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zachwill

1,161 karma · joined April 12, 2011

http://twitter.com/zachwill
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zachwill··on US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
One gallon of almond milk requires 1,600+ gallons of water (likely much more — given some estimates are each almond requires up to 3 gallons of water). US almonds are almost entirely grown in California and consume 1.5T to 2T gallons of the state’s water.

It’s pretty dumb to compare AI/data center usage to water usage when something that’s actually wasteful such as almond milk exists.

There’s better metrics to make one’s anti-AI point.

zachwill··on A Preview of DuckDB v2.0
Big fan of Windmill here! Use it heavily. The way you guys integrate seamlessly with Bun/DuckDB/Postgres/Python is just fantastic. Keep up the great work, Ruben!
zachwill··on What does it mean to “write like you talk”?
It’s a very good post — and I do agree with the main ideas. It’s pretty remarkable how good writers like Scott Alexander and others are able to consistently pump out good writing, especially when the key does seem to always comes down to clarity (and mostly revision for me). Maybe reps are able to give that over time, but even with getting older and now being able to bounce ideas off LLMs == it still takes me so many iterations before I feel like my prose / ideas / outlines are worth sharing.
zachwill··on Incident with Webhooks
Thanks for this! I had been meaning to mark a phantom notification as read — and this snippet came in handy.
zachwill··on N8n added native persistent storage with DataTables
We’ve similarly had a lot of success with self-hosting Windmill.
zachwill··on React is winning by default and slowing innovation
Super insightful. I hadn’t been able to articulate the same feelings.

    Even as Next seppukus itself,
    people will likely just fall back 
    to React on Vite…
This is my exact read on the situation, as well. I’m not sure if anything can meaningful affect React’s domination in the short-term or medium-term, even with the accumulation of poor choices.
zachwill··on CustomEasy – GSAP animation curves made easy
This is really well done!
zachwill··on Deno's Decline
I tried Deno for awhile — the ability to run Jupyter notebooks was a cool idea — but I’ve been Bun-only for around a year now. It’s just significantly faster and easier to use.
zachwill··on Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
Congrats, Tom!
zachwill··on uv downloads overtake Poetry for Wagtail users
I’ve been primarily a Python developer since 2012 and recently switched to uv. The ability to manage dependencies, venv, and multiple Python versions makes it best-in-class now. It really is a fantastic tool.
zachwill··on Augurs demo
As someone coming from the Python data science / Jupyter side: holy crap this is lightning fast. Kudos! Very impressive work.
zachwill··on Two Turntables and a Microphone (2006)
An insightful comment! Had never drawn those parallels before -- great call.
zachwill··on 98.css – A design system for building faithful recreations of old UIs
Holy crap, that Mac OS 9 one is fantastic!!!
zachwill··on Beware the Man of Many Studies
Examine.com does something similar for health related studies, and I've found it valuable in the past.
zachwill··on Terence Tao on GPT-4
Note: I haven’t worked with PDF bank statements.

My current solution is pdfplumber → GPT-3 API. I played around with a few different options, and this is personally what’s worked best for my use cases.

zachwill··on Ask HN: Share your favorite YouTube channels focused on mastering a skill/craft
Frank Howarth is an absolute gem: https://www.youtube.com/@frankmakes

I've been following his woodworking channel for 10 years — and I have no interest in woodworking myself. I've never come across someone who is 1) 99th percentile at the craft, 2) probably better at videography than the craft itself, and 3) will literally walk you through his line of thinking while including all the dumb mistakes he thought along the way.

Hikaru has a similar way of explaining high-level chess and coming off as human, but the quality of Frank's stuff is nearly unparalleled, in my opinion. It's like watching an absolute master of his craft have a beer with you and explain his 4D chess moves in an Explain Like I'm 5 years old format.

Highly, highly recommend watching him.

zachwill··on I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month
Interesting read! Crazy that it was basically 3x increase/decrease in productive hours. Wouldn't try this myself, but found it interesting nonetheless @sberens.
zachwill··on Show HN: Hstream – quick Python web apps – Streamlit alternative using htmx
Huge fan of Streamlit — I've used it a ton at work — and HTMX + Django is my preferred method for building larger sites. Cool work!
zachwill··on Ask HN: Solo Dev Stack of 2022?
I was similarly going to recommend HTMX — think the ease-of-use and beginner-friendliness is exactly what OP is looking for. (The Rails comment mentioning Turbo is basically the same thing as HTMX, so feels like a few of us are in agreement.)
zachwill··on Ask HN: Should I checkmate my employer?
Garry Tan has the best career advice: https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1377661970178973696

    My best career advice: at every job you should either learn or earn. 
    Either is fine. Both is best. But if it's neither, quit.
My suggestions would be focusing on a few cosmetic things:

- Update your resume (you can get inspiration from Dribbble).

- Update your personal site to look nice.

- Update your GitHub account to have a few repos.

These are mostly cosmetic, but that seems to be the problem you’re having right now: getting your foot in the door to interview for positions.

Earn or learn. If you’re not doing either, it’s time to move on.

zachwill··on It wasn't for nothing
Great article, Marius! I can absolutely relate to this.
zachwill··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2022)
Portland Trail Blazers | Full-Stack Developer | REMOTE OR ONSITE (Tualatin, OR)

We are looking to add a talented Full-Stack Developer to our Basketball Operations team. Help contribute to the development of tools and systems to automate and enhance the day-to-day workflow and access of key insights to both front office and coaching staff.

The Full-Stack Developer will work closely with the Director of Data Science and the rest of the Basketball Data Science and Engineering staff.

Apply online here: https://careers-rosequarter.icims.com/jobs/1326/full-stack-d...

zachwill··on Ask HN: Which book are you reading, since when?
grugq recommended The Blacktongue Thief a few months ago, and it was fantastic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29670545

Since then, I've read several of the author's other books — and recently I've been re-listening to The First Law trilogy. (Steven Pacey is the best Audible narrator in the game.)

zachwill··on Show HN: A plain-text file format for todos and check lists
Great work on this — love the website demo!
zachwill··on Some tiny personal programs I've written
Very cool! Great story.
zachwill··on The new silent majority: People who don't tweet
This is actually an excellent explanation that I’d never thought through before. Totally makes sense. Rarely would you see “the whole” of your whole Dunbar group + a few hundred more — so makes sense why it could turn into such a cesspool. Really interesting idea.
zachwill··on On Anki's Database
Mochi is great!
zachwill··on Plost – a deceptively simple plotting library
Nice work on this library! Hadn’t come across it before. I’ve been using Streamlit quite a bit the last few months and really enjoy it. Have a few ideas in mind for incorporating plost after going through the sample app and seeing the event plots!
zachwill··on Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
You’ve done an unbelievable job, Mike!
zachwill··on Write shitty code
I do this too — and feel like “throw-away code” is a great moniker for it!
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