SmellTheGlove (u/SmellTheGlove)

SmellTheGlove commented on How to install TrueNAS on a Raspberry Pi jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/furkansahin

dfee · 3 days ago

i have 4x 4TB drives that are in my dead QNAP NAS.

i've wanted to get a NAS running again, but while the QNAP form factor is great, the QNAP OS was overkill – difficult to manage (too many knobs and whistles) – and ultimately not reliable.

so, i'm at a junction: 1) no NAS (current state), 2) custom NAS (form factor dominates this discussion – i don't want a gaming tower), or 3) back to an off-the-shelf brand (poor experience previously).

maybe the ideal would be a Mac Mini that i could plug 4 HDDs into, but that setup would be cost-inefficient. so, it's probably a custom build w/ NixOS or an off-the-shelf, but i'm lacking the motivation to get back into the game.

SmellTheGlove · 3 days ago

I tried a Mac Mini for a while, but they're just not designed to run headless and I ultimately abandoned it because I wanted it to either work or be fixable remotely. Issues I had:

- External enclosure disconnected frequently (this is more of an issue with the enclosure and its chipset, but I bought a reputable one)

- Many services can't start without being logged in

- If you want to use FileVault, you'll have to input your password when you reboot

Little things went wrong too frequently that needed an attended fix.

If you go off the shelf, I recommend Synology, but make sure you get an Intel model with QSV if you plan to transcode video. You can also install Synology OS to your own hardware using Xpenology - its surprisingly stable, moreso than the mac mini was for me.

SmellTheGlove commented on Installing a mini-split AC in a Brooklyn apartment probablydance.com/2025/08... · Posted by u/ibobev

stego-tech · 22 days ago

> Old homes (if not historic) should get depreciated aggressively by the market to the point that knock downs make sense.

This doesn’t get shouted nearly enough. >90% of New England housing stock older than 30 years is not remotely worth the price they’re commanding. They’re either dumpster fires of knob-tube wiring and sagging floors, or contractor “spray foam specials” that make deliberate errors like the OP’s post points out. Yet because zoning laws are strongly tilted in favor of existing owners (and who are predominantly NIMBYs), it makes teardowns a costly affair on their own - and getting approval to build a new structure can take years, if at all.

Housing shouldn’t be disposable, but it should be readily replaceable with modern techniques and efficiency gains, provided it’s up to local code.

SmellTheGlove · 21 days ago

I agree with you in principle, but 30 years is probably the wrong number. I have a house in coastal Maine, built in 1997. It's coming up on 30 years. I assure you, it's vastly different than the my first house (1941) or my last (1953), in good ways.

But to your point, we consider way too much to be "historic" and I'd like for that to change. You really should be able to tear down almost anything you'd like and rebuild as long as it's to code/zoning, and zoning needs to be cut back to things like dimensions and use, not appearance. Being old shouldn't make something eligible for historic preservation on its own.

SmellTheGlove commented on Installing a mini-split AC in a Brooklyn apartment probablydance.com/2025/08... · Posted by u/ibobev

RatchetWerks · 22 days ago

I’m very happy others are documenting their heat pump installs.

It confirms three things for me.

1. Contractor quality is the biggest pain for the adoption of residential green tech.

2. Old homes (if not historic) should get depreciated aggressively by the market to the point that knock downs make sense. Japan does this.

3. DIY is has the hidden benefit of speed/quality/cost, since contractor pain is high. Yes, I understand the massive opportunity costs.

A friend of mine is trying to install a new central heat pump in their home. The only thing stopping them is contractors being hard to work with. Not price.

Here’s my DIY install.

https://www.ratchetwerks.com/heat-pump-mini-split-install

SmellTheGlove · 21 days ago

How did you charge your unit? Did you learn how to do that and get the EPA certificate or did you convince someone to come out and do that?

SmellTheGlove commented on Fun with uv and PEP 723 cottongeeks.com/articles/... · Posted by u/deepakjois

ACAVJW4H · 2 months ago

finally feels like Python scripts can Just Work™ without a virtualenv scavenger hunt.

Now if only someone could do the same for shell scripts. Packaging, dependency management, and reproducibility in shell land are still stuck in the Stone Ages. Right now it’s still curl | bash and hope for the best, or a README with 12 manual steps and three missing dependencies.

Sure, there’s Nix... if you’ve already transcended time, space, and the Nix manual. Docker? Great, if downloading a Linux distro to run sed sounds reasonable.

There’s got to be a middle ground simple, declarative, and built for humans.

SmellTheGlove · 2 months ago

Would homebrew do the job?

SmellTheGlove commented on Series C and scale cursor.com/en/blog/series... · Posted by u/fidotron

aduffy · 3 months ago

Students aren’t a market though. Sun and Java was really just marketing to future users

SmellTheGlove · 3 months ago

Isn’t marketing basically spending money now that will result in revenue later?

SmellTheGlove commented on I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students indyweek.com/culture/duke... · Posted by u/drvladb

Analemma_ · 3 months ago

> You can barely give away china these days. We would get beautiful, perfect condition full sets of china, mark it down to like $30 for an entire 12-place set, and it would just sit there.

Chinaware sucks to actually use: it can't go in the dishwasher, it's smaller and less convenient than normal-sized dishes, and so on. Even if you want to spend lots of money on dishes, you're much better served buying nice stoneware at Crate and Barrel or something, it looks as good or better and is actually useful. Chinaware generally just sits there and takes up space; I wouldn't take any even if it was free.

And the thing is, it's not really a tragedy that nobody bothers with chinaware anymore. Chinaware was only ever a "keeping up with the Joneses" status-signalling purchase to show you'd made it as a middle-class household, and it's been replaced by other goods for that purpose. We're not losing out on some kind of heritage tradition here, it's just one set of shallow luxury goods getting replaced with another.

SmellTheGlove · 3 months ago

We got china for our wedding and at some point we just decided to use it regularly like our other dishes. So far it’s been more durable than our crate and barrel stuff that we also got for our wedding, and we put it in the dishwasher too!

That said we also have some china that’s been in my wife’s family for generations and we’re afraid to put that in the dishwasher. That effectively makes it decorative in our case.

SmellTheGlove commented on Tales from Mainframe Modernization oppi.li/posts/tales_from_... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

neilv · 3 months ago

This would be fun to work on.

But, as an over-30 on HN, I'd be afraid that having the word "mainframe" on my resume would alienate a 20-something co-founder or hiring manager. :)

OK, OK, I did once do a little bit of mainframe-related work. It was reverse-engineering a small part of a certain domain-specific mainframe network protocol, with the goal of replacing at least one of the companies' mainframes with... 21st century Linux servers running... Lisp. (IMHO, the HN karma should at least balance out there by using Lisp, like the post did by using Rust.)

SmellTheGlove · 3 months ago

I’m mid 40s, had mainframe on my resume from probably 15 years in financial services (not the exciting, high paying kind either). I moved into tech in my mid 30s and am now in a fairly senior leadership role. But that person that gave me a shot in tech, at a YC company that pretty much everyone here has heard of, was in their 20s! I tell you this to encourage you to do interesting things, whatever you think those are. You wouldn’t want to work with a founder or manager who dismisses you because your keywords don’t overlap theirs. You want to work with the founder or manager who asks questions and wants to understand what you learned and how that experience helps you now.

Mainframes may not be what you’d work on at a startup today, but they’re complicated pieces of engineering, and writing software for them requires you to understand a lot about how they work. Updating or rewriting their software further requires you to understand how the people before you _thought_ they worked. That’s how I tell that story.

SmellTheGlove commented on Show HN: Roast My Dish – AI roasts your food photos with brutal honesty roastmydish.online/... · Posted by u/romeumaleiane

SmellTheGlove · 3 months ago

Wow this is a clever way to get people to both supply and annotate images for you for free. 2025 is gonna be the year of the seefood app.

SmellTheGlove commented on Google Gemini has the worst LLM API venki.dev/notes/google-ge... · Posted by u/indigodaddy

SmellTheGlove · 4 months ago

Google’s APIs are all kind of challenging to ramp up on. I’m not sure if it’s the API itself or the docs just feeling really fragmented. It’s hard to find what you’re looking for even if you use their own search engine.

SmellTheGlove commented on Home Battery versus Generator pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/... · Posted by u/gnabgib

dlcarrier · 5 months ago

Why not both?

Even small generators provide a lot of power at once, for a small initial price, but are expensive to run continuously. A battery has low operating cost, but one large enough to run a house off of solar power, year round, is extremely expensive. A battery that is large enough to work 99% of the time is much cheaper, and a generator can fill in that 1%, operating only a few hours a year, at a very low cost.

SmellTheGlove · 5 months ago

I live in Seattle and I was originally going to go with batteries. However, the half of the year when our power is most likely to go out is also the half of the year where there is very little sun. So for a prolonged outage I’d either need a lot of battery or a generator. For short outages, a battery made sense, but the cost was a lot higher.

I ended up with a 6.5kW portable tri-fuel generator instead. It cost me $1300 and I spent a little more for a plumber to add a gas stub to connect it to. I did my own electrical work which saved some money, but wouldn’t have been much more for an electrician. It can run my whole house indefinitely (obviously with some maintenance - it’s a small engine), except for the A/C which generally isn’t needed most of the year, and with some manual load shedding we can run the hot water too.

I live in the city and shouldn’t need any of this, but Seattle is poorly run so we have lots of outages from trees hitting things. Often a different transformer on the same block because the city will repair them but not take the time to trim the trees near the lines on the same block. I’ve had to throw some food away the last two outages (both in the last 6 months) so this won’t take long to pay for itself!