Top all-time · #3440
Lalit Maganti
Personal blog · lalitm.com/post · on HN as lalitmagantiprogrammingsystemsai
Lalit Maganti's personal blog at lalitm.com covers programming, systems and ai. Since 2025, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 44 times, most often “Why Senior Engineers Let Bad Projects Fail”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Lalit Maganti's posts on saying no to bad projects, a human-written example of blog structure, and plain-text multi-currency accounting, and praise their clear explanations.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Software performance, developer tools, and open source, from a founding engineer of Perfetto.
Most-linked posts?
- Why Senior Engineers Let Bad Projects Fail3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-01-14
- The surprising attention on sprites, exe.dev, and shellbox3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-01-31
- Perfetto, Open Source, and Company Priorities3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-10-18
- How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-07-26
- Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-04-05
- Don't Answer the First Question2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-05-17
- Syntaqlite: High-fidelity devtools that SQLite deserves2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-03-17
- Responsibility Is Taken Before It Is Given2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-08-15
- One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-01-01
- We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-11-23
What Hacker News says?
> So in the open source community maybe, but it's use in the Android organization in Google is ubiquitous. Yes I know, I used to work on Android ;) > By split off, do you mean from a "branding" perspective? > And in practice, we've been working on the last year or so on "pluginizing" the UI - basically turning the UI into a modular set of components and separating the "core" of the UI (which doesn't know anything ab…
Comment linking /perfetto-oss-company-prio/
on “Perfetto: Swiss army knife for Linux client tracing”Submitted How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer as a story · 591 points
HN discussionThanks for the detailed comment! > overwhelmingly it gets used because of their integration with the exceptionally simple JSON tracing format So in the open source community maybe, but it's use in the Android organization in Google is ubiquitous. Obviously, people outside the company don't see this, but we do. And I think even outside, there are a fair number of people using it for Android/Linux related things. > UI…
Comment linking /perfetto-oss-company-prio/
on “Perfetto: Swiss army knife for Linux client tracing”Submitted I ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer as a story · 547 points
HN discussionInteresting, though I disagree on basically all points... > No Silver Bullet As an industry, we do not know how to measure productivity. AI coding also does not increase reliability with how things are going. Same with simplicity, it's the opposite; we're adding obscene complexity, in the name of shipping features (the latter of which is not productivity ). In some areas I can see how AI doubles "productivity" (what…
Comment linking /post/building-syntaqlite-ai/
on “The Cult of Vibe Coding Is Insane”Submitted We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs as a story · 284 points
HN discussionI also wrote recently [1] about Exponential Search [2] which is another algorithm if you need to repeatedly binary search in an array where the elements you're searching are themselves are sorted. It allowed for an 8x speedup in our workload! [1] https://lalitm.com/post/exponential-search/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_search
Comment linking /post/exponential-search/
on “You can beat the binary search”Submitted I made a build visualizer to understand Bun's compile times as a story · 173 points
HN discussionThere's a good article about it. Saying no is a budget. In other words you don't have enough veto power to stop all bad projects so you need to be strategic about spending this budget. https://lalitm.com/post/why-senior-engineers-let-bad-project...
Comment linking /post/why-senior-engineers-let-bad-projects-fail/
on “The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon”Submitted We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs as a story · 173 points
HN discussionHere's a great example of something written by a human that otherwise seems to have a similar structure to the OP: https://lalitm.com/post/building-syntaqlite-ai/ Flags for LLM vs human drafting: - Subtitles have the rhetoric turned to 11 with LLMs. ( Note: Who has ever had multiple sentences as a blog post heading? It's bizarre ) : - LLM "The Demo Works. Production Does Not." - Human "AI is why this project exist,…
Comment linking /post/building-syntaqlite-ai/
on “Unverified: What Practitioners Post About OCR, Agents, and Tables”Submitted Perfetto: Swiss army knife for Linux client tracing as a story · 161 points
HN discussionAccounts (in the accounting sense) are unitless, and refer to whatever meaning we ascribe to them, so we can transfer value from $ to shares, or USD to GBP or whatever. Lalit describes this I think really well in his article https://lalitm.com/post/one-number-i-trust/#chapter-4-invest...
Comment linking /post/one-number-i-trust/
on “One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household”Submitted GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Senior Engineers Let Bad Projects Fail as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted I Find Problems to Solve as a Staff Engineer as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted The surprising attention on sprites, exe.dev, and shellbox as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Responsibility Is Taken Before It Is Given as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Responsibility Is Taken Before It Is Given as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Which country voted the best at Eurovision? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Syntaqlite: High-fidelity devtools that SQLite deserves as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Senior Engineers Let Bad Projects Fail as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted When Good Technical Writing Isn't Enough as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Cast(x AS STRING) casts to integer in SQLite as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Cast(x AS STRING) casts to integer in SQLite as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Perfetto, Open Source, and Company Priorities as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Harnessing Frustration: Using LLMs to Overcome Activation Energy as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Opus 5 doesn't use em-dashes in code comments as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
