it for rust (the game) that make a killing.
eajr··on Ask HN: Has your opinion on AI changed over the past year?
Yes, a year ago I thought these things were just toys and wouldn't amount to much, and I've done a complete 180 on that stance. Started using cursor about 9 months ago and saw some potential, but my mind completely changed when I tried Claude code for the first time. We've got a long way to go till this tech is usable on large production codebases but for small greenfield stuff, it is killer.
eajr··on How do I get a paid internship as a 16yo developer?
The couple comments you've gotten so far are pretty spot-on. The job market is not good for software engineers in general right now. I'll second bix6's advice to start something of your own. When I was a teenager I got into reverse engineering via an mmorpg that the server executables leaked, and ended up launching a number of private modded servers that netted good income. Make something of your own and you'll learn a lot that will be very useful in your career further down the road. Best of luck to ya
eajr··on Show HN: OffChess – Offline chess puzzles app
Very cool app. Chess.com costs too much and lichess is rather ugly and has barebones puzzle support. I like how you can choose different categories. Will be using this from now on. Btw you have "Egnlish Opening" misspelled.
eajr··on Show HN: LLMs playing poker against each other
Really cool
eajr··on LM Studio is now an MCP Host
I've been considering building this. Havent found anything yet.
eajr··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
There was a Trade Wars inspired game 25 yrs ago called "Black Nova Traders" that was a whole lot of fun. The original author is embarking on a v2 after a quarter century since the first release. You might find it interesting to see if yours and his vision align and work together[1]. All good if not, I'll keep an eye on your project as I love Trade Wars inspired games.

[1] https://github.com/harwoodr/bnt2

eajr··on Show HN: I developed a nostalgic Pokemon web game – Pokemon Journey Together
Great job for your first game. Animations are great. Skills & Pokémon are in Japanese so no idea what I'm reading/using. Do Pokémon evolve?
eajr··on Show HN: TradeSight – a Rust-powered market risk dashboard with AI analysis
Very cool. Shared with some friends as well. Overall risk score at the top is nebulous - not sure what 8.75 means. Maybe a little context would be helpful. From a UI perspective things are quite large and too much space between elements. Can definitely condense down so we can see all the metrics in one glance. Mouseovers on pills (ie Mortgage Rate -> "High") the popup gets cut off so you cant fully read the text.
eajr··on Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties
Just so you know the 518 is back in production as of a couple years ago with an updated sensor. It is by far the best mouse ever made, still to this day.
eajr··on Ask HN: Have your search results gotten worse recently?
I switched to Kagi a few months ago and pay for it -- it's worth every penny. I never go back to google/ddg (unless im looking at maps).
eajr··on Ask HN: How to compare mini PC's for homelab usage?
There's a bunch of youtube videos where people compare and contrast mini pc's for their homelab setup. I ended up going with these off of ebay:

- Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q Tiny | i7-7700T | 16GB RAM | 512GB M.2

For $150/ea. Comes with windows but ubuntu server was a quick & painless install on them (no driver issues).

eajr··on Ask HN: How to monetize the one-off service?
It sounds like you're in the price discovery phase of the business. If you can't get people to convert there's a few questions you need to ask... 1. Is the price too high? If you truly only need to scan once a quarter or once a year, it's going to be hard to ask for a monthly charge. 2. Sites are different sizes so do you charge a flat fee regardless of how big the site your scanning is? Would seem unfair if I was a tiny site and I was subsidizing larger sites because we're charged the same rate. 3. How efficient is your checkout process? Is there any friction you can remove?

Out of your potential avenues 1 seems most probable for higher revenue and what you should do.

I would ask the question why am I charging a monthly fee. Personally, your service sounds like you need more a credit system. Buy credits (could correspond to pages scanned, or just raw executions), with a minimum number of credits ($10 = 10 credits), and allow people to setup schedules to scan when they see fit. Maybe you'll see people mostly schedule once a quarter. You can have credits automatically top-up when it reaches a certain threshold (ie 5 credits).

Hope that helps, and good luck!

eajr··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2019)
It's definitely possible for the right candidate.
eajr··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2019)
Mueller Water Products | https://www.muellercompany.com | Atlanta, GA or Toronto, ON | Multiple Roles | Full-time | ONSITE

At Mueller, we are building the next generation of smart water infrastructure for cities and municipalities all over the world. The Mueller business has been around for over 150 years and is the leading manufacturer of hydrants, valves, and other water products. Our technology teams are integrating custom built smart devices to provide IoT capabilities all over towns and cities. We are working on a lot of different problems: Leak Detection, Pressure Monitoring, and Automated Metering Infrastructure (AMI Networks). We have over a million IoT devices in the field and are really pushing the boundaries of what is possible for a smart water infrastructure.

Our current stack includes: Angular, Typescript, C# (.NET Core), C++, C, MSSQL, AWS Services (ECS, RDS, API Gateway, Cognito, Lambda, etc)

Roles we have open:

   * Senior Full-stack Engineers
   * Senior Front-end Engineers
   * Data Engineers / Architects
   * Firmware Engineers
   * Hardware Engineers
If interested, send me an email at ealfonso+hn@muellerwp.com
eajr··on DevOops, some common anti-patterns
(Not the OP) If cloud equates in your mind to expensive, then you were probably using the cloud wrong. Using AWS (for example) as a data-center and self hosting on EC2 can be pretty expensive compared to just getting a few dedicated boxes. The point of cloud architecture with tools like terraform are meant to be able to have resources be torn down and scaled down when they are unnecessary. You can't scale down bare metal, and you can't scale it up either automatically. If you have a consistent workload and know exactly what you need on any given day/time and for any given number of clients and can predict what you need - bare metal is honestly not a bad choice.

Edit: Just realized I didn't answer your initial question in the post: A cloud architect, who comes from an engineering background, is more along the lines of what you would need versus just a pure ops person. My last company was a small company (startup mentality) and as chief architect I was able to design our cloud architecture as well as write code on our projects when my developers were struggling to meet deadlines.

eajr··on Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
I can't upvote this enough. Burnout is real and it is horrible to experience, and could possibly derail your career for years. I was fortunate when I experienced burnout in my mid 20's that it didn't derail my career trajectory, but I have seen cases where it has.

This is definitely the #1 thing to focus on as a junior dev. Start to understand your limits. Listen to your body, become conscientious of your emotional state. One of the best junior developers I had the opportunity to mentor was a 35-40 hour per week developer who consistently day in and day out delivered code. He was dependably consistent and eagerly took advice without ego.