Hacker News: brucejackson

New comment by brucejackson in "SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine"

brucejackson — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:31:33 +0000

Have used it in my homelab for the past 2 years, can recommend it. Easy to run in docker and helps both get better search results and keeps your search history local and in your control.

New comment by brucejackson in "I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself"

brucejackson — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:54:00 +0000

I have 2 Synology boxes, both DS1618+. The first one is my media storage, the other one is a backup target for both the media storage and other devices on the network. I also don't use the API, these are just "dumb" storage boxes that exist to store. No real configuration here from my perspective.

New comment by brucejackson in "CarPlay Is Additive"

brucejackson — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:32:37 +0000

Like the author, CarPlay is table stakes for any vehicle purchase. I literally installed a Sony screen receiver in my 2016 F150, that was given to my by my father after he lost his license due to his age. That was a fun weekend with the dash apart reliving my younger days when I did car audio installations. The truck lasted 1 week before I had the dash apart to get CarPlay back. The native Ford infotainment system was so crap.

New comment by brucejackson in "I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself"

brucejackson — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 23:19:59 +0000

Same stack here — proxmox as the hypervisor, packer for the golden images, opentofu to deploy, ansible to configure, whether the vm runs bare services or hosts containers. The separation is what keeps it low-effort: image build is one job, provisioning another, config a third, so a change only ever touches one layer. Few minutes a week, rollback through captured state or pinned versions.

On your synology holdout: I run two of them plus a custom truenas, and I treat the storage layer as the deliberate boundary of the declarative model rather than fighting to pull it in. Topology is truenas on fast ssd backing the running vms, synology one as primary, synology two as the backup target for both truenas and the primary. The synologys are imperative islands — dsm doesn't want to be config-managed — so I codify the consumption side (the exports, and the vms that mount them) and treat the boxes themselves as data, not infra. Truenas is the exception, since the api gets you closer to declarable.

Are you leaving the synology fully hands-off, or driving any of it through the api?

New comment by brucejackson in "Most arguments are about ego, not ideas"

brucejackson — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 20:36:58 +0000

A long time ago a wise person said to me is it better to be kind or right. I live with that decision matrix every time I engage with a human. At the end of the day the humans carry significant ego and emotions that for me to be right, most of the time, they have to be wrong. Arguing turns into a zero sum game with only losers on both sides. Until I learned this lesson, I won many arguments but lost the human. This article bears this out from another person learning the same lessons.

New comment by brucejackson in "Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business"

brucejackson — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 20:30:22 +0000

This rings so very true. Have been in the software business for too many decades and having inherited other people's code many many times, there is always the decision about what to do going forward. Leave it running, refactor it gently or rip and replace. Each has it's own set of traps that need to be carefully considered.

New comment by brucejackson in "Fable 5 Is Back"

brucejackson — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 20:24:15 +0000

Happy to see that Fable is back, was sad to see it go after getting to use it for only 1.5 days before. Add on top sonnet 5 availability and coding is looking fine again.