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aviperl

Re:Worth Building on Monday October 05, 2026 @11:20PM (#49973767)
I've been considering opening a 2nd GitHub profile just for AI stuff. I'll link to it from my regular profile, I'm not hiding it! If someone's checking me out for a job or whatever, it might be nice to have differentiate between ideas of mine, and things I've spent time making.
Re:Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock on Thursday September 24, 2026 @02:45AM (#49827078)
> If we were to fix the clock we would be next to it and so we would also be high up. And being high up involves heights, and steep long ladders are needed to get up high.

Human writing, Claude could never!

Re:Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @09:11AM (#49815563)
Ouch.

I've had to send such messages, but internally at work, not on HN!

Have a great day, human.

Re:Muse: Meta's personal AI agent, features and capabilities on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @08:53PM (#49619314)
Same. Personal ORM essentially with a sqlite DB that sinks to a home server. Totally useful without an agent at all, but exposes basically all functionality via tools that have access limited for private information and the like.

My favorite part is that I'm in full control. All that caution about giving an app phone permissions? Gone. I could track my physical location in a table recording all the DB changes if I wanted to.

All it's missing is a local model.

Re:Intellectual Fly Is Open on Sunday September 06, 2026 @08:45AM (#49586043)
When I log into LinkedIn, it seems like a vast majority of the posts are there to farm credibility and build a personal brand.

Pre LLMs, I found it all to be pretty gross. Post LLMs, my reaction to being on the receiving end of that is to find it pretty intellectually insulting.

There are ways in which using an LLM is branding suicide.

What about other machine learning related skills? Does this wave of LLM mean less need for that kind of work?

I would think not, but when I started to look into OCR options recently - assuming that obviously a dedicated tool would do a better job than an LLM - I was wrong (apparently).

Love it! Every class of app needs this treatment. No ads, no install, and no fluff. Tools are better when the motivation for them is to be helpful.
Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026) on Sunday July 12, 2026 @07:43PM (#48886042)
https://avi-perl.github.io/dense-printer/

I tend to print a lot of stuff to read while disconnected. This is a tool to help squeeze as much content onto a printed page as possible instead of printing 4 or more pages per sheet.

A good use of Claude slop I'd argue. Currently trying to figure out how to set up the site so that an LLM tasked with printing content through it can figure out how to use it in the best way.

Heads up, I get a 404 on the 30 sec demo link.
I have a box full of film gear and development equipment because, one day, I want to hang a picture of my kids on the wall that I _made_. My photo, on film I developed, printed manually by my hand, hung in a frame I built. I'll get to it some day!

The idea of building a camera like this tickles me the same way. It's fun!

Only a small anecdote, but I'm 2 projects into telling Claude to "make it look like Google podcasts" and getting satisfactory results. Still smells like llm in parts, but overall it is not screaming low effort.
Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2026) on Friday May 01, 2026 @02:45PM (#47978470)
100 BLVD | Data Engineer (ETL, SQL, Power BI) | Remote (NJ in the US, Eastern time overlap required) | Contract to hire

My company is hiring, here's their description of the role:

> We are seeking a hands-on Data Engineer to design, build, and optimize our data pipeline and reporting infrastructure. This role will focus on ETLing data from our low-code platform into a SQL-based data warehouse, merging production and archived historical data, and preparing high-quality, performant datasets for client reporting.

> The ideal candidate has strong experience in Python-based ETL development, SQL data modeling, performance optimization, and Power BI administration and report development. This is a contract-to-hire position with the opportunity to transition into a long-term role.

https://www.notion.so/Data-Engineer-ETL-SQL-Power-BI-3147b80...

Please email me at aviperl <at> 100boulevard <dot> com and mention this comment.

I was hanging out on a slack community of developers where I would commonly respond to questions and chat on the channel for Python. Someone there had a friend with AWS costs flying through the roof and he needed some help from somebody who could understand python. My action on that channel caused him to reach out to me.

Once I solved their issue, they asked me if I could add features to the site. I turned them down and told them they would be better off rewriting it from scratch, which they then hired me to do.

Still working with them 6 years later.

I had a previous career in commercial photography. I spent a lot of time on a Facebook community group for photographers doing the same thing; chatting, being helpful, being willing to share what I knew. I got a significant amount of work through the members of that group and met my wife through those connections as well!

Be nice on the internet, I guess.

Using my real name severely limits what I can post online. This is helpful with my desire to limit my use of social media.
Re:1-800-ChatGPT on Wednesday December 18, 2024 @07:41PM (#42457139)
The best part of GOOG411 was that they would connect you to the phone number, free of charge, across borders.

List a business with a Google voice number and you can call in, check messages, and _dial out_ from Google voice. Free international calls!

I was in school in Canada where we had a payphone in a hallway. People heard me randomly saying "Funny Business Name, City State ... Connect me" into the phone so much, it became a running joke.

When I eventually got my own phone, I transferred the number and I still have it.

Thanks for the response!

Another note: in the email, it's totally not clear what I'm "approving" which is not really a huge issue. But it might be nice to include the username in the email.

This is super neat! Here are some of the things I noticed:

My site link of

> Avi Perl's personal site!

Shows as

> Avi Perl&#39;s personal site!

On the edit page, there's no link to my homepage where the links are shown. In fact, it wasn't obvious that that's where I needed to visit in order to see my links. It was a guess that brought me to my page.

The confirmation links are going to spam in Gmail.

Perhaps the confirmation page can have a link to redirect me to my edit page, or my homepage?

With a very long bio, on mobile, the last button is floating over your text on the bottom which doesn't look great.

On mobile, the text on the bottom of the page is also a bit off-kilter in its centering.

Idea: If each entry had its own short name, you could also operate as a URL shorter. If I could add "p" as the "short name" for my personal site, lynx.boo/aviperl/p could function as an alternative to tinyurl. Combined with an option to hide the URL from my homepage, I never need those services again. :)

On the topic of structured logs, can anyone point me towards where I might learn more about what people have learned over time?

I'm new to the world of querying through my logs, but I can already see a benefit to logging with JSON...

This is what I've defined as a solution for a need of mine for the moment: https://gist.github.com/avi-perl/b173fdc30219155eb9ee4bb3a21...

Re:Web Scraping in Python – The Complete Guide on Tuesday February 20, 2024 @01:13PM (#39444668)
An easy way to do this that I've used is to cache web requests. This way, I can run the part of the code that gets the data again with say a modification to grab data from additional urls, and I'm not unnecessarily rerunning my existing URLs. With this method, I don't need to modify existing code either, best of both worlds.

For this I've used the requests-cache lib.

Re:Ask HN: Show me your half baked project on Thursday October 12, 2023 @07:16PM (#37864422)
https://gist.aviperl.me/

Convert your GitHub Gists into a full featured blog and RSS feed.

Example: https://gist.aviperl.me/avi-perl https://gist.aviperl.me/avi-perl/rss

By default it works as a simple redesign of an existing set of gists. But gist hosted configuration files and compiling gist data to a static site can turn it into something much more rich, seo friendly, etc.

Re:On Keeping Sketchbooks on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @06:39PM (#37242819)
I've been doing more or less this with a small pocket size notebook since October. I admit that I initially fell for the romance of the idea and made an impulse purchase, but started to use them a couple of weeks after I bought them.

I tried different formats and pre-planning and have basically made peace with my reality, that I don't know what I'll be doing in it on any given day. So I operate like a log, whatever is next comes next. Sequentially. But I'll also jump to a page, or two-page spread, for notes on a particular project.

Here's what I use:

Moleskine Cahier Journal, Soft Cover, Pocket (3.5" x 5.5") Dotted, Black, 64 Pages (Set of 3) https://a.co/d/9jXRxNt

I also use a 4 color flexion erasable pen, but I can't recommend that since you're liable to lose all your notes if you leave it in a hot car. Not so bad though, it comes back if you stick it in the freezer. No joke.

If you provide me with your username and the id of a secret gist for configuration, I'll add your username to the list of users to precompile pages and use the full features.
I've been working on blog powered entirely by GitHub Gists. https://gist.aviperl.me/

With zero extra effort, you get a simple blog. With configuration via settings files stored in a secret gist or on a gist itself, a rich blogging experience.

A currently hidden feature that is useful is RSS feeds for any GitHub users gists: https://gist.aviperl.me/avi-perl/rss

I'm hoping that the GitHub graphQL API might let me get list of gists with their file content, in which case, no outside build step would be needed to provide the full experience for a GitHub user.

What I mean here by "full experience" is adding a title, image, tags, etc.

Making something _actually useful_. Creating a to-do app teaches me how to use tools, creating a web scraper that sent me an email when clothing my wife missed the chance to buy was back in stock filled me with confidence.
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @01:20PM (#36589706)
I'm working on a project to create a blog powered entirely by GitHub gists, POC is working but there is lots more to do.

https://gist.aviperl.me/

It's an outlet for sharing some small code ideas I have here and there.

Re:I made a smooth shadows generator on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @07:58AM (#36402796)
On chrome on a phone, selecting Linear does not work, and after selecting it, no changes are possible.

Looks great!

I've particularly enjoyed saving loads of time by having it convert API responses to typescript classes.

And once I was done, asking it to write up some functions for the way they interact worked out very well.

In general, I've made a habit of asking it coding questions (usually how to do something in a complicated framework) before bothering teammates. Probably about 80% success rate.

Re:Ask HN: How Long Does a Deployment Take at Your Company on Friday February 17, 2023 @03:33PM (#34840155)
I have an app that takes 15 minutes to deploy. We use GitHub actions to run the process which includes a build of a next.js site, building containers, creating assets in AWS, installing Python dependencies, and publishing the whole thing.