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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/

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simplecto··on The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy and four times subprime
now do crypto
simplecto··on Ask HN: What is the perfect tech stack for web development?
and Django as the icing on top of this framework cake :-)
simplecto··on Show HN: I replaced vector databases with Git for AI memory (PoC)
Just had a look at the repo -- I'm curious to know where this goes when you add vectors for semantic / hybrid search.

The use of commit-hooks is also very clever (mentioned here in the replies)

simplecto··on Show HN: PgDog – Shard Postgres without extensions
very cool to see people go deep in the weeds to make it easier for lazy devs like me.
simplecto··on Show HN: Oauth2_capture – A Django package for handling OAuth2 token flows
Hmmm...if I understand it this is possible. The freelancer's client would need to oauth authenticate and approve the right permissions/scopes through.

Then those tokens would be saved in the database for your freelancer to use on their customer's behalf.

simplecto··on Hypertext TV
make the internet weird again. 10/10 rating
simplecto··on Ask HN: Anyone quit their job due to health issues?
This crept up quite a bit during the pandemic and a lot of people just "powered through" which only exacerbated things. That had a compounding effect on which led to burnout and anxiety.

One left tech to join his brother in an outdoors adventure company where they rent/sell rafting and camping equipment and run tours.

I know another one who shutdown his zombie startup. Now he just manages his rental properties and runs a newsletter for a "ZeroHedge" type crowd.

No one seems to be getting rich but they seem much more fulfilled.

simplecto··on JOAT API (Jack Of All Trades): A lazy lazy lazy developers API
It is not (I'm not sure where it is going. But here is a gist of that file.

This is in my requirements.txt

git+https://github.com/richardpenman/whois.git@master#egg=python...

And the meat of the file:

    import whois

    """Get WHOIS information for a domain."""
    try:
        domain_info = whois.whois(domain)
    except whois.parser.PywhoisError as e:
        return Response({"message": "Bad request", "details": str(e)}, status=400)

    if domain_info["domain_name"] is None and domain_info["registrar"] is None:
        return Response({"message": "Bad request", "details": f"{domain} not found or registered"}, status=400)

    return {"result": domain_info}
simplecto··on JOAT API (Jack Of All Trades): A lazy lazy lazy developers API
Thanks! -- It is in the backlog under "pending".

If this thing takes off and becomes a thing then adding those will be fairly straight forward.

simplecto··on Show HN: While the world builds AI Agents, I'm just building calculators
Hahaha. There is something in the aether today. I just posted here about my own similar tool, but doing it with REST apis.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43173022

simplecto··on JOAT API (Jack Of All Trades): A lazy lazy lazy developers API
Hey, I'm embarrassed to release this often, which is kind of the mantra around here, right?

Long story short is that I've decided to build an API service that wraps many of the most useful libraries and other services, even those "one-feature" SaaS offerings.

Be gentle, I'm sharing it to poke and critique.

I have some colleagues in F50 companies who asked to have a service like this deployed internally because of a number of bureaucratic reasons.

It is easier to get an internal API approved than it is to add it to the existing compiled/deployed software stacks. (weird, but it is what it is -- mostly about software supply chains)

Anyway, go look at the openapi spec and see that it is mostly just about scraping and format conversions (for now).

simplecto··on OpenEuroLLM
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922989
simplecto··on Hetzner cuts traffic on US VPSs, raises prices
Enron tried this in the late 90s/early 2000s.

That didn't work for a number of reasons (cooking the books), but also network bandwidth is not fungible. Unlike commodities such as oil or natural gas, bandwidth’s value is highly dependent on specific factors like location, time, and network conditions. This variability makes it difficult to standardize bandwidth as a tradable commodity, complicating efforts to create a seamless trading market.

There are a few in the crypto/DePIN space poking at this problem. I remain highly skeptical.

simplecto··on Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loop API for AI Systems
I knew this was coming, so kudos to you all for getting out of the gate!

I've implemented this in our workflows, albeit a bit more naive: when we kick off new processes the user is given the option to "put a human in the loop" -- at which point processing halts and a user/group is paged to review the content in flight, along with all the chains/calls.

The human can tweak the text if needed and the process continues.

simplecto··on Meta loses ground to Bluesky as users abandon Elon Musk's X
Social media is like freeways. They will fill up and become as crowded as before.

It is a land grab like everywhere else.

The crypto people have already shown up, and the solopreneurs are chiming in as well.

Hopefully Bluesky’s algorithm can make the experience significantly different that people stick around.

Instagram launched a recent thing where they allowed people to reset their profile history and clean the slate.

simplecto··on Software-defined (Internet) radio with Liquidsoap (2023)
This is such a secret sleeper piece of software. Keep in mind this will also do video as well, which excites me to experiment with making 24/7 streaming channels like old-school cable tv.
simplecto··on Britain is building one of the world’s most expensive railways
California -- here, hold my Chardonnay
simplecto··on Understanding the BM25 full text search algorithm
because the space moves fast, and from my learning this is the current thing. Like fashion -- it changes from season to season
simplecto··on Understanding the BM25 full text search algorithm
It seems that the current mode (eg fashion) is a hybrid approach, with vector results on one side, BM25 on the other, and then a re-reank algo to smooth things out.

I'm out of my depth here but genuinely interested and curious to see over the horizon.

simplecto··on Understanding the BM25 full text search algorithm
Those are some really spicy opinions. It would seem that many search experts might not agree.

David Tippet (formerly opensearch and now at Github)

A great podcast with David Tippet and Nicolay Gerold entitled:

"BM25 is the workhorse of search; vectors are its visionary cousin"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENFW1uHsrLM

simplecto··on Ask HN: How would you launch a much better and minimal, LinkedIn-like Platform?
I would focus on a niche not well served by the current platform.

I dont know who that would be.

Multi-sided marketplaces are really hard to bootstrap, but with the right offering to the right people— it could be a win.

simplecto··on Show HN: Midnight Reminders via Morse Code
pipe that through an LLM and you will have a page full of word salad :-)

but seriously, this is a neat idea. and kudos to OP for building a full prototype -- this is the level of geekery I show up for.

I remember the days of T9 on the old Nokia phones. I was so good that I didn't have to look down at the screen.

My favorites were fixed in my phone. I knew how many down clicks on the button would land on the right friend/family member. I could literally send messages from my pocket.

And yes, I admit -- I did engage in texting while driving. And this is the part where I justify it -- "but I had eyes on the road the whole time!"

Oh! and there was old skits on late nite where people woudl compete with the old morse code guys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRuRE-Bwk1U

simplecto··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (November 2024)
SEEKING WORK | EU | Remote

  Senior Python/LLM/Django Engineer & Technical Leader
  "Let's do this" attitude + proven track record

  └─── IMPACT
  • 40K+ nodes/validators (petabyte-scale)
  • $1M+ annual infrastructure savings
  • 150B+ messages/month (200M+ MAUs)

  └─── EXPERTISE
  • Django, Python, LLMs, MLOps, Automation
  • AWS/GCP/Azure, K8s, Terraform
  • PostgreSQL, Vector DBs, Observability

  └─── LEADERSHIP
  • Technical architecture & strategy
  • Team mentorship & process design
  • ISO 27001, GDPR compliance

  ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │ Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/heysamtexas │
  │ Github: https://github.com/heysamtexas        │
  └───────────────────────────────────────────────┘
simplecto··on Ask HN: What's your go to DevTool these days?
The AI stuff is cool, but the unlock for consistently improved developer experience and productivity has been the consistent use of linters, formatters, type checking, strict commit messages, and automated releases, and change logs.

Having all that in place really changes my attitude from "playground on my machine" to "put my name on it and ship it." -- it makes me proud.

I'm heavy on python, so there are a few "aftermarket" bolt-ons:

- ruff for linting and formatting - flit for package management (will experiment with uv in the coming days) - commitizen for commit formatting - pyright for type checking (but not for Django projects) - pycharm is where all the magic happens - pre-commit for commit hooks and final checks before it get shared to the repo

I don't mention all the CI/CD stuff here because that is a separate thing.

Building up this stack took a while to onboard into. Taking it on all at once would be overwhelming and leave me bewildered.

It is nice to have claude or chatGPT around to have around for going into the weeds. However, "trust but verify" -- these LLMs will hallucinate, so you should check the original documentation.

The overall impact has been that I now use template repos where I can spin up a production-ready codebase with all the fixins. Not only that -- it is also ready for others to consume in a predicable fashion.

I still need to write docs, use cases, and things like that. But having this in place give me the opportunity to run faster, ship faster, and revisit old work with a confidence that was not there before.

simplecto··on Astral: Next-Gen Python Tooling
ruff has been a fantastic discovery for me, along with pre-commit, commitizen, and flit.

In about the length of a weekend I was able to find a reasonable group of settings for my pyproject.toml and roll that out to many of my projects.

The tooling is maturing and converging on more common ground (eg pyproject.toml) while adopting existing, accepted practices and standards.

The documentation is awesome and integrates well within my IDE of choice (pycharm)

Myself, I run ruff with most of the lintiners turned on. It is quite strict and opinionated (to the point of pedantic) -- a good learning path for me because I would never read PEPs anyway.

But once it is running I just stay within bounds and take the enforced rigor around doc-strings, syntatic sugar, and other little things.

I'm not on the uv train yet because I have no issues with venv and pip right now.

simplecto··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (October 2024)
I've been unwinding my side-projects into their component parts and publishing them as their own python packages. Some examples:

1. https://github.com/simplecto/django-reference-implementation -- My personal production-ready Django boilerplate. "There are many like it, but this one is mine"

2. https://github.com/simplecto/sitemap_grabber -- A python library to recursively crawl every sitemap.xml for a website. Also handles robots.txt and other well-knowns.

3. https://github.com/heysamtexas/django-oauth2-capture -- A Django app to capture OAuth2 tokens for non-authentication purposes, enabling your application to act on behalf of users across external platforms like GitHub, LinkedIn, and X (Twitter)

I'm also taking popular and helpful software and wrapping them in RESTful apis as part of a larger api project I call the JOAT (Jack Of All Trades).

4. https://github.com/heysamtexas/REST-headless-browser -- Playwright headless browser wrapped in a FastAPI REST application, running inside a docker container

simplecto··on I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
Hah. beat me to it. I knew someone else would be weird enough to mention this guy. A very interesting guy. I recall he has gone dumpster diving behind libraries to save information that has not been digitized.
simplecto··on Minifying HTML for GPT-4o: Remove all the HTML tags
One of my projects is a virtual agency of multiple LLMs for a variety of back-office services (copywriting, copy-editing, social media, job ads, etc).

We ingest your data wherever you point our crawlers and then clean it for work working in RAGs or chained LLMs.

One library we like a lot is Trafilatura [1]. It does a great job of taking the full HTML page and returning the most semantically relevant parts.

It works well for LLM work as well as generating embeddings for vectors and downstream things.

[1] - https://trafilatura.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

simplecto··on You can't learn to swim by reading a book
Pretty much anything, but yea especially AI in all its forms and formats.

There are some good grifts on LinkedIn, X, and Substack if you want derivative news and "knowledge."

The leap from playing with ChatGPT to building Bayesian filters in scikit-learn was like going from the 1-meter to 3-meter diving boards (keeping with the swimming theme). I'm not ready to climb to the 5 and 10-meter versions of AI/ML yet. :-)

simplecto··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (September 2024)
SEEKING WORK | Remote | Stockholm, Sweden (CET/CEST)

Staff+ Engineer with deep experience in SRE, Blockchain, and DevOps. Specializing in building processes and systems that serve as flywheels, accelerating team productivity and scaling infrastructure efficiently.

Solutions: SRE, Blockchain Infrastructure, DevOps

Services: High-impact technical leadership, Infrastructure automation, Process optimization, Team enablement

Tech Stack: Django, Python, Rust, Golang, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker

Cloud: AWS, GCP, Azure

Blockchain: Ethereum, Solana, Zk-rollups, Oracles

Specialties: CI/CD pipelines, Scalable infrastructure, Compliance (ISO, GDPR)

Available for fractional engagements or project-based work.

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Book me directly: https://calendly.com/heysamtexas

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

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