HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

pplante

491 karma · joined July 19, 2009

submissionscomments
pplante··on Anthropic acquires Stainless
I feel like we are seeing agentic coding tools morph into walled gardens with these acquisitions. Anthropic has restricted claude code usage while OpenAI has sort of let Codex fill the void. I am curious to see how this continues to evolve.
pplante··on Becoming a father shrinks your cerebrum (2022)
As a father of three, ages 4, 5.88, and 9 I can concur that the sleep deprivation doesn't improve much. Especially if they are neurodivergent.
pplante··on Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
I watched Alien: Earth recently and was admiring the TUIs everywhere. The show takes place in 2120 and they kept up the aesthetics of the original movies. A future full of synthetic humanoids and interstellar ships kept the TUI. I do not remember tablets being in the series, however even those seem to use a similar TUI.

I look forward to my great grandchildren rediscovering the TUI.

pplante··on Hyperflask – Full stack Flask and Htmx framework
I poked around at the code and I like some of the concepts here. Introducing jinjapy as a jinja template with frontmatter allowing me to write python code is useful in some scenarios.

I got most excited about sqlorm (https://github.com/hyperflask/sqlorm). It is way too early to feel comfortable adopting this, but I really like the concepts. I use pydantic a lot, I would love to see the SQL as docstrings as a pydantic extension. I get tired of writing serializers everywhere and would prefer to have a single pydantic model to reference throughout my codebase. Primarily I use Django, but these days am using less and less of the framework batteries outside of the ORM.

pplante··on CDC officials’ resignation emails
As an autistic person with 3 kids with ASD, I get triggered by this bullshit nearly daily. I sincerely hope that whatever "reveal" they have planned does not further harm our ability to access the early interventions that my kids are benefiting from.
pplante··on Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf
I was using Windsurf in Pycharm, until I switched to Claude Code / Gemini CLI last week. I am also finding that Copilot with Sonnet 4 is pretty on par to Windsurf.
pplante··on Gemini 2.5 Flash
I like to think of my interactions with an LLM like I'm explaining a request to a junior engineer or non engineering person. You have to be more verbose to someone who has zero context in order for them to execute a task correctly. The LLM only has the context you provided so they fail hard like a junior engineer would at a complicated task with no experience.
pplante··on Gemini 2.5 Flash
I like to think of my interactions with an LLM like I'm explaining a request to a junior engineer or non engineering person. You have to be more verbose to someone who has zero context in order for them to execute a task correctly. The LLM only has the context you provided so they fail hard like a junior engineer would at a complicated task with no experience.
pplante··on Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row
Yes, I am being very flippant. Sometimes we need to jest in order to digest reality.
pplante··on Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row
Life is imitating too many dystopian books, movies, etc these days. I think we need to put an end to all creative works before the timeline becomes irrecoverably destroyed.
pplante··on Parsing PDFs (and more) in Elixir using Rust
Very shameful IMHO.

The only relevance is the PDF format.

pplante··on Show HN: I built a DIY plane spotting system at home
I'd settle for a device that just normalized the volume levels, but this would be even better!
pplante··on Ask HN: Has anyone tried alternative company models (like a co-op) for SaaS?
So you mean a customer? Why do you want them to own it? Just open source it if you want to share without building a business.
pplante··on Starship's Seventh Flight Test
I was surprised to read they don't expect atmospheric burnup and are targeting a splash down in the Indian Ocean. I really hope someone didn't mess up some mundane detail in their calculations.
pplante··on Bench accounting services shutting down
What gave you that impression? I always consulted my financials when making decisions. Unfortunately the books were wrong and I made incorrect choices from that bad data.
pplante··on Bench accounting services shutting down
Bench was a terrible service in my experience. I used it for one of my startups a few years ago. I personally invested a lot into said start-up. I checked my books and everything seemed ok. Eventually I found that they had hidden my Gusto payroll line items from view and they were no longer taken into consideration in my books. This led to a $300k shortfall from where I thought I was vs reality. Their team just shrugged when I brought the issue to their attention. The impact was immediate layoffs affecting real people who depended on me.

Sure ultimately everything falls upon me the founder. But something so common as GUSTO payroll should never be miscategorized and hidden from view.

pplante··on Htmy – Async, pure-Python rendering engine
I was looking for something like this a few weeks ago. I typically use Django and hate the template engines limitations. I needed to make some reusable components and the best option available was switching to jinja to get their macro support, bleh.

This reminds me of the best part of Flutter UI composition, but in a language I always return to.

Have you done any benchmarking? I don't even know what the comparison would be.

pplante··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2024)
Location: Sacramento, CA Remote: Yes, or will commute to Bay Area Willing to relocate: No Technologies: LLM Wizardry, Python, Django, Postgres, Typescript, Flutter, C / C++, OpenGL, Java (Android mostly), Ruby Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pplante/ Email: unhappyrobot AT gmail

I have 20+ years of professional experience as a programmer, technical leader, and entrepreneur. I am currently diving into Web Extensions to scratch a few itches, I am constantly learning something new.

Looking for full time, part time, or contract work.

pplante··on Anthropic Claude 3.5 can create icalendar files, so I did this
I just did this with my kids various school calendars all of which are locked up in gross PDF files. Claude only made one tiny mistake which it was able to correct when I asked it why it made the mistake. It actually pointed out the confusing formatting used by the author.

I tried to do the same with ChatGPT a few weeks ago and was unable to get very far.

pplante··on LibreCUDA – Launch CUDA code on Nvidia GPUs without the proprietary runtime
The bonus is free heating for every employees household!
pplante··on Multiple airlines disrupted due to Microsoft Azure outage
Sounds like it's more of a problem caused by Crowdstrike. I'm sure azure fell over when millions of servers all freaked out simultaneously.
pplante··on OpenAI board shakeup: Microsoft out, Apple backs away
This is boring news. I was really looking forward to another episode of Boardroom Shakeup.

It's interesting that Microsoft and Apple have made such deep integrations and are forgoing any direct control or influence. I am sure there are plenty of nonofficial channels, but it still is surprising.

pplante··on Show HN: I've build a stupidly simple invoicing for freelancers and contractors
For $9/mo you are really expecting a library to integrate this in your other applications? I think you forgot a few numbers on that value.
pplante··on Ask HN: Where did you first learn to code?
I started playing with a pirated copy of VB3 on my computer and asked my parents for a programming book for my upcoming 12th birthday. My Dad got me a copy of Learn VB4 in 21 days on Oct 26th 1997. I was extremely excited until I saw the 600 page tome and felt overwhelmed. He died in a car accident around 1030pm on Oct 28th, right before my birthday on the 29th.

I spent the next few weeks absorbing that book as a way for me to honor his persistent career/life advice that I use my mind rather than my hands. I'm 38 now and haven't stopped coding.

pplante··on Tesla Will Not Have True Robotaxi Release This Year
I'm not surprised, we've been extending Musk's delivery dates for years.

That said, I have a 2020 mX with FSD on v11.3. I use FSD almost every time I drive and am very familiar with its abrupt failure modes and capabilities. I had a newer loaner mX last week that had v12 FSD and it was a huge leap forward compared to my daily driver. So while I have zero expectations that the robotaxi is coming this year, their reliance on vision only seems to be working fine as they continue to refine the system. Waymo has a lot more sensors that I feel will someday be unnecessary.

pplante··on What is the most useful project you have worked on?
In 2004 I was a summer intern after high school at a small software shop, they happened to be a subcontractor for a company providing a customs declarations tracking system for one of the largest container shipping companies in the world. In the first few days I was given access to a server running an instance of the system, I was given the impression that it was staging. I needed to restore a backup to fix a bug in the ASP 3.0 app. Being a Windows server I right clicked on the DB, and hit delete.

A few minutes later my boss gets a call saying someone is having trouble accessing the server. Turns out that single machine hosted staging and production. My boss kept his cool and we put up a more friendly error page saying it was down for maintenance, then started the 16 hour restore process. Somehow I kept my job, probably because he realized his incredible negligence.

The biggest impact I had was pushing the parent company to buy better servers, and set up proper isolated environments with minimal access. Preventing the situation from happening again.

I have hired close to one hundred engineers over my career, and I humble myself to every single one of them with this story. I want people to understand mistakes happen, how we handle them as a team is the most important thing I want to cultivate. I learned a lot from that job that became foundational to my career.

pplante··on Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software to run on other chips
Yuzu ran a private discord that was allegedly full of piracy activity. They didn't moderate it. Writing an emulator isn't illegal, nor would gate keeping features. Allowing piracy to happen in your paid for channel might make you more complicit/responsible.
pplante··on Winklevoss Twins' Startup Gemini Will Pay Burned Customers $1B
When they are standing on the other ones shoulders.
pplante··on John Deere Announces Strategic Partnership with SpaceX
I was really hoping this was some sort of green Martian Rover system.

SpaceX made satellite communications so ubiquitous and boring it's even used in farming. They tend to have this effect on their products. Reusable rockets are so obvious and now boring because the novelty is gone. I cannot wait for Starship to do the same with LEO (and beyond) delivery.

pplante··on ALOHA robot learns from humans to cook, clean, do laundry
Only via superuser privileges.
Page 1 of 7Next →