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wawhal

581 karma · joined September 26, 2017

https://rishi.monster
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wawhal··on The AI Noise
I genuinely feel that companies with existing well designed systems with intentional architecture and design patterns will have far more leverage, with AI coming into the picture - as opposed to upcoming systems which are vibe coded from day 1.

Disclaimer - Author

wawhal··on Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
Try PianoForAll. My experience, fwiw - Pianoforall was instrumental in helping me play real music at parties and make the piano journey rewarding and enjoyable early on. Without that, the early days of learning classical music, music theory, practicing scales, ballads etc were a limbo - you don't feel like you are making progress (even when you are).

That said, PFA only compliments your classical syllabus, not replaces it.

wawhal··on Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
Here's mine: 0. Build the habit of taking notes ruthlessly to build a comprehensive second brain. 1. I transitioned to the penhold grip in Table Tennis in Nov 2025 and it has been a fun exploration. My goal for 2026 is to learn to play all the strokes comfortably with the penhold grip, and start competing at the district level. 2. Go from novice-intermediate to upper-intermediate in piano playing. Learn, memorize, and perform flawlessly 30 advanced piano pieces (minimum Henle 7–9) end-to-end, recorded on video, within the next 12 months. 3. Learn to speak Kannada. Been living in Bangalore past 9 years and it's almost embarrassing to not know a single complete Kannada sentence.
wawhal··on Being a developer in the age of reasoning AI
> but rarely is what I’m going to type out.

Just curious, does it matter? For some simple boilerplate code, simple test cases and simple skaffolding, which is needed in most applications, do you even care?

wawhal··on Safe Superintelligence Inc. – Ilya Sutskever
I'm yet to find a convincing definition for super intelligence. "Intelligence that surpasses human brain" is such a half hearted definition that I don't know what to make of it.
wawhal··on Graphqurl v1.0: Open-source cURL for GraphQL with autocomplete and subscriptions
It would have made sense to have GraphQL support in cURL, had GraphQL been a standard transfer protocol rather than a query language. Support for query languages is out of cURL's scope AFAIK.
wawhal··on Modi government to set up app store alternative to Google Play, Apple App Store
> by a company who understands security and has a financial backing to commit to a secure system

Not sure if this stands true for the current Indian government.

wawhal··on SQL is a better API language than GraphQL – Convince me otherwise
This is where GraphQL shines. You give your developer a schema and "they" choose the queries and mutations they want to make to make their life easy. Also, there's very less friction because the GraphQL schema can be completely documented.

And while going to prod, you just allow the queries that are being used, disable rest.

wawhal··on SQL is a better API language than GraphQL – Convince me otherwise
You can avoid this by allowing only specific queries in staging and production environments, this way, the introspection query can be disabled too.

Not sure if this violates the GraphQL spec though, because, ideally the server supports introspection, but it is disabled in some cases for safety reasons.

wawhal··on Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
1. Have you tried mindfulness meditation? 2. Which type of mindfulness meditation have you tried? 3. Why do you think it is useless when most people find it useful? 4. With what goal did you try the meditation that it seemed useless?

You cannot throw a word "useless" without emphasising the "use".

wawhal··on Assholes: A Probing Examination
> Not everyone is perfect just how they are but everyone doesn't have to act the same way to be acceptable.

This undermines the very concept of "law and order". There "must" be restrictions on behaviour if it is intrusive, offensive, inflamatory, indecent etc. I think it is okay to have an enforced "code of conduct" to prevent assholery.

wawhal··on Durable Design (2017)
Exactly, "sexiness" is subjective.
wawhal··on Durable Design (2017)
I respectfully disagree. I think most people would be okay with "average aesthetics" as long as the functionality of the product is designed well (flexible batteries in this case)

What looks good to 5/10 people, might not look good to the other 5/10. For an instance, consider an iPhone 4S. It is a pretty average design "aesthetically" IMO. But the phone did extraordinarily well because it was a well engineered phone. Another example is this website that you're looking at. I would call this average aesthetics as well.

Of course good aesthetics is an awesome add-on, but it is not fair to disqualify a product based on just aesthetics.

wawhal··on Avoid Indirection in Code
I slightly disagree because I prefer the code to be consistent all across my codebase.

Sure it is some effort to backtrack to the util functions, but I think the effort is worth it because I would rather have a developer spend multiple hours debugging and figuring out the code than having something that is a nightmare to iterate upon.

wawhal··on Show HN: Thoughter
Not sure if you can solve this at all. Because thoughter will be used for a reason that it isn't meeant to be used for.

So correct me if I am wrong but I think thoughter is most useful when you almost "know" that you have a thought resonating with somebody else and you want to confirm it. Its not for making wild hits at people. Right?

wawhal··on Show HN: Thoughter
Not fair.

A lot of people are not comfortable with confrontation in the first place. And it is entirely normal. It just how people are wired and expecting them to change themselves drastically is not fair on them. It should be a gradual process and a thing like thoughter is a great use for "getting started". End goal is of course to confront.

wawhal··on Show HN: Thoughter
Love the idea. I was trying this out. Turns out that the email goes to the spam folder of gmail :(
wawhal··on Show HN: A Color Picker I Made
This is amazing! A boon for people who cannot visualise colors in the head (people like me =)) Thanks for this and congrats.
wawhal··on Show HN: Graphql2chartjs: Realtime Charts Made Easy with GraphQL and ChartJS
It doesn't have to deal with streaming. You stream your data, use whatever algorithm and pass the final output to this. It is just going to transform it into the API that ChartJS expects.
wawhal··on Show HN: Graphql2chartjs: Realtime Charts Made Easy with GraphQL and ChartJS
Not really. You can use it with any GraphQL server that returns a list of records :)

The Hasura and Postgres combo is ideal because you can have complicated aggregations over the Postgres data in the form of views and Hasura can help you query them realtime over GraphQL. Also Postgres has nice community tools around it like PostGIS and Timescale which help you handle geolocation and timeseries type of data that is often used for visualisations.

PS: Co-author here. And I am an engineer at Hasura.

wawhal··on Show HN: Graphql2chartjs: Realtime Charts Made Easy with GraphQL and ChartJS
Hi HN!

We built this tool so that we could build charts using GraphQL as a data-source. This is a super neat fit especially with creating tables and views in Postgres and getting charts easily.

Hope you find it useful.

wawhal··on Hacker News Meetups
High-quality people (as defined by you) still might not have common areas of interests and hence the question still stands: "What will actually be talked/presented/discussed in the meetup?"
wawhal··on Hacker News Meetups
This question really deserves an elaborate answer. Not sure if it has one though.

The whole idea behind a meetup is to connect people with a similar interest or a similar group of interest so that they can talk, listen to and discuss things that they care about.

HN has such broad range of topics that it is seems hard to find a group of people sharing the same interest.

It would be really helpful if somebody that attends these meetups shares insights about them.

wawhal··on Principled GraphQL
Apollo's marketing game has been ridiculously on point. They are the only GraphQL client in the ecosystem that is fully compatible with any GraphQL compliant server [0]. And since it is pretty good, whenever one has to talk/market/propose anything about GraphQL in the community, they end up cross-marketing for Apollo.

[0] Relay has its own spec and can be used only if the server supports it. Other GraphQL clients are either not well maintained or do not support as many features as Apollo does (caching, subscriptions are two features that come to mind)

wawhal··on Show HN: Simple way to share state using React Hooks and Context
I don't buy the way things are done in this library (constate). I wouldn't import a library just for doing this. It is not very hard to achieve the same with plain `useContext` and `useState` directly.

That being said, I don't agree that hooks are futile, because, using hooks, your state logic can be reused. For example, if your app uses 10 independent counters (with different render logic and different styling), hooks are definitely useful to reuse the state logic.

wawhal··on Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness
About time for mindfulness to actually be a thing. Waiting for a time where people are at least exposed to the idea of mindfulness, whether they continue to practice it, is their choice. A subject in school is the best way to achieve this.

For adults, if one thinks that they are already super happy and self-realised, it still makes sense to try out the techniques of mindfulness just with a consideration that they "could" be even more so. They "could" be missing an entirely different dimension.

Personal experience: Up till the age of 21, I was enjoying my life, doing well, fooling myself that I am the happiest I can be. That's when I took this course in IIT Madras called Self Awareness [1]. I had taken it because people said they always give good grades. The course caused a massive self-discovery for me. It was all and all about mindfulness. The teachings were mainly from the books: `Siddhartha` [2], `The power of now` [3] and `Stop sleep walking through life` [4]. They introduced us to relaxing exercises, meditation and breathing techniques along with some ideas to watch yourself while you are getting emotionally vulnerable. Briefly, the course was about being conscious of your existence, about feeling one with the present and about figuring yourself out for real. It has been 4 years since and I can clearly see that I am a different person, I have much less fights, I am rarely depressed, I handle criticism much better, I am much more productive in my work and most important of all, I have the clarity about who I am.

Sucks to think that I wouldn't have known (never mind achieved) all this if it weren't for a mindfulness course. Props to the schools in England for this initiative.

[1] https://courses.iitm.ac.in/course/info.php?id=849 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddhartha_(novel) [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6708.The_Power_of_Now [4] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/258519.Stop_Sleep_Walkin...

wawhal··on Getting Answers
Mildly unrelated, but there should be a nice and polite in-person variation of RTFM. It is certainly annoying when certain questions are asked but they are just a google away.
wawhal··on Show HN: Json2graphql – From a JSON file to Postgres-backed realtime GraphQL
I am sorry, but if possible, could you elaborate @chrisseaton? (preferably with a bit more punctuation :D)
wawhal··on Show HN: Json2graphql – From a JSON file to Postgres-backed realtime GraphQL
Circular references basically mean that a table is referencing itself. Any row in the table could reference any row.
wawhal··on Show HN: Json2graphql – From a JSON file to Postgres-backed realtime GraphQL
No. The tool also creates relationships based on foreign key references using Hasura. So to query all the users with the child users, you would make a GraphQL query like:

  query {
    user {
      id
      name
      childUser: userByUserId {
        id
        name
      }
    }
  }
The response would be:

  {
    "data": {
      "user": [
        {
          "id": 123,
          "name": "John Doe",
          "childUser": {
            "id": 123,
            "name": "John Doe"
          }
        },
        {
          "id": 456,
          "name": "Sita K",
          "childUser": {
            "id": 123,
            "name": "John Doe"
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  }
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