Hacker News: acidburnNSA

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

acidburnNSA — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:17:38 +0000

I did a book in rst and liked that it had cool admonition, import, glossary, and index features that made it better than markdown for me. Still hate the heading conventions.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)"

acidburnNSA — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 01:28:51 +0000

On the plus side, mine misdetected a wake word during a funny conversation and said "Sorry, I can't find any area called _____[60 second repeat of funny conversation]___" and it made my family laugh harder than we've laughed in a really long time. I even went into the tts cache and saved the wav b/c it was sooo funny.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Animated 'Firefly' Reboot in Development from Nathan Fillion, 20th TV"

acidburnNSA — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 21:37:46 +0000

The announcement on instagram is here in case anyone wants to see it directly. Pretty well done. Nathan did a bunch of teasers with the other stars earlier. Kinda funny and goofy.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DV6Js56jT3F/

New comment by acidburnNSA in "My Homelab Setup"

acidburnNSA — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:07:59 +0000

Ryzen 5950x cpu, 64 gb ecc ram, dual 16 tb drives for zfs, Nvidia 5070 gpu.

Way way overspeced for what I listed, but I use it for lots of video processing, numerical simulations, and some local AI too.

I have a similar subset of this stuff running at my mom's house on a 16 GB ram Beelink minicomputer. With openvino frigate can still do fully local object detection on the security case, whish is sweet.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "My Homelab Setup"

acidburnNSA — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:54:11 +0000

I have something like this, in the same case. I have beefier specs b/c I use it as a daily workstation in addition to running all my stuff.

* nginx with letsencrypt wildcard so I have lots of subdomains

* No tailscale, just pure wireguard between a few family houses and for remote access

* Jellyfin for movies and TV, serving to my Samsung TV via the Tizen jellyfin app

* Mopidy holding my music collection, serving to my home stereo and numerous other speakers around the house via snapcast (raspberry pi 3 as the client)

* Just using ubuntu as the os with ZFS mirroring for NAS, serving over samba and NFS

* Home assistant for home automation, with Zigbee and Z-wave dongles

* Frigate as my NVR, recording from my security cams, doing local object detection, and sending out alerts via Home Assistant

* Forgejo for my personal repository host

* tar1090 hooked to a SDR for local airplane tracking (antenna in attic)

This all pairs nicely with my two openwrt routers, one being the main one and a dumb AP, connected via hardwire trunk line with a bunch of VLANs.

Other things in the house include an iotawatt whole-house energy monitor, a bunch of ESPs running holiday light strips, indoor and outdoor homebrew weather stations with laser particulate sensors and CO2 monitors (alongside the usual sensors), a water-main cutoff (zwave), smart bulbs, door sensors, motion sensors, sirens/doorbells, and a thing that listens for my fire alarm and sends alerts. Oh and I just flashed the pura scent diffuser my wife bought and lobotomized it so it can't talk to the cloud anymore, but I can still automate it.

I love it and have tons of fun fiddling with things.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Put the Zipcode First"

acidburnNSA — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 23:43:48 +0000

Yeah, but autofilling everything down to the neighboring city is still a huge improvement.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Put the zip code first"

acidburnNSA — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 23:43:22 +0000

I think they can just skip the zip code entry and enter everything else as usual.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Show HN: Omni – Open-source workplace search and chat, built on Postgres"

acidburnNSA — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:27:48 +0000

Are all people with physical access to the servers or network access to the hosts guaranteed to be US persons? Are all physical and network accesses logged for audits? That's the kind of thing govcloud promises that export control auditors want to see.

I felt like "Confidential Compute" tech could solve this issue once and for all but I'm not so sure after seeing some of the attacks people can do with physical access.

Another option of course is to not use cloud at all and have your own rack in a locked room with a good security system and/or armed US person guards.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Show HN: Omni – Open-source workplace search and chat, built on Postgres"

acidburnNSA — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:39:29 +0000

Even self-hosting on AWS, GCP, or Azure isn't local enough for certain application, such as people doing export-controlled work where any sysadmin or person with physical access to the server/data is required to be a US Person (or equivalent in other countries). This is the niche that the govcloud solutions are aimed at serving. But some people just want to build big actually-private, actually self-hosted systems and do their own physical and network security.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Show HN: Omni – Open-source workplace search and chat, built on Postgres"

acidburnNSA — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:16:27 +0000

* "Self-hosted: Runs entirely on your infrastructure. No data leaves your network."

* "Bring Your Own LLM: Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, or open-weight models via vLLM."

With so many newbies wanting these kinds of services it might be worth adjusting the first bullet to say: "No data leaves your network, at least as long as you don't use any Anthropic, OpenAI, or Gemini models via the network of course"

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)"

acidburnNSA — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:23:24 +0000

That is a common and reasonable sentiment. I can't help wonder if Claude Code will move this needle. Maybe people will stop relying as much on excel?

New comment by acidburnNSA in ""Operation Windlord": C-17 Airlifts a Micro Nuclear Reactor for the First Time"

acidburnNSA — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 13:48:14 +0000

Note that the headline means it's the first time a C-17 airlifted a reactor. Of course we airlifted many reactors in other types of aircraft: a swimming pool reactor from ORNL to Geneva in 1955, a TRIGA to Geneva in 1958, the PM-1 military microreactor from Baltimore to Montana in 1961, a few TOPAZ-II space reactors in 1992.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "DialUp95 – A 90s inspired nostalgia hit"

acidburnNSA — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 20:01:02 +0000

Very nice!

Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't the lights of the icon computers light up for transmitting and receiving?

New comment by acidburnNSA in "How I use Obsidian (2023)"

acidburnNSA — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 08:06:06 +0000

It'd be cool to write a little script that dumps them out into an Anki deck for spaced repetition.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash"

acidburnNSA — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 02:24:33 +0000

This is the way. Do you use frigate for NVR or something else?

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash"

acidburnNSA — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 02:16:14 +0000

Frigate is incredible. I have 3 instances of it (different homes across the family) running using various amcrest and reolink local-only PoE and Wifi cams. I access the remotely using wireguard. One is running on a 2017 miniatx box (Intel i7-7700T) using openvino to do local-only object detection with the 2017 intel CPU. One is using a Beelink EQ14 Mini PC, Intel Twin Lake N150, also using openvino for object detection (people, dogs, cars, etc). One is using a nvidia 5070 gpu. All notifications are processed via the home assistant integration.

Truly top-notch quality, full-featured, very low maintenance, easy to set up, cheap to operate. I'm glad so many people are using it now.

For video doorbell I just have a cam that can see the front door and I drew a box around the area I want notifications for. When a person enters the box, I get a notification and snapshot.

https://docs.frigate.video/

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Using an engineering notebook"

acidburnNSA — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:43:58 +0000

I used to do that but switched to Logseq and love it. Most people use obsidian.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Disaster planning for regular folks (2015)"

acidburnNSA — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 04:31:57 +0000

Lots of good stuff in here. One thing to note about building off-grid self-sufficient abodes for "Problem space #3: The zombie apocalypse" is that the roving hordes of warlord-run gangs will consider finding those to be the ultimate booty. This point is made quite clearly in Six Minutes to Winter, the new book about nuclear war by Mark Lynas. As much as I always wanted a sweet prepper cave, the idea has now soured on me a bit.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Dead Internet Theory"

acidburnNSA — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 11:19:23 +0000

If you have the compose key enabled it's trivial to write all sorts of things. Em dash is compose (right alt for me) ---

En dash is compose --.

You can type other fun things like section symbol (compose So) and fractions like ⅐ with compose 17, degree symbol (compose oo) etc.

https://itsfoss.com/compose-key-gnome-linux/

On phones you merely long press hyphen to get the longer dash options.

New comment by acidburnNSA in "Dead Internet Theory"

acidburnNSA — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 11:03:21 +0000

For me I use en dashes a lot for ranges like 1–N