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purrcat259

245 karma · joined April 21, 2016

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purrcat259··on Launch HN: Speko (YC S26) – OpenRouter for Voice AI
Word Error Rate and Character Error Rate.

Common metrics to track how coarsely or finely accurate voice AI is

purrcat259··on Cheap self-hosted Kubernetes on Hetzner cloud (2025)
I've been doing the same for over a year. I think single node kubernetes is very underrated, both for running a single project or for multiple.
purrcat259··on The drivers behind software delivery inefficiency
I agree. I saw the same.

Hold up... We saw it at the same place :D

purrcat259··on Europe's Largest Unions Demand Right to Cancel Work on Days Above 30C
_laughs in maltese_
purrcat259··on "Stop Moralizing AirCon": How Institutions Shift Responsibility onto Individuals
Your comment makes me think you don't live in a warm country.

Where I am from it is currently 24-25C at 3am. It will likely go up to 27C in August. We keep our AC on overnight in some evenings.

purrcat259··on Webcam head tracking, webcam to control in‑game FOV
When I used a head tracker (homemade infrared one), I just got used to shifting my head but keeping my eyes on the screen. Having a wider screen helps.
purrcat259··on 1024000^2 Blocks, 2B2T Minecraft Server World Download Project, and Discoveries
This is a great video trying to understand the artistic side of 2b2t as a persistent world (rather than the anarchy its more well known for): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09m5BAkkOtw
purrcat259··on OpenAI and Government of Malta partner to roll out ChatGPT Plus to all citizens
Some amount of micro-electronics. https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/about/manufacturing-at-...
purrcat259··on OpenAI and Government of Malta partner to roll out ChatGPT Plus to all citizens
The coasts will definitely be wiped in 100 years but underwater is a bit of an overstatement
purrcat259··on OpenAI and Government of Malta partner to roll out ChatGPT Plus to all citizens
Literally no one I know in the 30+ years I have been here collects rainwater on their roof. Whats your source, r/malta?
purrcat259··on OpenAI and Government of Malta partner to roll out ChatGPT Plus to all citizens
Maltese population are historically price sensitive. €20 a month isn't something you easily justify especially with recent cost of living increases.

So the fact that you get it free after doing some basic due diligence is actually a big deal in the local context.

purrcat259··on OpenAI and Government of Malta partner to roll out ChatGPT Plus to all citizens
Citation needed. I haven't heard of this.

I'm Maltese so feel free to be as detailed as needed.

purrcat259··on OpenAI and Government of Malta partner to roll out ChatGPT Plus to all citizens
Unlikely. Other than the telcos there's only one proper commercial datacentre here. Space is very constrained and the electricity supply stability + summer heat aren't a fun combination
purrcat259··on OpenAI and Government of Malta partner to roll out ChatGPT Plus to all citizens
Unfortunate thats the reputation we have :(
purrcat259··on Cloudflare Email Service
Scaleway TEM offer pay per use. I moved off of resend when my side project went beyond their free tier and now pay <0.5€ a month
purrcat259··on Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message
Good luck sticking within limits, I have been burning up my baseline limits insanely fast within a few prompts, a marked change from a few weeks ago.

There's a few complaints online about the same happening to multiple users.

Otherwise anti-gravity has been great.

purrcat259··on Ask HN: What do you look for in your first 10 hires?
Basically no one who has a life outside of work, or a household to upkeep or a family to take care of.

Your criteria heavily biases towards very performative and obvious signs of hard work in a commercial setting, completely oblivious to hard work and character outside of it.

purrcat259··on My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs
An easy correction is to only merge PRs from folks who are on the on call rota.

Those not on rota can either join or have their PR receive heavy scrutiny

purrcat259··on I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk
Not doing 996 is a feature not a bug
purrcat259··on I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer
OP discovered the state of Malta's InfoSec culture the hard way.

TLDR: infosec is screwed in Malta. The only people who benefit are malicious actors.

Some missing historical context is that there was no real legislation other than computer misuse up until the recent case known as the FreeHour case. A group of students discovered some pretty nasty vulnerabilities in an app aimed at matching student schedules. One of these vulns was exposing RW API keys for hundreds of student's google calendars, hanging out to dry on the open internet.

The students involved, together with one of their lecturers, sent a standard vuln disclosure notice via email to the company. Instead of what you'd expect, the students were arrested, strip searched and charged with computer misuse.

This really threw the entire local infosec scene off, with some very vocal voices saying how draconian the situation was. Finally they all receieved presidential pardons [1] although last I heard they don't have their hardware back yet. FreeHour and their tech supplier (never publicly mentioned but if you ask around you can find out who they are) never saw any consequences.

I've done two public disclosures [2] [3] which worked out well but only because I knew how to go about it. In such a tiny country is about who you know and how you know them, so in both cases I established contact via trusted intermediaries, both times ensuring I found someone who would know what I was talking about whilst also not immediately reach for the police.

I'm sitting on another issue I discovered because after a long conversation with CSIRT about it we figured the only way I can actually anonymously report it is by snail mailing it to them. I can't pull together the energy to complete it because I don't have the time right now in my life for another legal melodramatic situation.

Despite this, MITA (the government IT department) annually runs cybersec award ceremony [4]. I had once planned to nominate the students for the award but the nomination criteria forbids nominations for individuals who have "averse media publications" about them.

This is very much a deep socio-political problem in the country: we don't handle candour or bluntness of any kind in the public sphere. Being a very blunt person, it got me in all kinds of trouble growing up.

[1] https://timesofmalta.com/article/pardon-issued-students-lect...

[2] https://www.simonam.dev/accidental-pentest/

[3] https://www.simonam.dev/total-account-takeover/

[4] https://ncc-mita.gov.mt/cyber-awards/

purrcat259··on Show HN: OpenWhisper – free, local, and private voice-to-text macOS app
If you're familiar with CLI you could use ffmpeg to extract audio then pipe the audio into whatever transcriber
purrcat259··on Show HN: Subth.ink – write something and see how many others wrote the same
wow seven people have the same password as me
purrcat259··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://www.simonam.dev/
purrcat259··on ChatGPT Health is a marketplace, guess who is the product?
> And how would you know what they base their hiring upon?

GDPR Request. Ah wait, regulation bad.

purrcat259··on Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone
I don't think WOL works over Wi-Fi and whether you can get WOL from a USB ethernet adapter.

My proxy doesn't attempt to handle security. Most folks use either Tailscale or some other VPN solution. In my case I use the wireguard server in my router to VPN into home which gives me access to the proxy and consequently to the machine.

purrcat259··on Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone
If you don't want to run your machine 24/7 (whether for electrical consumption, environmental, noise, etc reasons), I wrote an ssh proxy [1] that will send WOL packets to a target machine and hold your connection until its alive.

I then configured debian-autoshutdown [2] to turn the machine off if there's no traffic on ssh after 15 minutes.

This way I just ssh into my machine (whether via antigravity on my laptop or termius on my phone) and within 30 or so seconds its awake, no physical button presses needed. I documented the whole flow in more detail on my blog [3].

I'm now working on an improvement called machine on proxy (or mop) that will allow me to start Proxmox VMs instead of physical machines, so I can let gemini-cli run wild and if it decides to wipe the entire hard drive I can restore from a snapshot.

[1] https://github.com/simonamdev/ssh-wol-proxy

[2] https://github.com/mnul/debian-autoshutdown

[3] https://www.simonam.dev/ssh-wol-proxy/

purrcat259··on Kitchen optimizations
Anecdotally, with two young children (5, 1), the savings add up and mean twenty more seconds with them or not being overwhelmed after they're asleep with the state of the house.
purrcat259··on Show HN: DBOS Java – Postgres-Backed Durable Workflows
I was super interested in DBOS but I had to back out when I figured that the observability isn't self hostable yet :(, so I'm chuffed to hear its coming!

Whats the best way to hear about it when it does? Maybe newsletter I can register to or something.

purrcat259··on CPUs and GPUs to Become More Expensive After TSMC Price Hike in 2026
Its definitely mostly entrenched interests that are the issue.

Funny you mention mercury tower. Thats a rich person's idea of what good housing is... which is way over the price any middle or even upper class person can afford. It isn't affordable housing, it's a parking lot for excess liquidity.

For what its worth it's the raising of property height limits that helped kick off a lot of the construction boom. One could argue the situation was better when the restrictions were bigger.

purrcat259··on CPUs and GPUs to Become More Expensive After TSMC Price Hike in 2026
A bit OT but I live on a very land constrained island with the highest population density in Europe (see Malta).

There has been major increase in demand for housing and supply cannot be built fast enough to match. Its turned most of the island into a construction site so rampant that I made an online tracker for urban planning permits so folks can get ahead on knowing whats going on around them.

Idk if you have any wisdom but there's no creative solutionising happening, just the rich able to buy whatever property they want causing prices to rise which is pricing out the middle class, causing a whole lot of grief and downstream issues (such as plummeting fertility rate because homes are too expensive).

Is there a magic toggle we missed to unlock this creativity or am I being realistic by being skeptical that limiting important resources just leads to harsher inequality?

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