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knadhon HTML Can Do That

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

knadhon Matt's Script Archive: The Scripts That Reshaped the Web

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!)

knadhon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://nadh.in

knadhon Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)

- https://dict.press - A (language) dictionary publishing and management system.

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

knadhon Mistral OCR 3

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.

knadhon Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k

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].

knadhon Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k

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...

knadhon Immich – High performance self-hosted photo and video management

Been self-hosting for a while. Amazing set of features and web and mobile apps work flawlessly.

knadhon Wttr: Console-oriented weather forecast service

Weather over DNS

  dig london.weather @dns.toys

knadhon Get the location of the ISS using DNS

Yep, all tools return formatted strings as TXT records.

knadhon Get the location of the ISS using DNS

This is quite cool! I just added this to dns.toys [1]

  dig iss.sky +short @dns.toys

[1] https://dns.toys

knadhon AI means the end of internet search as we've known it

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/

knadhon Two upstart search engines are teaming up to take on Google

Pretty much exactly what I have been thinking lately. Write about it recently here: https://nadh.in/blog/decentralised-open-indexes/

knadhon Why pay for a search engine

> 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/

knadhon Dublin Core, what is it good for?

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

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

https://nadh.in/blog

Techno-philosophical ramblings.

knadhon AWS Lambda function for converting of Telegram channel to RSS feed

Related: I've written a Python tool (CLI) that exports Telegram channels to static webpages.

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

knadhon Thunderbird Is Thriving: Our 2022 Financial Report

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.

knadhon Ask HN: What not-profit-seeking project are you tinkering with this week?

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

knadhon Free tool to translate your i18next resources

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

knadhon Ask HN: How to say no to a GitHub issue feature request?

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...

knadhon WeatherKit

The Norwegian Meteorological Institute has an excellent free HTTP/JSON weather API that covers the globe. No signup required.

https://developer.yr.no

knadhon Thunderbird 102

Thunderbird has been my primary mail client since ~2006. It has been rock solid and fast. Way faster than popular web mail UIs today.

knadhon Viper – Go Configuration with Fangs

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

knadhon Ask HN: Open-source software authors – why do you do it?

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.

knadhon Open-source mail delivery platform for incoming and outgoing email

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.

knadhon Ask HN: What are some must read books?

Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran.

Blew my mind (pun intended) and changed my perspective on pretty much everything forever.

knadhon Learning how dictionaries work

That's strange. Apart from the fact that the dictionary website renders utf8 Kannada text, there's nothing else to it. Can't imagine how the browser managed to switch its language based on text found on a webpage!

knadhon Learning how dictionaries work

https://alar.ink (Kannada-English dictionary) was built using https://github.com/knadh/dictmaker

It addresses some of the things you’ve mentioned.