Hacker News: pplante

New comment by pplante in "Becoming a father shrinks your cerebrum (2022)"

pplante — Sat, 02 May 2026 14:42:38 +0000

As a father of three, ages 4, 5.88, and 9 I can concur that the sleep deprivation doesn't improve much. Especially if they are neurodivergent.

New comment by pplante in "Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?"

pplante — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 18:23:02 +0000

I watched Alien: Earth recently and was admiring the TUIs everywhere. The show takes place in 2120 and they kept up the aesthetics of the original movies. A future full of synthetic humanoids and interstellar ships kept the TUI. I do not remember tablets being in the series, however even those seem to use a similar TUI.

I look forward to my great grandchildren rediscovering the TUI.

New comment by pplante in "Hyperflask – Full stack Flask and Htmx framework"

pplante — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 17:55:30 +0000

I poked around at the code and I like some of the concepts here. Introducing jinjapy as a jinja template with frontmatter allowing me to write python code is useful in some scenarios.

I got most excited about sqlorm (https://github.com/hyperflask/sqlorm). It is way too early to feel comfortable adopting this, but I really like the concepts. I use pydantic a lot, I would love to see the SQL as docstrings as a pydantic extension. I get tired of writing serializers everywhere and would prefer to have a single pydantic model to reference throughout my codebase. Primarily I use Django, but these days am using less and less of the framework batteries outside of the ORM.

New comment by pplante in "CDC officials’ resignation emails"

pplante — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 02:14:07 +0000

As an autistic person with 3 kids with ASD, I get triggered by this bullshit nearly daily. I sincerely hope that whatever "reveal" they have planned does not further harm our ability to access the early interventions that my kids are benefiting from.

New comment by pplante in "Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf"

pplante — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 19:52:22 +0000

I was using Windsurf in Pycharm, until I switched to Claude Code / Gemini CLI last week. I am also finding that Copilot with Sonnet 4 is pretty on par to Windsurf.

New comment by pplante in "Gemini 2.5 Flash"

pplante — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 01:24:03 +0000

I like to think of my interactions with an LLM like I'm explaining a request to a junior engineer or non engineering person. You have to be more verbose to someone who has zero context in order for them to execute a task correctly. The LLM only has the context you provided so they fail hard like a junior engineer would at a complicated task with no experience.

New comment by pplante in "Gemini 2.5 Flash"

pplante — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 01:24:03 +0000

New comment by pplante in "Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row"

pplante — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 20:02:15 +0000

Yes, I am being very flippant. Sometimes we need to jest in order to digest reality.

New comment by pplante in "Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row"

pplante — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 16:34:11 +0000

Life is imitating too many dystopian books, movies, etc these days. I think we need to put an end to all creative works before the timeline becomes irrecoverably destroyed.

New comment by pplante in "Parsing PDFs (and more) in Elixir using Rust"

pplante — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 05:35:55 +0000

Very shameful IMHO.

The only relevance is the PDF format.

New comment by pplante in "Show HN: I built a DIY plane spotting system at home"

pplante — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 18:17:03 +0000

I'd settle for a device that just normalized the volume levels, but this would be even better!

New comment by pplante in "Ask HN: Has anyone tried alternative company models (like a co-op) for SaaS?"

pplante — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 15:15:44 +0000

So you mean a customer? Why do you want them to own it? Just open source it if you want to share without building a business.

New comment by pplante in "Starship's Seventh Flight Test"

pplante — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:19:43 +0000

I was surprised to read they don't expect atmospheric burnup and are targeting a splash down in the Indian Ocean. I really hope someone didn't mess up some mundane detail in their calculations.

New comment by pplante in "Bench accounting services shutting down"

pplante — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 17:03:30 +0000

What gave you that impression? I always consulted my financials when making decisions. Unfortunately the books were wrong and I made incorrect choices from that bad data.

New comment by pplante in "Bench accounting services shutting down"

pplante — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 16:43:12 +0000

Bench was a terrible service in my experience. I used it for one of my startups a few years ago. I personally invested a lot into said start-up. I checked my books and everything seemed ok. Eventually I found that they had hidden my Gusto payroll line items from view and they were no longer taken into consideration in my books. This led to a $300k shortfall from where I thought I was vs reality. Their team just shrugged when I brought the issue to their attention. The impact was immediate layoffs affecting real people who depended on me.

Sure ultimately everything falls upon me the founder. But something so common as GUSTO payroll should never be miscategorized and hidden from view.

New comment by pplante in "Htmy – Async, pure-Python rendering engine"

pplante — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 04:31:27 +0000

I was looking for something like this a few weeks ago. I typically use Django and hate the template engines limitations. I needed to make some reusable components and the best option available was switching to jinja to get their macro support, bleh.

This reminds me of the best part of Flutter UI composition, but in a language I always return to.

Have you done any benchmarking? I don't even know what the comparison would be.

New comment by pplante in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2024)"

pplante — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 22:14:19 +0000

Location: Sacramento, CA Remote: Yes, or will commute to Bay Area Willing to relocate: No Technologies: LLM Wizardry, Python, Django, Postgres, Typescript, Flutter, C / C++, OpenGL, Java (Android mostly), Ruby Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pplante/ Email: unhappyrobot AT gmail

I have 20+ years of professional experience as a programmer, technical leader, and entrepreneur. I am currently diving into Web Extensions to scratch a few itches, I am constantly learning something new.

Looking for full time, part time, or contract work.

New comment by pplante in "Anthropic Claude 3.5 can create icalendar files, so I did this"

pplante — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 06:09:53 +0000

I just did this with my kids various school calendars all of which are locked up in gross PDF files. Claude only made one tiny mistake which it was able to correct when I asked it why it made the mistake. It actually pointed out the confusing formatting used by the author.

I tried to do the same with ChatGPT a few weeks ago and was unable to get very far.

New comment by pplante in "LibreCUDA – Launch CUDA code on Nvidia GPUs without the proprietary runtime"

pplante — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 00:32:58 +0000

The bonus is free heating for every employees household!

New comment by pplante in "Multiple airlines disrupted due to Microsoft Azure outage"

pplante — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 07:33:04 +0000

Sounds like it's more of a problem caused by Crowdstrike. I'm sure azure fell over when millions of servers all freaked out simultaneously.