HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

tomalaci

851 karma · joined August 3, 2022

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomalaci/ Email: tomass@tomalaci.com

Technologies: Go, Python, Rust, Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, GitOps, PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB, ClickHouse, Kafka, RabbitMQ, MQTT, IoT, distributed systems

---

Senior/Lead Platform Engineer and backend developer with 12+ years of experience building distributed systems, data platforms, IoT fleet-management platforms, and infrastructure automation.

Recent work includes platforms managing 10,000+ distributed energy devices, telecom monitoring systems processing tens of millions of data points across millions of devices and sensors, and Kubernetes/GitOps platforms spanning AWS and private data centres.

Strongest in architecture and hands-on implementation: backend services, telemetry ingestion, time-series data, developer platforms, CI/CD automation, reliability, and cost-aware infrastructure. I have led small engineering teams, established engineering practices, and improved release frequency from weekly deployments to several releases per day.

---

Interested in Senior, Lead, Staff, or early-stage founding/platform engineering roles. Open to permanent employment or B2B contracts through my Swedish company, Tomalaci Systems AB.

submissionscomments
tomalaci··on Karpathy: Let's reproduce GPT-2 (1.6B): one 8XH100 node 24h $672 in llm.c
With how much NVidia is developing AI-workload accelerating hardware, I expect this will cost maybe few dozen dollars and train in few hours within next few years.

What I think will be interesting is when commodity hardware can run cheap inference from very capable, specialized models. Pretty sure it will spawn a new golden age of AI-powered desktop applications.

For example, video game space has already been trying to create AI-powered NPCs, world generation and story-telling (e.g. Inworld AI).

tomalaci··on The Limited Value of Multivitamin Supplements
I usually find that a lot of multivitamins are quite underdosed. Athletic multi-vitamins are better dosed but are stupidly expensive compared to just buying separate.

As others have noted, you just need few main vitamins/supplements to cover your most likely deficiencies (Vitamin D, Zinc, Magnesium, Omega, etc.)

If you really care about this then find and do a simple general blood test for your micros/vitamins. It will show you where you are deficient and can focus on supplementing on only those. No not much point supplementing micros that are already OK.

tomalaci··on My spiciest take on tech hiring
I usually just do a small pair programming session for a simple problem that can be expanded with various tweaks (even fizzbuzz can work for it, I usually have some business problem related components).

During that session, which lasts about an hour, I usually have pretty good idea if the person would work out or not for the team. Works pretty well for a lot of fakers too (usually consultants that have crazy padded resumes).

Of course, if your hiring is more beurocratic where your technical teams aren't really involved in hiring (or don't want to be) then don't be surprised if you get pretty much randomly skilled persons (or fakers).

tomalaci··on AI is exhausting the power grid
I suggest using kind or minikube to simplify the setup but make sure you supply --nuclear option to create Nukernetes cluster. Also setup scheduled batch of jobs to dump nuclear waste, we wouldn't want to have that overflowing in our laptops, do we?
tomalaci··on Welcome to the safest time to give birth in human history
Pretty sure you want to include location as a variable in this kind of statistic.
tomalaci··on General Availability of .NET Aspire: Simplifying .NET Cloud-Native Development
Am I getting this right? With this you can actually write infrastructure as proper code? No more YAML?

If so I hope they succeed to make it popular so it spreads to other languages as well.

tomalaci··on YouTube algorithm weaponised to shut down Russia-Ukraine war reporting channel [video]
Typical Google product that really has no actual customer support and is using faulty/naive algorithms to deal with things.

Unfortunately, I have a feeling this HN topic will be flagged as well and disappear into nothingness.

tomalaci··on Why Custom GPTs are better than plugins
Oh dear, looks like this seeming bot-comment is one of those reliability issues that GP was on about.
tomalaci··on Eating fewer calories can ward off ageing
https://protocol.bryanjohnson.com/#skin-health

For non-invasive skincare he does daily face-wash, moisturizing creams (face and body), application of creams containing Vitamin C, E, B3 and more. Personally, it is enough to apply some moisturizer (for face and body) and UV-protective cream. If you want really smooth/clean face then you can look into getting some retinol/retinoid - the stronger the better the effect as long as your skin can tolerate (so requires experimentation). Stick to proven brands such as Cerave, Eucerin and few other big ones.

For more invasive procedures he does microneedle and laser procedures. Both operate on principle of basically causing controlled damage on the skin to force your body to repair it. I used to have some stretch marks that were repaired using CO2 laser. Before trying to do any of this - consult your local dermatologist if you have something that bothers you on the skin, however. These procedures can be costly, requires after-care and obviously should be performed by certified professionals.

He also does microbotox injections to clear any pores. In my opinion this is now veering off more to cosmetic enhancement with fillers and the like.

tomalaci··on Eating fewer calories can ward off ageing
It is on https://protocol.bryanjohnson.com site. For example, his fitness routine: https://protocol.bryanjohnson.com/#fitness

Personally, I have taken few things from his routine and double-checked it with other sources and more importantly found much cheaper products/things locally than the ones that are advertised (even though, most of them are fine anyways such as in Skincare he uses standard Cerave stuff).

Do note that this is -one- guy trying basically everything that seems plausible. It would likely result in frequently switching up things that are not researched well.

tomalaci··on Eating fewer calories can ward off ageing
He frequently renews his skin through rather extensive skincare. In health terms, ideal skin has no sun damage or micro-scars/exterior damage and, therefore, is not surprising that he does look like some sort of vampire. I mean, the guy even transfuses blood from his kid.
tomalaci··on Otter, Fastest Go in-memory cache based on S3-FIFO algorithm
For a long time Go did not expose their super efficient internal map hashing algorithm that, if possible, would use AES instructions from the processor to hash even faster. That is, they did not expose it as an official API. People usually did some "unsafe" usage to link to that internal hashing function for their own super-fast map implementations.

That was changed some time ago. They released official maphash package: https://pkg.go.dev/hash/maphash

Otter author could probably look into replacing their 3rd party hashing dependency (https://github.com/dolthub/maphash) with the official one and knock off an unneeded dependency :)

tomalaci··on Murder is a pixel art ECS game engine in C#
I think that the name is too generic and popular. You see "murder", the word, in most news outlets, vast majority of movies/games/etc. - any media.

Sure, you have "Unity", "Unreal", "Godot", ".NET" and etc. but I would argue that they are distinct and unique because they have some heavy-weight organizations and popularity behind them. I also think that they are not on the same level of generic use as "murder".

This engine's name, however, will have to compete with the generic "murder" that is already used in various different contexts. Surprisingly, you can still find it as top result if you search "murder engine" so they got that going for them.

Still, would of preferred if it was maybe some variation of "murder" word if they want to stick with that.

tomalaci··on [dead]
Original Ukrainian source: https://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2023/11/29/7430924/
tomalaci··on Ask HN: Which sources cover AI developments without falling for the hype?
Missing Elon Musk, guy is a leading authority on all things AI that even the British government asks what to do about it from him (big /s).
tomalaci··on Researchers uncover the fastest semiconductor yet
I remember when people were super excited for graphene and nanotubes in semiconductors. What happened to that? Seems like a lot of things stop dead in its tracks when it comes to mass manufacturing.
tomalaci··on Minimum 15% global corporate tax has too many loopholes
The problem I find with these global taxes is not the arbitrary percentage set but the agreement and collaboration between countries that implement it. Some specialize in offering tax incentives in differing sectors (i.e. Ireland with their innovation tax). Some are very lax on enforcement or keeping a good eye on things (i.e. Switzerland). Are they really going to scrap that for this global tax if there is high likelihood that not everyone will play ball?

If you only have a subset of countries on the same page, the accounting firms will definitely exploit that and move the wealth away from them, avoiding the tax. I just don't see this working at all any time soon, period - too many corrupt states in play at the moment.

tomalaci··on 4K4D: Real-Time 4D View Synthesis at 4K Resolution
Add volumetric sound, integrate VR and you almost have recreated braindance from the Cyberpunk 2077 game. Doesn't seem that far off in the distance.

The missing component from complete braindance would be integrating physical senses. AFAIK we are pretty far away from having anything revolutionary in that domain. Would love to be proven wrong, however.

tomalaci··on Croatia wants to turn superhot underground lake into 16MW power plant
I have to admit that it has become strange seeing such projects costing only single or double digit millions. Every time I read that some new interesting power plant is to be built the cost is usually high triple digit millions or actual billions.

Is it mostly because this is Croatia? If so then why cant we have similar cheaper construction across rest of the Europe? I feel like construction projects have their costs vastly inflated the further you go to the western side.

tomalaci··on HTTP/3 adoption is growing rapidly
Will the spread of QUIC improve low latency services such as video game servers? Last I checked they were using either gRPC or homecooked protocol over UDP.
tomalaci··on Drinking diet sodas daily during pregnancy linked to autism in male offspring
"... consumption of either diet soda or a comparable amount of aspartame ..."

Of course, it isn't the actual bevarage but one or combination of its compounds.

tomalaci··on Adding runtime benchmarks to the Rust compiler benchmark suite
I know a lot of places tend to use things like AWS spot instances for their CI runners but they obviously provide inconsistent performance. As others have noted you can always measure performance through other metrics like certain counters, not just the absolute runtime duration.

I can recommend getting your company a dedicated instance from OVH or Hetzner since they are dirt-cheap compared to cloud offerings. Setup some simple runner containers with properly constrained CPU and memory that would be similar to production environment, hook them up to your Gitlab or Github and you are good to go. You don't really need high availability for development things like CI runners.

tomalaci··on Valve is a wonderful upstream contributor to Linux and the open-source community
I think big reason Valve is so good is because they are a private company and that allows non-traditional management style.

Unlike certain public companies that bring in executives that perform spectacularly bad decisions (cough, cough, Unity).

tomalaci··on Sweden Home Buyers Cancel New House Deals at Record Pace
Archive link: https://archive.ph/xnlP6
tomalaci··on Dutch e-bike maker VanMoof goes bankrupt, leaving riders stranded
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36769998#36770325

This company had an interesting concept to fight bycicle thievery with "hunters" who steal it back [1].

[1] https://www.vanmoof.com/en-SE/peace-of-mind

tomalaci··on Opendream: A layer-based UI for Stable Diffusion
I haven't followed diffusion image generation development for a while. Where do you find information on what models you can use in the model_ckpt field? Do I need to import them from somewhere? What are the main differences between them and which are more modern or better?
tomalaci··on Why doctors pay millions in fees that could be spent on care
I could already see the scenario there. The startup gets very successful and entrenches itself as this middleman. Eventually someone figures out that this cheque system is dumb and everything should be digital by default. The startup then starts lobbying and further locks in the archaic cheque system.
tomalaci··on Why doctors pay millions in fees that could be spent on care
As an European it is unbelievable with the kind of crap Americans need to deal with. I would expect the bank to apply a microscopic transfer fee and that's it, not a normal company deciding an arbitrary insane percentage fee. It really feels like everything is trying to nickel and dime you guys over there.
tomalaci··on Why homes often feel warmer than the thermostat suggests – what to do about it
That is a pretty good read to optimize temperature for your home, however I find controlling humidity more troublesome during winter months. I live in Sweden and even with a humidifier rated for my apartment size doesn't make much of a dent against dryness.
tomalaci··on After Raising $235K, Abode Remains Committed to Taking on Adobe
Important: This is not VC funding. This is a Kickstarter project [1].

Honestly, this feels like a scam. Their logo and name is stupidly similar to Adobe which would obviously result in trademark lawsuit. I think they are just scrounging up money from the Kickstarter and will just disappear after a while.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/culturehustle/abode-a-s...

← PreviousPage 2 of 5Next →