Hacker News Reader

zefhouson The real cost of owning a home

Exactly — it doesn’t matter how many “hidden” costs he finds to adds to the cost of owning for the article — the renter pays them all, plus the owner’s profit.

zefhouson DaVinci Resolve – Photo

Just this morning I was missing Aperture and mentioned it to my kids. I was organizing some pictures with Photos.app and adding a tag or removing from an album takes about 5 seconds for the UI to visually represent my change. I have a decently big library but certainly not anomalous. Aperture made it so fast to organize and deal with photos.

zefhouson Parametric CAD in Rust

Yup, the attachments with BOSL2 are really great. You can do a ton without much math at all, TBH.

https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2/wiki/attachments.scad#se...

zefhouson The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

My city utility provider used secured-server.biz for billing for a long time. I always thought it was hilarious and very suspicious looking.

zefhouson Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://zef.studio

zefhouson Investors bought 27% of US homes in Q1, as traditional buyers struggle to afford

How one defines “distorting markets” is an important question when it comes to defining policy, and not an un-contentious one.

zefhouson CU Randomness Beacon

Then one could dynamically and randomly choose which randomness beacon to use! I like it.

zefhouson The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

Uh... in-app purchases for $24 for a 24-hour license? $80 pay-per-count? The AI marketing images... Ugh.

zefhouson Gridfinity: The modular, open-source grid storage system

Not gridfinity compatible, but I have a set of corner pieces that uses a similar concept. The majority of the material can be scrap acrylic, mdf, cardboard, etc. and you just print the corner pieces. Lids and stuff too.

https://www.printables.com/model/57813-boxkit-parts-for-maki...

3d printing is great, but a lot of wasted plastic if you print large organizers and stuff like that.

zefhouson Supabase raises $200M Series D at $2B valuation

Part of what I think is rough is the framing of Postgres being "an alternative to Google’s Firebase" in the article. I mean, ok yeah they are both databases in a sense, but they are not the same thing at all. Firebase is a service and Postgres a database technology, and certainly not well-described as an alternative to Firebase by anyone competent in the industry. Lol.

I don't mean to demean "vibe coders" exactly either, but rather jumping on the hype train of using that term for your funding pitch. You're using AI to learn to become a software developer? Great! No problem with that.

But also — if you now have a database involved and you're handling people's data, you better learn what you're doing. A database provider pushing "vibe coding" is not a good look imo.

zefhouson Supabase raises $200M Series D at $2B valuation

Oof this bit is rough!

> The startup supports Postgres, the most popular developer database system that’s an alternative to Google’s Firebase. Supabase’s goal: To be a one-stop backend for developers and "vibe coders."

zefhouson My Beancount books are 95% automatic after 3 years (2024)

Love this! I have been using hledger for a while now and have a pretty automated process for importing exported CSVs. I would love a little more automation in terms of pulling down the data, but on the bright side the manual process provides a good touch point to keep up on accounting regularly in small doses. This is great for just keeping an eye on things on a monthly basis.

I am starting a new business now and intend to see how far I can take plain text accounting in that context. I plan to use mercury for banking and want to automate as much as possible. I would also like to associate invoices that are stored in a self-hosted paperless-ngx instance.

zefhouson Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

I have found a lot of great content available in Libby and Hoopla. I use my local library card, but am also able to get a card from a nearby larger city library, and between the two I have access to a lot of content and very soon in a lot of cases.

zefhouson The Antikythera mechanism – 254:19 ratio

I’m just here to fulfill the Hacker News rule that any post mentioning the Antikythera Mechanism must have a comment linking the excellent Clickspring build videos.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4R...

zefhouson Tritone Substitutions

Like Sting said, “it's not a chord until the bass player decides what the root is.”

zefhouson Ask HN: What indoor CO2 monitor do you recommend?

DHH gave a talk about this a while ago with good citations to studies about CO2 concentration and other VOCs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRqh8oLY7Ik

zefhouson New GitHub Organization for the Swift Project

I extremely excited about the future of Swift and being able to use it in new places like Embedded Swift.

As an iOS developer I’ve been getting into some firmware stuff on ESP-32. It’s my first time writing C++ and while it’s been better than I expected, I really miss Swift and especially the safety it brings.

zefhouson The Lunacy of Artemis

Destin from Smarter Every Day gave a talk that addresses a lot of these issues that I found pretty interesting too.

https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU

zefhouson Show HN: My $1k self-install, off-grid solar backup build for renters

I live in Boulder, Colorado. We had the Marshall Fire[1] a couple years ago, which burned down 1084 structures on a day with high winds. These winds are pretty normal around here on occasion, at least multiple times each year.

What's not normal is that last week, our utility (Xcel Energy) decided to preemptively shut off power to 55,000 customers to reduce risk before a forecasted wind event with high fire-risk[2]. They had intended to restore power the next day, but some went without power for a couple days.

The communication and execution of the shutdown seemed poor, and the infrastructure problems that led to the shutdown are still here. The impression I have from comments in local groups is that they are trying to avoid liability and have not adequately invested in fixing shoddy infrastructure that is going to be safe here. People are expecting regular shutoffs to become the new normal. Wind storms aren't going away, fixing the infrastructure would take a long time, and people don't think Xcel is interested in spending the money, even though they can likely afford to.

This has definitely left me thinking about a DIY battery+solar solution to keep my heating system running, as well as fridge/freezers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Fire [2] https://www.cpr.org/2024/04/08/for-the-first-time-a-colorado...

zefhouson We are going to start charging for dedicated IPv4 in January 1st

Thank you for making this right! I didn’t think there was any malice in it and it’s nice to know it was a simple mistake.

I’ve also already unassigned my unneeded address and I’m still interested in using fly for some things in the future.

zefhouson Do It Yourself Blind Repair

It does feel like this site has everything, but I can’t find a solution here to a problem I had with mine either. I figured out a fix on my own and made this video about it, which I’m pleased has helped others fix theirs too.

https://youtu.be/7fcxoEkgxZk

zefhouson We are going to start charging for dedicated IPv4 in January 1st

Posting a notice isn’t exactly the same as communicating with accounts that will be affected by the change. I hadn’t seen anything about it so it was a surprise to me. Would have appreciated a simple heads up - “hey, we’re going to start billing for this”

zefhouson We are going to start charging for dedicated IPv4 in January 1st

I just came to HN to see if there was something about this here. I just got my first charge out of nowhere. I’ve had an account there for a couple years and tried it out a long time back but wasn’t actively using it.

I like fly as a service, and I have no problem with them charging, but coming out of nowhere with no prior notice is definitely frustrating and unexpected.

zefhouson Animated Knots

In this case, a web app is hardly going to help me when I’m camping with no internet connection. But a native app with good offline support is exactly what I would want.

And while web apps have plenty of practical benefits, those are mostly from the perspective of the developer. As a user, once an app is downloaded, good native apps are preferable just about every time.

zefhouson Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?

One of my favorite things that I’ve made in terms of utility is a little leather belt holster for my AirPods. I wear it almost every day and enjoy the functionality of it. I made it for the first generation AirPods case, but it still fits the wider AirPods Pro case sideways, so I didn’t have to make a new one for those.

https://zef.studio/projects/airpods-holster

zefhouson Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?

As explosive as the bat was, I feel like the most explosive thing you’ll ever make is your YouTube channel. One of very few instant-subs for me.

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

https://zef.studio/

Mostly journaling projects in the physical realm. I’ve been enjoying making things with wood, leather, metal, electronics, 3D printing. And some introspective writing, mostly for myself. I have lots more drafts of projects that I’m hoping to publish in the near future.

zefhouson VSCode Swift 1.0

The vim keybindings that Xcode has implemented work fine for me, but some omissions like using the period character to repeat the last action are quite debilitating.

zefhouson Japanese Artist Creates Miniature Dioramas Every Day for 10 Years

Love it! Thanks for sharing. I'll check that out later.

zefhouson Japanese Artist Creates Miniature Dioramas Every Day for 10 Years

I'd love an iOS homescreen widget that shows them every day! I have one for the Wikipedia picture of the day that I enjoy.

I'm seriously considering making one if there isn't one already...