News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

bencevans

Re:Show HN: Hacker Times – HN Reader on Monday June 29, 2026 @11:31AM (#48720598)
Thanks! Funnily enough, I did start building it before but then decided not to merge as I came to quite like the finiteness of it without. Shall maybe reconsider!
Re:Backblaze has stopped backing up your data on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @07:03AM (#47763989)
I found this to be a common theme in web design a while back, and in part led to an experiment developing a newspaper/Pocket-like interface to reading HN. It's not perfect, but is easier on the eyes for reading... https://times.hntrends.net/story/47762864
Re:UK Government Launches Fuel Forecourt Price API on Monday February 02, 2026 @07:41PM (#46864618)
This is great news. There's been a pilot study in which each retailer (voluntarily) hosted a JSON file containing their current prices (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/access-fuel-price-data). I noticed recently that a few of them had been removed/stopped working.

Neither the pilot nor the current API appears to include all fuel stations, but at least they provide (hopefully) more reliable updates from the ones that do.

I'd been playing with the pilot study data and set up FuelBelly to aggregate and compare https://fuelbelly.com/explore?lat=51.50740713124398&lng=-0.1.... (doesn't include the API updates, yet...)

A quick play with the API, the information responses (opening times, addresses etc.) doesn't appear to be working, I just get a 500 (HTML not JSON) response. But the price calls are working, and I'm glad this is being pushed forward post-pilot.

I'm quite happy to read something in a paper that ChatGPT or equivalent has written, just as i'm happy to read something that has been written with the assistance of other tools such as Grammarly, LanguageTool, Spell Check etc. I see it as the (human) authors responsibility to ensure that what has been written is factually correct.
Re:Updates to the GitHub Feed on Wednesday September 06, 2023 @06:26PM (#37412256)
I'm not sure i'm unusual in using the GitHub feed to keep an eye on commit activity on watched repos, all of a sudden there's no option to see push activity in the feed. o.O
Re:Using SVG to create simple sparkline charts on Monday July 10, 2023 @08:37AM (#36665437)
I've recently used this approach for generating Open Graph images for display when a link to the site is used on Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc [1]. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly something could be implemented. The last time I'd done something similar was using Cairo and needing to write more of the scaling dynamics. I don't think I ever got it to adjust to dynamic content very well. This time I put together a prototype in Inkscape, converted it to a template and render it to PNG with Sharp [2].

[1]: https://hntrends.net/api/og?word=twitter [2]: https://github.com/lovell/sharp

Re:Show HN: HN Trends on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @11:49AM (#36588276)
It's a static list ordered by the number of mentions of all time. I plan to make this dynamic in the future and allow ordering by total score and filtering by time range. Also, I'd like to add separate pages for each book showing the stats and reviews, and maybe some form of sentiment analysis would be cool.
Re:OCR at Edge on Cloudflare Constellation on Monday July 03, 2023 @08:55AM (#36572230)
Looking forward to GPU support for workers. Cloudflare announced they were working on it in 2021 [1], but it doesn't seem generally available yet; they still have a signup page for notification [2].

I know other companies have struggled with demand, so maybe they're doing it on an invite basis.

[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/ [2]: https://www.cloudflare.com/nvidia-workers/

Re:Show HN: HN Trends on Monday July 03, 2023 @05:29AM (#36570661)
Cheers! Yes, I already have 'it's' and 'it’s', but that one escaped! Added now.
Re:Show HN: HN Trends on Sunday July 02, 2023 @05:50PM (#36566158)
Thanks for the suggestion, yes a good idea! Aha, yes, I've spotted that with Reddit, and it is actually true as appose to a bug, as there's something like just one post back in 2016, and it mentions, thus, 100% popularity. I'll add some other metrics to the page soon.
Re:Show HN: HN Trends on Sunday July 02, 2023 @11:59AM (#36562690)
Thanks for the heads up! Fixed
Re:Show HN: HN Trends on Sunday July 02, 2023 @10:27AM (#36561789)
Thanks! Same; I've been coming to HN for books to read for years and finally got them in one place. I plan to extend the functionality there in the future :D
Re:GitHub Actions Incident 29.3 on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @02:32PM (#35361293)
Also causing issues due to a change that's made release source tars change [1] (changing hash), so build systems are rejecting [2].

1: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/402616 2: https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg/issues/30481

Re:Migrating to GraphQL: A Practical Assessment on Thursday July 04, 2019 @06:06PM (#20358184)
Re:How a shampoo bottle is saving young lives on Friday December 21, 2018 @05:32AM (#18732514)
Adding it to Pocket, then lets you read it.
You've got it! You run a P2P system on your local machine... in theory, you don't need the internet to communicate. Messages can be sent via your friends hopping between LANs using the underlying gossip protocol.
Re:Show HN: A proxy service for debugging HTTP/S traffic on Saturday December 09, 2017 @09:47AM (#15885995)
Interface looks cool but what benefits are there over using mitmproxy?

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