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marvinblum

Re:European Alternatives on Sunday October 11, 2026 @06:38AM (#50041687)
I tried submitting Pirsch.io, but there is a CORS error for OPTIONS https://db.buy-european.net/api/collections/suggestions/reco... -> 403 CORS missing allowed origin...
I played Silent Hunter III with the One Onix (or something like that) mod, which is probably the best SH we have today.
Love it! I'm looking forward to every update :)

Btw. I found the game by watching Wolfpack345's video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7c9LfWvTt8

Re:Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days? on Saturday August 15, 2026 @06:09AM (#49309312)
Came here to say the same thing. I'd like to add that keeping up has also become very boring. It's always the same news - AI this AI that, I would like to see something new.
I bought it a few days ago. Thank you for including native Linux support <3

So far, it's really fun and the tutorial is great! A few things that could potentially be added to the game:

- Crew management (nothing fancy, just a bit, like food management)

- Different kinds of torpedoes (if the US had that, I only know about German submarines)

- Countermeasures (like noise makers)

- Seeing resources (number of torpedoes) on the campaign map

- A better indication whether a ship is sunk or will stay afloat (I resolve and don't know if the ship has been sunk or not)

- And German submarines + campaign of course

Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026) on Monday June 15, 2026 @06:59AM (#48539486)
I'm rewriting the open-source core [0] of our product [1] to add more flexible reports.

This is the first time I'm building with the help of AI (Claude), but I don't really let it write code. It has been really helpful in discussing ideas (I'm mostly working alone), like a rubber duck that actually talks back. The code it generates however has many subtle and sometimes obvious mistakes in them, so I decided to write the code myself.

The main benefits over the previous version will be:

- Dynamic reports (ClickHouse queries are generated on the fly)

- Better performance

- Much cleaner and less code

- Better and faster data ingestion including new features, like full support for JSON metadata

- And much more

It feels kinda crazy that I've been working on this project for more than 5 years now and it's still exciting :)

[0] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch (v7 is the new branch)

[1] https://pirsch.io/

Re:Dithering with CSS on Friday May 08, 2026 @05:40AM (#48060818)
Exactly what I thought. Work sheets used to look like this if they have been copies of copies of copies...
Re:If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes? on Monday December 15, 2025 @04:59AM (#46272429)
Of course not, otherwise the rich wouldn't get richer and that would be bad for power consolidation. Everything is moving into this direction, so why should it be different with AI?

We had this discussions for years with factory machines, and nothing came out of it. Don't get me wrong, I hate having taxes for everything (living in Germany with ~65% total tax strain for me if you include everything), but this is about power and stealing other peoples work.

Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025) on Monday December 15, 2025 @04:52AM (#46272372)
I've decided to take a break from working on Pirsch Analytics (pirsch.io) until next year and focus on some side projects instead:

1. Shifu (https://github.com/emvi/shifu) - a code-based CMS with admin UI. It's really easy to set up, written in Go, free and open-source, and I already sold a few websites using it. It can be used as kind of a framework to build more specialized features into a website and takes away the maintenance hell from managing a WordPress installation or a similiar CMS with tons of plugins that break with every update.

2. Zenko (working title, repo is private for now) - a very simple and no-bullshit project management software. It will be free and open-source, but I might offer a hosted option for a few bucks (like $20/year for all users of a team). I mainly build this for ourself to replace Linear, because we don't really make use of it. Don't get me wrong, Linear is awesome, but we basically only need an advanced Todo list. Main goals:

* Pull updates on the dashboard by yourself, instead of receiving notifications all the time via email

* Keep it simple stupid - no unnecessary features, no AI, just the bare minimum

* Cheap (for the hosted version, free if self-hosted) and easy to host (again written in Go)

* No feature-creep

3. Last but not least, I'm working on a "game engine" written in Go and SDL2. I do this for fun, but it is coming along nicely and teached me a few new concepts already (like ECS in Go).

On the plus side, this has prompted many people to finally switch to Linux. Even people I would never have thought would consider it are now thinking about it, or have already moved over. Companies are also recognising the issues with Microsoft.
Re:A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size on Thursday October 09, 2025 @07:59PM (#45534246)
I'd say cats are already pretty much self-driven.
Thank you for making ProtonDB! I use it a ton <3
Yup, I've been running Altcha on pirsch.io for a while now, and it was super easy to set up, is free, and open-source.

One of the main reasons we've switched from hCaptcha is privacy. The server-side stuff can be self-hosted and there is a Golang integration. Really nice.

Here is the link for anyone who would like to take a look: https://altcha.org/

Re:ClickHouse raises $350M Series C on Thursday May 29, 2025 @12:39PM (#44127726)
It's not that hard, but there are a few pitfalls you can stumble into. I currently run three clusters for myself and have set some for clients in the past.

Some of the default config options are weird and SSL is something that needs to be addressed. Overall, still one of the easier DBs to maintain.

Re:Open source Google Analytics replacement on Thursday May 08, 2025 @05:22AM (#43924493)
I keep recommending it, but you can check out https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv... for a more complete list of EU based web analytic services.

I'm one of the co-founders of Pirsch, and a bit worried because the space is getting really crowded :D

Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025) on Monday April 28, 2025 @05:18PM (#43826221)
I'm still working like crazy on our privacy-friendly web analytics tool Pirsch Analytics (pirsch.io) :) I've been doing this for more than 4 years now and I'm still super motivated, especially because it's challenging from a technical point of view and very rewarding (I live from it now).

There is still a lot to do and learn (especially in the marketing department), but we have plans for a new product in the privacy space. I don't want to say too much about it until we've started working on it, but it's in the compliance space and fits quite well with our existing product. I think it's always a good starting point to solve your own problems.

Re:Ask HN: Do you still use Search Engines? on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @05:19AM (#43630308)
It's the same for me. I've switched to DuckDuckGo about 2 or 3 years ago and it feels like Google used to. I'm always shocked to see how bad the results are and how cluttered the top section is on Google if I happen to search there on someone else's computer.

LLMs have mostly been useful for three things: single line code completion (in GoLand), quickly translating JSON, and generating/optimizing marketing texts.

We had someone with a lot of experience in this field working for very large German corporations and got a discount/startup bonus. I wouldn't call it cheap.

Imagine starting a business in Germany. How are you suppose to pay 30-50k for legal questions before selling anything?

Funny enough, they seem to have "copied" our structure. I remember when it basically was just a slider, without tiers.
I guess you have to sign up to a few, test them on your site, and decide which one to use. In the end, they are all slightly different.

If you would like to self-host or have other specific requirements, you can quickly reduce the list to a couple of options of course.

This also factors in, yes. If we would store it indefinitely, there is the risk of profiling (estimating who someone is by their behaviour).
No, they are comparable, but it's an independent tool. When we started, Plausible wasn't as big as it now is. We also had a focus on deeper integrations via API from the get go, a nicer dashboard, and a few other minor details.

I basically started this for my personal use as a library for Go, which it still is:

https://marvinblum.de/blog/server-side-tracking-without-cook...

No. You can learn more about it here:

https://docs.pirsch.io/privacy

For Pirsch, we have a PWA you can install right from your mobile browser :)
Yeah, we also use the delta. However, you can send a custom event on close to update the session duration. The session won't be counted as bounced in our system then and the time is updated.

https://docs.pirsch.io/advanced/events

Correct, it's not so much about Cookies, but how data is collected and what is stored.

We have done a privacy risk analysis with an external lawyer and data protection officer, and concluded that Pirsch is in line with GDPR as we do not collect nor store personal identifiable information (PII). Processing stuff like IP addresses for example is legal as long as they are not stored and only cached for a reasonable amount of time (a few milliseconds in our case).

If you're interested, we have extensive documentation on this. You can reach out to [email protected] to get it :)

If anyone is interested in doing something similar. This did cost us about 8,000 € in Germany.

You can find a nice list of privacy-respecting analytics tools on European Alternatives [0], including mine, Pirsch [1].

I've been in this space for ~3 1/2 years, so if you have any questions, please let me know :)

[0] https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv...

[1] https://pirsch.io

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