Hacker News: belthesar

New comment by belthesar in "The lost joy of music piracy"

belthesar — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 17:19:03 +0000

I still find that, even after all these years, Pandora's recommendation engine still seems to be the best. I can tune into stations that I created, jeez, 15+ years ago, and it might play one or two tracks that I know, but it quickly diverges into new tracks that are still within the "flavor" of the station, but I've never heard of.

New comment by belthesar in "Show HN: Fast, native Mac file manager (filters, fuzzy find, 9 MB, no Electron)"

belthesar — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:37:08 +0000

During the days of my Powerbook G4 and 1st gen Intel Mac days, I used to use Path Finder [^1] over the native Finder, as it provided a richer and more comprehensive toolset. The base Finder wasn't bad, but Path Finder did more. Totally understand in today's era why you might jump to enshittification as the reason for this. Sometimes though, someone see the functionality a tool does, and goes "I wish it did this, but a little bit more".

^1: https://cocoatech.io/

New comment by belthesar in "Resetting Xbox"

belthesar — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:15:40 +0000

Point of clarification:

While Bungie had historically been tied to Xbox / Microsoft during the Halo era, Bungie spun out to be its own company in 2007, and then was bought by Sony in 2022. It was Sony, not Microsoft, driving the most recent layoffs at Bungie.

New comment by belthesar in "Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot"

belthesar — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:15:40 +0000

Same here, haha. A very cool coworker a decade ago was the person finally able to convey to me how to change that up, and it was lifechanging.

New comment by belthesar in "SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)"

belthesar — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:49:44 +0000

These were likely made with Foone's Death Generator. https://deathgenerator.com/#sc2k

New comment by belthesar in "The Quiet Renovation at Bitwarden"

belthesar — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:53:53 +0000

There is not an alternative frontend that I'm aware of, but as the article mentions, the clients are Apache 2.0 licensed, so in the event of a rug pull, a fork and rebrand of the clients would be what is needed to restore service.

New comment by belthesar in "US Supreme Court reviews police use of cell location data"

belthesar — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:49:53 +0000

> but cell tower data isn't going to be as accurate as GPS

Worth noting that 6G MIMO beamforming requires being able to calculate incredibly accurate location information in order to tune the signal towards your device. I don't know enough to be able to speak more in depth about this, but my guess would be that the adage of cell AP based aGPS is likely to be able to surface far more accurate device location than before.

New comment by belthesar in "From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in our office lab"

belthesar — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:24:50 +0000

Nested virtualization can be very handy in both the lab and in production. In the lab, you can try out a new hosting platform by running one atop the other. IE: Proxmox on VMWare, Hyper-V on KVM. This lets you try things out without needing fresh bare metal hardware.

In prod, let's say you run workloads in Firecracker VMs. You have plenty of headroom on your existing hardware. Nested virtualization would allow you to set up Firecracker hosts on your existing hardware.

New comment by belthesar in "Home Assistant waters my plants"

belthesar — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:51:43 +0000

Cost-wise, there's a solid chance that the Pi would have been more expensive. Jeff Geerling ran some numbers (^1) on this last year, before the current chip crisis we're in, and it was bad enough already.

Home Assistant does a surprising amount of Disk I/O, if for nothing than for logs. Sibling commenters are also advising not running it on the SD card to avoid wearing it out, so there's definitely some truth here. This means we're adding a Pi M.2 hat + SSD into the mix. The Pi5 SSD kit for 256 GB, when it was available, was around $60 USD. A Pi5 with 8 GB of RAM is $130 USD. Now we need a cooler, a case that will fit the Pi5 with said M.2 hat, and a power supply. We're already well north of $250 USD, encroaching on $300, and we're not even using the core benefits of the Pi's platform. No need for GPIO pins, tightly integrated cameras or other sensors, none of that.

For all we know, the blog author did this assessment (or trusted the assessment of others, eg: Jeff) and came to the came conclusion - it wasn't worth the price of entry.

^1: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/intel-n100-better-val...

New comment by belthesar in "19 States approved permanent daylight saving time"

belthesar — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 19:31:38 +0000

We tried that in 1998! See Swatch Internet Time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

New comment by belthesar in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

belthesar — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:28:23 +0000

The same way that Element does - they host a service for you that relays push notifications their Firebase Cloud Messaging endpoint for Android or iOS Instant Notifications for Apple. I believe ntfy's hosted option is the way they offset the costs of hosting this, even if self-hosted options can take advantage of those servers free of charge.

I think it's reasonable for Zulip to ask for compensation for access to these gateways, since Apple and Google do not make them available to end users free of charge, and the burden of responsibility to ensure that these systems aren't abused is on them. Also, the fact that they offer mobile push notifications for any self hosted server of up to 10 users is pretty generous, and there seems to be a Community plan option for larger servers that includes "groups of friends" as a qualifier. It really seems they're offering quite a bit.

New comment by belthesar in "Don't rent the cloud, own instead"

belthesar — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 14:16:56 +0000

From a platform risk perspective, each tenant has dedicated resources, so it's their platform to blow up. If a customer with root access blows up their own system, then the resources from the MSP to fix it are billable, and the after-action meetings would likely include a review of whether that access is appropriate, if additional training is needed to prevent those issues in the future (also billable), or if the customer-provider relationship is the right fit. Will the on-call resource be having a bad time fixing someone else's screw up? Yeah, and having been that guy before, I empathize. The business can and should manage this relationship however, so that it doesn't become an undue burden on their support teams. A customer platform that is always getting broken at 4pm on a Friday when an overzealous customer admin is going in and deciding to run arbitrary kubectl commands takes support capacity away from other customers when a major incident happens, regardless of how much you're making in support billing.

New comment by belthesar in "AI generated music barred from Bandcamp"

belthesar — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 21:24:19 +0000

Musicians who are being threatened by AI impersonating them, flooding the market with music like theirs, and otherwise actually harmed by this would disagree with you. Benn Jordan speaks at length about it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVXfcIb3OKo

New comment by belthesar in "Framework Sponsors CachyOS"

belthesar — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 21:52:55 +0000

Lutris by default will use an older WINE version (something based on WINE8 IIRC) by default for reasons I don't quite understand. You can, however, configure Lutris to use proton-cachyos by default, to which I was able to get Battle.net to install and work correctly without issues. Not sure what feature was implemented in later WINE to make that work better, but it works.

New comment by belthesar in "Steam Machine"

belthesar — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 20:53:33 +0000

"EAC supports Linux, but devs just won't turn it on" is the clickbait answer, but the details are more nuanced. EAC has multiple security levels that a title can set based on the threat model of the game, and most games with heavy MTX that use EAC shy away from it, largely because Fortnite doesn't do it. EAC is owned by Epic, and if Tim Sweeney says that you can't do MTX on Linux safely, then any AAA live services game with in-game MTX is going to shy away from it, regardless of how true the statement actually is.

New comment by belthesar in "Using a laptop as an HDMI monitor for an SBC"

belthesar — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 20:33:22 +0000

I feel like this is kind of looking a gift horse in the mouth, especially for the cost of these units. Certainly not impossible to add, but an increase in the BOM vs. the loads of off-the-shelf super cheap HDMI capture chips available, and questionable compatibility (DP Alt Mode is getting better, but plenty of devices still have interesting quirks with it depending on implementation). These devices aren't made with daily driving a system in mind so much as for installation and recovery of a system.

Would it be handy to have this all in one cable on both ends? Sure, absolutely, that'd be killer. I personally don't think it's too big of an ask to use two cables in an installation or recovery case though, and if your devices only have USB-C ports for video out, an active USB-C to HDMI via DP-Alt cable can be had to meet that need.

New comment by belthesar in "Using a laptop as an HDMI monitor for an SBC"

belthesar — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 16:18:00 +0000

For use cases like attaching to an SBC or really any other computer, I'm sure this is great, but there are also USB crash cart consoles that can be gotten pretty cheaply like the NanoKVM-USB[0] or Cytrence's KIWI[1]. This gets you both video, keyboard and mouse.

[0] https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/kvm/NanoKVM_USB/introduc...

[1] https://www.cytrence.com/product-page/cytrence-kiwi

New comment by belthesar in "Atuin Desktop: Runbooks That Run – Now Open Source"

belthesar — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 23:31:49 +0000

Following the Obsidian model, which I love and support. Give folks the best part of the product, offer a paid option to enhance it, but allow folks to use alternatives as first class options.

New comment by belthesar in "Ask HN: Has anyone else been unemployed for over two years?"

belthesar — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 22:35:23 +0000

Heads up - OP said they entered 400 apps over the past 1.5 months, not since they’ve been unemployed.

New comment by belthesar in "Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year"

belthesar — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 03:29:27 +0000

This doesn't address everything, but I thought I'd chime on specifically on the chat history question. It's still early days for support from most IRCd's, but IRCv3 has been slowly bringing protocol level support for many of the same features that Slack, Teams (chat), Mattermost, etc. have, including chat history support. It's likely not reasonable for the public IRC networks to ever support history, but for a self hosted IRC server to service your team/company/community/whatever, it would be totally feasible to connect and receive scrollback.