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sidmitraon Foliate – A simple and modern eBook viewer for Linux desktops

Are you also able to access/browse your Calibre library on your phone? And what about your annotations?

Currently i'm resisting not using annotations, because while i manager books on my laptop, i read them on a e-ink android tablet(Onyx air). I would want my annotations to sync two ways if possible.

sidmitraon Foliate – A simple and modern eBook viewer for Linux desktops

There is calibre-web[1] which some might prefer.

[1] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

sidmitraon Ask HN: What have you created that deserves a second chance on HN?

Saw that best espresso machine example on the homepage was missing https://www.home-barista.com/

That's basically Mecca for us coffee geeks :-) so consider adding it.

sidmitraon Make a Resume in LaTeX

Having gone that route word -> latex -> html; i've converged to using an Open source desktop publishing app called Scribus [0]. You get WYSIWYG, but on an open format. There wasn't anything fancy to learn on the tool. The app is actually used to all kinds of magazines and books, so a resume is pretty simple compared to those.

If you need a template to get started, you can use mine here [1]. The output pdf is also in the repo(although haven't updated it in 5 years now!). Reminds me to go and fix/refactor it a bit.

[0] https://www.scribus.net/

[1] https://github.com/sidmitra/sidmitra.com/blob/master/static/...

sidmitraon Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?

>and just deal with the fact it's not externally available

Perhaps wireguard(or tailscale just for this bit). Not saying you have to, having local only as default is perfectly good and safer maybe!

sidmitraon A Human-Centered Approach to Developer Productivity

I've been interested in this topic lately, given the economic outlook, which in turn is pressing more and more companies to look at impact, productivity, "doing more with less"

Here's some other related links i've looked at before, but i'd be interested in gathering further research on this as well.

- SPACE framework, https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3454124

- DORA metrics, https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/using-the-...

sidmitraon What are you planning to learn in 2023?

https://www.languagetransfer.org/free-courses-1#french is pretty good for starting out.

Try and get out of Duolingo mode(law of diminishing returns!) and move to native audio(radio, podcasts, movies, songs) in your target language. Get used to being uncomfortable and not understanding anything at first. If you can make a game/habit out of this, you will make progress in due time(think a few years, not months/days). Search around for "immersion learning". I went into the rabbit hole a while back and learnt spanish but eventually being immersed in the language is the only way that seems to work.

sidmitraon TreeSheets: Open Source Free Form Data Organizer

There is definitely a lot of benefits to this free form format. This was the promise of MS OneNote, which i adored back in uni. I only forced myself to move off, when i moved to Linux and well came to know the importance of open formats! Since then there's nothing else that has comes close. This looks interesting, but lacks the drawing capabilities it seems?

Currently i mostly stick to Org-mode for everything with deft for fuzzy searching... text never goes out of fashion. Had to sacrificed everything else non-text along the way though. Although lately been looking at diagrams as code again with mermaid and D2lang

sidmitraon PostgREST – Serve a RESTful API from any Postgres database

Instead of Vue, have you considered htmx with django-rest-framework? See https://htmx.org/essays/spa-alternative/

sidmitraon Ask HN: Good Metabooks?

- The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook http://socraticmethod.org/

>a way to think more intelligently about questions large or small

All Philosophy books are meta

sidmitraon Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023

I don't know why you were downvoted, but your comment made me google some of the books to see if there's something to the recommendations. I don't know what the 1619 project is; but the first few google links are all adverts like

> What Is The 1619 Project? - The 1619 Project And Socialism

> 1619 Project Debunked - What parents should know.

So i assume there's a certain section that disagrees with the book so much that they're paying for ads to counter it! Maybe there's an answer lying there. i.e. it triggers the left versus right debate and hard!

sidmitraon Ask HN: How do you deploy your side-projects?

What OS(flavour) are you running? How do you do OS upgrades/patches?

sidmitraon Debugging Lisp: fix and resume a program from any point in stack

Some of the basic hot-loading features can probably be approximated in Python. Here's some from my bookmarks(i've not tried them personally)

- https://github.com/breuleux/jurigged

- https://github.com/reloadware/reloadium

I would imagine lisp can do this on a whole different level. Emacs seems like a testament to that. Basically the entire editor feels like eval()

sidmitraon Ask HN: Software architects – what’s your typical day look like?

@lexx, i think most of the things you put in your answer were very reasonable and non-controversial and probably what most good senior-ish engineers do. I think the parent comment is slightly in his "local minima" and he's generalizing his experience to everyone else

>"Trying to persuade people to avoid technical debt at all costs" - put in a linter

This for example does not make sense to me. This would mean all tech debt is just static analysis. There is no linter for figuring out the correct abstraction and using them correctly. Eg. no linter yet will tell you "hey you should have used a state machine here!"

You need a width range of experience before you can develop "better" taste in what's good and bad in different scenarios. Some of it can be gained from years of experience, and some from exposure to books/code.

sidmitraon GitHub announcing a $10M open-source fund

Then shouldn't this greater-than-internet technological evolution happen under some public domain, licensing of sorts, instead of in a proprietary silo?

Atleast the web had RFCs, and came from a "research" institution. Here there's nothing but a "cloud", and perhaps some day they'll let you pay 8$ for a blue checkmark to commit code.

sidmitraon Ask HN: Recommendations for an in-depth book/video series about economics

https://www.core-econ.org/

sidmitraon ZincSearch – lightweight alternative to Elasticsearch written in Go

>MeiliSearch (but their API triggered a panic response)

Could you expand on that with examples? I only played around with it lightly but it seemed ok via the Python SDK.

I've been recently leaning towards Meilisearch for some client facing search features. This was over Typesense because, i believe Typesense is totally in-memory, but in some cases my dataset might not fit in RAM(atleast not at a reasonable cost). I was fine with taking a performance hit for disk access, provided i could have thousands of separate indexes with separate permissions etc. and directly call them from the browser app.

sidmitraon Ask HN: Shared Database Anti(?)-Pattern

We use Stitch[1] for this. You can selectively replicate some tables from any "source" to any selected destination[2]. I believe 1 destination is there on the free plan. You can point to any self hosted(or cloud) Postgres DBs. There are a bunch of supported destinations eg. Postgres, Snowflake etc. The sources also can be a varied like Google sheets.

We use this to send relevant tables to analytics teams outside of engineering. There's a bit of tweaking initially(i.e. having a timestamp column like 'last_updated` helps to replicate only those rows)

Having a separate readonly DB user is also pretty common. We use that internally inside engineering(where we trust them slightly more). Important bit is to always add a statement_timeout so people cannot not run random slow queries on your production database that are hung for days.

I've also had my eye on https://www.singer.io/ , which seems like an open source ETL tool similar to Stitch. But i've not experimented with it locally yet. It uses "taps" and "targets" nomenclature. And there's a healthy ecosystem of opensource extensions of creating your own taps/targets.

[1] https://www.stitchdata.com/

[2] https://www.stitchdata.com/integrations/destinations/

sidmitraon Writing a simple operating system from scratch (2010) [pdf]

This is the course the above comment mentions, since the original link redirects to a login page.

https://www.udemy.com/course/writing-your-own-operating-syst...

sidmitraon Ask HN: Good free resources for self-learning and teaching Financial Modelling?

I've definitely enjoyed some of the videos which were part of a course on Valuations by Aswath Damodaran[1]

- [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLvnJL8htRR1T9cbSccaoVw

sidmitraon PostgreSQL 14

One possible solution for the ETL stuff might be to use Heroku Kafka for the Change Data Capture and then from that Kafka you can move it someplace else.

See https://blog.heroku.com/streaming-data-connectors-beta Heroku's own Kafka seems to have slightly more native support than if you use a 3rd party like Confluence.

We've not yet tried any of this, but it's been bookmarked as a possible solution to explore.

sidmitraon Show HN: Paper Time – Listen to abstracts of CS papers, like a custom podcast

Do you mean like Fermats Library? People can share annotated papers there. There aren't a lot of papers though, but i found some good ones outside of comp-sci recently.

1) https://fermatslibrary.com/s/why-stress-is-bad-for-your-brai...

2) https://fermatslibrary.com/journal_club

sidmitraon Functools – The Power of Higher-Order Functions in Python

Not really for use with python, but still worth a look since it brings some interesting syntax along.

http://coconut-lang.org/

> Coconut is a functional programming language that compiles to Python. Since all valid Python is valid Coconut, using Coconut will only extend and enhance what you're already capable of in Python.

> Why use Coconut? Coconut is built to be useful. Coconut enhances the repertoire of Python programmers to include the tools of modern functional programming, in such a way that those tools are easy to use and immensely powerful; that is, Coconut does to functional programming what Python did to imperative programming. And Coconut code runs the same on any Python version, making the Python 2/3 split a thing of the past.

sidmitraon Datalore enterprise – Jupyter environment for data science teams

There's also https://deepnote.com/ which i've seen used in a few fintech startups.

sidmitraon Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

For first timers

- Duolingo(don't do it for more than a few months)

For beginners

- https://www.languagetransfer.org/free-courses-1#french

For all others, some sort of immersion approach is the only way if you don't live in the country. Figure out the general approach below and adapt for your target language.

- AJATT http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/all-japanese-all-t...

- TMW https://learnjapanese.moe/

- Refold https://refold.la/

sidmitraon Automatically Make Unit Tests

Type checking, compile-time errors won't check if the program you wrote is correct, only that it's internally consistent. That is an entirely different thing than checking for correctness. You do need a layer of tests that actually try to prove that given some input your program actually does what it's supposed to do. That is hard to automate.

Joe Armstrong(of the Erlang fame), talks about this a bit here: https://youtu.be/TTM_b7EJg5E?t=778

I've pointed to a specific timestamp, but there might be more details somewhere else in that talk.

sidmitraon Codecov breach impacts GoDaddy, Atlassian, P&G etc.

FYI their support actively asks you to move to the bash uploader from the Python one, and the Python one had other compatability issues.

Here's a snippet from a support thead with them last year:

>One thing I noticed is that you are using the python uploader to upload coverage reports to Codecov. We do not support this uploader as a first-party tool, but we do support the bash uploader (https://docs.codecov.io/v4.3.0/docs/about-the-codecov-bash-u...) with full-time staff. We want to make sure this issue isn't related to something in a third party uploader before troubleshooting further. > Would you be able to switch to using this uploader to see if it's related?

I'd stopped using codecov last year for pricing reasons, when they moved to per-user pricing.

sidmitraon I Learned French in 12 Months

> difference between intermediate and advanced is the ability to move from discussing only facts to making a coherent argument.

This is a brilliant point and never thought about it this way. I've spoken spanish for 5 years but i've always felt some things lacking when i've tried to make an coherent argument about politics for eg. One more thing i'd like to add is 'humor'. If you can make jokes or be sarcastic to natives in their language, then you've definitely crossed another barrier.

sidmitraon Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?

I finished the audiobook a month ago. I had read up on the wikipedia page, but had conveniently skipped the controversy section. I assumed there are always naysayers! This time I took the time to read it. It definitely does put a different colour on the whole thing!

sidmitraon If this project is dead, just tell us

They don't do the same thing. pipenv allows you to create, manage virtual environments(using venv) apart from managing requirements file(Pipfile) and an npm like locking mechanism, dependency graphs, dev dependencies and more.

I prefer poetry though, since the consensus seems to be coming together on pyproject.toml rather than individual files like Pipfile. A lot of tools have already started supporting the toml file for their config, or have PRs pending.