Hacker News: wmchen

New comment by wmchen in "EVE Online moves to Python 3"

wmchen — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 19:32:12 +0000

I haven't played it, but a commonly suggested alternative for EVE Online that revolves around spreadsheets and a free market is Prosperous Universe.

Gemini 3.5 Transcribe

wmchen — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:02:37 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-3-5-transcribe/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49452393

Points: 18

# Comments: 4

New comment by wmchen in "Hister – A private, full content search index that you control"

wmchen — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 20:17:32 +0000

Thank you so much for building this! It's a really awesome piece of work and I'm grateful for your work. I'd love to sponsor you on Github in the near future.

The only thing that I think would be interesting to see is native support for crawling via a sitemap.xml instead of recursively. I worked around this by implementing a basic scraper that fetched pages exclusively from the sitemap.xml to add into Hister.

I think you're already aware of this, but I also experienced some data loss during the import because I was running a concurrent reindex. I clocked it pretty quickly so I didn't think too much of it. [1]

[1] "TODO store new documents in both indexes while running reindex to guarantee not losing any data." @ https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/blob/master/server/indexe...

New comment by wmchen in "Hister – A private, full content search index that you control"

wmchen — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 19:23:38 +0000

I set this up a few months ago based on asciimoo's comments on HN, and barely used it at first, but I realized not too long ago that it could be a pretty useful research tool for one of my hobbies (award travel), that revolves around being in the know around various concepts and quirks.

I scraped and imported posts from the blogs I regularly reference for award travel, then hooked it up to OpenCode/Codex as an MCP server and used that corpus for research on those topics. So I can ask things like "has anyone ever mentioned running into this problem before?" [1]

If you have a hobby or working situation that requires you to regularly reference a core set of websites or reference materials, Hister provides almost all the tools out of the box to start a search engine against it. The default datasets they promote include the Python Stlib, MDN and RFC corpus, as an example. [2]

[1]: https://wmchen.com/blog/revisiting-hister/

[2]: https://hister.org/datasets