News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

knadh

knadh on Hacker News

Show HN: Pkgbot – Fast Linux package search engine

Posted by knadh on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @01:56PM
from the show-hn dept.

https://pkg.bot

I recently switched to NixOS and in the process of setting it up, found the package search on its repo site very clunky and tedious. No permalink to share, no way to find or sort by recency or version.That got me thinking that most repo websites, including aggregators like pkgs.org and repology.org have the same issue with UX (AUR is nice and simple though).So I made https://pkg.bot on top of...

( Read More... | no comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re:HTML Can Do That on Friday August 21, 2026 @02:47AM (#49384623)
I'm currently in the process of taking a lot of risk rewriting a large-ish app that I maintain to fully eliminate the use of frontend frameworks (and the larger JS ecosystem in general) and to switch to simple SSR + semantic HTML and CSS.

Using this tiny lib [2: shameless plug] I wrote specifically incorporating the "HTML Can Do That"-style realisations going into the big rewrite.

[1] - https://github.com/knadh/listmonk/issues/3073

[2] - https://oat.ink

Re:Matt's Script Archive: The Scripts That Reshaped the Web on Wednesday June 24, 2026 @11:59PM (#48668690)
Deploying and tinkering with Matt's scripts was a very formative exercise in my early teenage years. I rememher offering public FormMail and guestbook hosting services (on underlying10MB shared hosting plans!)
Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here? on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @02:36PM (#46621614)
https://nadh.in
Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (January 2026) on Sunday January 11, 2026 @01:36PM (#46578330)
- https://dict.press - A (language) dictionary publishing and management system.

- WIP: A FOSS, self-hosted Luma alternative (for use across our community initiatives)

Re:Mistral launches OCR 3 – 74% win rate over OCR 2 on Saturday December 20, 2025 @01:37AM (#46334081)
Once you have managed to get the data out and structured, you may want to check out dict.press. It's a dictionary publishing and management tool (which I maintain). Multiple widely used Indian dictionary projects run on it.
Re:Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k on Wednesday November 12, 2025 @12:35PM (#45903058)
The delay is on our side while we wait for regulatory approvals (India) for cross-border disbursements, I must clarify. The issues are described in the post I linked [2].
Re:Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k on Wednesday November 12, 2025 @12:01PM (#45902592)
We've allocated $60,000 to NTP from FLOSS/fund [1]. It happened in May, but the disbursal is pending owing to paperwork [2]. We hope it'll go through in the next couple of months.

[1] https://floss.fund/projects/2025/

[2] https://floss.fund/blog/second-tranche-2025-anniversary/#wha...

Re:Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management so... on Monday September 08, 2025 @10:19AM (#45168643)
Been self-hosting for a while. Amazing set of features and web and mobile apps work flawlessly.
Re:Wttr: Console-oriented weather forecast service on Thursday July 17, 2025 @10:07AM (#44593615)
Weather over DNS

  dig london.weather @dns.toys
Re:Get the location of the ISS using DNS on Sunday July 06, 2025 @02:12PM (#44482828)
Yep, all tools return formatted strings as TXT records.
Re:Get the location of the ISS using DNS on Sunday July 06, 2025 @01:04PM (#44482336)
This is quite cool! I just added this to dns.toys [1]

  dig iss.sky +short @dns.toys
[1] https://dns.toys
Re:AI means the end of internet search as we've known it on Friday January 10, 2025 @11:03PM (#42663186)
I wrote about something tangential a few months ago; the need to have curation-based alternate forms of discovery on the WWW.

https://nadh.in/blog/decentralised-open-indexes/

Re:Two Upstart Search Engines Are Teaming Up to Take on Google on Tuesday November 12, 2024 @10:35PM (#42122648)
Pretty much exactly what I have been thinking lately. Write about it recently here: https://nadh.in/blog/decentralised-open-indexes/
Re:Why pay for a search engine on Monday October 14, 2024 @02:27AM (#41834760)
> I hope Kagi succeeds. But personally, I think the web is dead. And no search engine can save it.

I concur. Maybe now is the time to seriously think about alternate visions for "search". I have been toying with an idea[1] along those lines myself out of sheer annoyance at the state of WWW and web "search" in general.

[1] https://nadh.in/blog/decentralised-open-indexes/

Re:Dublin Core, what is it good for? on Sunday September 01, 2024 @11:09PM (#41422298)
Omeka-S[1] is an open source publishing platform (for museums, libraries, artifact collections etc) that has first class support for Dublin Core.

Dublin Core “clicked” for me when we started using it in Omeka to publish a collection of digitised books online[2].

- https://omeka.org

- https://gpura.org

Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @02:16PM (#36590564)
https://nadh.in/blog

Techno-philosophical ramblings.

Re:AWS Lambda function for converting of Telegram channel to RSS feed on Friday May 12, 2023 @02:25PM (#35920146)
Related: I've written a Python tool (CLI) that exports Telegram channels to static webpages.

https://github.com/knadh/tg-archive

Re:Thunderbird Is Thriving: Our 2022 Financial Report on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @11:48PM (#35883430)
Daily Thunderbird user for about 17 years. Has always worked well. The recent UI improvements are nice (on the eyes), but, I’m so used to the UI/UX, it just blends into the background.
Re:Ask HN: What not-profit-seeking project are you tinkering with this... on Wednesday October 19, 2022 @12:07AM (#33257521)
Adding new features to listmonk (mailing list / newsletter manager), preparing for its next release.

https://github.com/knadh/listmonk

Setting up and playing around with Omeka, a brilliant document publishing system, to help publish an archive of digitised physical books and documents.

https://omeka.org

Re:Free tool to translate your i18next resources on Sunday September 25, 2022 @03:04PM (#32974816)
I’ve a simple static HTML+JS page that renders a translation UI by reading a JSON i18n file from a GitHub repo (can be any URL).

Demo: https://listmonk.app/i18n/

Source: https://github.com/knadh/listmonk-site/tree/master/i18n

Re:Ask HN: How to say no to a GitHub issue feature request? on Saturday August 06, 2022 @05:53AM (#32366588)
Huge sense of entitlement showing up on project forums is inevitable. I think it is okay to be open and blunt (and civil) when responding to such posts.

I had ended up codifying [1] my stance around this to a contrib document to quickly link to annoying issues when closing them. Saves the headache of having to write fresh explanations.

[1] - https://github.com/knadh/listmonk/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.m...

Re:WeatherKit on Sunday July 03, 2022 @12:55AM (#31965183)
The Norwegian Meteorological Institute has an excellent free HTTP/JSON weather API that covers the globe. No signup required.

https://developer.yr.no

Re:Thunderbird 102 on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @11:53PM (#31916296)
Thunderbird has been my primary mail client since ~2006. It has been rock solid and fast. Way faster than popular web mail UIs today.
Re:Viper – Go Configuration with Fangs on Monday May 23, 2022 @12:29AM (#31475360)
Use viper with care. It has some dangerous fundamental flaws [1]. We got bitten hard, submitted a PR [2] and followed up for a year and a half to no avail, before I went ahead and reinvented the wheel and wrote koanf (plug), specifically to avoid viper's flaws.

Most importantly:

- Breaks JSON, YAML, TOML etc. language specs by forcibly lowercasing all keys internally. Dangerous because it can silently merge differently cased config keys into lowercase.

- Hard codes big unnecessary dependencies into the core, significantly bloating build sizes. No separation or abstraction.

[1] https://github.com/spf13/viper/pull/635

[2] https://github.com/knadh/koanf#alternative-to-viper

Re:Ask HN: Open-source software authors – why do you do it? on Wednesday April 27, 2022 @02:13PM (#31183680)
Writing software is a hobby I enjoy unconditionally. Seeing people find utility in the software I write makes me happy. Seeing people derive happiness from it, for free, makes me happier. Been doing it for about two decades now.

Thankfully, I don’t need to make a living from my hobby FOSS projects. If I had to, maybe it wouldn’t feel like a hobby.

Re:Open-source mail delivery platform for incoming and outgoing email on Monday December 06, 2021 @11:29PM (#29469067)
We self-host Postal and it’s worked quite well for us. We are a heavily regulated organisation and have to send several millions of transactional emails every day (as mandated by financial regulations).

IP reputation has nothing to do with Postal and has to be managed separately; have the records setup properly, don’t send spam, and keep an eye on public blocklists regularly.

Older »