Hacker News: mcbetz

New comment by mcbetz in "Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition"

mcbetz — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 10:27:05 +0000

Mistral Voxtral has timestamps and diarization and does a good job for German (have not tested for other languages yet).

New comment by mcbetz in "I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure"

mcbetz — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:27:03 +0000

Have been using it for transactional mails, that was okay. Have not tried it for non-transactional, esp. not in 20+ mio/months.

New comment by mcbetz in "I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure"

mcbetz — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:21:36 +0000

It's also difficult to find providers for competetive large-scale non-transactional emails, i.e. marketing and newsletter mails.

None comes close to AWS, closest comes are messageflow (PL), elasticemail (PL), brevo (FR). Other players like Scaleway TEM (FR) and Lettermint (NL) don't offer non-transactional.

New comment by mcbetz in "Viral AI Video of Brad Pitt Fighting Tom Cruise Shakes Hollywood"

mcbetz — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 06:05:23 +0000

The video: https://xcancel.com/RuairiRobinson/status/202139494075720913...

New comment by mcbetz in "Escaping the trap of US tech dependence"

mcbetz — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 18:17:13 +0000

You might benefit from LMArena's Leaderboard. It does not have Danish (yet), but German and English evaluation might help: https://lmarena.ai/de/leaderboard/text/german

Openrouter.ai shows the location of providers, you can find just a few European services, but also Singaporean and Canadian. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to filter easily.

New comment by mcbetz in "Meta announces nuclear energy projects"

mcbetz — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 19:33:10 +0000

Official source for 2025 Q3: 64,1% renewable 20,6% coal 12% gas

https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...

Show HN: Visual Countdown Timer (Open Source)

mcbetz — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 13:39:08 +0000

Inspired by physical countdown timers like TimeTex, I created a minimal open source app with countdowns up to 60min.

I used Tauri, vanilla CSS and JS, the app is ~9mb.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46365238

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mcbetz in "Show HN: A vibe-coded database GUI"

mcbetz — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 12:02:02 +0000

The project was vibe-coded by the author and hence, likely the LLM created that tagline as well. Your service is around a year old (based on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44321099) and LLMs might have picked it up already and also the tagline is straight forward business talk, so no big surprise that multiple people and LLMs come up with the same idea.

New comment by mcbetz in "Show HN: A vibe-coded database GUI"

mcbetz — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 08:10:55 +0000

Article on the creation: https://www.mikenikles.com/blog/i-vibe-coded-a-database-gui

Author wanted to try vibe coding, despite being a critic. Says that result is unmaintainable.

Show HN: Item Size Comparison Tool - Visualize and Compare Sizes Easily

mcbetz — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 17:15:51 +0000

While checking out the new Remarkable reader, I wanted to compare sizes against other readers.

I could not find a simple, non-bloated app that helped.

So I built one, together with Aider (Sonnett 3.5 and Deepseek models).

You can add items with different sizes, get a visual comparison and even share the results (as URL). It's not optimized for mobile device usage, works nicely on Desktop only, I guess.

Maybe that's a small app that has use cases (like when looking for a new mobile phone). I'm also sharing my log of pairing with the AI companion Aider.

Use it: https://minthemiddle.github.io/compare-sizes/ Repo: https://github.com/minthemiddle/compare-sizes History of pairing with Aider: https://aider.chat/share/?mdurl=https://gist.github.com/mint... (I lost quite some progress in the middle due to some strange Git commits that I could not revert properly)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41458618

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mcbetz in "E Ink faces growing competition in the "paper-like" display space"

mcbetz — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 09:50:23 +0000

Any first-hand experiences with the Nxtpaper devices? There's a lot of press coverage of the release official material, especially on the 14 inch model, but few actual reviews. Availability or even infos on availability is an issue, at least in Europe as well.

New comment by mcbetz in "Show HN: LLM-Term – Simple Rust-based CLI assist tool"

mcbetz — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 10:35:16 +0000

https://github.com/simonw/llm-cmd supports Anthropic (and a lot more models) to achieve the same.

New comment by mcbetz in "Show HN: PinkArrows – An open-source Skitch alternative on the web"

mcbetz — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 15:14:53 +0000

Documentation of processes with annotations. There's lots of steps, each step with a screenshot and ~10 annotations and if steps change, I need to recreate from scratch. Doable, but also lots of manual work.

Yes, exalidraw or tldraw are drop-in replacements for Figma that make it save and easy to share, but they are general purpose tools, I prefer single-purpose tools with limited features.

New comment by mcbetz in "Show HN: PinkArrows – An open-source Skitch alternative on the web"

mcbetz — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 13:56:09 +0000

I loved Skitch as well and this is a neat app. I wish there was some way of saving a sketch (maybe in LocalStorage) and edit it later (e.g. replacing with new screenshot but keep the markers). I can't remember if Skitch could do it, I use Figma for this today (but it comes with a huge overhead).

New comment by mcbetz in "Show HN: Open-source LLM provider price comparison"

mcbetz — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 14:25:08 +0000

Thanks for bringing llmprices.dev to my attention. I have also a comparison page for models hosted on OpenRouter (https://minthemiddle.github.io/openrouter-model-comparison/), I do comparison via regex (so "claude-3-haiku(?!:beta)|flash" will show you haiku, but not haiku-beta vs flash.

I wish that OpenRouter would also expose the amount of output tokens via API as this is also an important criteria.

New comment by mcbetz in "SQLite FTS5 Extension"

mcbetz — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 06:14:44 +0000

Does anyone have successfully worked with Non-English text with FTS5 in Sqlite? I could not find any reference for German, e.g. and the default stemming does not seem to work properly (given some short tests).

New comment by mcbetz in "Import and Export Markdown in Google Docs"

mcbetz — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 10:36:39 +0000

I used Hackmd in the past to share the draft of my book (1) and liked that people don't need to have an account to comment. Google Docs was no option as no markdown support and account required. The process worked well but I found Hackmd too expensive for just getting feedback. Stash looks promising for this use case.

(1) Written fully in Markdown in Obsidian at this point. I moved to Asciidoc since because of formatting. The early draft is still available on Hackmd though. Details in my bio.

New comment by mcbetz in "Show HN: Beyond text splitting – improved file parsing for LLMs"

mcbetz — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 15:07:11 +0000

This article compares multiple solutions and recommends docTR (Apache License 2.0): https://source.opennews.org/articles/our-search-best-ocr-too...

New comment by mcbetz in "Show HN: Reor – An AI note-taking app that runs models locally"

mcbetz — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 18:43:41 +0000

Interesting project, wishing you all the best!

If you are using Obsidian, Smart Connections in v2 (1) does also support local embeddings and shows related notes based on semantic similarity.

It's not super great on bi/multi-lingual vaults (DE + EN in my case), but it's improving rapidly and might soon support embedding models that cater for these cases as well.

(1) https://github.com/brianpetro/obsidian-smart-connections

New comment by mcbetz in "Celebrating 30 Years of Blender"

mcbetz — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 13:03:35 +0000

I would add sqlite as well.