shivekkhurana

As much as I respect Dr. T (and by proxy, the guest author on his blog), it seems that Math Bros are having the meltdown that SWEs had last year.

SWE is a capitalistic game and Academia seems to be a game of status ?

Regardless, they are not going to make it if they remove LLMs.

Someone, somewhere will use SOL/Opus and mog the big boys.

Sync engines are fascinating way to build modern apps. I think they will become the norm soon, here's what we have so far: https://shivekkhurana.com/blog/sync-engines/

I have gotten into the habit of keeping the Codex app open on my laptop, and using the ChatGPT app on my phone as a remote. Maybe hosting is the way to go!

Slightly related: Amazon’s bedrock has better privacy guarantees. This seems to be skills that can be added to Desktop app, which can connect to Bedrock for inference.

My home country of Bharat is a major textile producer and exporter. I can find anything here.

Two reasons: 1. My thighs are bigger than usual for my waist size, so I adapted. 2. Indians (Bharat) have a culture of wearing lose clothes, and I also like lose clothes. They are more comfortable.

The waist is fitted, but with elastic bands on the side for added comfort (my belly gets bigger during evening, when I sit down and after I eat).

Hello fellow Clojurist, I sent you an email.

No classes. I was probably hyper aware of how my body reacts to clothing.

For example, the waist of almost every pant became uncomfortable when I sat down after eating food.

The area below arm pits and close to thighs was always tight. The length of pants was always long for the waist.

- To determine my taste, I looked at various styles of women clothing (on Pinterest).

Then for the models I found most attractive, I imagined what would the clothes they have put on look like if they were men. That led me to the realisation that I like formal aesthetic, reserved and subtle colors.

Everything else was experimental

Would love to talk. My goals are not anchored around sustainability, but I optimise against synthetic fibres.

My website is shivekkhurana.com. My email is on my github.

No. I expected 5 people to show up, but there were almost 50.

I took care of the stage but couldn’t manage operations.

https://shivekkhurana.com/about. 3/4 photos are my custom made clothes.

I do make clothes for close friends and family, but I don’t intend to make money of it. Playing this game for the game sake.

Fast fashion forces you to dress for the masses. Loose shirts, baggy pants and shallow pockets is not fashion, its cost optimisation for brands.

I didn't want to dress up like a boy. Me and my friend were in Paris when we got inspired by the floor(fashion_sense). I was already working on my clothing, but that day we promised each other that we will not be underdressed anymore.

He opted for off-the-shelf formal clothing: high quality shirts, and pants. I went all in.

First I found markets that sell cheap fabrics, so I can experiment. I travel a lot, so my clothing had to be designed for all weathers. I'm Indian (Bharat), but look racially ambiguous, so I also wanted my clothing to reflect my roots and culture, yet be modern enough for any room in the world.

I run a company, and write code, so comfort was paramount. But I also had meetings or presentations so I wanted to be presentable.

Started with pants, because I thought pants are easy to optimise, and I just need a black, gray and dark blue one. Over 5 iterations, I reached a design with elastic straps on the side (because when I eat food, my tummy bloats a little and its uncomfortable to sit down), and loose on the thighs. Imagine pyjamas, that look like pants.

Then next step was to experiment with jackets and shirts. I played with fabric, patterns, and finish (zippers, titch buttons, different cuff lengths and styles, different collars).

My friends started noticing, and I also consulted some clients. Then I gave a talk about it. This is one of my skills that I discovered by first principles. The best part is that I met my girlfriend because she noticed my aesthetics, and she told me that she makes her own clothes too.

I started designing my own clothes. The insight was that I spend 80% money on suits that I wear 2 times a year, and the rest was low quality clothing I actually wore.

I flipped it, and made suits and pants that I could wear everyday.

The fast fashion stores were crap quality, my body is not a template size and I care about fabric and comfort.

The process was to learn how to sketch, to determine fabrics, colors and fit. I made pants that stay comfortable even after I eat food, I made suits that I can wear casually.

I don’t stitch myself, for that I worked with multiple workshops, until I found one that works for me.

Took me about 3 years to reach a point where all my wardrobe is designed by and for me.

There were multiple side effects on my confidence, my life, and the opportunities coming my way.

I have been writing Clojure since 2017. Unlike every other language that helps you achieve a task, Clojure helped me think.

Clojure for me is a rich vocabulary to talk interact with data. When Jank becomes stable, Clojure will be unstoppable.

This blog post could have been a 4 hour in person event.

The TTS/STT models are actually good and aggressively priced. I personally built a voice-mode ai assistant.

STT time to first token is ~300ms. ~20 second audio takes less than 1 second to be converted.

TTS time to first token is ~700ms. ~20 second of audio is generated under 2 seconds.

A singleton pattern for coordinating rate limits across distributed Workers

I have been recording every txn with GnuCash for the last 8 years. I reached a point where I started writing scripts on top to support my multi-currency setup.

Then Claude became a thing, and I thought what if I use Hledger and let Claude manage my books ? I was reluctant to migrate years of txns, so I started with an opening balance.

This has been the highest leverage usage of Claude for me. I drop everything: bank statements, invoices, etc and ask Claude to make entries. When it makes a mistake, I add a new rule for future. Privacy issues aside, I cannot go back to traditional tools.

My time was better spent building my startup.

The return from the startup was experience, friendships, skill-development and money.

I chose to trade my time for tangible returns.

I second the sentiment expressed. I used to blog often and cross post on Medium and Twitter.

At peak, every third post I wrote went viral. But then I stopped because I had no return from it.

I recently started writing on my blog again: https://shivekkhurana.com

The main reason was to get back into the habit of writing, and by extension thinking. ChatGPT has weakened my thinking capacity.

I was advised to start with vanilla eMacs to get the hang of the system.

I now feel it was bad advice.

As someone who grew up with good dx tools like Sublime, it’s really hard to be productive in vanilla eMacs.

I’d suggest going with Doom, but don’t enable any package except Evil, LSP, Treesitter and Projectile.

This will give you a Vim like experience with basic project management.

As you become more comfortable, you can enable more packages.

This way you will stay productive and learn on the back of the community wisdom.

I have friends across the world. I talk with 7 of them every quarter.

We have scheduled video calls on our calendar. And after every call, we put notes on the call schedule.

Before the call, we get notified and we confirm if both parties will be available over text message.

Jank is Clojure.

Languages are often thought of in-coupling with the runtime.

But Clojure is a way of writing code. The official implementation runs on JVM. There are community ports for Node, C#, Go. Jank is the port on CPP.

Jank winning is Clojure winning.

Claude is really good at writing these configurations.

I was able to make VSCode behave like EMacs with vibe coding.

Neovim with Lazy is really easy to vibe code too.

But can it run Doom ?

At my university, I followed David Beazly's talks and tutorials. Just seeing him work and present improved my style and approach manifolds:

https://www.dabeaz.com/tutorials.html

> But cross border payments are expensive to facilitate

Although that sounds logical, there are multiple services that offer 0% fx conversion. Wise, Monzo, Niyo etc. These travel cards are what I carry around in a different country.

3.5% is brutal. Wise is a near 0% solution, with just one time setup fee. I get the convenience aspect, but most people foreigners visit would accept a card (i guess?)

HN is a global forum, and most people probably don't know about UPI.

But this is amazing. Do you have a subscription service or do you charge a markup on forex deposits ?

Also how did you build a legal structure to allow this ?

Congrats on the launch. Wish you success :)