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mayank

2,721 karma · joined September 11, 2010

AI Monetization @ Meta

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayanklahiri/

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mayank··on Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows
If you’re doing breakeven math on subscriptions, consider that your own rig can run 24/7 whereas you will get a fraction of that with sub rate limits. Even if you factor in PG&E residential rates, the breakeven is a lot closer to months for overnight long-running agentic coding a couple times a week.

And in terms of interesting use cases: recently pointed an agent at Blender and gave it vision. That setup can essentially iterate on a scene forever.

mayank··on Launch HN: Stoa Markets (YC S26) – A Marketplace for GPUs and AI Servers
I assume this is a strictly B2B proposition in spite of "built for every side of the GPU market" -- meaning I'm probably not going to be able to buy/bid on small (e.g. 2-8) lots of used, matched RTX 3090s for example?
mayank··on Using an open model feels surprisingly good
Close to $500 in overage for me :) I’m going to give GLM a shot next.
mayank··on Using an open model feels surprisingly good
Oddly enough, I did the exact same thing this past weekend, for a couple hundred usd in Fable overage.

It was truly remarkably easy to build and package it exactly to my whims, in my case as a single docker container with a process reaper that runs llama, my Go code, tts, chat harness, browser in xvfb, and even a mailer daemon. With Gemma, it even runs on a RPi 5.

What’s absolutely wild to me is that over a couple hours, I could probably have it import parts of Home Assistant for my devices directly, and do other wacky stuff in what is essentially software for one.

mayank··on Using an open model feels surprisingly good
I was curious about the cost angle too, i.e. how much "free" coding agent I can get for what cost. Here's the research by Fable if you're interested: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/2c9a5001-0b7e-4944-beb1-9...
mayank··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
Spent nights over the last six months combining AI coding agents with containers, spec-driven development, and formal verification, so that I (eventually) don't have to manually review 10k+ lines of AI code a day, or worry about the latest model wiping out my home directory:

https://www.overplane.dev/ (Apache-2.0)

mayank··on Show HN: Overplane: Containers and formal verification for AI code
TL;DR: Overplane is an AI build system that pairs popular AI coding agents with containers, spec driven development, and automatic lightweight formal verification for a safer, replayable AI codegen workflow.

Like many others, I’ve watched AI code pile up at work, and get increasingly lighter reviews due to its size and maddening uniformity. On my side projects at night, I see the full speed and fragility of vibe coding. Neither practice seems sustainable, so I’ve been playing around for the last few months looking for a balanced, middle ground.

The key idea here is similar to chip design: if AI written software functionally does what you intended it to (by virtue of increasingly sophisticated testing against a codification of your intent), then it’s perhaps less important to manually review every line of generated code.

Overplane is a labor of love that brings that idea to life as an open-source experiment, combining some old personal loves: containerization, content addressed build systems, and formal verification.

The example I’d start with is rustdis, a partial, wire-compatible Redis clone in Rust with an empty [dependencies] section. Created with seven short specs and about $45 of Claude Opus, in about three hours: https://www.overplane.dev/examples

What sold me on the approach is that the one IR generated by Overplane from the specs paid for itself downstream: Z3 checks at build time, 48 generated proptest properties, and Kani proofs on the parser and arithmetic core.

It also holds up against redis-benchmark better than I expected, within about 90% of real Redis on my box unpipelined and a bit ahead on some pipelined workloads, which I mostly attribute to rustdis doing less than Redis does.

It’s v0.0.8 and rough. If you’ve tried spec-first workflows or lightweight formal methods in anger, I’d love to hear where they broke down for you.

mayank··on Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
Such a great comment, and I agree with all of them.

For me in a similar vein:

- mar ‘24: thinking about how to survey the field and implement a hard research task in Natural Language Processing, and then just approximating it well enough with a prompt and a completions api

- mid ‘25: Llama 3 being able to analyze a good sized codebase I was onboarding onto, and synthesize it into diagrams that matched the quality of ones I’d generated by hand with deterministic tools.

- dec ‘25: opus 4.5 basically generating multi-class modules and tests perfectly (syntactically). Finding that errors were my own under-specification of the prompt. Stopped writing code by hand, mainly because it was good enough and came with tests, docs, build scripts, and other goodies for free.

mayank··on Colossal Cave Adventure (1976)
Indeed! It’s a form of a branch table: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_table
mayank··on Technical debt vs. technical assets: What's the difference?
Got a source for this? Because it’s brilliant.
mayank··on Comparison of Claude Sonnet 3.5, GPT-4o, o1, and Gemini 1.5 Pro for coding
Agreed and flagged, this almost seems LLM written, not a bit of data.
mayank··on Launch HN: Fresco (YC F24) – AI Copilot for Construction Superintendents
This seems odd. If your scribe can lie in complex and sometimes hard to detect ways, how do you not see some form of risk? What happens when (not if) your scribe misses something and real world damages ensue as a result? Are you expecting your users to cross check every report? And if so, what’s the benefit of your product?
mayank··on Slack AI Training with Customer Data
> They need to reword this. Whoever wrote it is a liability

Sounds like it’s been written specifically to avoid liability.

mayank··on The lifecycle of a code AI completion
Very interesting! I wonder to what extent this assumption is true in tying completions to traditional code autocomplete.

> One of the biggest constraints on the retrieval implementation is latency

If I’m getting a multi line block of code written automagically for me based on comments and the like, I’d personally value quality over latency and be more than happy to wait on a spinner. And I’d also be happy to map separate shortcuts for when I’m prepared to do so (avoiding the need to detect my intent).

mayank··on How to find the AWS account ID of any S3 bucket
> aws s3 bucket needs to match the domain for website hosting.

This is outdated information, and not required anymore when using CloudFront.

And even in the past, you could use the S3 API to implement a reverse proxy without matching bucket and domain names.

mayank··on The One Billion Row Challenge
> the minimal runtime is typically the best estimator

Depends what you’re estimating. The minimum is usually not representative of “real world” performance, which is why we use measures of central tendency over many runs for performance benchmarks.

mayank··on The One Billion Row Challenge
This is a pretty standard measure called the Trimmed Mean: https://statisticsbyjim.com/basics/trimmed-mean/
mayank··on UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals "insane" say experts
Very debatable, if both are done right.
mayank··on Vector Search with OpenAI Embeddings: Lucene Is All You Need
It is in industry, but you may be shocked if you read “research code”
mayank··on Show HN: We are building an open-source IDE powered by AI
> You don't actually write code with e2b. You write technical specs and then collaborate with an AI agent.

If I want to change 1 character of a generated source file, can I just go do that or will I have to figure out how to prompt the change in natural language?

mayank··on Google Cloud now lets you suspend and resume VMs
> Because there are many services (each with their own readiness criteria), a cold boot takes a long time until all services stabilize (worst case I've seen was over 30 minutes). With hibernation they can resume where they started off within a couple of minutes.

This is exactly what we use hibernation for in conjunction with EC2 Warm Pools -- fast autoscaling of services that have long boot times. There's an argument to be made that fixing slow boots should be the "correct" solution, but in large enough organizations, hibernated instances are a convenient workaround to buy you some time to navigate the organizational dynamics (and technical debt) that lead to the slow boot times in the first place.

mayank··on Building ClickHouse Cloud from scratch in a year
This is a wonderful article, architecture, and project. Can anyone from Clickhouse comment on any non-technical factors that allowed such a rapid pace of development, e.g. team size, structure, etc.?
mayank··on JDK 20 and JDK 21: What we know so far
All modern languages heavily borrow from each other’s latest iterations. In the case of Java though, playing catch up is by design since it’s intended to be a conservative/stable language.
mayank··on Tell HN: Twitter Is Down
Wow....confirmed!

`{"errors":[{"message":"Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information","code":467}]}`

mayank··on Premium .dev domain with Google costs $850
Can you comment on a reply below that claims there was promotional pricing in 2019 at launch?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33929132

mayank··on Ask HN: How would software look if hardware had stopped improving long ago?
Exactly! Hashcash was proposed in 1997: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash similar mechanics for a different use case
mayank··on Ask HN: Nested Resources in REST/HTTP API URLs?
> - /organizations/:id

> - /blogs/:id

The pragmatic, large-company-only counterpoint is the narrow edge case where:

- :id must be human-readable for "SEO reasons"

- there are many competing organizations and blogs to the point where there may be a name collision.

Although in that case, I'd still suggest:

/:organization-name/:blog-name

mayank··on Programming breakthroughs we need
There's a hierarchical modeling paradigm/tools called C4 that (while being boxes and lines) helps with the zoom-in/zoom-out nature of understanding systems: https://c4model.com/
mayank··on Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot
> I still can't get over the banana-pants insanity of the first count... arguing that Twitter lied about its numbers for years specifically so that someone would buy it at an inflated price?

Not a lawyer, so could you explain why this is banana-pants insanity? There's malicious fraud (unlikely) and then there's the more likely case of under-investing in bot-detection and expunging efforts, e.g. "in favor of other priorities", to keep DAUs and subsequently valuations high for a potential sale.

mayank··on An ex-Googler's guide to dev tools (2020)
I agree! But —

- BigQuery is available on GCP

- Bazel is an open source Blaze

- google source formatting (for java at least) is open source

There are probably more…

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