afiodorov · HackerLangs

vor 9 Tagendiscuss

  Location: Las Palmas, Spain
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes (can work in EU & UK)
  Technologies: Go, Python, Kubernetes, AWS, Apache Spark, Airflow, LangGraph, RAG, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Docker
  Résumé/CV: https://cv.fiodorov.es/
  Email: [email protected]

Senior Backend & AI Engineer with 10+ years of industry experience, including 5+ years in crypto (Kraken / CryptoWatch, Glassnode). Work spans high-throughput Go microservices, large-scale data pipelines (Spark, Airflow, Iceberg, Kubernetes), and hands-on AI product development (LangGraph, RAG, pgvector). Most recently launched AI-driven, company-wide recommendations for crypto tokens & assets at Kraken. Mathematical background: Cambridge MMath, UCL MPhil in Probability (published paper). Looking for senior, autonomous roles at small companies or start-ups where I can drive technical decisions from architecture to production.

afiodorov

vor 26 Tagendiscuss

A RAG search accross all HackerNews comments is back online with a new design: https://hn.fiodorov.es/

afiodorov

vor 7 Monatendiscuss

The running costs are very low. Since posting it today we burned 30 cents in DeepSeek inference. Postgres instance though costs me $40 a month on Railway; mostly due to RAM usage during to HNSW incremental update.

afiodorov

vor 7 Monatendiscuss

Daily updates I do on my m4 mac air: takes about 5 minutes to process roughly 10k fresh comments. Historic backfill was done on an Nvidia GPU rented on vast.ai for a few dollars. If I recall correctly took about an hour or so. It’s mentioned in the README.md on GitHub.

afiodorov

vor 7 Monatendiscuss

I've been embedding all HN comments since 2023 from BigQuery and hosting at https://hn.fiodorov.es

Source is at https://github.com/afiodorov/hn-search

afiodorov

vor 9 Monatendiscuss

Apparently Persian and Russian are close. Which is surprising to say the least. I know people keep getting confused about how Portuguese from Portugal and Russian sound close yet the Persian is new to me.

afiodorov

vor 9 Monatendiscuss

I've found that building my side projects to be "scalable" is a practical side effect of choosing the most cost-effective hosting.

When a project has little to no traffic, the on-demand pricing of serverless is unbeatable. A static site on S3 or a backend on Lambda with DynamoDB will cost nothing under the AWS free tier. A dedicated server, even a cheap one, is an immediate and fixed $8-10/month liability.

The cost to run a monolith on a VPS only becomes competitive once you have enough users to burn through the very generous free tiers, which for many side projects is a long way off. The primary driver here is minimizing cost and operational overhead from day one.

afiodorov

vor 9 Monatendiscuss

Data all-rounder with 10 years building everything from low-latency Go microservices to training ML models to large-scale AWS data pipelines. Looking for a senior, autonomous role at a small company/startup.

  Location: Las Palmas, Spain
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Go, Python, SQL, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS (S3, EMR, RDS, Aurora, Athena), Apache Spark, Apache Airflow, TypeScript, React, gRPC, REST APIs, PostgreSQL, Google BigQuery, LangChain, LangGraph, RAG, faster-whisper
  Résumé/CV: https://cv.fiodorov.es
  Email: [email protected]

afiodorov

vor 9 Monatendiscuss

RAG search that contains all HN comments since 2023

https://hn.fiodorov.es

I treat it more like a homework exercise for a Coursera course but I like the result.

afiodorov

vor 10 Monatendiscuss

> It was uncomfortable at first. I had to learn to let go of reading every line of PR code. I still read the tests pretty carefully, but the specs became our source of truth for what was being built and why.

This is exactly right. Our role is shifting from writing implementation details to defining and verifying behavior.

I recently needed to add recursive uploads to a complex S3-to-SFTP Python operator that had a dozen path manipulation flags. My process was:

* Extract the existing behavior into a clear spec (i.e., get the unit tests passing).

* Expand that spec to cover the new recursive functionality.

* Hand the problem and the tests to a coding agent.

I quickly realized I didn't need to understand the old code at all. My entire focus was on whether the new code was faithful to the spec. This is the future: our value will be in demonstrating correctness through verification, while the code itself becomes an implementation detail handled by an agent.

afiodorov

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I've been told verifiable builds are possible already, I don't know how practical though:

twitter.com/stskeeps/status/1774019709739872599

afiodorov

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

We should be able to produce a tar and a proof that tar was produced from a specific source code.

Quote from the article:

    That line is not in the upstream source of build-to-host, nor is build-to-host used by xz in git.

Zero Knowledge virtual machines, like cartesi.io, might help with this. Idea is to take the source, run a bunch of computational steps (compilation & archiving) and at the same time produce some kind of signature that certain steps were executed.

The verifiers can then easily check that the signature and indeed be convinced that the code was executed as it is claimed and source code wasn't tampered with.

The advantage of Zero-Knowledge technology in this case is that one doesn't need to repeat the computational steps themselves nor rely on a trusted party to do it for them (like automated build - that can also be compromised by the state actors). Just having the proof solves this trust problem mathematically: if you have the proof & the tar, you can quickly check source code that produced the tar wasn't modified.