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koehr

143 karma · joined March 16, 2016

Source code as art, freelancing, based in Berlin, Germany.

meet.hn/city/de-Berlin

Socials: - koehr.at.hn - github.com/nkoehring - instagram.com/coffee_n_code - reddit.com/user/koehr

Interests: Freelancing, Hacking, Mentorship, Networking, Open Source, Philosophy, Programming, Remote Work, Privacy, Social Impact, Technology, Web Development, Writing

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[ my public key: https://keybase.io/koehr; my proof: https://keybase.io/koehr/sigs/Og6pOR4F2t5w_kycA8yZqc-71k_IatrPww32whM8Dio ]

submissionscomments
koehr··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
I'm working on Solace¹, a programming language that targets JavaScript, but is not a superset, like Typescript. The idea is, to allow zero-runtime-cost safeguards, like Optional Values and Error Unions (syntactically they look like Zig's), decent pattern matching and Traits. There's still a lot of work to do, though, because some of the approaches I went for, don't hold in all cases (generics are tricky).

1) https://git.koehr.ing/n/solace

koehr··on SingleRide: Longest route on NYC Subway without visiting the same station twice
So the longest subway ride in NYC is 24km (15 miles) and 1h long? We have multiple underground lines farther than this in Berlin with the longest being 32km (20 miles). But don't get fooled, the issues are the same.
koehr··on Claude Opus 4.7 Model Card
This reads more like an advertisement for Mythos, on the first glance
koehr··on Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app
I just tried it. It downloaded Qwen3.5 2B on my phone and it's pretty coherent in its sentences, but really annoying with the amount of Ente products mentioned in every occasion. Other than that it's fast enough to talk to and definitely an easy way to run a model locally on your phone.
koehr··on Firefox's AI Kill Switch Is a Trap: How Mozilla Made AI Your Problem
This is the wrong argument. Claiming that Mozilla is doing it wrong because the technology purist part of their userbase decided they don't want AI is simply short-sighted. The kill switch is the best option, because it let's Firefox be like a typical user would expect, while still giving the option to deactivate things. Deactivate by default and the typical user feels patronized.
koehr··on Why Prefer Textfiles? (2010)
For me this really speaks for intermediate text formats like Markdown, that are easy to read and render, while covering most formatting needs.
koehr··on DNS4EU Blocks Blog.fefe.de
Historically, it was a rather famous page. It's a watchblog by the German security expert Felix Von Leitner. It exists since 2005, but since May this year, he didn't write anything until one new entry that you can see here: http://blog.fefe.de/?mon=202512
koehr··on DNS4EU Blocks Blog.fefe.de
They replied in the meantime and removed the domain from their threat database.
koehr··on DNS4EU Blocks Blog.fefe.de
Interesting, I just downloaded the big list and couldn't find it there.
koehr··on DNS4EU Blocks Blog.fefe.de
Looks like https://temp.sh/ is blocked as well.
koehr··on Plaintext Casa First Release
Including a CLI client, an NPM package and some spec refinements, working towards web page generation.
koehr··on Plaintext Casa – A decentralized social network
Plaintext Casa - now with working links on its website! Thanks for letting me know!
koehr··on Plaintext Casa – A decentralized social network
A decentralized social network that uses plain text files over HTTP. No algorithms. No ads. No data harvesting. But not just microblogging. With rich about sections and multipage feeds, it can be a full blogging platform. Write short posts, long essays, organize by topics. All in plain text.
koehr··on Using street lamps as EV chargers
It's interesting how this sounds like a cutting edge experiment, while this is a common thing to see in Germany and other European states for quite a while now.
koehr··on The Q Programming Language
I think the syntax is really pretty!
koehr··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)
I started playing around with the idea of a new programming language that compiles to JavaScript. Despite syntactic improvements and type-checking, it's goal is to streamline promises, async/await and callbacks into one signal based system I call live variables. Additionally, those could be compiled via different, interchangeable compiler plugins to framework specific code, like React's useState or Vuejs' Refs, to make it more future prove. It's still in a concept stage and maybe the whole project is futile, but if it piqued your interest, check out https://github.com/nkoehring/Solace
koehr··on Show HN: Changefly – Rebuilding the foundation of privacy and authentication
Great to see that there is work happening in this direction. I wonder what the difference to usual public-key authentication is.
koehr··on Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
Have you tried matterrank.ai? It might give you want you want, but as a search engine, instead of a chat interface.
koehr··on The Impervious Browser: Your Portal to the P2P Internet
The misconception here is that the internet is not decentralized. The original idea of the internet is to be decentralized. There are just very large centralized silos built on top of its structure.
koehr··on Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?
Funny, even ironic, that the thread now starts with someone saying "I use Arch". Good meme food.
koehr··on Ask HN: Why have we accepted the cookie pop-up situation across the web?
Wow, this is exactly the "solution" that all the tracking companies love to hear from the people.
koehr··on It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
The EU can still, in theory, sue them because they're serving Europeans. Especially in the beginning many companies became afraid of the possibility so they simply blocked access to see where it goes. Then it probably became clear the European customers are not worth the effort to change back. But actually it's still illegal what they're doing because the GDPR also states that customers have to be treated neutral regardless of their location, as long as it's not about licensing of course.
koehr··on Onivim 2 is a retro-futuristic modal editor
Honestly, melting two open source editors together (or rather cloning one while integrating the other) and ask for that amount of money for it is in my opinion unacceptable. The only thing that would make this a bit more acceptable is when the developers are promising to spend a lot of their earnings for vim development (and maybe VSCode, too).

*edit:* Just saw that it is actually open source and will be available for non-commercial use for free. I'm more than fine with that model!

koehr··on Windows 11 will create heaps of needless trash
I fail to see any mention of or link to the detailed requirements talked about. To save y'all from yet another search engine visit, they are basically Intel 8th Gen Core upwards and comparable AMD CPUs. Here you can find the lists: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/min...
koehr··on 250kb-Club – the better 1MB club?
After Bradley Taunt published 1MB.club, a good discussion sparked ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25151773 ).

One big opinion that I definitely share is that 1MB is actually pretty generous, even excessively generous. So I went for a more reasonable number that allows for fast loading everywhere but also some complexity. Another point raised was that not only the size should matter but also the amount of content. 200kb of pure text are probably more valuable than a single word shown with a 200kb webfont.

The page analysis and insertion are (semi-)automated. As currently visible on 1MB.club, the manual process is just not feasable. The pages are downloaded and analysed with Phantomas. They are also rechecked after a week.

koehr··on 1MB Club
I love the idea and I think it is a very reasonable, although generous limit. Excessively generous, as @yellowapple called it, maybe. But I am indeed surprised to find not only tiny blogs and personal homepages on this list, but also government (gov.scot, gov.uk) and other resource intensive pages.

Despite all that, I propose an additional, even more exclusive club, because the internet needs a break. I propose 250kb compressed first-load size.

koehr··on Vue3 TypeScript Starter App
A webpack configuration and example application for Vue3 with Typescript, Router, simple global state (no Vuex) and some neat build time features.
koehr··on Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?
I'm working on an RPG Card generator. It allows you to design a set of cards in a wysiwyg way and then print them out to do good old Dungeons&Dragons or whatever tickles your fancy. It's not usable yet but if this is interesting for you, you can track its progress here: https://github.com/nkoehring/rpg-cards-ng/
koehr··on EHTML: Front-end development can and should be simple
"Every moment a new JavaScript framework borns here and there, so here is mine." That is what should be written on the page, to be honest. And not even the claim, that it lets you do everything without writing any JavaScript is not true because you simply move your JavaScript into the DOM node attributes. I think this is pretty much a step backwards towards in-page PHP or some XML logic parsing.

Thanks for trying though. The fatigue is real.

koehr··on Dear Devs, please stop using Medium for your contents
Exactly my thought.
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