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abareplaceon Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)

I continue to work on Aba Search and Replace, a tool for regex search and quick conversions (Base64, URL encoding, JSON Web tokens, timestamps to dates and vice versa). https://www.abareplace.com/

abareplaceon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

I continue to add more features to my search-and-replace tool for Windows (https://www.abareplace.com/). I initially built in for myself and it was one of the first incremental grep implementations (allowing you to see the results as you are typing the search pattern). Now it supports various formats like Base64, URL encoding, or timestamp conversions. With one-liners, you can add width/height attributes to <img> tags or insert file contents.

abareplaceon Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)

I'm working on a regex / data conversion tool for web developers: https://www.abareplace.com

Plan to add more handy features in the next version.

abareplaceon More Mac malware from Google search

Agreed, the lack of borders or indentation on the screenshots is very confusing. It's hard to understand what text comes from the malicious website and what is from the author.

abareplaceon Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

Is it for iOS? Then, it could be the Swift runtime library.

abareplaceon The Rise of Whatever

Eevee is she, not he. See the website footer and the home page.

abareplaceon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

https://www.abareplace.com/

An old-school regex and text processing tool for web developers. Great for browsing source code, automating complex replacements, and decoding Base64, URL encoding, or Unix timestamps from your clipboard.

abareplaceon Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?

It helps to start blogging about things that are related to your product or interesting to your target audience. I got the first users by writing about text-processing tasks that you can do with regular expressions: https://www.abareplace.com/blog/

abareplaceon Notepad++ is 21 years old

Exactly, not loading the whole file into memory works well only for hex editors.

abareplaceon AVX Bitwise ternary logic instruction busted

Yep. BitBlt originally used complex 16-bit "operation codes" that store the binary operations in reverse Polish notation. Then, they added "operation index" that stores the same information in a byte, like in Amiga, which is shorter and more elegant. The coding is now redundant because each raster operation code contains both an operation index and an operation code. See https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180528-00/?p=98...

abareplaceon Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison

If there is no application manifest, you will get Windows NT4 / Windows 9x style buttons. Just tested this on Windows 11.

abareplaceon The "email is authentication" pattern

booking.com natively supports this "email is authentication" pattern, so you even don't have to change your password and come up with a throw-away password. They just send you a link by email, you click the link, and you are logged in.

abareplaceon Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

No, they won't get dark mode and this is the biggest problem for Win32 UIs now. If Microsoft would make dark mode available for classic Win32 apps, it would meet all requirements of the original poster.

abareplaceon Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

Check out the Scrollbars series from Raymond Chen:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030731-00/?p=43...

https://github.com/mity/old-new-win32api?tab=readme-ov-file#...

abareplaceon Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

My app is around 500 KB (not megabytes) and it supports dark mode (see https://www.abareplace.com/). So this is definitely possible without using Electron or bloated GUI libraries.

abareplaceon Imhex: A hex editor for reverse engineers

Unfortunately, it does not load under Firefox

abareplaceon Ask HN: What non-AI products are you working on?

I'm working on a bulk search-and-replace tool for webmasters and developers that allows you to correct errors on your webpages, add width/height attributes to <img tags, convert all method names to lowercase/uppercase, insert a header with the filename and copyrights to each source code file, etc.

https://www.abareplace.com/

abareplaceon Llamafile lets you distribute and run LLMs with a single file

The CPU usage is around 30% when idle (not handling any HTTP requests) under Windows, so you won't want to keep this app running in background. Otherwise, it's a nice try.

abareplaceon My personal C coding style as of late 2023

This is length of a null-terminated string, e.g. lengthof("abc").

abareplaceon My solopreneur story

Thank you. Unfortunately, my experience is the same: it's hard to promote a software project on today's Internet without investing a lot of money or spending 4 hours/day on social media like the original poster did. There are many interesting projects like yours that remain invisible to their potential users.

abareplaceon I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

You can afford not reading news only if you live in a democratic country with a stable economy, far from any conflict zones. In other parts of the world, you would miss information that you need for your survival.

abareplaceon Calculate the difference and intersection of any two regexes

The double quote (") is also broken. If you use it in the regex, then no DFA is displayed.

abareplaceon Calculate the difference and intersection of any two regexes

The web page hangs on the regular expressions that produce a DFA with a lot of states. For example, these ones:

(ab+c+)+

(abc){100}

a.*quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

abareplaceon Ask HN: Why did Python win?

Not ignoring, but taking it seriously without demagogy and trying to prove that 2+2 equals to five.

abareplaceon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://www.strchr.com/

C and assembly language programming under Win32

abareplaceon Everything that uses configuration files should report where they're located

I use ini files for my Windows application [1]. They are enough if you don't need multiple levels of nesting. The simpler the format is, the better.

When storing settings in config files, you can just copy the program folder to another computer and your settings will be transferred. This is called "a portable application" in the Windows world. When using the registry, you need to export the registry keys and import them, which makes it hard to backup all your apps with their settings or to set up multiple computers to use the same apps with the same settings.

[1] https://www.abareplace.com/docs/options.php#optionsStorage

abareplaceon Google Authenticator now supports Google Account synchronization

You need to store the password on the iPhone in this case, which is insecure. The whole point of having the second-factor auth is using two separate devices: a computer stores the password (in a password manager) and a smartphone generates the TOTP codes.

abareplaceon Empty character class in JavaScript regular expressions

[] is treated differently in JavaScript and in other regex engines

abareplaceon Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python

It's already solved in Google Sheets

abareplaceon Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

Consent-o-matic does not work on most websites; you still have to click the consent banners manually. Try https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/