Hacker News Reader

jasoncartwrighton Self Driving Car Insurance

Yet still on relying you to cover it with your insurance. Again, clearly not autonomous.

jasoncartwrighton Self Driving Car Insurance

I see. So not Tesla's product they are using to sell insurance around isn't "Full Self-Driving" or "Autonomous" like the page says.

jasoncartwrighton Self Driving Car Insurance

Sounds like it's neither self-driving, nor autonomous, if I'm on the hook if it goes wrong.

jasoncartwrighton Self Driving Car Insurance

If it autonomous or self-driving then why is the person in the car paying for the insurance? Surely if it's Tesla making the decisions, they need the insurance?

jasoncartwrighton France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

Built using Django!

jasoncartwrighton Porsche sold more electrified cars in Europe in 2025 than pure gas-powered cars

I've been charging from lampposts and other street chargers for 11 years now

jasoncartwrighton Porsche sold more electrified cars in Europe in 2025 than pure gas-powered cars

You use kerbside charging. Unlike petrol, electricity comes to you.

jasoncartwrighton A super fast website using Cloudflare workers

Yeah, it's really quick because there is pretty much nothing on it

jasoncartwrighton Unifi Travel Router

Hotel wifi is often hilariously slow compared to plugging my travel router into an in-room ethernet socket. From spotty <10mbps to often a full uncontended gigabit.

Makes video conferencing and large downloads usable.

jasoncartwrighton Unifi Travel Router

Because it's not available until the 29th

jasoncartwrighton A train-sized tunnel is now carrying electricity under South London

Sounds like you are trying to compare the many hundreds of miles (thousands?) of transmission cables needed to cope with the massive geographic change of generation sources to this ~20mi cable system.

There are many examples of how the UK is London-centric. This isn't one of them.

jasoncartwrighton Django: what’s new in 6.0

Yes, words have multiple meanings - but only some words are apparently worthy of censorship - which is my point.

> did people stop using the word "fag" to refer to a cigarette?

Yes, seems so. I've not heard that in at least a decade

jasoncartwrighton Django: what’s new in 6.0

Amusing to have my throwaway comment replied to with links to earnest points from prominent essayists. Never change, hacker news!

jasoncartwrighton Django: what’s new in 6.0

[flagged]

jasoncartwrighton UniFi 5G

I think you answered your own question - also the places where mmWave is available, there is also often other better internet connection options.

jasoncartwrighton Demand for UK Food Bank Up 15% Year on Year

Strange to see an article about UK food banks on the Hacker News homepage. At the same intersection as my work...

https://www.givefood.org.uk/

https://www.givefood.org.uk/api/

jasoncartwrighton Using street lamps as EV chargers

This is ISO 15118 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15118

jasoncartwrighton Using street lamps as EV chargers

I've been using these in London for at least eight years. Strange to see it written up as a test here.

jasoncartwrighton Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)

https://setpdf.app

Small webapp that allows musicians to add PDFs locally and offline, arrange them, then download for use on an e-reader during performances. Built for a classical musician friend who uses really old Android devices, also my first almost entirely 'vibe-coded' app.

jasoncartwrighton 10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea

I got a £50 pick set from https://x.com/martin__newton

https://imgur.com/a/sbXoBCK

jasoncartwrighton 10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea

LPL is superb. He inspired me to get a lock pick kit and a few simple padlocks - a cheap and fun hobby during COVID lockdowns.

jasoncartwrighton Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server

Any VPS you fancy that fits the price/performance/location/support you want, then point Coolify/Dokploy/whatever at it.

I did just this using Coolify, Mythic Beasts running Django & Postgres the other month from Google App Engine. Hilariously easy, even with my extremely rusty skills.

jasoncartwrighton American solar farms

Very much enjoy this guy flexing his setup his always interesting articles

jasoncartwrighton Devpush – Open-source and self-hostable alternative to Vercel, Render, Netlify

Political posts are often squashed from the homepage quite quickly (and for good reason)

jasoncartwrighton AI crawlers, fetchers are blowing up websites; Meta, OpenAI are worst offenders

I recently, for pretty much the first time ever in 30 years of running websites, had to blanket ban crawlers. I now whitelist a few, but the rest (and all other non-UK visitors) have to pass a Cloudflare challenge [1].

AI crawlers were downloading whole pages and executing all the javascript tens of millions of times a day - hurting performance, filling logs, skewing analytics and costing too much money in Google Maps loads.

Really disappointing.

[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-challenges/

jasoncartwrighton Car has more than 1.2M km on it – and it's still going strong

In the UK we call this Trigger's Broom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56yN2zHtofM

jasoncartwrighton My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

I enjoy the idea that when programming before AI I wasn't 'merely a machine operator'

jasoncartwrighton Making 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Pro GA, and introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite

Web scraping - creating semi-structured data from a wide variety of horrific HTML soups.

Absolutely do swap out models sometimes, but Gemini 2.0 Flash is the right price/performance mix for me right now. Will test Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite tomorrow though.

jasoncartwrighton Getting free internet on a cruise, saving $170

Pirate seaborne internet has been tried.

"A Navy officer is demoted after sneaking a satellite dish onto a warship to get the internet"

https://apnews.com/article/navy-illegal-wireless-internet-53...

https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy...

jasoncartwrighton Next.js 15.1 is unusable outside of Vercel

Post suggests the underlying problem is the metadata takes too long to put in the HTML? A few tags? Really?

This kind of problem, and the vendor lock-in, is completely unimaginable for any web framework I can think of. Bizarre.