Top all-time · #7619
Chris Hager
Personal blog · metachris.com · on HN as metachrisprogrammingsecuritysystems
Chris Hager's personal blog at metachris.com covers programming, security and systems. Since 2015, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “Comparison of 10 ACME / Let's Encrypt Clients”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Chris Hager's posts comparing free and hosted transactional email services and Let's Encrypt/ACME clients. One commenter calls the email comparison a very good overview of hosted options.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Builder, Maker, Engineer
Most-linked posts?
- Comparison of 10 ACME / Let's Encrypt Clients3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-12-14
- Free Transactional Email Services – The Best Alternatives to Mandrill and Co2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-03-21
- /2016/03/free-transactional-email-services-the-best-alternatives-to-mandrill/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-06-15
What Hacker News says?
There are a bunch of great unofficial clients, several written in Go (I like acmetool): https://www.metachris.com/2015/12/comparison-of-10-acme-lets...
Comment linking /2015/12/comparison-of-10-acme-lets-encrypt-clients/
on “Leaving Beta, New Sponsors”Submitted Starting a TypeScript Project in 2021 as a story · 228 points
HN discussionThere was a lot of activity in this space when Mandrill "died" last year. This comparison was a very good overview of hosted options: https://www.metachris.com/2016/03/free-transactional-email-s... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11328631 And the discussion there linked this detailed sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Nb1YqYJq9eWm6ojLDRXd... | https://sendyhost.com/mandrill-alternatives-245/
Comment linking /2016/03/free-transactional-email-services-the-best-alternatives-to-mandrill/
on “Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative to Mailgun or Sendgrid”Submitted Free Transactional Email Services – The Best Alternatives to Mandrill and Co as a story · 206 points
HN discussionacme-tiny is another good and simple client, which I personally prefer. I've recently compared 10 different Let's Encrypt / ACME clients: https://www.metachris.com/2015/12/comparison-of-10-acme-lets...
Comment linking /2015/12/comparison-of-10-acme-lets-encrypt-clients/
on “Let's Encrypt has issued its first million certificates”Submitted Creating standalone Mac OS X applications with Python and py2app as a story · 108 points
HN discussionI've recently compiled a list of free transactional email services with a feature comparison: https://www.metachris.com/2016/03/free-transactional-email-s...
Comment linking /2016/03/free-transactional-email-services-the-best-alternatives-to-mandrill/
on “Google App Engine Silently Stopped Sending Email 5 Weeks Ago”Submitted Show HN: PDFx – Extract Metadata and URLs from PDFs, and Download Referenced PDFs as a story · 93 points
HN discussionThis is the PDF in English (via Google Translate): https://www.metachris.com/download/PostgreSQL_Oracle_en.pdf
Comment linking /download/PostgreSQL_Oracle_en.pdf
on “Oracle's letter to Russian IT companies”Submitted Great talks and presentations at 33C3 as a story · 63 points
HN discussionI second this, I recently switched my apps off of Mandrill because of their changes. I assume the authors didn't want to deal with the different "incoming webhooks" from different services, but it shouldn't be too hard to implement in theory. For reference, here's a list of SMTP providers which support inbound email: https://www.metachris.com/2016/03/free-transactional-email-s...
Comment linking /2016/03/free-transactional-email-services-the-best-alternatives-to-mandrill/
on “Show HN: Deskulu – Opensource knowledgebase and ticketing system”Submitted Comparison of 10 ACME / Let's Encrypt Clients as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI recommend a static generator such as Jekyll [1]. If you want a boilerplate to get up and running quickly, i've put the source of my blog [2] on Github: https://github.com/metachris/jekyll-boilerplate [1] https://jekyllrb.com [2] https://www.metachris.com
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Should I blog on Medium for my open-source project, or self-host?”Submitted Comparison of 10 ACME / Let's Encrypt Clients as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted Comparison of 10 ACME / Let's Encrypt Clients as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted PDFx: Extract references and metadata from PDFs, and download all referenced PDFs as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Show HN: MicroPython-Ctl – a TypeScript lib for talking to MicroPython devices as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Securing private keys with an efficient threshold signature-based protocol as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted PDFx update and new version release (v1.4.1) · Chris Hager as a story · 1 points
HN discussion