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jhot

357 karma · joined May 4, 2017

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jhot··on Should you wash your solar panels?
I asked a friend with a window cleaning business and they charge about $10 a panel. At that rate I'm tempted to try it but I'm not sure if it's even worth that.
jhot··on Building durable workflows on Postgres
Haven't used DBOS but use Temporal at current job and used it at previous job as well so I have about 1.5 years under me now. I also run it at home to handle some home automation tasks that aren't super time sensitive (the latency of workflows isn't super bad, but I wouldn't use one for something that is triggered by a motion event in my house unless we're talking about a timeout to turn something off after inactivity).

I really like running a thin rest API in front of it inside your vpc or k8s cluster or whatever to help with event driven triggers so that they don't have to worry about Temporal auth and checking workflow status if there is any decision making around that. This helps keep your event as logic-free as possible.

Let me give a vague example: you have some sort of db trigger, and this trigger either acts directly or puts the event on a queue, your handler calls the thin rest api with the necessary event details, rest API can make the decision if this starts a workflow, signals an existing one, or ignores it (the pattern for this can vary based on the situation, but SignalWithStart is common for me or just dropping if the event is not worthy of starting a workflow and no workflow for that <ItemYouCareAbout> exists).

Then the parent/child workflow ability is very valuable when you need to orchestrate different self-contained behaviors for a single object's lifecycle, with cancellability when an external factor changes the trajectory of an object.

Long, vague story short, I find it very powerful and easy to work with and has really helped move lifecycle logic out of APIs where things can easily become riddled with debt and precarious to manage. I agree with you that it helps follow more best-practices instead of just throwing logic some place that seems easy but becomes a hidden trap later.

jhot··on Antigravity 2.0 Tops the OpenSCAD Architectural 3D LLM Benchmark
Last weekend I bought my wife a bike off marketplace. It was in good condition but was missing one of the internal cable routing grommets. I gave Claude pictures of the pill-shaped hole by itself and with my digital calipers in the long and short directions.

Gave it a short prompt and it gave me an openscad model with everything parametrized. I printed with no changes in tpu and it was nearly perfect on the first try. Claude put in a 0.3mm subtraction in the x/y dimensions and I lowered it to 0.1 and it's perfect.

Much easier shape than ancient Roman architecture but still very cool how easy it was.

jhot··on 6B Miles Driven
But how many of those miles are spent hanging out in the left lane of a highway while other drivers, having to pass on the right, send death stares to the person in the passenger seat?
jhot··on Why Nextcloud feels slow to use
I've been running filestash in front of sftpgo (using a combination of s3 and nfs for file backends) for a couple years now and have been very happy with it.
jhot··on Open Source Maintenance Fee
I've been out of the windows world for about 10 years or so, but before that I was the one tasked at my company with streamlining our installers from a CI/CD perspective. I do agree that WiX is complicated and you really have to dig through the docs and do a lot of trial and error, but at the time I couldn't find any alternatives that allowed for the automation that I could achieve with WiX.

That said it was still somewhat ugly: msbuild the application, potentially copy in some dll's that weren't included in the output, use WiX's "heat" tool to generate installer files from the build output, use a xslt to transform that output to match how we installed shared libraries and such, build the installer with generated files, run automated ui tests and filesystem validations.

At the time installshield, advanced installer, and a few other tools I tried did not have the same flexibility to generate installers and automatically pick up file changes like WiX (without opening up a UI).

I'm so glad I haven't had to think about the nightmare that is MSI in over a decade.

jhot··on My dream thermostat (2024)
GoControl has a zwave thermostat that works well. Has no smarts of it's own (behaves like a pretty standard thermostat with heat, cool, and fan settings) but can be changed via home assistant so I've written a pretty extensive algorithm to meet my needs.
jhot··on Protecting NATS and the integrity of open source
I only use NATS as part of my home automation architecture but I have found it very nice to use and would have been happy to use it at work if we weren't so entrenched in AWS proprietary services.

I wonder if they are hoping to become more of a platform and leverage NEX to sell edge functions like cloudflare, bunny.net, etc are doing?

jhot··on KOReader: Open-Source eBook Reader
I think the eink focus is mainly in the UI as it avoids scrolling in favor of pages and tabs.
jhot··on Are Levi's from Amazon different from Levi's from Levi's?
Gap's soft jeans have been my go to for the past couple years. I could sleep in them they're so comfortable and are more durable than Levi which I wore for many years before.
jhot··on The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment
At least where I live, most families are moving to new development areas to get more square footage per dollar. So the schools in the established part of town are seeing declining attendance and having to consolidate to prevent high administrative overhead. The new development areas are car-only hellscapes (neighborhoods on random parcels of land that have been bought up and developed with no forward thinking) with pickup lines as described in the article.

It's also fashionable for parents to choose a school across town for arbitrary reasons in order to signal that they care more about their children (in my opinion). We have tried advocating for the local options and the positives it has had for getting to know others in the community but most don't even consider.

I'm lucky to live in an older neighborhood with an elementary school, middle school, grocery store, and a few other shops. There are also safe ways for kids to cross from adjacent neighborhoods so there is still a lot of autonomy for the kids getting to and from school.

jhot··on A look at the creative process behind Bluey and Cocomelon (2024)
My 3 legged heeler can still run laps around me. But if you can keep them busy, they are very loyal and can understand a crazy amount of words/signs. My previous heeler went deaf and still obeyed perfectly by watching signs and body language. Incredible dogs.
jhot··on AI-designed chips are so weird that 'humans cannot understand them'
Two antennas get married. The wedding was ok but the reception was great!
jhot··on Nearly half of Steam's users are still using Windows 10
I'm approaching a year of exclusively gaming on Linux with very few hiccups. Most of it being on Steam Deck, but also switched to Bazzite on desktop.
jhot··on Escaping surprise bills and over-engineered messes: Why I left AWS
We do this at current job for most of our internal tools. Not a setup I would choose on my own, but serviceable. Using a simple handler function that uses mangum [0] to translate the event into a request compatible with FastAPI, it mostly Just Works TM the same in AWS as it does locally. The trade off comes with a bit harder troubleshooting and there are some cases where it can be difficult to reproduce a bug locally because of the different server architectures.

0: https://github.com/Kludex/mangum

jhot··on My Struggle with Doom Scrolling
I don't have any social media and don't travel that often. When I went on a trip this past fall and saw a very high percentage of people sucked in to these short form videos at any idle moment at the airport and out at public events, I definitely felt existential doom.

Couldn't help but look at everyone the same as all the people on the space ships in Wall-E.

jhot··on The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy
This. I have been social media free for many years now and want to encourage others to do the same. Engagement algorithms, selling influence to the highest bidder, and misinformation alone ~should~ be enough to sway most, but it's also just a big waste of time.

What I do instead: send pictures to friends/family via various messaging platforms, get news via RSS (self-hosted Miniflux), run pinchflat to download youtube videos from a very select group of channels (no comments section, no suggested videos, sponsorblock to remove the annoying bits), and use a lot of the extra time I was wasting to read, workout, and engage in my various hobbies.

Some other helpful things I do with my Android phone: set to grayscale, uninstalled any time wasters (youtube, news, games), use an app called BuzzKill to limit distracting notifications (some notifications disable during work hours, some apps have a cooldown so they can only notify once every 15 minutes for example), setup notifications every 5 minutes when using an app that could be used for time wasting (browser mainly). These time wasting alerts (done via Tasker) are a nice reminder of time wasting as the amount of time can easily go unnoticed.

PS I also don't feel like I have a boring life. I have many IRL friends, hobbies, and a close-nit family. All these steps have aided in finding fulfillment with what I have.

jhot··on I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
I run pinchflat [0] to automate yt-dlp and file management behind the scenes. Also can integrate with sponsorblock to remove in-video ads.

0 - https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat

jhot··on Spinal cord injuries from mountain biking exceed hockey, other high-risk sports
There are sections of trail that I would almost always OTB (over the bars) on when attempted on my old 1998 hard tail. After finally upgrading in 2018, I almost never go OTB because of the longer and slacker geometry.

One ride on a double black rated tech trail nearby, the air shaft in my fork seized up so I lost all front compression. Even without front suspension, I was able to complete the ride and even keep up with my group, my arms were just toast after that. Modern bikes are just that capable based upon geometry alone.

That said, I now ride at significantly higher speeds and ride much harder terrain. But even still, my crashes are different and more to the side than directly over the bars.

jhot··on Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs
The startup I was at previously laid most people off in early 2021. I spent 2 days applying to a bunch of jobs that seemed interesting and spent the following 3 weeks with a pretty full schedule of interviews. Received several offers and was able to pick my favorite.

I have been feeling out the market the last couple months, applying mainly for jobs that match my exact experience, and have had exactly 1 phone screen. In the past I have been told I interview very well and haven't received many rejections after getting to talk to a person. But things are definitely different now.

If current job has to do big layoffs, which feels like it could happen in the next year or two, it's going to be rough.

jhot··on Glue Work Considered Harmful
My previous job was specifically to do glue work for the engineering team and it was my favorite job I've ever had by a mile. I loved doing things to smooth the other engineers jobs and they loved the productivity gains.

Company had to lay most of us off and my current job is similar but a way bigger company so the productivity gains are less apparent. But I will continue to seek out the glue work jobs as long as I can find them.

jhot··on Ask HN: Life-changing purchases since 2020? (Under $100 and under $1000)
I was going to say a steam deck as well. I've beaten a ton of RPGs that I never had the desire to play at my desk, but are great in 20-30 minute bursts here and there.
jhot··on Ask HN: Life-changing purchases since 2020? (Under $100 and under $1000)
Similar. 2 kids, 2 cargo e-bikes, 1 car. My wife has over 3k miles and I'm just under 2k (I work from home every day). We live in Colorado and bundle the kids up in ski clothes, and some nice buffs and hats and they do just fine for rides to school in the winter (if the roads are ok).

With the plethora of bike trails and neighborhood routes, I'm nearly as fast as a car getting around without going overboard on pedal assist (I do about 18 mph).

jhot··on On Good Software Engineers
I'm hoping this is sarcasm. The people I've worked with who are highly pedantic wreck team dynamics and rarely deliver anything of value.
jhot··on Rio: Web apps in pure Python
I spend 95% of my work time doing backend python microservices for internal tools, 5% on terraform for the infrastructure, and 0.0001% of my time building frontends for these tools (I just use plain html and JS, and only add a frontend when absolutely necessary). I've build a react app for fun in the past just to learn how that works but if I had to do it again for work I would basically have to go through the entire learning process again.

So, something like this where I'm writing pure python for my web components could really save me a lot of that churn time, not to mention that many of my coworkers have absolutely no JS experience. I have an upcoming task to build a new frontend and am going to add in a couple days to try this out to see if it meets our needs.

jhot··on Linux 6.11 Released
Been running it for 3 months, very pleased with my all AMD pc.
jhot··on You can kick the alpha tires on System76's Cosmic, a new Linux desktop
I run Bazzite (another universal blue build tailored for gaming) on my desktop and I've been very happy with it. I have been keen to try out one of the other builds for my dev laptop but haven't carved out the time yet.
jhot··on Canada became a car theft capital of the world
Just had my car stolen in Canada. A real headache since I'm not a Canadian. The hotel's parking garage had many other cars broken into that night and my van must have been a convenient stuff-hauler.
jhot··on Air Quality Monitors Compared: AirGradient vs. Purple Air
I, too, am not a fan of their paid API changes, but you can configure your purple air to send the data to any URL you'd like. I have an endpoint that parses the payload and sends the pm25 and temperature to home assistant.

That said, I have definitely considered an airgradient and the esphome firmware.

jhot··on What happens when an HTTP client raises $225M at a $5.6B valuation
A folder of text files is what my team does, using https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient
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