Hacker News: jastr

New comment by jastr in "πFS"

jastr — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 23:25:46 +0000

Back in college, I thought I could compress my phone number by telling people its index in pi, but my 7 digit phone number is at an 8 digit index.

I didn’t have the compute to find my 10 digit number with the area code.

New comment by jastr in "A DuckDB-based metabase alternative"

jastr — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:24:55 +0000

I had this too until I lowered it's memory limit. In ~/.duckdbrc `set max_memory='1GB';` or even less

New comment by jastr in "A DuckDB-based metabase alternative"

jastr — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:24:00 +0000

By default, it tries to take 80% of your memory. I've found that you need to set it to something much smaller in ~/.duckdbrc `set max_memory='1GB';`

New comment by jastr in "Charts.css: CSS data visualization framework"

jastr — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 14:15:05 +0000

You can be my first user!

https://postgraphs.com/ - it’s an old weekend project of mine that I’d like to finish up soon

Gomp – A small CLI to compare Git branches, for rebase based workflows

jastr — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 14:19:08 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/MarkForged/GOMP

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32898686

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jastr in "The dumbest way to solve a maze [video]"

jastr — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 15:00:04 +0000

Similarly, watch a random walk solving a maze https://stripenight.com/random_walk.html

New comment by jastr in "Ask HN: Why is Python package management still a dumpster fire?"

jastr — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 07:28:05 +0000

The best way to get software engineers to solve your issue with X is to phrase your question “Why is X so horrible? It can’t even do Y.”

The engineers will inevitably reply “That’s so simple. You just need to …”

The ecosystem for managing python dependencies has improved a lot: pyenv, virtualenv, poetry.

PATH isn’t innate to Python. Understanding PATH will definitely help with other issues in the future.

New comment by jastr in "Show HN: WindowHandler – Serverless functions that run in your browser"

jastr — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 16:34:15 +0000

I hadn't heard of Opera Unite. It's similar and 10+ years older!

Thanks for the kind words - friends have been mostly confused by this project.

Show HN: WindowHandler – Serverless functions that run in your browser

jastr — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 15:07:16 +0000

Article URL: https://windowhandler.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32251376

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by jastr in "Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)"

jastr — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 19:32:31 +0000

Heroku's github integration has been down for 2 weeks

Rethinking Mobile App Monitoring

jastr — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 17:59:25 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.logrocket.com/rethinking-mobile-app-monitoring/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30517487

Points: 18

# Comments: 5

New comment by jastr in "Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?"

jastr — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 17:41:33 +0000

> there's actually proportionally less failures in Product Hunts busiest period

This is a really interesting post! I think there's a little survivorship bias. As Product Hunt grew 2015-2017, users posted old projects of theirs which were already popular and successful.

New comment by jastr in "Postgres is a great pub/sub and job server (2019)"

jastr — Sat, 18 Dec 2021 00:26:18 +0000

This is advice that seems reasonable but is actually pretty harmful.

Take a startup with a few users. The senior engineer decides they need pub/sub to ship a new feature. With Kafka, the team goes to learn about Kafka best practices, choose client libraries, and learn the Kafka quirks. They also need to spin up Kafka instances. They ship it in a month.

With postgres, they’ve got an MVP in a day, and shipped within a week.

New comment by jastr in "Show HN: Google Sheets as a Database – Save HTML Forms to Goggle Sheets"

jastr — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 13:49:13 +0000

This is a neat idea, but I think the site is a bit too barebones for people to want to trust with their data.

New comment by jastr in "SQL: The difference between WHERE and HAVING"

jastr — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 13:35:56 +0000

The article does a good job of explaining the difference between WHERE and HAVING. The simplest resource I've found for this is Julia Evans' "SQL queries run in this order" [0], which points out for example that SELECTs are one of the last things to run in a query.

I've managed software teams and data engineering teams, and both teams get tripped up with even moderate SQL queries. To simplify, we encouraged teams to use a clearer subset of SQL. Most HAVING can be replaced with a WHERE inside a more readable and explicit subquery. Similarly, we got rid of most RIGHT JOINS.

[0] https://jvns.ca/blog/2019/10/03/sql-queries-don-t-start-with...

New comment by jastr in "Ask HN: Web App Environment Recommendation?"

jastr — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 20:53:46 +0000

This is quite a bit of infrastructure for an app that hasn't launched yet. If it's not too late, consider simplifying by removing RabbitMQ or Redis. Perhaps even getting rid of both, and only using MySQL. Maybe your workers could become cron-jobs or threads.

For hosting, consider Heroku and Heroku add-ons for MySQL, Redis, and RabbitMQ. You could run workers in Heroku as well.

It would be possible to run this entirely in a VPS as well and fairly straightforward. I've also had success running the web app (with postgres and redis) in Heroku but the workers on a VPS.

New comment by jastr in "Tailwind CSS v3.0"

jastr — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 01:27:39 +0000

When you first hear Tailwind's concepts, they seem to contradict everything you know about good software design. When you try it out and begin to remember some of the class names, you get into a great state of flow - it's the high developers are always chasing.

I can't help but feel that Tailwind detractors have never actually tried Tailwind or are too square to give it a chance.

New comment by jastr in "Show HN: Pretty print invalid JSON (or anything that looks sort of like JSON)"

jastr — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 22:07:47 +0000

Hi HN! This was a python script I used on the command line for a while, before spending a weekend converting it to a microsite.

Pretty print json with single quotes or None or anything that looks like json, like python dictionaries/arrays or anything that PHP can spit out.

Show HN: Pretty print invalid JSON (or anything that looks sort of like JSON)

jastr — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 21:56:23 +0000

Article URL: https://prettyprintplease.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29181471

Points: 9

# Comments: 4

New comment by jastr in "My framework for building side projects as a solo developer"

jastr — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 17:17:19 +0000

Lots of developers believe that if they think hard enough and choose the right side project, it will succeed.

I think the takeaway here is that chance plays a big role. So increase your chances by shippings lots of projects. And a tip to ship several projects is to stay emotionally, physically, and financially healthy.