Top all-time · #2035
Dan Q
Personal blog · danq.meprogrammingculture
Dan Q's personal blog at danq.me covers programming and culture. Since 2019, 36 different Hacker News readers have linked it 53 times, most often “Your 'App' Could Have Been a Webpage (so I fixed it for you)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link his posts on FreshRSS XPath scraping, the Cheatman Hangman app, Automattic hiring and HSBC email handling, mostly as references or for implementation details.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Personal blog of Dan Q: hacker, magician, geocacher, gamer...
Most-linked posts?
- Your 'App' Could Have Been a Webpage (so I fixed it for you)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-07-09
- XPath Scraping with FreshRSS4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-07-15
- <Blink> and <Marquee> (2020)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-11-13
- Subverting AI Agent Logging with a Git Post-Commit Hook2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-03-04
- The Page with No Code2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-01-11
- Webpage Copy-Protection is Impossible (and that's great)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-10-14
What Hacker News says?
> Have you ever shoved a <blink> into a <marquee> tag? If you did, it would blink on Netscape, and it would be a marquee in IE, but not both (in the 90s!). Netscape had blink and IE had marquee and did not support the other[1][2], at least in the 90s. [1] blink: "some, such as Internet Explorer, never supported the element at all" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_element [2] marquee: "the first time I tried Netsc…
Comment linking /2020/11/11/blink-and-marquee/
on “Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)”Submitted Google shared my phone number as a story · 471 points
HN discussionOften I'm lazy and just black out revealing information, like I did in my blog post about how British Gas can't understand my name ( https://danq.me/it-is-only-q ). But sometimes I've done the same thing in other places and gone further, sometimes concealing "fun" messages. In my post about Halifax putting the wrong names on a letter to me ( https://danq.me/halifax-dun-goofed ), I changed my address to a message alo…
Comment linking /halifax-dun-goofed
on “Google shared my phone number”Submitted The Elegance of the ASCII Table as a story · 285 points
HN discussionThere is one in your CV: https://danq.me/cv
Comment linking /cv
on “Google shared my phone number”Submitted <Blink> and <Marquee> (2020) as a story · 231 points
HN discussionWebsites usually link to their RSS feed using a <link> attribute in the head of the page. Browsers used to detect this and show an RSS icon near the address bar if the website you were viewing had a feed - and you could click the icon to see more details and subscribe. I use this Firefox addon which replicates that functionality: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feed-preview/ FreshRSS is a good self-ho…
Comment linking /2022/09/27/freshrss-xpath/
on “How RSS beat Microsoft”Submitted The Difference Between Downloading and Streaming as a story · 160 points
HN discussionIn a similar vein: Cheating Hangman, once described as "an app that perfectly recreates the infuriating feeling of playing hangman with your older sibling who was definitely cheating and also knew way more words than you". https://cheatman.danq.me/ Implementation details: https://danq.me/2019/09/26/cheatman/
Comment linking /2019/09/26/cheatman/
on “Kaboom: an unusual Minesweeper”Submitted XPath Scraping with FreshRSS as a story · 79 points
HN discussionhttps://danq.me/2017/09/26/gmail-plus/
Comment linking /2017/09/26/gmail-plus/
on “Future of OSU Open Source Lab in Jeopardy”Submitted I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys as a story · 70 points
HN discussionRSS still exists, it's just hidden. Like you can just add any Youtube channel page to an RSS reader and get a feed for it - instead of visiting youtube's algorithm-generated front page. I just a month ago started moving all my feeds to a self-hosted FreshRSS installation. It lets me create feeds from pages without RSS using XPath[0] or CSS selectors to pick the elements. I also did a handful of Go applications that…
Comment linking /2022/09/27/freshrss-xpath/
on “Forget Twitter threads and write a blog post instead (2021)”Submitted That's Not How Email Works, HSBC as a story · 54 points
HN discussionSome more information on how Automattic hires: - https://automattic.com/work-with-us/how-we-hire-developers/ - https://www.andyserong.com/2019/07/25/switching-jobs-and-app... - https://danq.me/2019/08/30/automattic-00/
Comment linking /2019/08/30/automattic-00/
on “How Automattic develops software for over 75M websites”Submitted I Learned the Pythagorean Theorem as a story · 21 points
HN discussionBrowsers have been grown, not designed. The competitive pressures exuded on browsers to render ill-specified things and hacks has resulted in something essentially where what it does is what it does. That's the case with a lot of software,because we made the choice as a community of programmers to not formally verify the things that we build. Thunk of the origin of the blink tag [1]. We decided to be hackers, and do…
Comment linking /2020/11/11/blink-and-marquee/
on “Why fuzzing over formal verification?”Submitted The Page with No Code as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThe article addresses this, actually. Fetching any unsecured content is an attack vector. https://danq.me/2026/01/28/hsbc-dont-understand-email/#footn...
Comment linking /2026/01/28/hsbc-dont-understand-email/
on “That's Not How Email Works, HSBC”Submitted Firefox 157 broke my vertical tabs as a story · 6 points
HN discussion"Republican"?! US defaultism strikes again. He's in the UK, and he states his pronouns here https://danq.me/about/ so doesn't sound very "Republican" to me.
Comment linking /about/
on “That's Not How Email Works, HSBC”Submitted Webpage Copy-Protection is Impossible (and that's great) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionFor non firefox users wanting to manually render the page, grab the base64 output from the link response header, e.g. - open developer tools, navigate to network and refresh - or run from a terminal "curl -s --head ' https://danq.me/wp-content/no-code-webpage/ ' | sed -nE 's/.*base64,([^>]+)>.*/\1/p'" - replace the base64 into the below code: document.head.innerHTML='<style>'+decodeURIComponent(atob('Ym9...9IA').spl…
Comment linking /wp-content/no-code-webpage/
on “The Page with No Code”Submitted We Need to Talk About Botsplaining as a story · 5 points
HN discussionRead last week, that freshrss has a new scraping feature: https://danq.me/2022/09/27/freshrss-xpath/
Comment linking /2022/09/27/freshrss-xpath/
on “Why your blog still needs RSS”Submitted Halifax Leaked My Financial Information (Again) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFreshRSS has XPath scraping. https://danq.me/2022/09/27/freshrss-xpath/
Comment linking /2022/09/27/freshrss-xpath/
on “Generate RSS feed for any website using CSS selectors”Submitted Your 'App' Could Have Been a Webpage (so I fixed it for you) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Converting ISO Country Codes to Flag Emojis as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted I guess I'm never paying DreamHost back as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
