ashwinsundar

Sir, this is a Wendy's

bikeshed

Thinking about whether a web architecture will hold up for 100 years is bikeshedding, is bikeshedding as well

Location: Westminster, Colorado (Greater Denver/Boulder)

Remote: Yes (US timezones)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Django, htmx, Alpine.js, Tailwind CSS, Postgres, Digital Ocean

Resume/CV: https://github.com/AshwinSundar/resume/blob/main/resume.md

Email: ashwin@sundarsoftware.com

I recently started Sundar Software LLC so that I may sell my software, MouseHouse (mousehouse.bio) to Harvard as a licensed vendor. I am looking to expand to more universities soon. In the meantime, one customer isn't enough to pay the bills, so I'm looking for part-time contractor work in the technologies described above. If you want some who understands Django and htmx inside and out, I'm your guy.

What are some examples of this?

You should have it also review the cards too! /s

Have you discovered any unusual or unexpected type of resistances? What's the furthest back in history you've been able to find something like this?

It's just not. I have done all these things. Maintenance is a piece of cake. Sorry that you struggled with this.

You can achieve a great deal of interactivity with pure get/post requests, along with a sprinkling of javascript one-liners and maybe alpine.js if client interactivity is important.

This is a mix of specious, and just outright incorrect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

Here are a few brief replies:

popups/tiling - use `<dialog>`

real-time chat - use websockets

slow/unreliable connections - well yeah this is a problem for any app...if you're delivering a 2MB paylaod to start the web app so that it doesn't need a connection, you're just betting that the user has a fast connection initially. what if that's not true either? back to square one. REST/Hypermedia encourages sending small payloads and working within those real constraints

I have no idea what you're talking about with "true web3 and ethereum". HTMX has nothing to do with web3 or crypto.

> If web interface is an application backed by a remote state

What does that mean?

Or, utilitarianism

I didn't realize maximizing money is the way to achieve moral excellence. It's interesting how Puritanical the EA folks are

This isn't a good example - people were completing 6-month bootcamps and getting $100k offers to do web development not too long ago, decades after the web and HTML took off. After a few years they were making as much as anyone who learned HTML and Web 1.0 back in the 90s.

Are the bootcampers better developers? Probably not. But they still were employable and paid relatively the same.

Where is the quote from? A web search revealed only your comment

Thanks, that's a good insight into my value system then. I understand that code doesn't have to be human-readable to be correct. I don't want to work on a codebase filled with unreadable code which no human colleague understands though. This is also why I don't like a lot of web frameworks - the final code outputted to the page is a huge spaghetti of un-inspectable Javascript and HTML.

I want to have the ability to understand each relevant layer of the system, even if I don't necessarily have the full understanding at every given moment.

I re-read your comment a few times, but don't understand what you're saying unfortunately.

    You can write code that works (for some definition of "works") with LLMs without doing it the way a human would do it.

Really having a hard time understanding what this possibly means.

Related - On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt.

    What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.

Also related - Gish-gallop

    During a typical Gish gallop, the galloper confronts an opponent with a rapid series of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies, making it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of the debate.[2] Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably longer to refute than to assert. The technique wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved, or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.[3]

It's appropriate for the commenter I was replying to, who asked how they can understand things, "while having never even read most of their code."

I like AI-assisted programming, but if I fail to even read the code produced, then I might as well treat it like a no-code system. I can understand the high-levels of how no-code works, but as soon as it breaks, it might as well be a black box. And this only gets worse as the codebase spans into the tens of thousands of lines without me having read any of it.

The (imperfect) analogy I'm working on is a baker who bakes cakes. A nearby grocery store starts making any cake they want, on demand, so the baker decides to quit baking cakes and buy them from the store. The baker calls the store anytime they want a new cake, and just tells them exactly what they want. How long can that baker call themself a "baker"? How long before they forget how to even bake a cake, and all they can do is get cakes from the grocer?

Hot take: you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you aren't writing code, designing the system, creating architecture, or even writing the prompt, then you're not understanding shit. You're playing slots with stochastic parrots

    The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

- Karpathy 2025

Why?

  Yes. BankGPT uses bank-grade encryption, access controls, and compliance with global data standards (GDPR, SOC 2, etc.) to ensure sensitive financial data is fully protected.

Just a minor point perhaps, but I don’t think I want to see the phrase “et cetera” in a FAQ answer about security. Especially when it comes to financial docs…

I had this very thought recently at a concert. Tickets were $20, great. A clever shirt that ripped off an Office joke with the band’s name plastered on the front was $35. The music wasn’t very good, and they were playing a recorded bass track. I wonder where the band focused their effort?

Vividness can be modified easily by adjusting the contrast, changing the black/white point, or changing the color temperature of an image.

Great read. In a similar (but not identical) vein, I have been reading "Leisure: The Basis of Culture" (1952) by Josef Pieper, which discusses the concept of "total work" - where every activity of the modern worker's day is either work, or in service of work. Even "leisure" activities are pondered in terms of how maximally leisurely they are, and how much they refresh the worker to prepare for the work week again.

"Leisure" is different from "idleness", as Pieper expands upon early in the book. I'm still only partway through the book, and am not sure I fully understand this difference yet, but I think Bertrand Russell's article shared here is a helpful piece that might get me there.

Leisure, it seems, is a more enlightened and intentional state than idleness, and one is permitted to conduct work-like activities while in a leisurely state, from what I understand. But then this seems to break down as leisure is supposed to be defined as independent of the concept of work. If two individuals are doing the same task, and it appears from the outside to be work, but one is doing it with a "leisurely" state of mind, then is only one of them actually doing work? It appears to be the case, from my reading so far.

I was first introduced to the concept of "total work" by Andrew Taggart's excellent article "The Secret to Office Happiness Isn't Working Less - it's Caring Less" (https://web.archive.org/web/20170810035800/https://qz.com/10...).

Are there any other related works on the concepts of "total work", "leisure", or "idleness" that people would recommend here?

I have never read whatever farmers write, but I am almost certain it is miles better than the average tech writing drivel

I want to do this too, and have a feeling that it's not as hard or time-consuming as it seems. 15 years ago, all my music lived in a /Music folder and I could play anything in there, instantly. It should be easy to just move that folder to a networked drive, get some sort of mp3 player app on my phone/devices, and point it at that folder. If the app is allowed to download files as well, that's even better. Otherwise, plugging in my phone/mp3 player and uploading songs manually was never particularly difficult, even back then.

If I remember correctly, all my playlists were really just text files used by Windows Media Player or iTunes, so it should be easy to support that type of functionality as well.

Sheesh, I liked it. It turned some research that may have been otherwise inaccessible or difficult to understand, and expanded it’s reach.

I probably did, sorry about that. Turns out people are finally starting to lavish NextJS with the criticism it deserves, based on all the comments here -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45099922

SEEKING WORK

Location: Denver, CO

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: python, django, docker, git, postgres, react, next.js, gatsby, typescript, jQuery, vanilla javascript, objectstore (nosql db), prisma ORM, graphql, bash/zsh, github actions, amazon web services (AWS), digitalocean, go, mqtt (mosquitto), R, matlab

Résumé/CV: https://github.com/AshwinSundar/resume/blob/main/resume.md

Email: ashiundar@gmail.com

Seeking: Part-time contracting work (25%-75%)

Target billing rate: $125-$150/hour

About: Full-stack developer with a master's degree in biomedical engineering. Polyglot technologist, with a focus on Python and Django development. Wide variety of professional experience to draw from. Am currently launching a startup (while working a full-time job as a Sr SWE) - I'd like more time to spend on the startup, while continuing to pay my bills. Thus the desire for part-time contracting work.