Hacker News: ashfn

New comment by ashfn in "The IsUpMap lets you check the status of over 100 major sites at once"

ashfn — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:04:59 +0000

Something must be wrong, it's showing github as up!

New comment by ashfn in "Show HN: Searchable aggregator of 24M London council spending transactions"

ashfn — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 21:57:56 +0000

Thanks, it's just raw js canvas and msgpack on the api to use less bandwidth

New comment by ashfn in "Show HN: Searchable aggregator of 24M London council spending transactions"

ashfn — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 12:05:17 +0000

Thank you so much

New comment by ashfn in "Show HN: Searchable aggregator of 24M London council spending transactions"

ashfn — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 11:11:11 +0000

Hi everyone, I built cspend.uk which is a free site that combines over 24 million published payments from all London boroughs and councils into one fast, searchable database. You can search by supplier, description, amount, date, borough, etc, filter/sort results, and skip the hassle of separate CSV files or PDFs per council. It's a side project to make public spending data easier to explore so that people can check where council tax goes. Feedback welcome: Is this helpful? What would you search for? Any improvements or issues? Found anything funny or interesting?

Show HN: Searchable aggregator of 24M London council spending transactions

ashfn — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 11:10:48 +0000

Article URL: https://cspend.uk

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086486

Points: 4

# Comments: 5

New comment by ashfn in "Show HN: I made islechat, like Slack but in the terminal over SSH"

ashfn — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 14:14:21 +0000

Updated the title it was a bit misleading!

Show HN: I made islechat, like Slack but in the terminal over SSH

ashfn — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 14:10:47 +0000

You can try it out with ` ssh username@isle.chat ` Enter a password to use on first join. It features a slack/discord style interface with channels on the left and users on the right. You can create and join your own channels, and upload ascii art to be the channels banner which shows in the top right. Auth is user/pass only for now but plan to add support for uploading your pub key if you want to use that instead.

Code is here if you want to self host or look at screenshots https://github.com/ashfn/islechat If you want to design a banner for your channel there is an editor here https://islechat.github.io/banner.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46444174

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by ashfn in "I built my own CityMapper"

ashfn — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 09:10:19 +0000

Potentially using the live arrivals APIs and seeing when its right now, not 100% it would work but might be worth a shot

New comment by ashfn in "I built my own CityMapper"

ashfn — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 22:37:38 +0000

Im thinking it might be better to revisit the project and analyse long term patterns in bus arrivals

Rendering Conways Game of Life with Braille

ashfn — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 20:52:59 +0000

Article URL: https://asherfalcon.com/blog/posts/4

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45785239

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ashfn in "I built my own CityMapper"

ashfn — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 19:05:54 +0000

I used this exact API extensively for both buses and tubes :)

New comment by ashfn in "I built my own CityMapper"

ashfn — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 17:58:05 +0000

I tried a route from a London tube station to Newcastle train station and it found one on the frontend for the tool so I think it may support national rail

New comment by ashfn in "I built my own CityMapper"

ashfn — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 17:47:30 +0000

It looks like TFL's journey planner API has the ability to do some of these national rail trips, only tested a few though

I built my own CityMapper

ashfn — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 11:18:53 +0000

Article URL: https://asherfalcon.com/blog/posts/5

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45719662

Points: 155

# Comments: 21

New comment by ashfn in "Hiding messages in a deck playing cards"

ashfn — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 17:55:22 +0000

That sounds very interesting, I'll look into it thanks :)

New comment by ashfn in "Hiding messages in a deck playing cards"

ashfn — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 17:54:28 +0000

Yeah that would make an interesting addition. I was thinking about error correction so if you swapped two cards it would be okay but was struggling with how it would work, but I think it would be quite fun to add :)

New comment by ashfn in "Hiding messages in a deck playing cards"

ashfn — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 14:42:28 +0000

Hey all, I found a cool way to convert text into a specific order of a deck of playing cards. I detailed the instructions of how it works in the blog post but a brief overview would be that it uses Lehmer codes which allow you to uniquely identify each permutation of a set i.e. each of the many many ways a deck of cards can be shuffled/arranged

Hiding messages in a deck playing cards

ashfn — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 14:41:04 +0000

Article URL: https://asherfalcon.com/blog/posts/3

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44605169

Points: 122

# Comments: 39

Hiding Images in DNS Records

ashfn — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 14:45:55 +0000

Article URL: https://asherfalcon.com/blog/posts/2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44282546

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ashfn in "Tailscale is pretty useful"

ashfn — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 08:32:47 +0000

Its relatively straightforward to host a nextjs app in a docker container and route it with nginx and cloudflare, but you probably wont get as good uptime