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j4mieon US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

I feel like we need some citations for these figures. Our World In Data [1] disagrees. I've not seen any analysis that puts any plant milk at a higher water use figure than dairy.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks

j4mieon Show HN: Itsyhome – Control HomeKit from your Mac menu bar (open source)

This looks great! Question on the API/CLI - is there any provision for capturing frames (or even streams?) from Homekit cameras, or even triggering events or webhooks based on the cameras detecting motion?

j4mieon Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

When we bought our house (1950s semidetached) it needed a full electrical rewire. I’m so glad I asked the electricians to run Ethernet all over the house at the same time, including to the ceiling in some rooms for WiFi access points.

j4mieon Django RAPID Architecture, a guide to structuring Django projects

Hi, author here. I have been building Django and DRF applications commercially for about fifteen years at DabApps, and this guidebook is an attempt to write down the architecture patterns we have arrived at, for projects that have to survive years of ongoing maintenance.

High level summary:

* We don’t hide Django under layers of abstraction, we just slice it up a bit differently than you would by default.

* Organise code by responsibility (readers, actions, interfaces, data) rather than by app.

* Put most business logic in plain functions, not in fat models or deep class hierarchies.

* Keep views thin: treat GET as "read some data" and POST as "do an action".

* Design endpoints around real frontend use cases (backend for frontend) instead of idealised resources.

* Control queries carefully to avoid performance traps.

Happy to answer questions!

j4mieon Happy 20th Birthday, Django

Laravel’s ORM was originally inspired by my now-long-dead PHP projects Idiorm and Paris:

https://laravelpodcast.com/episodes/c7807d42/transcript (Search for “Paris” to find the relevant section)

https://github.com/j4mie/idiorm

https://github.com/j4mie/paris

Idiorm was started in early 2010 while I was still writing PHP professionally. I’d heard about Django from a talk @simonw gave at the FlashBrighton meet-up group in 2009 and immediately fell in love. Idiorm and Paris, although not direct attempts to duplicate Django’s ORM, came from frustration that such an elegant ORM and query builder didn’t exist in the PHP world.

So in a roundabout way, Laravel’s ORM was absolutely inspired by Django.

As a side note, I’m still doing Django 16 years later and love it more than ever.

j4mieon Switching Pip to Uv in a Dockerized Flask / Django App

It's worth noting that uv also supports a workflow that directly replaces pyenv, virtualenv and pip without mandating a change to a lockfile/pyproject.toml approach.

uv python pin <version> will create a .python-version file in the current directory.

uv virtualenv will download the version of Python specified in your .python-version file (like pyenv install) and create a virtualenv in the current directory called .venv using that version of Python (like pyenv exec python -m venv .venv)

uv pip install -r requirements.txt will behave the same as .venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt.

uv run <command> will run the command in the virtualenv and will also expose any env vars specified in a .env file (although be careful of precedence issues: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/9465)

j4mieon Heroku Is Down

Things that are down or impacted:

* Heroku and most of Salesforce

* Pipedrive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234098

* OpenAI: https://status.openai.com/incidents/01JXCAW3K3JAE0EP56AEZ7CB...

* Lobsters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44234075

What's the common denominator?

j4mieon Prepper Disk

"Please state the nature of the medical emergency"

j4mieon Why the next energy race is for underground hydrogen

For anyone who wants to understand the economics of hydrogen, I can't recommend this lecture [1] by Michael Liebreich highly enough.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0Q9cuF8zKg

j4mieon Why the next energy race is for underground hydrogen

Do you have a source for your statement about copper? The closest I can find is [1] "The expansion of electricity networks means that copper demand for grid lines more than doubles over the same period". That's a doubling of demand, not of total current circulation.

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in...

j4mieon Ask questions of SQLite databases and CSV/JSON files in your terminal

From the article: "It adds LLM as a dependency, and takes advantage of LLM’s Python API to abstract over the details of talking to the models. This means sqlite-utils-ask can use any of the models supported by LLM or its plugins"

Ollama is supported in LLM via this plugin: https://github.com/simonw/llm-ollama

j4mieon Diagram as Code

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31849787

Repeating my comment from that thread:

  from diagrams import Diagram
  from diagrams.aws.compute import EC2

  with Diagram("Simple Diagram"):
      EC2("web")

This has a very odd API. It's using (abusing?) context managers and contextvars to do weird spooky things that you could just as easily do with ordinary objects or functions.

j4mieon Ludic: New framework for Python with seamless Htmx support

Glad someone got the reference!

j4mieon Ludic: New framework for Python with seamless Htmx support

I wrote a library a little while ago which is intended to be the simplest possible expression of this idea:

https://github.com/j4mie/hotmetal/

The core implementation is only 85 lines of Python, and has no imports at all, so works nicely on minimal/alternative Pythons like Micropython.

I'm using it on a medium-sized side project and it's shockingly productive compared to string templates. I don't think anyone is using it except me, though.

j4mieon Django Styleguide

I've been heavily inspired by this styleguide over the years, but I still think it's a bit too complex. A few random thoughts:

  - I think "services" is too much of a loaded term. I prefer "actions", and I always use the function-based style.
  - I hate the naming of "APIs" in this document. They use the term "API" when they mean "endpoint" or "view".
  - "Reuse serializers as little as possible" is the single best piece of advice when using DRF. The inline InputSerializer thing is brilliant.
  - Having each each endpoint only handle a single HTTP verb is brilliant.
  - URLs and views should be separate from all other business logic (models, actions etc).
  - For read endpoints and associated business logic, I'd encourage https://www.django-readers.org/ (disclaimer: I'm the author).

j4mieon Django Styleguide

https://github.com/dabapps/django-db-queue

(I am the author)

EDIT: oh hi, Andy :)

j4mieon Using Mypy in Production

> This makes me think you've never dealt with untyped Python code in a large production repo.

I run an agency and we maintain dozens of large, mature production projects (up to ~100k lines of code each).

I do understand the arguments and examples in the rest of your post, and intuitively they make sense, but practically I have almost never had an experience like the one you describe in 20+ years of working on Python codebases.

> you have to dig into the function to find out what it's actually going to give you

This is exactly what I do, and it's just fine. I find it more difficult to build a mental model of what's happening in type-annotated code.

Like I said, it's subjective. That's why I find "types improve readability" arguments in posts such as this to be problematic. They are stated as basic axioms with no supporting data. It's easier to read for you.

j4mieon Using Mypy in Production

The more I think about it, the more I think that the controversy around static type annotations in Python boils down to this:

  Improved readability

This is very subjective, and is particularly sensitive in a language like Python which (rightly) has such a strong historical emphasis on readability above almost anything else.

My personal opinion is that static type annotations are extremely detrimental to readability. They add jarring line noise that makes reading Python much less like reading English. Hitting a type annotation when reading Python forces my brain into little backtracking loops which hugely diminishes my ability to form a mental model of the code from a quick read.

I wonder if people who come to Python from other languages (that are already statically typed) are accustomed to the poor comprehension introduced by types, and so don't experience this drawback.

j4mieon Black MIDI

Black Midi is also the name of a rather excellent band: https://bmblackmidi.com/

j4mieon Diagram as Code

  from diagrams import Diagram
  from diagrams.aws.compute import EC2

  with Diagram("Simple Diagram"):
      EC2("web")

This has a very odd API. It's using (abusing?) context managers and contextvars to do weird spooky things that you could just as easily do with ordinary objects or functions.

j4mieon Jasonette – Native App over HTTP