Gourav Varma

Software Engineer

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Weekend hack: HackerTube. I was annoyed with YouTube's recommendations so I had Claude filter down 43M comments over 20 years of HN to 6,454 videos that keep being recommended. *Significantly* better viewing experience, ~2 hours with Opus 5.5:
https://t.co/JIhXN7OSh1

- Excellent recs without any logins (state is kept in local browser session)
- Thumbnail is a representative frame from middle of the video instead of the super duper A/B test hyper-optimized user uploads
- Underlying data from the comment analysis as one zip file, point your Claude at it and ask for your own version
- HackerTube Longs ✊

A bit more on the process:
I use Claude Code (desktop app for Mac), Opus 5.5 on Medium effort as my default. I only talk to Claude and have it do everything, the only "manual work" I helped with in tandem was in the browser (reminiscent of MenuGen): 1) I had to create some kind of API key from Google Cloud UI to query YouTube for video metadata, 2) I booted up a VPS box for serving and 3) I bought the domain name. Once the box was up I gave Claude the IP and told it update, secure, harden, deploy and optimize the code, and it did the whole thing.

Many awesome projects that would have normally taken weeks/months even can now be few-shotted for breakfast. What else are we not thinking of.

[Tesla @Tesla]

Real life, baby

[Gourav Varma @gvarma28]

@Saanvi_dhillon Slack 🤫

[Gourav Varma @gvarma28]

@teej_dv 😂🤣

[Gourav Varma @gvarma28]

@arpit_bhayani i've been using cmux + px0 lately, and it's been working great for me.

only thing i'm missing is code folding, hope to see it soon 🥺

[Gourav Varma @gvarma28]

Tradeoff: Kafka gives you strict per-partition ordering + replay. Pub/Sub gives you elasticity.
Different defaults, not better/worse

[Gourav Varma @gvarma28]

Coming from GCP Pub/Sub, Kafka's scaling model caught me off guard.
Pub/Sub: near-infinite subscriber pods, no real ceiling.
Kafka: parallelism capped by partition count, extra consumers beyond that just sit idle.

#backend #kafka #gcp #pubsub #devops #kubernetes #weekend

[Ashutosh Maheshwari @asmah2107]

@grok do you run on matrix multiplication at the core ?

[Gourav Varma @gvarma28]

Top 5%? Guess I’ve made it to the elite club 😂📈
@ThePrimeagen

[Nikhil Kamath @nikhilkamathcio]

Caption this

@elonmusk

[Matt Carey @mattzcarey]

Add this to your vscode settings, thank me later

"typescript.experimental.useTsgo": true

[FFmpeg @FFmpeg]

Zerodha's $100k donation to FFmpeg, while by their own admission not using it that much, makes it even more generous.

Companies with businesses depending on FFmpeg should (but probably won't) learn from such generosity.

[Gourav Varma @gvarma28]

This week’s been all about our AWS → GCP migration.

We finally outgrew our server-less setup on AWS and are moving towards GKE.

It’s been so much fun diving into the re-architecture. Honestly, haven’t felt this excited to log into work in a long time. 🚀

[Gourav Varma @gvarma28]

TL;DR: Instead of booleans, use datetime if you care when it happened, or enum if there are/may be more than two states.

[Chris Allen @theodorvaryag]

That boolean should probably be something else

[Ashutosh Maheshwari @asmah2107]

Quick question :

You need to add a new, required phone_number column to your users table, which has 500 million rows.

You write a simple ALTER TABLE script.

You run it during a "maintenance window."

It locks the entire users table for 8 hours while it adds the new column to every row.

For 8 hours, no one can sign up or log in.

Pain right ? You cannot perform "stop the world" operations on a live, large scale database

How will you do a “Painless Database Migration” ?

[Gourav Varma @gvarma28]

Apple's containerization project seems pretty cool. 👀
Can I run my docker containers on macOS without docker? 🤯

#WWDC25 #macOS #AppleDeveloper #Containers #Docker #DevTools

[Gourav Varma @gvarma28]

@OlajideParis 🥲

[Gourav Varma @gvarma28]

So ChatGPT went down.
People started flooding Claude.
Claude down too. 😐

#ChatGPTdown #chatgptoutage

[Gourav Varma @gvarma28]

RIP @raycastapp
RIP @alfredapp

#apple #macos26 #WWDC2025 #WWDC25

[Abhinav Upadhyay @abhi9u]

I see possibilities.