Hacker News: dsvf

New comment by dsvf in "Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish"

dsvf — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 21:36:02 +0000

As a native German speaker, I have also referred to a chatbot in English as "he", and similar to you, a native English speaker, felt jarred by it. It was definitely not out of any personification or humanization though. In German, I would say it is "der Chatbot" (from "der Roboter"), which in German is a male noun so I would refer to it as "er" (the male pronoun) - which in my head I autotranslated to "he". Most of the time, though, I think of it (and refer to it) as an LLM, which is "das Sprachmodell" (neutrum), so I automatically translate it to "it".

So that's another, maybe more harmless reason for it.

New comment by dsvf in "PCB Rework and Repair Guide [pdf]"

dsvf — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:51:19 +0000

Andrew Zonenberg posted a Twitter thread a year or two ago where he fixed a missing PCB trace some layers down a PCB, with a stereo microscope, precision mill and very steady hands.

Edit: here's the thread. It's a 6 layer PCB with a short on L5 that needs to be fixed from the L1 side.

https://xcancel.com/azonenberg/status/1468825231225540611#m

New comment by dsvf in "The hidden engineering of runways"

dsvf — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 04:24:53 +0000

I don't know if their math is incorrect, but your intuition of the limit case is - downhill slope is the ratio of height change per length. A perpendicular angle thus has "infinite percent" slope (since the denominator, length, is zero), which intuitively matches an infinite landing distance.

New comment by dsvf in "There's no single best way to store information"

dsvf — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 18:39:28 +0000

It _does_ open up amazing opportunities for compression though.

New comment by dsvf in "Garage – An S3 object store so reliable you can run it outside datacenters"

dsvf — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 20:35:38 +0000

I always understood this requirement as "garage will run fine on hardware with 1GB RAM total" - meaning the 1GB includes the RAM used by the OS and other processes. I think that most current consumer hardware that is a, potential garage host, even on the low end, has at least 1GB total RAM.

New comment by dsvf in "OSHW: Small tablet based on RK3568 and AMOLED screen"

dsvf — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 10:42:58 +0000

I keep wanting to get into Kicad, and the learning curve did become easier in the last years. But what I _want_ is to get a usable board into my hands, not just create a beautiful layout file. Historically, my pain points were were footprints, parts sourcing and SMT soldering. From a hobbyist-with-limited-time perspective, EasyEDA and the integrated JLCPCB assembly flow solved all these problems good enough that the hurdle to figure out how to do it with KiCAD was always higher. The minute I find a similar level of convenience in KiCAD + plugins, I'll gladly ditch being tied to online.

New comment by dsvf in "Self-hosting my photos with Immich"

dsvf — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 21:05:08 +0000

Immich manages to detect my kids faces much better than expected. I only have two years, but it is spot on with kid #1 from newborn to 2yo, and it manages to not mix up the new baby photos of #2 with the baby photos of #1. In my 44k photos there are zero statues face detected, the only flukes are a few photos from a restaurant with a celebrity picture wall.

New comment by dsvf in "Self-hosting my photos with Immich"

dsvf — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 14:47:18 +0000

Not my experience hosting immich for close to two years now. There was only one "breaking change" a long time ago where you would have to manually change a docker image in the compose file, but since then things have been smooth for me.

Immich may not be the pinnacle of all software development, but with the alternative being Google photos:

- Uploading too many photos won't clog my email and vice versa

- I'm not afraid of getting locked out of my photo account for unclear reasons and being unable to reach anyone to regain access

- If I upload family photos from the beach, then my account won't get automatically flagged/disabled for whatever

- Backups are trivially easy compared to Google takeout

- The devs are reachable and responsive. Encounter a problem? You'll at least reach a human being instead of getting stranded with a useless non-support forum

I would instead say that my (and my family's) photos are too important to me to pass their hosting on to a company known for its arbitrary decisions and then being an impenetrable labyrinth if there is an issue.

So you do pay some price, but it is an illusion to think that the price of Google photos (be that in cash, your data or your effort) is much lower.

Things that did break during this time: - my hacky remote filesystem - network connectivity of a too cheap server but these were on me and my stinginess.

New comment by dsvf in "Android users can now use conversational editing in Google Photos"

dsvf — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 17:55:43 +0000

You could keep the Hetzner VPS with storage for faster online serving of assets and connect a second immich instance only for machine learning on your home server. That way you'd get the best of both worlds: fast media serving and higher performance. That would mean that images are uploaded to the Hetzner server, but the compute-intensive image classification takes place on your home server.

New comment by dsvf in "The Pentium contains a complicated circuit to multiply by three"

dsvf — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 19:50:42 +0000

No question, but just in general appreciation for the wonderful content you put out there that we get to enjoy!

New comment by dsvf in "Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS"

dsvf — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 17:20:05 +0000

Yes, your input into the thread cleared many things up for me, thanks!

New comment by dsvf in "Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS"

dsvf — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 10:53:25 +0000

I'm a happy and satisfied JuiceFS user here, so I too would be interested in the difference between these. Is the Regatta key point caching?

New comment by dsvf in "Rawdrawandroid – Build Android apps without any Java, in C and Make"

dsvf — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 20:32:51 +0000

I develop an app with flutter on Mac OS. I open xcode when creating a new project to setup signing. I never installed Android studio since I use an Android device for testing and just use the command line tools and SDK (setting this up without android studio was a bit of pain and probably not worth it but still it proves that it's possible).

All development work takes place in VS code, including the incredibly incredibly convenient and performant hot code reload, as well as the final step of "flutter build ios"/"flutter build aab"

It is an experience with very few pain points* and I find it to be very enjoyable.

*except for the random Cocoa Pods error every few months which can be solved by random helpless googling and then deleting the podfile.lock

New comment by dsvf in "Google has been blocking Invidious with error "This helps protect our community""

dsvf — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 19:46:58 +0000

Some of this is intentional on websites from Google. Google sheets has a very very annoying bug where if you want to multiply two values in a cell formula and press the asterisk key, the cursor jumps to the left of the asterisk. You then have to manually place the cursor to the right of the asterisk (since pushing the right arrow key may instead jump to the next cell to the right), breaking any typing flow whatsoever. However, if you fake your Firefox user agent to chrome (but change nothing else), the bug disappears.

I recall reading a post here on HN that Google has been found from time to time to intentionally cripple the FF user agent, which in turn led me to "discover" the sheets bug fix.

This does not change much about what you wrote, but it's at least something to do against malicious incompatibility

New comment by dsvf in "Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection"

dsvf — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 22:22:13 +0000

Even better, the latest release from a few weeks ago lets you manually set the delay for long press. I've set it for 100ms and can now blaze through mines even faster. But that guaranteed solvable makes it so much better than nondeterministic minesweeper as well.

New comment by dsvf in "I accidentally built a meme search engine"

dsvf — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 22:43:03 +0000

Happy immich user here! I once took a cute photo of our baby chewing on a whisk, and actually finding the correct photo in an unsorted, untagged huge pile of photos by simply searching for "whisk" was a mindblow experience! It is an amazingly powerful tool!