Hacker News: pchm

Show HN: Rediscover the Small Web with an AI-Ranked RSS Reader

pchm — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 10:08:09 +0000

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48552985

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by pchm in "Appreciating Exif"

pchm — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 06:32:56 +0000

Yes. I run a niche webapp[1] that extracts exif and xmp (Lightroom edits) from images. At one point I tried to write my own exif parser. It's not that complicated, but very quickly you'll run into weird legacy, vendor-specific nuances (apart from what the parent mentioned, you have to handle both big & little endian exif). And the long tail of those edge cases is, well, very long. Exiftool handles pretty much all of that.

[1] https://pixelpeeper.com/

Go-pty: Procfile process manager with PTY support

pchm — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 20:34:45 +0000

Article URL: https://www.mendelowski.com/go-pty/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47328475

Points: 10

# Comments: 0

Hold on to Your Hardware

pchm — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 12:48:45 +0000

Article URL: https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47100321

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Show HN: ActionBar – GitHub Actions in macOS menu bar

pchm — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 16:08:14 +0000

I wanted a tool like this for a long time, but couldn't find one, so I built it[1]

* Log in with your GitHub account

* Minimal permissions — no access to your code needed

* Get a notification when a run completes

* Select repositories you want to monitor

* Native macOS app

Known issues:

After you install the app on your GitHub account, it takes about a minute for GitHub to propagate the changes to the REST API - and this makes it look like my app is stuck at the "Install on GitHub" step. Not great, but I couldn't think of a way to work around this, other than a (I hope) a descriptive error message.

Feedback welcome!

[1]: Maybe it already exists, but good luck googling anything with "github actions"

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46946769

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by pchm in "My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2022)"

pchm — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 20:42:39 +0000

I have a TODO.txt and it’s the only productivity system that I’ve ever been able to stick with. Just a list of stuff I need to do, what’s done gets moved down or deleted. Maybe there’s value in having an archive (a DONE.txt?) but I’ve found that after a while most notes/items lose the context and often it’s hard to decipher what they were about.

One thing I haven’t figured out yet: I’d love to be able to keep this file open at all time, have it pop up with a hotkey. Currently it’s just a TextMate window that I often close by accident.

Modern techniques for writing better CSS (2021)

pchm — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 13:43:23 +0000

Article URL: https://www.aleksandrhovhannisyan.com/blog/writing-better-css/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38720272

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by pchm in "How does Base32 (or any Base2^n) work exactly?"

pchm — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 20:05:43 +0000

You make some good points. What I was trying to say is that even though there is the RFC, it's quite common to modify the alphabet or use other variants like Crockford's (mainly to avoid random profanity, e.g. in the URL identifiers).

When you see a Base64 string, you can be pretty certain that it's the standard version. With Base32, it's not obvious which variant was used.

Many languages don't provide a stdlib Base32 implementation (Ruby doesn't), but Base64 is pretty much always included. Maybe this influenced my perception of the lack of a universal standard.

Anyway, I should work on that section to communicate my point better.

How does Base32 (or any Base2^n) work exactly?

pchm — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 15:17:13 +0000

Article URL: https://ptrchm.com/posts/base32-explained/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38673392

Points: 70

# Comments: 45

New comment by pchm in "Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project?"

pchm — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 14:24:08 +0000

I run https://pixelpeeper.com on the side.

It's a micro-SaaS for photographers who edit in Lightroom. Lets you reverse-engineer Lightroom edits from JPG files and download them as presets that you can apply on your own photos.

Took a month or two to reach $2k/mo, riding the wave of instagram's popularity in 2017-2018, plus the project went viral initially. However, the niche is ultimately too small to grow the revenue significantly. Still chugging along, almost 6 years later, though.

Building an image processing service in Go

pchm — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 13:18:42 +0000

Article URL: https://ptrchm.com/posts/image-processing-service-in-go/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33999062

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by pchm in "Ask HN: Which books you have read till now that were worth investing time in?"

pchm — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 09:18:45 +0000

Taleb's Incerto (Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game).

Opens your eyes to a wide array of fallacies that govern our daily life (unknown unknowns, "experts" explaining past events as obvious in retrospect, the news, predictions, survivorship bias, confirmation bias, iatrogenics and a lot, lot more) — almost to a fault, i.e. if you take it too far, you'll see these fallacies everywhere and things like stories of success/failure, biographies (or history in general) etc. will no longer make the same impression.

New comment by pchm in "DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing"

pchm — Mon, 16 May 2022 14:45:12 +0000

So the price increase for the managed database is... 100%? Currently paying $240/mo for 16 GB RAM / 6vCPU / 270 GB Disk. The new price is $480/mo.

We have a bunch of these databases at work, so I'm sure we'll be considering other providers now.

New comment by pchm in "WebAuthn Browser Support"

pchm — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 13:02:34 +0000

> IIRC, Twitter, Google, Dropbox and Facebook also don't allow to enroll multiple Yubikeys.

Don't know about Dropbox, but I set up Yubikeys for Twitter, Google and Facebook recently and they all allow multiple keys.

Ask HN: Creative uses for a macOS server?

pchm — Sun, 07 Nov 2021 15:24:50 +0000

I have an unused mac that I want to put to work and I'm looking for inspiration. So far the only examples I've found are the typical home server stuff:

- plex/media server

- remote backup

- file sharing/sync

But I'm more interested in scriptable use cases that can't be covered by a Linux server, e.g.:

- Xcode builds

- headless browser service (puppeteer) for website screenshots (for apple emoji & font rendering)

- automated screenshots/screencasts (via screencapture & apple script)

- iCloud file organization (e.g. with Hazel.app)

I'm sure there are many more possibilities, so... if you have a macOS server, what do you use it for?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29140178

Points: 3

# Comments: 4

New comment by pchm in "Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?"

pchm — Tue, 02 Nov 2021 15:11:44 +0000

OP here, thanks for clarifying this - I can imagine it's a super complex problem and I truly appreciate all the work that you (and other contributors) have put into this project.

My only point (and a source of confusion) here is that I never anticipated the cascading effect that installing a single package can have on seemingly unrelated parts of the system. I've been using homebrew for many years and as far as I remember, the only time anything broke like this was when I explicitly ran update/upgrade.

I'm going to try HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_UPGRADE/HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE — it does seem like a more intuitive default, but again, I don't know anything about how homebrew works under the hood.

Thanks again!

Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?

pchm — Tue, 02 Nov 2021 10:03:39 +0000

Yesterday I ran `brew install virtualenv` and homebrew decided to upgrade postgres, ruby, youtube-dl, vim, rust, wget and 50 other unrelated packages. The single command took 45min and broke all of my local postgres databases (and who knows what else).

At this point I should know better than to install postgres via homebrew, but unwanted/unasked-for upgrades is not a feature I'm looking for in a package manager.

What's your experience with other package managers for macOS? Currently looking into macports & nix and not sure which one to choose...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29079096

Points: 271

# Comments: 298

New comment by pchm in "Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files"

pchm — Sun, 17 Oct 2021 19:43:14 +0000

Roam Research, most likely

New comment by pchm in "How to Make Writing a Lot Easier"

pchm — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 11:54:11 +0000

"How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens is probably what parent meant.

Build something unambitious

pchm — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 13:14:42 +0000

Article URL: https://ptrchm.com/blog/build-something-unambitious/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28584084

Points: 3

# Comments: 0