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sylvinus

2,816 karma · joined December 10, 2010

Founder/Co-founder/CTO: Pricing Assistant, dotConferences, Jamendo, TEDxParis, Joshfire

Angel investor in 120+ companies and 10+ funds.

Now working with the French government: https://sylvainzimmer.com/blog/2025/01/public-sector/

All my projects: http://sylvinus.org/

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/sylvinus; my proof: https://keybase.io/sylvinus/sigs/jQNfmDNeTbuL2y1OAPyyoDrd7JYaHnFzi650ZkAWWuw ]

submissionscomments
sylvinus··on Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows
I did the same for a scanner that was missing an driver for latest macOS! https://github.com/sylvinus/freethescan
sylvinus··on Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents
Are we all posting our agent VM containers ? :) https://github.com/sylvinus/agent-vm
sylvinus··on Forking the Web
Why not try to define a strict subset of the current specs, that would target ease of implementation & graceful degradation? I'd rather have many different clients compatible with a "web-lite" spec that is enough to navigate on 95% of websites, which would have an incentive to officially support that subset if it becomes popular enough.
sylvinus··on Redis array: short story of a long development process
Thanks for the write up. Always interesting to see how very senior developers interact with AI these days.

@antirez: Introducing a regex feature that late into the project for a seemingly unrelated feature feels a bit weird? Can you explain more your rationale on that? thanks!

sylvinus··on Agent VM – Lima VMs for local agents and more
I'm using this as my main way to run Claude & others, it's just a shell wrapper but it provides a lot of niceties and a pretty good developer experience in a single command line. Curious to have feedbacks on it!
sylvinus··on Oxide raises $200M Series C
Love Oxide and what they're building, but I'm not sure raising even more VC money is the way to build a generational company. Quite the opposite? With money you don't need, you're trading faster growth for more dependencies on third parties that will seek a ROI eventually?
sylvinus··on Sandboxing AI Agents in Linux
This is the way to go! On my side I've build a very small `claude-vm` wrapper to run each instance in a VM with Lima: https://github.com/sylvinus/agent-vm
sylvinus··on France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US
We do support the foundation: https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/sinformer/espace-presse/dinum-...
sylvinus··on France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US
Exactly, we do have private forges we build and deploy from.
sylvinus··on ClickHouse raises $350M Series C
ClickHouse has native support for sampling https://clickhouse.com/docs/sql-reference/statements/select/...
sylvinus··on France Endorses UN Open Source Principles
Facts (and code) are following. We're building a fully open source workspace (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/en) among other ambitious initiatives (https://beta.gouv.fr/).

The turmoil caused by the two contracts you mention also prove that the new normal has already shifted towards open source. It's a slow process, but it's undeniable that we are making progress.

sylvinus··on Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
AFAIK, there are lots of contributions from developers in the French government to the Grist open source repository. We also deploy it, we have instances running in various government agencies.

For Docs, we bootstrapped the repository ourselves on top of Django, Next.js, BlockNote.js, Y.js and many others. We welcome contributions!

sylvinus··on Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
Well I think that most of our users have never typed a "[" character... So for them, Markdown is definitely complex :)
sylvinus··on Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
Indeed, Docs is already available both in English and German :)

AFAIK we took a lot of inspiration from Gov.uk and 18F/USDS (RIP), at least for digital services. You can look at https://beta.gouv.fr/

sylvinus··on Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
Hey. A few developers from the team are on HN and will be happy to answer any questions here!

We also made a small scratchpad you can use to test collaboration features, if it doesn't get too flooded :) https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/a3f0becc-f2b7-45be-a5e5-...

sylvinus··on Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
Not really a database, but I've made a prototype integration of Docs with IronCalc: https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/pull/466

This could also take the form of a custom block that you could embed in a text document.

sylvinus··on Docs – Open source alternative to Notion or Outline
Our primary target is indeed larger organizations but we're working on one-click deployment solutions and an all-in-one container.
sylvinus··on Busy Status Bar
The Ulanzi TC001 is a great, cheap piece of hardware. I found a second-hand one for $20 and flashed it via USB with https://github.com/lubeda/EspHoMaTriXv2, a more practical firmware if you already have a bunch of ESPHome devices at home.
sylvinus··on Is ClickHouse Moving Away from Open Source?
I don't know him but most of his GitHub activity seems to be contributing to the ClickHouse ecosystem, including popular projects like this one: https://github.com/Altinity/clickhouse-operator

My point is just that he doesn't appear to be someone complaining and not contributing.

sylvinus··on Is ClickHouse Moving Away from Open Source?
AFAIK, the author is indeed trying to contribute back, that is the whole point: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/54644
sylvinus··on Is ClickHouse Moving Away from Open Source?
There's a kind of survivorship bias here! I'm sure that if Altinity (or others) weren't forced to do RFCs on GitHub like the one mentioned in this article that get low/no attention from the core team, they would be in the top committers :)
sylvinus··on Ask HN: Favorite Game Engine?
I recently made a small game with https://defold.com/, and it was very pleasant. Completely free and cross-platform out of the box (including Switch & PlayStation support!)
sylvinus··on WordPress Playground: A WordPress that runs entirely in the browser
I think this is the part done with the Service Worker, which intercepts network requests: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...
sylvinus··on Netlify acquires Gatsby
It still does!
sylvinus··on A new carbon capture plant will pull 36k tons of CO2 from the air each year
I'm surprised by all the negativity here. Usually HN commenters are good at understanding exponential growth. Maybe it's easier when talking about Active Users?

Climeworks (and others) are just a couple orders of magnitude away from having real impact, with a clear roadmap lying ahead. Let's support them, along with all other potential solutions? We're going to need more than one.

sylvinus··on A year with the Elgato Stream Deck
I built something somewhat similar, to link YouTube videos to steam deck buttons so my 2yo kid could listen to his songs :) It runs everywhere Python is available, including raspberry pis ;) Code is here: https://github.com/sylvinus/raspberrydeck
sylvinus··on YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers
> Where is the negative?

For one, you are wasting a solar panel that could be offsetting more positive energy usage. And building both the solar panel and the miner is far from emission-free.

sylvinus··on Orion is a new WebKit-based browser for Mac
Congrats for the project! Love the simple UI and extensions support.

Don't you fear being held back by WebKit, which is notoriously slow to implement new web platform features? Can you give some insights on how you chose the engine?

Thanks!

sylvinus··on [dead]
This thread is highly misleading. The BioNTech filing is about a risk of perception because of classification as gene therapy, not an actual risk of permanently altering the DNA.
sylvinus··on Proposal: expression to create pointer to simple types
Best part of this proposal from Go's co-creator:

> Would you consider yourself a novice, intermediate, or experienced Go programmer?

I have some experience.

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