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williamjackson

207 karma · joined October 21, 2012

Currently doing infrastructure automation, mostly in AWS. A fan of Python and Docker.

meet.hn/city/30.446081749999998,-97.6771739673697/Wells-Branch

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/williamjackson; my proof: https://keybase.io/williamjackson/sigs/Tt9BucOoFNVu1_kvWbiaHH7KRZCOQs7yt8SdmNMoQfk ]

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williamjackson··on .gitignore Isn't the only way to ignore files in Git
I do this too! But I call it `.local`
williamjackson··on Uv is fantastic, but its package management UX is a mess
Coming to uv from pip, I fall back to

    uv pip list --outdated
when I need that information.
williamjackson··on Show HN: Waiting for LLMs Suck – Give your user a game
I was really hoping for a gif or two!
williamjackson··on Reducing Dependabot Noise

    At sufficient scale, Dependabot’s analysis will time out before completing, effectively rate-limiting the number of PRs it can generate. This natural throttling prevents notification fatigue while maintaining the appearance of active security tooling.
Am I being trolled?
williamjackson··on Reducing Dependabot Noise
Thank you for expressing my thoughts as well. The article seems to be full of contradictory “advice”.

Use a dependency cooldown, okay … but don’t commit your lockfile so you are always running the latest transitive deps? That’s nuts.

williamjackson··on WebDAV isn't dead yet
I was surprised, then not really surprised, when I found out this week that Tailscale's native file sharing feature, Taildrive, is implemented as a WebDAV server in the network.

https://tailscale.com/kb/1369/taildrive

williamjackson··on When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030808-00/?p=42...
williamjackson··on JSON is not a YAML subset (2022)
I don’t like writing YAML. I like writing Python. So I write Python that generates YAML config files. JSON is in the standard library but YAML isn’t. So I generate JSON and name the file “file.yaml”.

GitHub Actions, Dependabot, and Docker Compose never complain.

williamjackson··on Show HN: Easy Python Time Parsing
And it only took 20 years!
williamjackson··on iPhone users can now set WhatsApp as their default calling and texting app
Access to contacts for iOS apps is no longer all or nothing. You can grant an app access to only specific contacts. This is what I do for WhatsApp.

Also, I know in the past I used WhatsApp without contacts access. It just showed phone numbers instead of names, but it was functional.

williamjackson··on Subprocess: Don't close all file descriptors by default (close_fds=False)
https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/86904
williamjackson··on What's your favorite RSS feed reader?
I run an instance of FreshRSS [0] and access it from a browser, but I also use NetNewsWire [1] as a client on platforms where it is available.

[0] https://freshrss.org/

[1] https://netnewswire.com/

williamjackson··on Django 5.1 Released
I use Flask a lot too. I generally just add keyword arguments to url_for() to automatically add querystrings to URLs.
williamjackson··on Bringing psql’s \d to your web browser
The fact that this is not a manual reimplementation, but a "transpilation" of the psql source from C to JavaScript, makes this super interesting to me.

    From the Postgres master branch (17devel), we take exec_command_d, exec_command_list and exec_command_sf_sv from command.c, and all of describe.c and sql_help.c, from src/bin/psql.
    We use plenty of RegExp search-and-replace to turn this C code into valid JS syntax.
    We implement some C library functions, such as strlen and strchr, and some Postgres support functions, such as printTable and printQuery, in JavaScript.
Read more here: https://neon.tech/blog/bringing-psqls-d-to-your-web-browser
williamjackson··on From Seattle move in a straight line due East. What country will you hit?
In my mind, "move in a straight line due east" can be interpreted as "for as long as you are moving, your movement should be due east". In that case, your latitude will never change. In the northern hemisphere, you will constantly be making a leftward adjustment to maintain a due east heading.
williamjackson··on Demoscene and video game music streaming radio links
I’ve been an admin at https://rainwave.cc for about 15 years now. One of the unique (I think) features we have allows listeners to influence what plays next on the radio.

While the current song is playing, we run a three-candidate election to choose the next song. We usually include a listener request as one of the three candidates in the election.

We’re a friendly community, in my obviously biased opinion. Feel free to hang out with us on Discord; the link is on the Rainwave homepage.

williamjackson··on Seximal is objectively the best way to represent numbers
If you give your thumb an absolute value of 5 (or 50, depending on the hand) you can finger count in base 10 all the way to 99!
williamjackson··on Show HN: Automating daily reports, because fuck it
https://github.com/simonw/llm
williamjackson··on Landauer's Principle
As a kid I always wondered where the name “Maxwell’s Maniac” came from.

https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Maxwell%27s_Maniac

williamjackson··on Niche Museums
This is a (fantastic!) project by Simon Willison, co-creator of the Django framework and creator of Datasette.

If you are wondering why the collection is so small, it would appear from the commit history that Simon only adds museums that he has visited himself.

https://github.com/simonw/museums/commits/main

williamjackson··on I stopped worrying and learned to love denormalized tables
Honest question: if I want to apply IaC to my views, is there a better tool than dbt to take care of that for me? I have never used dbt before, only read about it.
williamjackson··on derekantrican/GAS-ICS-Sync: A Google Apps Script for syncing ICS/ICAL files
If anyone knows of a tool that can sync both ways between Google Calendar and a CalDAV server, I'd love to know about it.
williamjackson··on The Best iPhone
I guess it depends on which “tech” specifically you care about. The jump from an iPhone 7 to the 3rd gen SE will probably feel amazing, considering it has the same SoC as all the iPhone 13 models. Sure, the SE doesn’t have the nice camera system like the high end models, but again, coming from a 7, it will be quite an improvement for you.
williamjackson··on The Best iPhone
The iPhone SE, described in the article, has Touch ID.
williamjackson··on A Note About Today’s Wordle Game
PLANT landed on Earth Day as a result of changes made to the word list after Wordle was acquired. You can compare the word lists from before and after the acquisition and see that some words were removed completely, but others were moved to be a solution on a future date.

I’m no conspiracy theorist but I suspect PLANT was deliberate.

williamjackson··on KeePassXC 2.7.1 Released
Every time KeePassXC comes up, I think about when I tried to switch from KeePass in 2020 and wrote myself the following notes:

    * Does not have global hotkey to show window
    * Does not have {PICKFIELD} auto-type placeholder
I hope someone can tell me I am wrong and somehow overlooked these features.
williamjackson··on Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)
You have eloquently elaborated on a truth I came to realize many years ago:

Cooking well (from a recipe) is the art of having enough experience to know what unwritten assumptions the recipe author has made.

williamjackson··on Docker as an Integrated Development Environment (2019)
I was not aware of prior work so I maintain Alpine wheels for packages I use personally in a GitHub org.

https://github.com/alpine-wheels/index

Besides my own needs, only one other person has requested additional packages, which I was happy to add. Maintenance is minimal, mostly just approving pull requests created by Dependabot.

williamjackson··on Docker as an Integrated Development Environment (2019)
That article should be titled, “Most Python packages do not upload an Alpine-compatible wheel to PyPI.”

If you know where to find Alpine-compatible wheels, or host your own, Alpine has no build-speed penalty.

williamjackson··on Violentmonkey – An open source userscript manager
I suspect the target demographic already knows what a userscript is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Userscript

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