Hacker News Reader

kitdon UK government exempting itself from cyber law inspires little confidence

Popularity is a poor measure of performance in UK politics. The British public are regularly shown to be fickle and easily led in their judgements.

Results are a bit meh so far with Labour but at least they're not Trussesque dangerous. And positive achievements rarely get a mention in our press. Can't think why.

kitdon Show HN: Executable Markdown files with Unix pipes

I realise Literate isn't actually MD-based, apologies. But the syntax is similar

kitdon Show HN: A geofence-based social network app 6 years in development

I find the opposite. Anonymity provides a protection from shame that real names don't.

kitdon Show HN: A geofence-based social network app 6 years in development

Very cool idea. My only worry is "Anonymous Mode". Anonymity IME usually results in conversations descending into vitriol, snark or libel.

kitdon Mysterious Victorian-era shoes are washing up on a beach in Wales

Fascinating story.

One thing that I don't understand though. The theory is they washed up a local river, got embedded in sediment and are only now being released. Given that, I would have thought their condition would be much worse. More likely that they were well-packaged on the wreck and have only just been released ?

kitdon Show HN: Executable Markdown files with Unix pipes

A couple more you may find interesting:

1. Xc [https://xcfile.dev/] - an md-based task runner

2. Literate [https://github.com/zyedidia/Literate] - a literate programming tool

kitdon “Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016)

I would go so far as to say the rise of Rails and the downfall of J2EE being concurrent was not entirely accidental. I have/had no particular affiliation for Rails, but it demonstrated how to write simple, opinionated backend code, and that inspired a flurry of Java/JVM web frameworks that tried to follow a similar pattern and eventually gave us libraries like DropWizard, Javalin, SparkJava, even Spring Boot to some extent.

kitdon C Is Best (2025)

That's the first time I've heard the C syntax being called "too rich". It's the epitome of succinctness IMHO (too a fault, even, or maybe I'm just old). Are you confusing it with C++? If so, you have a point.

kitdon Worlds largest electric ship launched by Tasmanian boatbuilder

Unless you're in Kazakhstan!

https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/travel-stories...

kitdon The British empire's resilient subsea telegraph network

My wife and I were visiting County Kerry in SW Ireland last summer. We were on Valentia Island and quite by chance walked past the telegraph building where the first transatlantic cable came ashore. Only marked by a (very interesting) plaque describing its significance.

kitdon The British empire's resilient subsea telegraph network

Yes, the Uk (southern England in particular) is dotted with "Semaphore Hill"s or "Telegraph Hills"s. There's one very close to where I'm sitting now, a few miles NE of Portsmouth.

kitdon Toro: Deploy Applications as Unikernels

This results in them moving up a layer, in this case creating a network of inter-dependent containers that you now have to put together for the whole thing to start... and we're back to square one, with way more bloat in between.

I think you're over-egging the pudding. In reality, you're unlikely to use more than 2 types of container host (local dev and normal deployment maybe), so I think we've moved way beyond square 1. Config is normally very similar, just expressed differently, and being able to encapsulate dependencies removes a ton of headaches.

kitdon Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

Indeed the "Learn X" books may even have a vested interest in not revealing rarely used features, so that you learn to reimplement them in X.

kitdon Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

"According to the Carbon Trust, the home TV, speakers, and Wi-Fi router together account for 90 percent of CO2 emissions from video streaming. A fraction of one percent is attributed to the streaming providers' data servers, and ten percent to data transmission within the networks."

It's the devices themselves that contribute the most to CO2 emissions. The streaming servers themselves are nothing like the problem the AI data centres are.

kitdon Build Your Own React

Love the way this is done. It's a shame commercial vendors don't do this sort of thing for their product docs more regularly.

kitdon Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest

I assume the age verification check when I went to page 2 is because I'm in the UK? If so, well played!

kitdon Please just try HTMX

Ofc if you really want to lose bloat, there's always Htmz

https://leanrada.com/htmz/

kitdon Please just try HTMX

Alpine even has a plugin to perform the same function as Htmx if you need it

https://alpine-ajax.js.org/

kitdon Please just try HTMX

Lol, it's ... a feature ... I think

kitdon Please just try HTMX

Sorry, I'm struggling to see the comparison

kitdon Please just try HTMX

This is the thing. Htmx is great if you only consider the frontend. But it does require fixing up the backed to match. A framework like that needs to integrate the front & back ends fairly tightly to have good UX. You may be interested in Datastar which does this better IMHO

https://data-star.dev/

kitdon Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

It's simpler than that. OSS strong encryption tools are available than anyone can run on the command line to encrypt their messages, which can then just go as attachments via email, whatsapp, etc. No new developers required. And as you say, the general public have to suffer with weak encryption while those who really want to encrypt do so regardless.

kitdon AI's real superpower: consuming, not creating

At least half of AI's "superpower" in OP's case is the fact that he has everything in Obsidian already. With all of that background context, any tool becomes super valuable in evaluating & guiding future actions.

Still, all credit to him for creating that asset in the first place.

kitdon IBM to acquire Confluent

Exactly. An agent may be acting on the contents of individual events, but also spotting trends and patterns in events, and intervening where needed/instructed.

kitdon IBM to acquire Confluent

Event-driven AI decision making is the C-suite wet dream. A large % of major orgs run Kafka for their eventing systems.

kitdon Imo.im – Instant Messenger

A Linux (or at least web) version would be nice ...

kitdon IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

https://www.ibm.com/granite

kitdon Anthropic acquires Bun

Comment of the year

kitdon 250MWh 'Sand Battery' to start construction in Finland

I can't find the link now, but there was an episode of Grand Designs here in the UK (a show detailing private individuals developing interesting or unusual homes) where the owner was building a passively heated house based on an idea by his architect father.

The ground beneath the footprint of the house was insulated around the sides to a depth of about 2m, effectively extending the thermal mass of the house into the ground. After construction, it took about 2 years (IIRC) to warm to a stable level, but thereafter required little to no energy to stay at a comfortable temperature year round.

kitdon Can you take an ox to Oxford?

Careful. You'll make the residents of Cockermouth nervous.