Hacker News: johsole

New comment by johsole in "Midlife Vascular Risk Burden and Dementia-Free Survival Years"

johsole — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:35:57 +0000

The importance of walking can not be overstated. Walking for 30 mins every other day will dramatically improve your life if you are sedentary. If you can't do 30 minutes, start with 15.

New comment by johsole in "What went wrong with data lakes? A 15-year reality check"

johsole — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:55:47 +0000

I'm building a product and exploring these questions in that domain. I'm thinking about it a little differently. I have a known set of hardware sensors that I'm collecting all the data from. Per sensor the data has a strong schema with a timestamp, what is interesting is the insights that can be gleaned across sensors. So what sensors do you have that you want to record, have a strong schema against that sensor, now have something you can use to tie across sensors, now you can use LLMs to query the data and draw interesting insights

New comment by johsole in "Don't be a meat proxy"

johsole — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:50:34 +0000

A lot of the joy I used to have doing this job is gone. I wrote some recursive code to turn nested API parameters into Elastic search queries, it was the last really cool thing I did pre-Ai. Sometimes I look at that code with a fond nostalgia, I'll never write code like that again unless I go out of my way to do it for fun. I don't even know what being a software dev will look like in a year from now.

New comment by johsole in "Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub"

johsole — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:22:27 +0000

Stacked PRs have been great, a huge boon for me. I was using it before the UI support, just on the command line. `gh stack rebase` is too useful.

New comment by johsole in "A $500 RL fine-tune of a 9B open model beat frontier models on catalog review"

johsole — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:43:42 +0000

I think we're going to get to that point on the 'S' curve. I also think the moat for a lot of companies is going to be their process and data, self hosting tuned models could be increasingly viewed as a trade secret.

New comment by johsole in "A $500 RL fine-tune of a 9B open model beat frontier models on catalog review"

johsole — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:42:00 +0000

What kind of hardware are you using and what is your token generation speed (tok/s)? Every time I've tried to run local models, even on my beefy mac book (128Gb Ram), I've been very disappointed at tok/s speed.

New comment by johsole in "Work out daily? OK, but how socially fit are you? (2023)"

johsole — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:12:59 +0000

I would describe myself as an introvert, but one thing I absolutely nailed was my marriage. I married someone who fits with me so well. We've been married for almost 14 years, we have 3 kids, and lots of responsibilities, but we still have lots of fun hanging out with each other and we make time to do that. Some of our most fun dates are still just going on walks and having a meal together.

I think if you've got a marriage like that, you've won. If you can layer on a few friendships, than you have plenty, and if you can layer on a community like a Church then you have abundance.

If you don't know where to start, a Church is a great place to start.

New comment by johsole in "Work out daily? OK, but how socially fit are you? (2023)"

johsole — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:49:43 +0000

Like most things, 80-20 rule probably applies.

> It was satisfaction in their relationships, particularly in their marriages, that was the best predictor of a happy and healthy life.

Good marriages is probably the 80. If you nailed that you've won.

New comment by johsole in "Removing React.js from the codebase and adapting Htmx for UI interactivity (2023)"

johsole — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:47:32 +0000

One nice thing about using React even on the web is that it forces your Backend to be REST right from the start. Although I sincerely thing that is less important now with the explosion of LLMs. I've started thinking about everything as Display + MCP Server. Where a SPA front end is really just pre-defined display.

New comment by johsole in "Removing React.js from the codebase and adapting Htmx for UI interactivity (2023)"

johsole — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:44:31 +0000

I know that you can have a shortcut on the users phone home screen but I've run into a bunch of problems with that setup where hitting it multiple times opens multiple tabs etc.

Have you found nice workarounds for that?

New comment by johsole in "Show HN: DroneWorld – Earth with multiplayer drones and Ethereum real estate"

johsole — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:47:23 +0000

Flew around a bit and was fun. What do you use to build it?

New comment by johsole in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

johsole — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:38:31 +0000

I would love to have floor to ceiling custom shelves. On my second floor I have ceilings that are angled instead of flat and would love to still have the usable space for books. Stuff like this is what I would love to make:

https://share.google/k4KshWNpwbCHKACre

New comment by johsole in "Towards a harness that can do anything"

johsole — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 21:16:34 +0000

There is an idea I have been enjoying called WET, Write Everything Twice. Basic idea is you should only make things more general and parameterized if you need to write it a third time.

The upshot of this is you actually have a much better understanding of the different way your script needs to work if you're adapting it for a third use instance.

New comment by johsole in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

johsole — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:11:11 +0000

This is super cool.

Bed frames might be a nice category to add as well :)

I have wanted to build some custom bookshelves for an oddly shaped room I have. Any plans on adding bookshelves that aren't rectangular?

New comment by johsole in "Show HN: Bible as RAG Database"

johsole — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 22:31:48 +0000

Very happy you built this. I was thinking about building this myself.

New comment by johsole in "Apple Foundation Models"

johsole — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:08:48 +0000

There was a time when Opus was the only model really worth using, I think that was maybe 4.4 or 4.5, but I agree Sonnet is pretty good now and can be used quite often.

New comment by johsole in "Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot"

johsole — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:53:43 +0000

Like many I also discovered this about 10 years ago and love.

One other thing I've been doing lately is also to use bar lacing instead of cross lacing. A small change that makes shoes much more comfortable.

New comment by johsole in "Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?"

johsole — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:06:18 +0000

+1 for htmx + Django, really my favorite stack for development.

New comment by johsole in "Ferrari shares fall after launch of first EV as Jony Ive design proves divisive"

johsole — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:54:09 +0000

Looking at the Ferrari and it's missing that certain look, styling, and tradition Ferrari's have. This design looks like a nice modern electric car, but doesn't have the wow of a Ferrari.

New comment by johsole in "He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice"

johsole — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:29:37 +0000

Thank you for linking the study.

Some good news from it. If you weigh the food instead of depending on the package size then the labels become much more accurate!!

"Serving size, by weight, exceeded label statements by 1.2% [median] (25th percentile −1.4, 75th percentile 4.3, p=0.10). When differences in serving size were accounted for, metabolizable calories were 6.8 kcal (0.5, 23.5, p=0.0003) or 4.3% (0.2, 13.7, p=0.001) higher than the label statement."

If you look at the table "Deviation of metabolizable calories from label calories" [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3605747/figure/F1/] you'll see that most labels even for service side are pretty good and there are some that are really bad.

If you'll look at one of the worst offenders Tostitos, the label has "Tostitos Tortilla Chips - serving size 24 chips", but chips vary a lot in size, so you could have a huge variance in weight. If instead you weighed them, which I do with my chips, I bet the calories are much closer to the label.

Body composition comes down to routine. I've found found I love to eat, but I pretty much eat the same meals week over week, that makes it extremely easy for me to lose or gain weight depending on my goals.