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simplecto

766 karma · joined June 29, 2019

Always open to chat, BS, or continue the spirited discussions we started here :-)

https://x.com/heysamtexas or

https://linkedin.com/in/heysamtexas/

submissionscomments
simplecto··on Is LinkedIn Listening In?
You can send voice memos in chat. I use it when I'm on the move.

It is in beta, but I think they also have video uploading, which probably means recording audio and video.

simplecto··on Low Cost Mini PCs
Websites like this talk to my heart. Strong early 2000s vibes of nerds just putting it out there.

Love this, thank you!

simplecto··on Dokku: My favorite personal serverless platform
Great writeup -- I have a gist floating around somewhere with a similar workflow, but for bitbucket pipelines.

Good solve!

simplecto··on Favicon.im: Instantly Grab Any Website's Favicon
Gets an upvote because this is a nerdy thing close to my heart. I posted here years ago about the hidden complexity in hunting this elusive little icon.

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22308457&ref=simplecto....

Original post: https://simplecto.com/complexity-downloading-favicons-told-i...

simplecto··on FastHTML – Modern web applications in pure Python
Django is like a marriage. You have to commit fully to get the most out of it. You have to work through the (perceived) suboptimal parts to find a compromise that such that the whole system does not fall down.

And with enough time you come to realize there are certain things that are out of scope for the current codebase. Just as there are things that are out of scope for the current marriage.

hahaha - I dont know...I should stop here. This metaphor is stretching thin

simplecto··on Ask HN: How can a BE/infra developer handle the FE side of personal projects?
Htmx.org and a minimum css style sheet.

Done and done.

simplecto··on Ask HN: Career advice, I know 100 VC fund managers
Why not talk to a few executive headhunters?

They can sometimes chart career paths or pivots that you might not have seen or thought about.

The good ones have their finger on the pulse of things and could offer some insights.

simplecto··on Ask HN: What Is OCaml Used For?
There is a really cool Audio and Video streaming language written in Ocaml.

It is called liquidsoap.

https://github.com/savonet/liquidsoap

simplecto··on Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?
"A programmer paired with another expert"

This is the key phrase here. I might tweak it to say "subject matter expert", but that is just semantics.

I help my friend customize and automate his trading research and strategies with my python and automation skills.

We are experimenting with openBB, and I'm learning about trading, finance, and other industries. He gets to do things that a Bloomberg cant or wont do. This is a win-win.

simplecto··on Ask HN: How many people use touch on their touchscreen laptop?
I sometimes have an iPad next to my MacBook when working.

I laugh at myself when I start swiping on the MacBook with my Apple Pencil.

Not sure if that means anything but that is my experience :-)

simplecto··on How to build software like an SRE
Great insights! I came to some similar conclusions as well.

I really like the one about failing on missing config parameters. I used to set default params all the time (thinking I was clever).

Another big win in the last few years has been feature flagging. I use it extensively to tune performance when in production. I can control batch sizes, delays, retries, and API key rotation.

bookmarked!

simplecto··on Ask HN: In your opinion which is the best job board and why?
LinkedIn

Use it as a reverse search engine. Your profile page is crafted with the right content and keywords to target the jobs you want.

Recruiters and hiring managers, using LinkedIn Recruiter, search for people like you.

When you pop up in the search results you get a templated message request. Usually something about “being impressed with your profile”

Reply to that and start a conversation. Book a call with them on calendly and hear their pitch.

Ask them questions about the market—what jobs are hot, industries, geographies.

Do this for a few weeks and you will Have a much better understanding of how to tweak your CV/Profile to what the market demands.

Let the recruiters open doors and make intros.

Job sites are great but it is difficult to not feel like your are throwing your CV over the fence and hoping for the best.

simplecto··on Show HN: A search engine based on RSS feed
Very cool discovery, and your biztoc.com work as well!
simplecto··on Ask HN: If your company is using cutting-edge webdev stack, what are you using?
For most things I need reasons to NOT use Django.

Over the years I’ve built up a body of experience, tooling, and templates that are up to date, maintainable, and scale well.

Dependencies do get changed out over the years, but many of them are feature complete from my POV.

Admittedly WEBSOCKETS are a blind spot for me. Django does support that but it is not in my tool belt yet

simplecto··on Day ahead electricity prices for EU
by that measure Swedish datacenters should be oversubscribed
simplecto··on Ask HN: Is there a spiritual successor to del.icio.us?
Is this the motivation I need to reboot my https://curabase.com efforts?

Several years ago I wrote my own spiritual successor. It’s called Curabase.

It has been posted on HN before. If there’s enough interest I will renew development efforts on it.

I’ve been looking for a side hustle again

simplecto··on Ask HN: What are the best tools for web scraping in 2022?
i hate to be that guy, but “it depends”

scrapy is still king for me (scrapy.org). there are even packages to use headless browsers for those awful javascript heavy sites

however, APIs and RSS are still in play, and that does not require a heavy scraper. I am building vertical industry portals, and many of my data rollups consume APIs and structured XML/RSS feeds from social and other sites.

simplecto··on Ask HN: List of titles and specifications for tech jobs?
Sounds like you might want an SRE lead / Platform owner.

in my experience it is still too early in the game to thin slice roles like this.

It makes sense to have broad buckets like:

  - mobile (ios, android)
  - frontend / backend (web or fullstack)
  - SRE
  - Security and compliance
  - AI / machine learning
this is how i might tag tickets. but small teams probably have to share responsibilities until there are enough resources to focus
simplecto··on Ask HN: Are there any speedy handheld keyboards that exist?
I miss the days of T9

I could type and ride a bike at bike at the same time, without looking at the screen.

I also did pretty well with the blackberry physical keyboards

simplecto··on School’s out for summer and many teachers are calling it quits
Students in Sweden use the teacher's first name. Today it is uncommon to hear people use proper titles.
simplecto··on Starlink Maritime
You probably would not run it 24x7 on a boat.
simplecto··on SOC2: The screenshots will continue until security improves
Great writeup. Dude is totally right about the importance of compliance and its implications.

There are other ones as well.

  * ISO 13485 for medical software
  * ISO 2700x for process, security, and change management
  * ISO 55000 for asset management
Your eyes might glaze over, but they can really help a startup graduate from "move fast and break things, cowboy shit" to a mature and respectable engineering organization.

Congrats on the SOC2 and finding a good spin on the story. It is also an important number of checkboxes you might need to get those juicy Enterprise and Government deals.

simplecto··on In Moscow, McDonald's packs up, radio falls silent and the brain drain begins
Walk the Streets of Stockholm and you will find the same franchise/chain stores on every block.

In fact, many are quite happy to visit the “Mall of Scandinavia”

And many / most smaller towns only have chains.

That Euro charm that so many romanticize is not evenly distributed.

simplecto··on Ask HN: What kind of tests do you write for your side projects?
My side projects can go months without and update. As such I try to do unit tests for my models, controllers, and middleware.

I make sure that stubs exist for functional and end to end tests. That way when I do see bugs come in from sentry I can quickly write tests into the right layer. Usually they are unhandled failures on external requests.

simplecto··on Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
Look at Arweave. https://www.arweave.org/

Taken from their site:

arweave is a global, permanent hard drive built on two novel technologies: the blockweave, a derivative of the blockchain, and proof of access, a custom incentivized proof of work algorithm. These innovations provide truly permanent data storage for the very first time and at a massive scale.

Essentially it is putting files on the blockchain in a permanent manner.

There are some podcasts out there where the founder talks about the details.

simplecto··on Google Drive bans distribution of “misleading content”
Have a look at Arweave - https://www.arweave.org/

It is an interesting exploration of crypto-based storage.

simplecto··on Vitalik Buterin just made a 1B dollar donation for India Covid Relief
Sadly most of that value is wiped out in the market as everyone else dumps to save their losing bets.
simplecto··on AWS on track to be bigger than IBM by Christmas
cloud liberated us from thinking in terms of data centers. it taight usbthe abstractions seeing compute, storage, and bandwidth as fungible utilities.

the next wave of innovation could come from compnies like iExec and FileBase who offer storage and lambda-like utility.

the cost, allocation, and delivery is governed in a decentralized manner.

the value accrues to the network where you uave a vote.

interesting times ahead when thinking of a post-cloud-lockin world

simplecto··on A new $69M NFT was sleepminted
No. It is a big deal.

Forgery is forgery, and this is a fundamental flaw in the ERC-721 token.

Provenance matters, and this is more than a shot across the bow. This is a direct hit on trust.

I only have to fool you long enough to get the tokens into my wallet. This kind of forgery seems to do the trick.

simplecto··on 'Whitest ever' paint reflects 98% of sunlight
hey @cyberlab, how can I get in touch with you? I've got something that might be a fit to your 3-hour challenge.

If you see this then you can reach me (in profile)

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