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nosecreekon The old-school way of keeping the summer heat out of your home

In addition, in some places (where I live) the air quality is extremely poor for much of the summer due to wildfire smoke. So even if you do get a cool night, if you don't have AC you have to choose between maintaining some level of air quality indoors or cooling your house.

nosecreekon The first non-opoid painkiller

Can confirm it is called acetaminophen in Canada

nosecreekon Why is everybody knitting chickens?

> It's an excellent hobby. I can explain more why if people are interested.

I'm interested in your why. It's something I've considered for a while but haven't actually started on yet.

nosecreekon Ask HN: What is the best LLM for consumer grade hardware?

Related question: what is everyone using to run a local LLM? I'm using Jan.ai and it's been okay. I also see OpenWebUI mentioned quite often.

nosecreekon Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)

Shameless plug for my own project (https://grocerytracker.ca/) since you're in Canada. Eventually I'd love for it to do what you're suggesting, but for now the closest thing you can do is create a basket for each store with the same items and then check each week to see which is the cheapest.

nosecreekon Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

I’ve been scraping and tracking Canadian grocery prices for a few years, lots of ideas on how to do more with it if I had more time… http://grocerytracker.ca/

nosecreekon Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

I’d be curious to hear more from OP on this as well. I’ve got my own price tracking site for Canadian groceries (http://grocerytracker.ca/) but my primary goal has been to get information in the hands of average Canadians so they can make informed buying decisions.

nosecreekon Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

I’ve got a site with the price history aspect for Canadian groceries (http://grocerytracker.ca/), but the community groups/public lists idea is interesting. I definitely feel like there is a lot of potential in this space.

nosecreekon Show HN: A Website You Can Only Visit Once

Love the idea, very creative and well executed!

nosecreekon Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright

In Canada I think they are legally required to, but sometimes it can be frustrating if they don’t always compare like units - one product will be price per gram or 100 grams, and another price per kg. I’ve found with online shopping, the unit prices don’t take into account discounts and sale prices, which makes it harder to shop sales (in store seems to be better for this).

nosecreekon Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright

For sure, just replace the first dot in the url from my profile with an @

nosecreekon Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright

Absolutely! It’s made it difficult to implement some of the cross-retailer comparison features I would like to add. For my charts I’ve just manually selected some products, but I’ve also been trying to get a “good enough but not perfect” string comparison algorithm working.

nosecreekon Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright

Very cool! I did something similar in Canada (https://grocerytracker.ca/)

nosecreekon AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

Interesting. I suspect I may have the same thing.

I also have poor vision without glasses, and I’ve always found that when I go swimming (and can’t wear my glasses) my hearing also gets significantly worse. Or at least the cocktail party problem gets worse, as my brain seems to get overwhelmed by every single background noise. I think some of this is explained by many indoor pools being big echoey spaces, but it still happens at outdoor pools as well. I suspect that when one sense (sight) is degraded, my brain tries to compensate by focusing on another sense (hearing), and the end result is even worse due to APD.

nosecreekon Reddit is taking over Google

Are there specific laws that deal with rate limits? Honest question - I get that something too fast could be considered DDoS, but so long as it’s below a certain threshold wouldn’t it be okay (not sure how said threshold would be determined)?

nosecreekon Ask HN: Why isn't there a Rotten Tomatoes for consumer electronics?

I know it doesn’t solve the problem for everyone, but many public libraries offer free access to Consumer Reports.

nosecreekon Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager

My favorite YNAB alternative is Buckets - https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/ although especially if you don’t need auto-sync

nosecreekon A site that tracks the price of a Big Mac in every US McDonald's

Agreed on the stores. Cities/locations should be sorted by distance from your location.

nosecreekon A site that tracks the price of a Big Mac in every US McDonald's

No, but I’ll admit that is my biggest hesitation in promoting it beyond what I already do. Walmart has the most aggressive blocking (in general, I don’t think specifically directed at my site) and I haven’t been able to get new data from them since October I think. Otherwise haven’t had any issues.

nosecreekon A site that tracks the price of a Big Mac in every US McDonald's

If I had unlimited time I would love to. Unfortunately I can’t see it expanding beyond Canada anytime soon though.

nosecreekon A site that tracks the price of a Big Mac in every US McDonald's

Not for Big Macs, but if you’re interested I’ve been collecting Canadian grocery price data over the past couple of years here: https://grocerytracker.ca/

nosecreekon Facebook is blocking Canadians’ posts on the assassination of a BC Sikh leader

He was a Canadian citizen: https://globalnews.ca/news/9969537/who-is-hardeep-singh-nijj...

nosecreekon Ask HN: What niche task/tool websites have you built?

Love it! I built a site to track grocery prices/inflation in Canada - http://grocerytracker.ca/

nosecreekon Web scraping for me, but not for thee

Agreed that legal clarity is important - especially for smaller players. I've built a significant hobby site that relies fairly heavily on scraping (grocery price comparison site). I believe what I'm doing is morally okay, and also that big players wouldn't run into any issues, but when it's just me (or even if it was a small company) the legal 'grey area' makes it a much bigger risk.

nosecreekon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://dustin.lammiman.ca/

Probably the most interesting things are homemade ice cream recipes and a (not very detailed) build journal for the teardrop trailer we made during COVID.

nosecreekon Now Reddit are coming for the individual personal subreddits

It seems to me a lot of subs also said they were closing for 2 days, but never re-opened. I understand that logic, but because the subreddits have stayed close there is no way for that community to indicate if they support the ongoing protest. There's a big difference between voting 'yes' to closing for 48 hours vs permanently.

nosecreekon Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?

Lemmy definitely looks interesting and I should really give it a shot, but while the fediverse stuff adds a lot of value I think it also makes it a lot more complicated. I think the tech stack matters too - running old forums on a LAMP stack made them pretty easy for a lot of people to setup on cheap hosting. When I go the "Run a Server" section in the Lemmy docs it immediately starts talking about Docker, etc. which I think is a much bigger barrier to entry for those who want to host an instance.

nosecreekon Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?

Asked this on another post as well, but is there something similar to phpBB, but using the Reddit/HN “tree” style for comments? I miss some of the old forums I used to be part of, but do think the tree style definitely has it’s advantages.

nosecreekon The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

Is there an equivalent to say phpBB or vBulletin, but using the reddit tree format?

nosecreekon Ask HN: Is there a good camping chair that is comfortable for programming?

Related question: any recommendations on a decent budget portable monitor for a similar purpose?