Hacker News: skypanther

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

skypanther — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:00:02 +0000

This looks great and I'll probably order a report. A couple of small suggestions. First, the price is very reasonable, but I think you should be more open about what it costs -- maybe on the home page or at least the Order Report page. Second, I think you should tell what areas of the country (world?) that you can provide reports for, again on the main page would be great.

New comment by skypanther in "Ask HN: Anyone tried Spotify's AI DJ feature?"

skypanther — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:10:46 +0000

I went through the setup where you specify what genre of music you want. It promptly played two top-ten pop songs, which is definitely not what I selected. I've never used it again.

New comment by skypanther in "Ask HN: Make cemeteries in cities less offensive by using virtual headstones?"

skypanther — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 21:28:16 +0000

There's a cemetery near me where all the headstones are mounted flat rather than standing up. They even call it a park. Though, you can't go there to use it like you would a park. I really dislike it. I have a couple of relatives buried there. It's impossible to find their graves. In a typical cemetery there are different types of headstones and you can triangulate off certain shaped ones to find your way. I hope my family doesn't bury me there.

New comment by skypanther in "Astrophotography Target Planner: Discover Hidden Nebulas"

skypanther — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 20:37:21 +0000

Looks nice, easy to use. Though it wasn't clear at first that I had to select "Discovery Mode" to get anything more than just well-known objects. I still got only 10 objects. I'm surprised that the Equipment section doesn't include diameter and maybe telescope type, also something about camera sensitivity.

New comment by skypanther in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2025)"

skypanther — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 15:02:08 +0000

Location: Rochester, NY, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, AWS, FastAPI, Flask, SQL, DBT/MWAA, engineering management

Resume/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timpoulsen/

Email: tim [at] skypanther.com

15 years of experience designing, building, and scaling cloud-native systems across SaaS, mobile, and enterprise environments.

New comment by skypanther in "Train and Weather Tracker with Raspberry Pi and E-Ink"

skypanther — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 11:57:34 +0000

I used an Inky wHAT display with an old Raspberry Pi B+ to build a weather display that shows live weather pulled from my Ambient Weather station. My project uses Inky's python library. Since the Ambient API doesn't provide forecasts, I pull a daily forecast from the US Weather Service. And I grab the moon phase from Visual Crossing. https://github.com/skypanther/inkywhat

New comment by skypanther in "Humans can have superpowers—scientists are studying them"

skypanther — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 13:06:12 +0000

https://archive.ph/0Imuz

New comment by skypanther in "Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?"

skypanther — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 14:08:18 +0000

Maybe export to Recipe ML[1] for a relatively portable backup format.

1. http://www.formatdata.com/recipeml/

New comment by skypanther in "Veo"

skypanther — Wed, 15 May 2024 13:23:56 +0000

What struck me about the northern lights video was that it showed the Milky Way crossing the sky behind the northern lights. That bright part of the Milky Way is visible in the southern sky but the aurora hugging the horizon like that indicates the viewer is looking north. (Swap directions for the southern hemisphere and the aurora borealis).

New comment by skypanther in "Novell – If at first you don't succeed"

skypanther — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 13:58:54 +0000

This brought back some fond memories of writing courseware and teaching NetWare classes at a startup called Logical Operations. We published courses that were an alternative to the official Novell courseware for earning your CNA/CNE. I'm pretty sure I still have my CNE (and MCSE) pin in a box around here somewhere. One of my co-worker's classroom tricks was to establish a network connection via ARCNet over a length of barbed wire.

Logical Operations ran their own Novell network. I recall the server would freeze up periodically. Our admin rigged up a phone line and a relay...call the number and it would power cycle the server. That way, he didn't have to drive into the office to reboot the server at night.

From there, I started teaching DBase courses, which led to programming, which is where my career has been ever since.

New comment by skypanther in "What's the Cloud Outlook for Eclipse Day? See If History Is on Your Side"

skypanther — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 17:35:04 +0000

https://archive.is/8uaXE

New comment by skypanther in "Agile development is fading in popularity at large enterprises"

skypanther — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 14:33:41 +0000

Most of my career has been at startups, but I'm at a fairly large enterprise now. Agile is very different here. It's much more rigid. Every team has an agile coach, there are rules that must be followed, there are limits on who can make decisions about certain things, we do every sprint ceremony ever conceived every sprint, all pods must follow the exact same process. There's no flexibility and little acknowledgment of the original Manifesto principles (e.g. people over process). With an implementation like this, I can see why enterprises can fail to gain as much benefit from agile as promised.

New comment by skypanther in "All arabica coffee is genetically similar: how can beans taste so different?"

skypanther — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 14:27:23 +0000

I can. I recently roasted up two batches of beans -- some El Salvadoran and some Costa Rican. I roasted both to a Full City (dark) roast level. They were very different. I finished the Costa Rican quickly. It was delicious. I'm struggling to finish the El Salvadoran. I'm terrible at describing flavors, but I'd say it's sour with a tea-like flavor.

There's a lot that goes into the flavor of coffee. The beans themselves of course. Brewing technique has a big influence as well. But also growing conditions (altitude, soil composition, rain/sun mix, etc.), processing (wet vs dry process, fermentation time, etc.), handling and shipping (dry or moist conditions), and probably more I don't know about.

I strongly prefer wet-processed beans (mostly south American varieties) over dry-processed beans (mostly African varieties are processed this way). I haven't tried honey-processed yet.

Green beans stay "fresh" for a really long time, but once roasted beans become stale quickly. I can taste the difference between my roasts a day or two after roasting vs days or weeks later.

New comment by skypanther in "Battery-free self-powered sensor harvests magnetic energy"

skypanther — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 19:00:44 +0000

Sadly, I expected that to be the answer. Oh well, I can dream! Thanks for your helpful follow-up.

New comment by skypanther in "Battery-free self-powered sensor harvests magnetic energy"

skypanther — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 13:53:28 +0000

I'm sure this is a completely dumb idea. But I want wireless Christmas lights. Individual little clip-on LEDs powered by ambient RF like wifi background, the ambient field from a home's wiring, or an "antenna" that you snake up the trunk of the tree to emit a field. Then you just clip on the lights where you want them. I'm not knowledgeable enough in electronics to know if this is even possible.

New comment by skypanther in "Coral Dev Board Micro"

skypanther — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 13:55:42 +0000

Limited use case, but Limelight Vision[1] supports Coral boards for their FIRST Robotics cameras. Accelerated vision pipelines for object detection in an FRC game[2].

[1] https://limelightvision.io [2] https://docs.limelightvision.io/docs/docs-limelight/pipeline...

New comment by skypanther in "The new local data stack: Integrating Dagster, dbt and DuckDB"

skypanther — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 13:59:42 +0000

I only skimmed the article due to its length. But I didn't see anything like a comparison to other toolchains. Like, how is this better/different/worse than Airflow + dbt + Snowflake?

New comment by skypanther in "Show HN: Is It Toxic To? – Check if a plant is toxic to your pets"

skypanther — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 14:50:13 +0000

We've had various cats that ate corn, melon, berries and our current crop of cats love our spider plants.

New comment by skypanther in "Pythagorean Theorem found on clay tablet 1k years older than Pythagoras (2009)"

skypanther — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 01:26:54 +0000

I took a course at the university of Buffalo in the early 80s about pre-roman examples of Pythagorean geometry in henge monuments and early structures. Basically the class was watching slide shows of the professors vacations across Europe and his photos of old ruins. Then he'd show us a line drawing of the structure and pick out what at times seemed random points that created 3-4-5 triangles. He'd exclaim 'see? They knew about the Pythagorean theorem before Pythagoras!' Our only graded assignment was to write a paper where we "discovered" a similar example. I picked a picture of some random ancient church and "found" the right triangle in it's foundation. I got an A. Definitely just an "observation" no theorum involved.

New comment by skypanther in "Black currants were banned in the USA (2017)"

skypanther — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 22:09:37 +0000

Elderberries make great jelly and pie. Unfortunately the birds keep getting mine before they're ripe, it's hard to find them in the wild on public land, and no one grows them commercially around me. So I haven't had either in years.