Top all-time · #16166
Peter Molnar
Personal blog · petermolnar.netwebculture
Peter Molnar's personal blog at petermolnar.net covers web and culture. Since 2017, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-06, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link petermolnar.net in threads on Google location-history data and on Gopher servers. The comments do not discuss the writing itself, only the topics and one personal location-logging setup.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Hi! I'm Peter, and you're on my homepage. It's an old phrase, but this place is my home, my own little corner on the vast internet. It's been around since 1999, had numerous domains, designs, and iterations. I'm trying to encourage...
Most-linked posts?
- /gopher/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-05-20
What Hacker News says?
https://petermolnar.net/article/asn-blocking-freebsd-pf-ngin... It's not the most sophisticated thing.
Comment linking /article/asn-blocking-freebsd-pf-nginx/index.html
on “Creepy Crawlies”Submitted LinkedIn is ignoring user settings as a story · 380 points
HN discussionI wrote about this when I dropped a lot of content from my site: https://petermolnar.net/making-things-private/
Comment linking /making-things-private/
on “Google Memory Loss”Submitted The three Facebooks (one of them executes 26.13 MB JavaScript) as a story · 13 points
HN discussionhttps://petermolnar.net Tech entries (mostly howtos to myself) on *nix finds; photos (places, landscapes, etc); random mutterings and thoughts when they really want to come out of me. Though the domain has changed, my site has been my online home for over 20 years now.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted We are living in instant messenger hell as a story · 5 points
HN discussionhttps://petermolnar.net Runs on a former thin client under a cabinet. Static HTML made with python, pandoc, and exiftool, with a dash of PHP for error and redirect handling.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted A Journey to the Underworld That Is RDF as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWordPress recently introduced a new editor, Gutenberg - that is certainly a point and click experience, no HTML involved. One can get Microsoft Office or LibreOffice and export to HTML. Or write a text file and upload it with SFTP. On the other hand, HTML is really not that hard, and a bit of sweat put into your creation is not bad either in my personal opinion: https://petermolnar.net/internet-emotional-core/
Comment linking /internet-emotional-core/
on “We should replace Facebook with personal websites”Submitted Do websites want us to use Reader Mode? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> I decided to go one step further with my personal site and eliminate all JS completely. I don't get enough traffic to make any kind of analytics or ad code worthwhile. I did the same a little while ago; if I want stats, I'll render them from the access logs, webalizer-style[^1]. Static HTML, with inlined CSS and SVG can get ridiculously fast on today's network, so if you don't have any actual reasons for JS (there…
Comment linking /going-static
on “I've removed all ad network code from my blog”Submitted The internet that took over the Internet as a story · 1 points
HN discussionDoesn't work; the 1U fans are a different format, than any noctua I was able to locate. Regardless I tried putting noctua in a 1U rack, ended up with horrible hack like this: https://petermolnar.net/article/home-server-downsizing/inwin...
Comment linking /article/home-server-downsizing/inwin-iw-rf100s-hacks-silen-fan.jpg
on “How to Turn an IKEA Coffee Table into a DIY Server Rack”I wrote a very similar entry not too long ago: https://petermolnar.net/internet-emotional-core/
Comment linking /internet-emotional-core/
on “Tell HN: I miss the old internet”I made my site available over gopher a while ago[^1]; After reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178885 and it's comments I curiously started up lynx and entered gopher the first time* and it was a massively unexpected ride into the forgotten oldskool internet. * I'm from Hungary and gopher never really existed there. Besides, it kind of predates my internet-age, which really started around 1996. [^1]: htt…
Comment linking /gopher/
on “I Miss the Old Internet”An open source implementation of the to google services layer exists already: the microG project[^1]. Combine it with f-droid, and apps like Yalp store[^2], and the phone functions perfectly. I've made a guide a little while ago on how to do this on a Nomu S10, one of the cheap, MediaTek based, rugged phones[^3]. [^1]: https://microg.org/ [^2]: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.yeriomin.yalpstore/ [^3]: https:…
Comment linking /odexed-android-6-marshmallow-with-microg/
on “Google starts blocking “uncertified” Android devices from logging in”Cross platform, closed source, including Jingle (audio/video): http://astrachat.com/ Android (no audio/video): https://conversations.im/ Web: https://conversejs.org/ Web with extras: https://movim.eu/ Desktop (Mac): https://adium.im/ Desktop (Win): https://gajim.org/ (not sure about this) Desktop (Linux): http://pidgin.im/ (needs extras: https://petermolnar.net/instant-messenger-hell/#extra-plugin... )
Comment linking /instant-messenger-hell/
on “Messenger systems compared by security, privacy, compatibility, and features”I wrote a guide how to ungoogle a stock, odexed rom: https://petermolnar.net/odexed-android-6-marshmallow-with-mi...
Comment linking /odexed-android-6-marshmallow-with-microg/
on “How to Android without Google”The lesson of the cracked screen is: always pair you phone for adb as one of the first steps in setting it up, and if possible, root it. You might need it if the screen cracks and you want to save data off it. Sometimes there are ways around it by dirty booting a recovery image, but it's not as simple as it sounds, and you'd need an unlocked bootloader to do so: https://petermolnar.net/article/save-files-from-a-dead…
Comment linking /article/save-files-from-a-dead-screen-android/index.html
on “Turn your old, cracked Android phone into a backup server”If you can find an apk I'm using Backitude (gaugler.backitude), notable for using location 'steals' when some other app gets location rather than directly querying on its own. I just have it write to a kml file locally, and another program syncs that folder to cloud storage 2x daily. It's also capable of pinging a url with location data if you prefer. Edit: this may be interesting from someone else actively using it…
Comment linking /location-tracking-without-server/
on “Google’s Sensorvault Is a Boon for Law Enforcement”https://petermolnar.net/the-three-facebooks/
Comment linking /the-three-facebooks/
on “SimpleSSR: Server-Side Rendering at Scale”Sendmail is everything but simple. The question was SMTP in general, which indeed is an extremely simple protocol. Here, this is how you send a plain text* mail in python: https://petermolnar.net/not-mime-email-python-3/ Using an HTTP API for this is a massive overkill. * I'm aware using utf-8 like this may confuse older clients but I didn't have problem with anything relatively modern I tested the receiving on.
Comment linking /not-mime-email-python-3/
on “Mailit: A Tiny Drop-In REST API to Send Emails”> And Spotify 320kbps is as good as CD No, it really is not. But it's close enough for most. https://petermolnar.net/spotify-how-good-is-high-quality-str...
Comment linking /spotify-how-good-is-high-quality-streaming/
on “They Don’t Make Music Like They Used To”I had to do home automation for FIR panels as the official solution had problems - writeup at https://petermolnar.net/article/herschel-fir-heating/index.h... - and used Domoticz. Never regretted it. I gave HA 3 runs, backed off each time. At first, in the YAML era, because it was insanely hard to create heating automation (not HVAC, just heating). Second when HA decided that their supported Python version was greate…
Comment linking /article/herschel-fir-heating/index.html
on “Confessions about my smart home”I have this: http://petermolnar.net/404.json It's the data source for a fallback PHP that tries to do magic if the static resource wasn't found. How to: check your server logs, look for 404s. See if you can set up a redirect, or serve a HTTP 410 Gone. I agree on the domain problem. It's a big problem.
Comment linking /404.json
on “The Web Is Getting Old”Because there are too many clients with a wide range of supported/unsupported features. The only solution out there that supports cross platform JINGLE is AstraChat[^1], which is closed source and commercial, but they lack OMEMO and Carbons. Conversations on Android has both OMEMO and Carbons, but no audio/video or p2p transfer files. Pidgin, Empathy, Gajim, etc are lacking behind with features, though Pidgin can be…
Comment linking /instant-messenger-hell/
on “Movim 0.16 – A federated web-based social XMPP client”Nah. It's also not a joke for me. It's literally my first thought. Maybe what you say is true in social circles specific to the Go language, but it's not unambiguous outside of that. HN often refers to technologies that more mainstream communities might refer to as obsolete, but it's not so for us. There are active Gopher servers right now , and surely a community that still uses them. I believe there is also a risi…
Comment linking /gopher/
on “GopherCon Singapore 2019 Videos”
