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Galaco

224 karma · joined March 14, 2019

AI Infrastructure Lead. Live and work in Tokyo
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Galaco··on I Bought a “Junk” PSP From Japan
The niche older fashion brands I used to enjoy here are no longer as accessible, in part due to these forwarding services; items are priced higher for foreign buyers who still underpay compared to their domestic supply, and items are becoming harder and harder to find at all as they no longer circulate the domestic market, they just get permanently removed from it. This is despite little change in the market price of such items in other markets/currencies.

Japan is a bargain for the dollar-holder and the market is choosing to price out local interest.

Galaco··on Sizing chaos
At a previous employer this was a problem we identified (and larger retailer customers) had recognised, although for other reasons. We had developed a size recommendation system for them, that used real product measurements in every size and a method of obtaining your body measurements from fully clothed photos. We also offered a statistical average measurement set for those who couldn’t/wouldn’t take photos of themselves (privacy was important to us, and there was no need to undress).

We were able to give details about fit comfort across many measurements for each size, but this feature was basically unused. 99% of users used the statistical average body of themselves instead of themselves, which actually exacerbates the body type problem.

Another interesting thing about the industry and the grading process we learned; many retailers had no measurements for their own clothes except the reference size. This was much more common of higher end brands.

1 last thing; some global brands actually have the same size name on the same product represent a different size in different region (eg an SKU in size S in US may have different measurements to the same SKU in S in Asia)

Galaco··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)
Thanks for posting! Are there specific language requirements, since the role is in the Japan office?
Galaco··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)
Location: Tokyo, Japan Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No, but flexible with timezones Technologies: Go, Typescript, PHP, Python, AWS, GCP. Others too Resume/CV: https://www.galaco.me/assets/CV.pdf Email: josh [at] galaco.me

Senior full-stack engineer living in Tokyo. 10 years experience. Experience in multiple AI startups delivering fast product on top of internal ML models. Looking for a startup that has a vision of what to solve and knows their market; ambiguity and ideation stage is great, I'll help get your product off the ground.

Galaco··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://www.galaco.me

Small time, bit of a mishmash of content, but might be interesting to a few people.

Galaco··on Claude Sonnet 4.5
Thanks for the info, but I did pause this, not through Google Play, it was via the UI. I received an automated email from them that my subscription had been paused as I expected and will resume in 1 month unless I cancel (I can’t cancel because the cancel UI doesn’t exist in whatever status my account is somehow in).

It’s funny that Claude Pro says this isn’t a feature, because their chatbot gave me instructions on how to unpause via the UI (although said UI does not exist) so the bot seems to know it’s a feature.

Galaco··on Claude Sonnet 4.5
This started a couple of days ago, before this announcement for 4.5 and code v2, so I already waited for it to be fixed.

As much as I hate to say it, I don’t have a large twitter following the only method I have to raise awareness of this issue is to try to piggyback on a big announcement like this in HN, that will have visible discussion, so I don’t always have the luxury of just chilling and waiting indefinitely.

Galaco··on Claude Sonnet 4.5
If you pause your subscription, Claude.ai breaks. I paused my subscription, and my account immediately transitioned to free. It has removed my invoice history, and attempts to upgrade again fail with an internal error. Their chatbot is telling me to navigate to UI elements that don't exist, and free users do not have the option of human support.

So I'm stuck; my sub is paused, and I cannot either cancel, or unpause and cannot speak to a human to solve this because the pause process took away all possibility of human interaction.

This is the future we live in.

Galaco··on Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room
I wouldn't be playing video games anymore if there were no more games with dedicated servers. Not from a moral standpoint, or from a competitive standpoint, but purely from the community perspective.

My youth was spent on Counterstrike: Source playing zombie mod, and then for years mapping for Zombie Escape, as a way to give back to those communities that gave me so much. I was never a mic user, and didn't use in game chat a huge amount either, but over time those regulars would still greet me and say hello. I rarely play now, but even after 17 years, when I show up once a year or so I'm always welcomed back in by all those who recognize me and admins switch to some fun maps (or some less fun ones that I made...), and we have a short catchup on life. Certainly many of these communities are on life-support, and most are long dead, but in all those people who play in these communities are the remnants of the communities who had just a little contribution in shaping the person I am today. I'll never forget when one community held a birthday event for me; for 8 hours we played every map I'd ever made, and won them all, with a full 64/64 server for the majority.

And I would never have experienced this if I hadn't happened to open Counterstrike: Source for the very first time, and my server browser's first entry just happened to be an early zombie mod server.

Shoutout to some of the old ZM/ZE communities: Syndicate Gamers, Plaguefest, i3D, icannt, ZES, Unloze & many more. ZE drove my interest to mapping, which drove my interest in Sourcemod, which drove my interest in programming, which led me to my career, which led me to my wife. Thank you.

Galaco··on iCloud Mail has DNS misconfigured?
iCloud Custom Domains & Mail are filled with bugs. My favourite one is that if my custom email I want to register has EVER been associated with an Apple account, it can never be used as a custom domain, unless that domain is set to catch all; it is impossible to add that specific address; it just errors without any specific message. The original account was fully deleted; going to the arduous process they set up that takes weeks to actually delete the account.

Customer support is worthless for actual technical problems as usual for Apple. Fun extra regarding customer support; if you arrange a support call in a language not native to your region, they honor that, but that information is lost if they escalate the call; the callback is always in the national language, despite explicit requests over the phone during the callback schedule

Galaco··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)
To me, vanity is only tangential to the purchasing of clothes, particularly fast fashion, where 'it looks good on the model' is often enough to part with money, not 'will it look good on me', or 'do I need it', which are often never even considered, surprisingly. The individual thinking they will look good is actually not always a factor; it can be a kind of addiction. Source comes from my previous employer (fast fashion related industry).

This app doesn't directly answer those questions, but it gives the data needed to stop and think about the answer (quickly). I don't consider myself a vain person, but I consider myself a person who makes poor decisions with their disposable income (fashion).

The main selling point would be this: You could avoid buying 2 shirts that will be unused then thrown away every year, for the cost of 1 shirt. Save money, and textile waste.

But also, why must everything be profitable? I most I could ever hope for is that the hosting costs are paid for.

Galaco··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)
I'm a fashion nerd. I've been working on an outfit tracking app for the last ~4 years (but only really pushed hard on it the last 3 months). I found I kept buying clothes that I never ended up wearing. Either because they didn't fit with what I had, I already had something like it, or it simply wasn't my actual style (although I thought it was). So, I built my own with the simple goal of buying less clothes, and throwing away fewer clothes.

There are plenty of apps that do outfit tracking, with some basic stats. But they all have a few or more of these shortcomings (from my perspective); unpleasant UI, no cross device syncing, lack of detailed usage statistics (e.g. cost spread over time by garment category), some categories just not supported, pushing a specific lifestyle such as Capsule Closets, or just plain focused on recommending what to wear using some mediocre algorithm that doesn't understand cuts and how different pieces fit together; basically only suitable for capsule collections.

These apps all have a lot of downsides too in common, which I haven't been able to solve either yet; ultimately you must start with an inventory of your clothes, and then work from there. It takes ages to catalog and import your clothes, and I haven't found many existing product that lets you export if you've even done it before. And on top of that, you have to be quite rigorous at tracking what you wear; the more data you have the more insight you can get from your choices.

I finally published on iOS a couple of months ago. No traction, and I don't expect there to be. I won't argue that my offering is better than any of the competition, but I've tried most of them (and wasted colossal amounts of time onboarding onto them) and found none fit my need properly. It's still very much work in progress, but I find myself reaching for it multiple times per week to inform my purchasing habits.

https://procloset.app

Galaco··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2024)
I just want to say your careers page is amazing. It's an often neglected part of even the most creative websites, so it was so refreshing to see.
Galaco··on Netflix's Distributed Counter Abstraction
All the money they spend still fails at basic UX, creating a finely crafted, polished turd of engineering perfection. I don't see the Netflix experience to be superior in any way to the other big services; they all have their own issues that engineering haven't solved properly, most likely some different ones.

An example (in this case ONE PIECE on Netflix Japan region): My Netflix language is set to English, but I am not in an English speaking country. And yet, all shows have an English description and title, as well as episode lists with descriptions also in English. And yet, the program itself is not in English, nor does it have English audio options or subtitles. And the UI does not indicate if there are English subtitles until I play an episode and open the subtitles menu. This is compounded to be even worse when there are so many shows that are only half subtitled (different rights holders I assume). Why does the UI lie to me by showing everything about the series/movie in my native language except the actual content itself? This is really common in non-English speaking regions, and it looks like a basic engineering failure of looking up their global database content in MY language while ignoring whether the actual CONTENT is available in my language. I suppose this could be a UX issue, but it also looks like an engineering one to me. And aren't those intertwined to some extent anyway?

Galaco··on Show HN: Simple script to cripple personalized targeting from Facebook
Same situation for me. Basically the only ads I ever see in my native language are for American expat tax services (I’m not American, have never visited the continent and have never expressed interest in doing so).

Sometimes I wonder just how good this adtech really all is when the best they can do is figure out I speak English (browser language) and live not in an English speaking country (IP address) and just assume therefore I am American.

Galaco··on Ask HN: Have you migrated to Proton mail/calendar/pass/etc.? How was it?
I'm aware of most of these improvements since I unsubscribed. Not worth resubscribing for me but I do follow the progress and am happy to see the improvements.

Proton Drive is quite impressive to me now. Photos beta came along about 2 weeks after I unsubscribed I believe; bad timing on there I think; the Windows support was dangling in front of me for so long with no Mac support or Photo support I gave up waiting and moved to iCloud.

Proton Pass at the time did not have a Safari extension iirc, so on an Intel Mac you could not use Safari. I use Safari (mostly unwillingly), therefore I could not use ProtonPass at that time.

For the family plan, is sub-users a new concept? I was shocked I couldn't have a shared email (us@example.com) + husband email (husband@example.com) + wife email (wife@example.com) with the obvious access controls you would expect from such a setup.

Galaco··on Ask HN: Have you migrated to Proton mail/calendar/pass/etc.? How was it?
I tried after they introduced the family plan, then gave up after a few months since most of the products were (at least then) extremely half baked and missing what were to me key features.

VPN was great, no issues. Calendar was pointless; no way to sync between Google calendar updates; you could import your calendar from Google, but as soon as someone changed an event Proton Calendar was out of sync and you wouldn’t know unless you check in on Google Calendar, thus making Proton Calender pointless.

Proton Pass seemed good except it launched with no way to use it on an Intel Mac. So unusable for me since one of my machines is an Intel Mac.

Drive I tried out but since there wasn’t a way to view photos like their competitors at the time I never did much with it.

Mail was good for years, but the family plan was enough for me to give up. There didn’t seem to be a way to share an email domain with my wife and have each of us be able to access an email on that domain (e.g. wife@example.com on her account and husband@example.com on my account).

I think Proton has good services once they mature but they had a spate of releasing half-baked products.

Galaco··on Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?
I wrote a mobile app for managing all my clothes and tracking what I wear every day (I’m heavily into avant garde fashion).

Used it every single day for almost 4 years now, and it gives me informed decisions on what I rarely wear, my favourite combinations, value for money, and what clothes I should consider selling or donating. It’s been great to reduce my consumption and keep a closet only filled with items I can pair well with

Galaco··on Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?
> I’m not quite sure what sub I’m reading, what’s user generated, and what’s an ad

I'm unable to tell apart ads properly either quickly on reddit, and given the it's the same user action to collapse a comment and to click an ad that looks like a comment, I've misclicked on ads many, many times. It doesn't help that they place them at the top of the comments section and seem to be deliberately designed to look like gif comments.

As an advertiser I would not be particularly chuffed. I can say with confidence that my accidental ad click rate on reddit is 100%.

Galaco··on Hetzner Introduces ARM64 Cloud Servers
Never figured out how to use Hertzner. Wanted to try since they get such a good reputation on here, but they banned my account when their system presented no way for me to verify my identity.

The required either PayPal or passport. I have no PayPal account, and their 3rd party verification system only allows passport from your country of residence (signup requires providing a contact address and they pre fill using this address; you can’t change the passport country). I am a British citizen living in Japan, and therefore hold a British passport; there was no way for me to provide a Japanese passport. I asked what I should do to comply, and they banned my account 6 hours later.

I can’t be the only one to experience this, can I?

Galaco··on The legacy of fy_iceworld, Counter-Strike’s divisive, popular custom map (2020)
In many cases, specifically working with those kinds of quirks. Being able to persist certain state between rounds in CS using these kinds of bugs has been a godsend for many custom game modes (for me personally, my work with Zombie Escape in CS:S and CS:GO)
Galaco··on WebContainers: Run Node.js natively in the browser
> Faster than your local environment. Builds complete up to 20% faster and package installs complete >= 5x faster than yarn/npm.

Above is a quote from the post. I feel like this is a stupid question, but how can running yarn/npm in a browser on my machine be faster than running yarn/npm on my machine? Particularly when each page load runs a fresh npm/yarn install?

Nonetheless, this is a incredible piece of software that i'll be following closely

Galaco··on Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?
A Steam dedicated Source Engine game server push notification service: https://ikamu.io

It’s been live and running for 6 months but generates no revenue, and has only a few users. It has monetised features, but no payment or subscription mechanism.

You add your favourite server ip addresses, favourite map names, then you get push notifications whenever any of those servers starts playing any of those maps.

I created it specifically to watch all Zombie Escape servers in CS:S and CS:GO so that I could play whenever servers started playing my own maps in order to record and gather feedback for improvements. Nowadays though, It’s really only useful for some custom game modes on Garrys Mod, Counterstrike Source and Counterstrike Global Offensive (such as Zombie Escape, TTT, Zombie Survival) as they have large map pools, and each play can last for up to several hours.

Galaco··on Play Counter-Strike 1.6 in your browser
I didn’t expect to see another CSS Ze player, given there’s so few of us now. There’s a good chance we play together! Thousands of hours spent playing and making maps, I wouldn’t trade them for the world.
Galaco··on WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web
To be a little pedantic, while this is a fantastic idea, is it really bookmarking?

What you’ve done instead is compiled a personal digital library; akin to a Kindle

Galaco··on It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)
I’d disagree with point 2. There shouldn’t be any responsibility for a (ex-)maintainer to provide alternatives themselves; especially when there may not be any at point of abandonment .

Is there significant value to maintaining a set of glorified search engine results in a README? It means the list of alternatives then have to be maintained in case they too are abandoned.

Galaco··on Ennui: How to Overcome Chronic Boredom
In my own personal experience, some aspects of that list may be indicative of, or lead to mental health issues that may indeed have a substantial negative effect on the ability to seek out such opportunity.

Irregardless of the truth each aspect of that statement, its commonly understood that beautiful people have easier access to opportunity than ugly people; we as humans are biased based on appearance.

Galaco··on Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll
> The headline says that 50% of Americans prefer working from home. That suggests that 50% prefer working from the office.

If you even glance at the article that's just not true. The remaining vote is split between 'Prefers the Office' and 'Unsure'.

If you were to split the 'Unsure' based on the current ratio of 'Prefers Home':'Prefers the office' between the 2, you're looking at closer to 42% 'prefer the office'.

Galaco··on How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin
If you already do this every day for 1/10th of that compensation with no way out, the misery and boredom are already the norm.
Galaco··on Simple text editor has over 15k monthly users
Interesting idea, but realised that I can't use undo/redo after pressing Tab (at least on FireFox); it immediately made the experience awkward and more complicated.