Top all-time · #20155
Thomas Vilhena
Personal blog · thomasvilhena.com · on HN as tcgvprogrammingeconomics
Thomas Vilhena writes thomas vilhena, a personal blog at thomasvilhena.com about programming and economics. Since 2019, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 63 times, most often “Craftsmanship coding and the five stages of grief”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Craftsmanship coding and the five stages of grief2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-02-13
- A Mindset for improving the product development workflow2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-02-25
What Hacker News says?
Exactly. I was reflecting on this topic as well and for lack of a better word I started calling it "code fluency" [1]. These kind of programs select developers with much higher code fluency, which is usually the result of a deeper dedication to coding, either in a previous work experience, in their free time or taking part in additional training. [1] https://thomasvilhena.com/2021/01/code-fluency
Comment linking /2021/01/code-fluency
on “My experience as a Gazan girl getting into Silicon Valley companies”Submitted A Review of Consensus Protocols as a story · 121 points
HN discussion> Everything involved with email is pain Agree. Even if you comply with most important technical standards/requirements you still need to spend a lot of time overseeing your system, and researching best practices and recommendations that directly affect domain and IP reputation, to avoid getting blacklisted. Shameless plug: A while ago I decided to try build a home made SMPT Mail submission component for better unde…
Comment linking /2020/01/mail-submission-under-the-hood
on “I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service”Submitted Stock Option Pricing Inference as a story · 103 points
HN discussionIf you have programming experience, you might find this interesting: back in 2019, when Google announced achieving quantum supremacy, I worked on a personal project to study the basics of quantum computing and share my learnings with others in my blog: - https://thomasvilhena.com/2019/11/quantum-computing-for-prog...
Comment linking /2019/11/quantum-computing-for-programmers
on “Willow, Our Quantum Chip”Submitted Complexity Classes of Problems as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> One such performance improvement involved moving the logic to check a user’s enabled features into a background thread that refreshed on an interval rather than checking their enablement while the request was being processed It's never a good idea to perform multithreaded operations within the web server, unless you have a strong knowledge of its internal workings. For instance, if you miss manage threads in an II…
Comment linking /2019/07/using-queues-to-offload-web-api
on “We found and fixed a rare race condition in our session handling”Submitted Scaling Decision-Making: Guardrails Beat Gatekeepers as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYes it is! But incredibly slow and resource intensive. A few days ago I shared a blog post here on HN about a simple quantum computing simulador I built as a weekend project, for learning purposes: - https://thomasvilhena.com/2019/11/quantum-computing-for-prog... Basically it is just linear algebra ;)
Comment linking /2019/11/quantum-computing-for-programmers
on “Amazon Braket – Get Started with Quantum Computing”Submitted A Successful Deployment Model as a story · 3 points
HN discussionInteresting, last year I wrote a blog post on this subject and it seems pretty in line with Slack's approach :) In regards to deployment monitoring, besides "error monitoring", I would also add "Health Monitoring" as valuable for early detection of deployment issues: > In this line of monitoring we are interested in assuring that our application is performing as expected. First we define a set of system and business…
Comment linking /2019/08/a-successful-deployment-model
on “Deploys at Slack”Submitted How New Technology Changes Business Models as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI argue the main issue is that many companies have invested significant resources in poorly assessed, designed, and planned AI implementations, rather than focusing on simpler, achievable, and impactful solutions [1] [1] https://thomasvilhena.com/2024/06/easy-wins-for-generative-a...
Comment linking /2024/06/easy-wins-for-generative-ai
on “Study shows that tacking the “AI” label on products may drive people away”Submitted Craftsmanship coding and the five stages of grief as a story · 2 points
HN discussionComputational power for quantum computers goes as 2^n, where n is the number of qubits, so unlike classical computing this machine should be orders of magnitude superior to Google's 53-quibit Sycamore. If you wanna learn more about the subject, a couple of years back I wrote a introduction to quantum computing for programmers which you may find useful: - https://thomasvilhena.com/2019/11/quantum-computing-for-prog...
Comment linking /2019/11/quantum-computing-for-programmers
on “IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor”Submitted Revisiting ChatGPT's financial advice, 15 months later as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe concept of information hiding came a bit before that, almost 50 years ago, first being described in a paper by David L. Parnas entitled “On the Criteria to Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules”. I wrote a blog post earlier this year based on this paper, describing how using the information hiding criterion naturally leads to an improved system structure when compared to using a procedural criterion [1] I'…
Comment linking /2020/03/a-strategy-for-effective-system-modularization
on “Pretending OOP Never Happened”Submitted Financial advice from ChatGPT? Let's give it a try as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI wrote a piece on the topic earlier this year in my blog [1] since I was also interested in learning more on the topic of Ethereum and DeFi, and not interested at all in the speculative take that attracts most people. In my post I write about an open source project I implemented using smart contracts that acts as an options (derivatives) exchange, and all the components required for making it work (ex: stablecoins,…
Comment linking /2021/02/building-a-decentralized-options-exchange
on “Ethereum Services Are Centralized”Submitted A linear interpolation based liquidity pool for decentralized options as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> since some kind of autoregressive time series forecasting system seems pretty unreliable. A few months ago I tried to evaluate autoregressive behavior in stock returns. To my surprise it seemed strong on some periods, but then weak on others [1], and as you said not reliable enough to rely on. My impression is that a lot more information aggregation and processing is required to obtain a sustainable edge worth tra…
Comment linking /2020/01/likelihood-of-autoregression-in-stock-returns
on “Building AI Trading Systems”Submitted Building a decentralized options exchange on ethereum as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAgree. Also, as a consequence in the long run writing unit tests / automated tests is the only way for maintaining productivity in a complex project, as every required code change to an existent component poses a great risk, and without automation it will be necessary countless hours of manual testing. Shameless plug: I while ago I wrote on the topic of how projects should be structured with the goal of automated te…
Comment linking /2020/04/on-the-architecture-for-unit-testing
on “Best practices can slow your application down”Submitted Restoring Individual Postgres Table as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Even OpenAI doesn't really have a product. Just throwing data at a bunch of video cards isn't value-generating in itself. We need (...) something people love that makes their life easier or better. I agree. I'm of the hypothesis that, when it comes to AI, a lot of product teams are pursuing overly ambitious and sophisticated features instead of targeting easy wins that are in plain sight [1]. [1] https://thomasvil…
Comment linking /2024/06/easy-wins-for-generative-ai
on “Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build”Submitted A mindset for improving the product development workflow as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere are my two cents on the subject: -- The need for complex numbers (...)? Complex numbers are just a mathematical tool. They are used to deal with calculations that involve magnitudes and phases, such as modeling qubit’s internal state. -- The fact that an n-qubit quantum computing system is significantly powerful than classical system (...)? Due to the physical phenomenon of entanglement quantum computers allow…
Comment linking /2019/11/quantum-computing-for-programmers
on “Learn Quantum Computation”Submitted A Mindset for improving the product development workflow as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI first encountered the Knapsack problem at a job interview. Intuitively I tried to solve it using what I later found out to be the greedy approximation algorithm [1], which proved unsuccessful to solve it for the interview's sample input. Since I had not much time left I switched to an inefficient brute force approach, basically a test of all possible combinations, which wasn't well received by the interviewer back…
Comment linking /2019/08/complexity-classes-of-problems
on “The Knapsack Problem Is All Around Us”Submitted Quantum Computing, for Programmers as a story · 2 points
HN discussion