Hacker News: williamjackson

New comment by williamjackson in "Uv is fantastic, but its package management UX is a mess"

williamjackson — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:37:12 +0000

Coming to uv from pip, I fall back to

    uv pip list --outdated

when I need that information.

New comment by williamjackson in "Show HN: Waiting for LLMs Suck – Give your user a game"

williamjackson — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 03:53:12 +0000

I was really hoping for a gif or two!

New comment by williamjackson in "Reducing Dependabot Noise"

williamjackson — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 17:28:54 +0000

    At sufficient scale, Dependabot’s analysis will time out before completing, effectively rate-limiting the number of PRs it can generate. This natural throttling prevents notification fatigue while maintaining the appearance of active security tooling.

Am I being trolled?

New comment by williamjackson in "Reducing Dependabot Noise"

williamjackson — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 17:12:39 +0000

Thank you for expressing my thoughts as well. The article seems to be full of contradictory “advice”.

Use a dependency cooldown, okay … but don’t commit your lockfile so you are always running the latest transitive deps? That’s nuts.

New comment by williamjackson in "WebDAV isn't dead yet"

williamjackson — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 21:24:19 +0000

I was surprised, then not really surprised, when I found out this week that Tailscale's native file sharing feature, Taildrive, is implemented as a WebDAV server in the network.

https://tailscale.com/kb/1369/taildrive

New comment by williamjackson in "When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”"

williamjackson — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 19:20:59 +0000

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030808-00/?p=42...

New comment by williamjackson in "JSON is not a YAML subset (2022)"

williamjackson — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 02:33:24 +0000

I don’t like writing YAML. I like writing Python. So I write Python that generates YAML config files. JSON is in the standard library but YAML isn’t. So I generate JSON and name the file “file.yaml”.

GitHub Actions, Dependabot, and Docker Compose never complain.

New comment by williamjackson in "Show HN: Easy Python Time Parsing"

williamjackson — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:08:10 +0000

And it only took 20 years!

New comment by williamjackson in "iPhone users can now set WhatsApp as their default calling and texting app"

williamjackson — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 13:04:53 +0000

Access to contacts for iOS apps is no longer all or nothing. You can grant an app access to only specific contacts. This is what I do for WhatsApp.

Also, I know in the past I used WhatsApp without contacts access. It just showed phone numbers instead of names, but it was functional.

New comment by williamjackson in "Subprocess: Don't close all file descriptors by default (close_fds=False)"

williamjackson — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 18:01:56 +0000

https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/86904

New comment by williamjackson in "What's your favorite RSS feed reader?"

williamjackson — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 12:56:17 +0000

I run an instance of FreshRSS [0] and access it from a browser, but I also use NetNewsWire [1] as a client on platforms where it is available.

[0] https://freshrss.org/

[1] https://netnewswire.com/

New comment by williamjackson in "Django 5.1 Released"

williamjackson — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 15:14:06 +0000

I use Flask a lot too. I generally just add keyword arguments to url_for() to automatically add querystrings to URLs.

New comment by williamjackson in "Bringing psql’s \d to your web browser"

williamjackson — Wed, 08 May 2024 17:47:37 +0000

The fact that this is not a manual reimplementation, but a "transpilation" of the psql source from C to JavaScript, makes this super interesting to me.

    From the Postgres master branch (17devel), we take exec_command_d, exec_command_list and exec_command_sf_sv from command.c, and all of describe.c and sql_help.c, from src/bin/psql.
    We use plenty of RegExp search-and-replace to turn this C code into valid JS syntax.
    We implement some C library functions, such as strlen and strchr, and some Postgres support functions, such as printTable and printQuery, in JavaScript.

New comment by williamjackson in "From Seattle move in a straight line due East. What country will you hit?"

williamjackson — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 21:28:34 +0000

In my mind, "move in a straight line due east" can be interpreted as "for as long as you are moving, your movement should be due east". In that case, your latitude will never change. In the northern hemisphere, you will constantly be making a leftward adjustment to maintain a due east heading.

New comment by williamjackson in "Demoscene and video game music streaming radio links"

williamjackson — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 21:57:19 +0000

I’ve been an admin at https://rainwave.cc for about 15 years now. One of the unique (I think) features we have allows listeners to influence what plays next on the radio.

While the current song is playing, we run a three-candidate election to choose the next song. We usually include a listener request as one of the three candidates in the election.

We’re a friendly community, in my obviously biased opinion. Feel free to hang out with us on Discord; the link is on the Rainwave homepage.

New comment by williamjackson in "Seximal is objectively the best way to represent numbers"

williamjackson — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 03:32:35 +0000

If you give your thumb an absolute value of 5 (or 50, depending on the hand) you can finger count in base 10 all the way to 99!

New comment by williamjackson in "Show HN: Automating daily reports, because fuck it"

williamjackson — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 01:52:24 +0000

https://github.com/simonw/llm

New comment by williamjackson in "Landauer's Principle"

williamjackson — Sun, 28 May 2023 21:21:51 +0000

As a kid I always wondered where the name “Maxwell’s Maniac” came from.

https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Maxwell%27s_Maniac

New comment by williamjackson in "Niche Museums"

williamjackson — Thu, 25 May 2023 15:59:33 +0000

This is a (fantastic!) project by Simon Willison, co-creator of the Django framework and creator of Datasette.

If you are wondering why the collection is so small, it would appear from the commit history that Simon only adds museums that he has visited himself.

https://github.com/simonw/museums/commits/main

New comment by williamjackson in "I stopped worrying and learned to love denormalized tables"

williamjackson — Sat, 13 May 2023 02:10:43 +0000

Honest question: if I want to apply IaC to my views, is there a better tool than dbt to take care of that for me? I have never used dbt before, only read about it.