simplecto

now do crypto

and Django as the icing on top of this framework cake :-)

Just had a look at the repo -- I'm curious to know where this goes when you add vectors for semantic / hybrid search.

The use of commit-hooks is also very clever (mentioned here in the replies)

very cool to see people go deep in the weeds to make it easier for lazy devs like me.

Hmmm...if I understand it this is possible. The freelancer's client would need to oauth authenticate and approve the right permissions/scopes through.

Then those tokens would be saved in the database for your freelancer to use on their customer's behalf.

make the internet weird again. 10/10 rating

This crept up quite a bit during the pandemic and a lot of people just "powered through" which only exacerbated things. That had a compounding effect on which led to burnout and anxiety.

One left tech to join his brother in an outdoors adventure company where they rent/sell rafting and camping equipment and run tours.

I know another one who shutdown his zombie startup. Now he just manages his rental properties and runs a newsletter for a "ZeroHedge" type crowd.

No one seems to be getting rich but they seem much more fulfilled.

It is not (I'm not sure where it is going. But here is a gist of that file.

This is in my requirements.txt

git+https://github.com/richardpenman/whois.git@master#egg=python...

And the meat of the file:

    import whois

    """Get WHOIS information for a domain."""
    try:
        domain_info = whois.whois(domain)
    except whois.parser.PywhoisError as e:
        return Response({"message": "Bad request", "details": str(e)}, status=400)

    if domain_info["domain_name"] is None and domain_info["registrar"] is None:
        return Response({"message": "Bad request", "details": f"{domain} not found or registered"}, status=400)

    return {"result": domain_info}

Thanks! -- It is in the backlog under "pending".

If this thing takes off and becomes a thing then adding those will be fairly straight forward.

Hahaha. There is something in the aether today. I just posted here about my own similar tool, but doing it with REST apis.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43173022

Hey, I'm embarrassed to release this often, which is kind of the mantra around here, right?

Long story short is that I've decided to build an API service that wraps many of the most useful libraries and other services, even those "one-feature" SaaS offerings.

Be gentle, I'm sharing it to poke and critique.

I have some colleagues in F50 companies who asked to have a service like this deployed internally because of a number of bureaucratic reasons.

It is easier to get an internal API approved than it is to add it to the existing compiled/deployed software stacks. (weird, but it is what it is -- mostly about software supply chains)

Anyway, go look at the openapi spec and see that it is mostly just about scraping and format conversions (for now).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922989

Enron tried this in the late 90s/early 2000s.

That didn't work for a number of reasons (cooking the books), but also network bandwidth is not fungible. Unlike commodities such as oil or natural gas, bandwidth’s value is highly dependent on specific factors like location, time, and network conditions. This variability makes it difficult to standardize bandwidth as a tradable commodity, complicating efforts to create a seamless trading market.

There are a few in the crypto/DePIN space poking at this problem. I remain highly skeptical.

I knew this was coming, so kudos to you all for getting out of the gate!

I've implemented this in our workflows, albeit a bit more naive: when we kick off new processes the user is given the option to "put a human in the loop" -- at which point processing halts and a user/group is paged to review the content in flight, along with all the chains/calls.

The human can tweak the text if needed and the process continues.

Social media is like freeways. They will fill up and become as crowded as before.

It is a land grab like everywhere else.

The crypto people have already shown up, and the solopreneurs are chiming in as well.

Hopefully Bluesky’s algorithm can make the experience significantly different that people stick around.

Instagram launched a recent thing where they allowed people to reset their profile history and clean the slate.

This is such a secret sleeper piece of software. Keep in mind this will also do video as well, which excites me to experiment with making 24/7 streaming channels like old-school cable tv.

California -- here, hold my Chardonnay

because the space moves fast, and from my learning this is the current thing. Like fashion -- it changes from season to season

It seems that the current mode (eg fashion) is a hybrid approach, with vector results on one side, BM25 on the other, and then a re-reank algo to smooth things out.

I'm out of my depth here but genuinely interested and curious to see over the horizon.

Those are some really spicy opinions. It would seem that many search experts might not agree.

David Tippet (formerly opensearch and now at Github)

A great podcast with David Tippet and Nicolay Gerold entitled:

"BM25 is the workhorse of search; vectors are its visionary cousin"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENFW1uHsrLM

I would focus on a niche not well served by the current platform.

I dont know who that would be.

Multi-sided marketplaces are really hard to bootstrap, but with the right offering to the right people— it could be a win.

pipe that through an LLM and you will have a page full of word salad :-)

but seriously, this is a neat idea. and kudos to OP for building a full prototype -- this is the level of geekery I show up for.

I remember the days of T9 on the old Nokia phones. I was so good that I didn't have to look down at the screen.

My favorites were fixed in my phone. I knew how many down clicks on the button would land on the right friend/family member. I could literally send messages from my pocket.

And yes, I admit -- I did engage in texting while driving. And this is the part where I justify it -- "but I had eyes on the road the whole time!"

Oh! and there was old skits on late nite where people woudl compete with the old morse code guys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRuRE-Bwk1U

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The AI stuff is cool, but the unlock for consistently improved developer experience and productivity has been the consistent use of linters, formatters, type checking, strict commit messages, and automated releases, and change logs.

Having all that in place really changes my attitude from "playground on my machine" to "put my name on it and ship it." -- it makes me proud.

I'm heavy on python, so there are a few "aftermarket" bolt-ons:

- ruff for linting and formatting - flit for package management (will experiment with uv in the coming days) - commitizen for commit formatting - pyright for type checking (but not for Django projects) - pycharm is where all the magic happens - pre-commit for commit hooks and final checks before it get shared to the repo

I don't mention all the CI/CD stuff here because that is a separate thing.

Building up this stack took a while to onboard into. Taking it on all at once would be overwhelming and leave me bewildered.

It is nice to have claude or chatGPT around to have around for going into the weeds. However, "trust but verify" -- these LLMs will hallucinate, so you should check the original documentation.

The overall impact has been that I now use template repos where I can spin up a production-ready codebase with all the fixins. Not only that -- it is also ready for others to consume in a predicable fashion.

I still need to write docs, use cases, and things like that. But having this in place give me the opportunity to run faster, ship faster, and revisit old work with a confidence that was not there before.

ruff has been a fantastic discovery for me, along with pre-commit, commitizen, and flit.

In about the length of a weekend I was able to find a reasonable group of settings for my pyproject.toml and roll that out to many of my projects.

The tooling is maturing and converging on more common ground (eg pyproject.toml) while adopting existing, accepted practices and standards.

The documentation is awesome and integrates well within my IDE of choice (pycharm)

Myself, I run ruff with most of the lintiners turned on. It is quite strict and opinionated (to the point of pedantic) -- a good learning path for me because I would never read PEPs anyway.

But once it is running I just stay within bounds and take the enforced rigor around doc-strings, syntatic sugar, and other little things.

I'm not on the uv train yet because I have no issues with venv and pip right now.

I've been unwinding my side-projects into their component parts and publishing them as their own python packages. Some examples:

1. https://github.com/simplecto/django-reference-implementation -- My personal production-ready Django boilerplate. "There are many like it, but this one is mine"

2. https://github.com/simplecto/sitemap_grabber -- A python library to recursively crawl every sitemap.xml for a website. Also handles robots.txt and other well-knowns.

3. https://github.com/heysamtexas/django-oauth2-capture -- A Django app to capture OAuth2 tokens for non-authentication purposes, enabling your application to act on behalf of users across external platforms like GitHub, LinkedIn, and X (Twitter)

I'm also taking popular and helpful software and wrapping them in RESTful apis as part of a larger api project I call the JOAT (Jack Of All Trades).

4. https://github.com/heysamtexas/REST-headless-browser -- Playwright headless browser wrapped in a FastAPI REST application, running inside a docker container

Hah. beat me to it. I knew someone else would be weird enough to mention this guy. A very interesting guy. I recall he has gone dumpster diving behind libraries to save information that has not been digitized.

One of my projects is a virtual agency of multiple LLMs for a variety of back-office services (copywriting, copy-editing, social media, job ads, etc).

We ingest your data wherever you point our crawlers and then clean it for work working in RAGs or chained LLMs.

One library we like a lot is Trafilatura [1]. It does a great job of taking the full HTML page and returning the most semantically relevant parts.

It works well for LLM work as well as generating embeddings for vectors and downstream things.

[1] https://trafilatura.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Pretty much anything, but yea especially AI in all its forms and formats.

There are some good grifts on LinkedIn, X, and Substack if you want derivative news and "knowledge."

The leap from playing with ChatGPT to building Bayesian filters in scikit-learn was like going from the 1-meter to 3-meter diving boards (keeping with the swimming theme). I'm not ready to climb to the 5 and 10-meter versions of AI/ML yet. :-)

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