Hacker News: zefhous

New comment by zefhous in "The real cost of owning a home"

zefhous — Wed, 27 May 2026 03:30:47 +0000

Exactly — it doesn’t matter how many “hidden” costs he finds to adds to the cost of owning for the article — the renter pays them all, plus the owner’s profit.

New comment by zefhous in "DaVinci Resolve – Photo"

zefhous — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:58:43 +0000

Just this morning I was missing Aperture and mentioned it to my kids. I was organizing some pictures with Photos.app and adding a tag or removing from an album takes about 5 seconds for the UI to visually represent my change. I have a decently big library but certainly not anomalous. Aperture made it so fast to organize and deal with photos.

New comment by zefhous in "Parametric CAD in Rust"

zefhous — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 18:26:45 +0000

Yup, the attachments with BOSL2 are really great. You can do a ton without much math at all, TBH.

https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2/wiki/attachments.scad#se...

New comment by zefhous in "The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible"

zefhous — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:02:17 +0000

My city utility provider used secured-server.biz for billing for a long time. I always thought it was hilarious and very suspicious looking.

New comment by zefhous in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

zefhous — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:38:17 +0000

https://zef.studio

New comment by zefhous in "Investors bought 27% of US homes in Q1, as traditional buyers struggle to afford"

zefhous — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 23:54:45 +0000

How one defines “distorting markets” is an important question when it comes to defining policy, and not an un-contentious one.

New comment by zefhous in "CU Randomness Beacon"

zefhous — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 13:08:08 +0000

Then one could dynamically and randomly choose which randomness beacon to use! I like it.

New comment by zefhous in "The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million"

zefhous — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 16:46:17 +0000

Uh... in-app purchases for $24 for a 24-hour license? $80 pay-per-count? The AI marketing images... Ugh.

New comment by zefhous in "Gridfinity: The modular, open-source grid storage system"

zefhous — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 20:56:18 +0000

Not gridfinity compatible, but I have a set of corner pieces that uses a similar concept. The majority of the material can be scrap acrylic, mdf, cardboard, etc. and you just print the corner pieces. Lids and stuff too.

https://www.printables.com/model/57813-boxkit-parts-for-maki...

3d printing is great, but a lot of wasted plastic if you print large organizers and stuff like that.

New comment by zefhous in "Supabase raises $200M Series D at $2B valuation"

zefhous — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 19:36:41 +0000

Part of what I think is rough is the framing of Postgres being "an alternative to Google’s Firebase" in the article. I mean, ok yeah they are both databases in a sense, but they are not the same thing at all. Firebase is a service and Postgres a database technology, and certainly not well-described as an alternative to Firebase by anyone competent in the industry. Lol.

I don't mean to demean "vibe coders" exactly either, but rather jumping on the hype train of using that term for your funding pitch. You're using AI to learn to become a software developer? Great! No problem with that.

But also — if you now have a database involved and you're handling people's data, you better learn what you're doing. A database provider pushing "vibe coding" is not a good look imo.

New comment by zefhous in "Supabase raises $200M Series D at $2B valuation"

zefhous — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 15:34:49 +0000

Oof this bit is rough!

> The startup supports Postgres, the most popular developer database system that’s an alternative to Google’s Firebase. Supabase’s goal: To be a one-stop backend for developers and "vibe coders."

New comment by zefhous in "My Beancount books are 95% automatic after 3 years (2024)"

zefhous — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 17:24:26 +0000

Love this! I have been using hledger for a while now and have a pretty automated process for importing exported CSVs. I would love a little more automation in terms of pulling down the data, but on the bright side the manual process provides a good touch point to keep up on accounting regularly in small doses. This is great for just keeping an eye on things on a monthly basis.

I am starting a new business now and intend to see how far I can take plain text accounting in that context. I plan to use mercury for banking and want to automate as much as possible. I would also like to associate invoices that are stored in a self-hosted paperless-ngx instance.

New comment by zefhous in "Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season"

zefhous — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 17:08:39 +0000

I have found a lot of great content available in Libby and Hoopla. I use my local library card, but am also able to get a card from a nearby larger city library, and between the two I have access to a lot of content and very soon in a lot of cases.

New comment by zefhous in "The Antikythera mechanism – 254:19 ratio"

zefhous — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 19:45:03 +0000

I’m just here to fulfill the Hacker News rule that any post mentioning the Antikythera Mechanism must have a comment linking the excellent Clickspring build videos.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4R...

New comment by zefhous in "Tritone Substitutions"

zefhous — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 04:22:02 +0000

Like Sting said, “it's not a chord until the bass player decides what the root is.”

New comment by zefhous in "Ask HN: What indoor CO2 monitor do you recommend?"

zefhous — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 18:46:37 +0000

DHH gave a talk about this a while ago with good citations to studies about CO2 concentration and other VOCs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRqh8oLY7Ik

New comment by zefhous in "New GitHub Organization for the Swift Project"

zefhous — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 23:47:31 +0000

I extremely excited about the future of Swift and being able to use it in new places like Embedded Swift.

As an iOS developer I’ve been getting into some firmware stuff on ESP-32. It’s my first time writing C++ and while it’s been better than I expected, I really miss Swift and especially the safety it brings.

New comment by zefhous in "The Lunacy of Artemis"

zefhous — Mon, 20 May 2024 01:49:58 +0000

Destin from Smarter Every Day gave a talk that addresses a lot of these issues that I found pretty interesting too.

https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU

New comment by zefhous in "Show HN: My $1k self-install, off-grid solar backup build for renters"

zefhous — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 20:57:34 +0000

I live in Boulder, Colorado. We had the Marshall Fire[1] a couple years ago, which burned down 1084 structures on a day with high winds. These winds are pretty normal around here on occasion, at least multiple times each year.

What's not normal is that last week, our utility (Xcel Energy) decided to preemptively shut off power to 55,000 customers to reduce risk before a forecasted wind event with high fire-risk[2]. They had intended to restore power the next day, but some went without power for a couple days.

The communication and execution of the shutdown seemed poor, and the infrastructure problems that led to the shutdown are still here. The impression I have from comments in local groups is that they are trying to avoid liability and have not adequately invested in fixing shoddy infrastructure that is going to be safe here. People are expecting regular shutoffs to become the new normal. Wind storms aren't going away, fixing the infrastructure would take a long time, and people don't think Xcel is interested in spending the money, even though they can likely afford to.

This has definitely left me thinking about a DIY battery+solar solution to keep my heating system running, as well as fridge/freezers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Fire [2] https://www.cpr.org/2024/04/08/for-the-first-time-a-colorado...

New comment by zefhous in "We are going to start charging for dedicated IPv4 in January 1st"

zefhous — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 12:42:11 +0000

Thank you for making this right! I didn’t think there was any malice in it and it’s nice to know it was a simple mistake.

I’ve also already unassigned my unneeded address and I’m still interested in using fly for some things in the future.