Alternatives
Products that do what Shiddns a DNS learning experience in Python does
Hi HN, as a learning experience, I created a small DNS resolver with blocking capabilities and resolution of local host names. There are already tons of good ad-blocking DNS implementations out there. And they do this much better than my implementation. Great examples are Blocky or pihole. So when I set out to "play around", I looked at these projects and tried to modify them. Fortunately for them, but unfortunately for beginners, these are already quite far developed and complex projects. So impatient me set out to "quickly write something in Python". Almost two weekends later, I put in so…
- 1NS
Hey everyone, I was always tired of setting up PowerDNS, Bind and PiHole and I am trying to do more projects in Rust, so here is Nomina. It has: * Split Horizon DNS (return a different IP/record if remote IP is in a certain network etc) * DynDNS Support * Blocklist Integration * DHCP4+6 Server * AXFR/IXFR support * Rewriting of records It can replace most of the common Home Lab setups incl. PiHole AdBlocking etc. https://github.com/DatanoiseTV/Nomina
Jun 2026
- 2GB
2014 · dns-api.com
- 3PP
Hey Hacker News, My friend and I are building a network level adblocker based on pihole. We wanted to invite you to try it here - https://datajoy.us/try/ 1. Click "Try Now" 2. The results page will show you the IP of our DNS server (139.162.177.133). Put that IP first in your router or device's DNS settings. Don't remove the other DNS entries! Just put us first. 3. ?? 4. Ad free browsing on a single device or on all devices on your network. If you want to join out mailing list for future updates, just drop the /try and signup. If you like the performance of this…
2017
- 4DB
We’ve just launched NUM [1] in the UK, it’s an alternative to the semantic web [2] but based in DNS. We’ve published 23 million data points about 4.8m UK businesses. We had some really interesting HN feedback when we previously posted about one of our example apps [3] so keen to hear what the community has to say this time round. 1. https://www.num.uk 2. https://num.uk/blog/we-crawled-5m-uk-websites-and-published-23m-data-points-to-dns 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598164
2021
- 5MA
2016 · github.com
- 6MF
Hey HN. I've just launched my very first webappp and would love your feedback. http://www.7bks.com It's a book list sharing website - kind of like playlists for bookworms. The site is built on pyton/appengine - and I learned to code in under 4 weeks to build the site. There's more details on the background of the site here: http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001 I've also published the full Python code for the site here: https://gist.github.com/670034 Feedback is really important to me and I want to work hard to make the site better so any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated. Contact…
2010
- 7AD
2018 · github.com
- 8MW
This is a little project I've been working on for a while in order to better learn Python. Although IRC may not exactly be the most exciting medium, I still find it to be fun and useful, this interest lead me to writing a bot. In doing this I realized that what would actually be more interesting would be if I had a framework. There may already be such a thing, certainly there are IRC libraries, but I don't know if they're well-suited to deploying bots. At any rate if for no other reason than the fact that I am relatively new to programming and eager to learn I decided to build a framework.…
2011
- 9PT
Hi there HN! I wanted to show you a weekend project I put together. Pingquick (https://www.pingquick.dev/) is a way to create APIs from your python functions. Just write/paste the function in, and it'll give you an endpoint to POST to. I made Pingquick because I just couldn't stand having to deal with deployment for some simple python functions. So, now I just put my code there and I can ping it as needed without needing to worry about any setup. Any and all feedback is very much welcome! Ian
2023 · pingquick.dev
- 10AO
If my experience is any indicator, the DNS issue seems to be getting worse as the hours go by, not better. However, I have found that adding OpenDNS servers (208.67.222.222, 208.67.222.222) to my list of DNS servers has completely eliminated the issue, at least for the time being. So, under my IPv4 configuration, in the "DNS Servers" field, I have "208.67.222.222, 208.67.222.222, 8.8.8.8" - the last one is the Google DNS server. I'm able to resolve Twitter, Github, etc.
2016
- 11RP
- 12PC
Hi HN! During the last year, I've been building python.cards: a site to learn Python using spaced repetition. My goal is to make the most of spaced repetition by making it extremely simple to use and by providing high quality flash cards. The site has been live for a month, with a few daily users who had joined the waitlist. The feedback has been quite positive, with most of the users using the site every day. Currently, we have a free deck (A Tour of the Stdlib) and a paid one (Pathlib in depth, for $9.99). I have other decks in the works, covering topics such as f-strings, collections,…
2024 · python.cards
- 13FA
Would like to share here a project that we have been working on for the last ~10 months. It all started with the goal of properly blocking adult & explicit content out of our own kids devices and expanded it to a free service that anyone can use. Feedback is welcome: https://cleanbrowsing.org CleanBrowsing is free Anycast DNS resolver that automatically blocks adult content and enforces safe search on Google, Google Image search, Bing, Youtube, etc. We have been crawling and categorizing the web for many months and we feel it got to a point where our database is large enough and we…
2018
- 14DP
2020 · github.com
- 15TE
Hi! I’ve always wanted a simple way to throw my Python projects online. Just to try things out, share them, or test a webhook with a real endpoint. But every time I hit the same wall: Buy a server, Set up HTTPS, Configure DNS, Get a domain. Write boilerplate to glue it together. It always felt like too much for something so small that I wanted to test. So Ive been hacking on Thread4 (currently in alpha): a tiny platform where you can write a Python function and go live instantly at yourname.thread4.eu. It’s not for production use, just quick testing, experimenting, or sharing your idea…
2025 · thread4.eu
- 16CS
Hey HN, Last weekend I vibe-coded a cool website that lets you do easy DNS record lookups. I know you can just use dig or nslookup, but oftentimes I'm too lazy to remember the syntax, and there are less technical users who need to manage DNS entries but aren't comfortable with the command line. We debug customer DNS issues often at ImprovMX, and we typically link to tools like mxtoolbox.com to point out DNS record issues. But those tools seem quite bloated and from the 2000s. I wanted something super clean & simple, and there were a few features I thought were ergonomically needed but…
2025 · inspector.improvmx.com
- 17DW
2016 · github.com
- 18DG
I tend to use AI to brainstorm domain names, but I kept wasting time pasting each idea into Namecheap to see if they were available. So I built DotComBuddy - it generates ideas (using DeepSeek V3 - switched from GPT-4o after realizing quality was just as good) and checks availability in real time via Name.com’s API. Built with Next.js and Vercel’s AI SDK, the app gives you a table of available domains with their price. 10 free searches to try it out, then $9/year (what I’d pay to never do this manually again). Sharing this for anyone else tired of switching tabs to check domains. Happy…
2025 · dotcombuddy.com
- 19MB
2016 · metiix.com
- 20DI
After having misspelled a domain and landed on a squatter’s site many times, I spent some time this year building domian.io to prevent this from happening again. It gives you a list of the most likely misspellings of a domain, their availability, and an easy way to register them - all in one simple tool. I built this with SvelteKit, Supabase, OpenAI, Resend, and Stripe using TypeScript and hosted it on Vercel. It was a really fun project and took some tinkering to get everything working together. Check it out and let me know what you think! PS. you can also access it through…
2023 · domian.io
- 21OP
Hello HN, Pietro here! I've been really excited to see the recent buzz around MCP and all the cool things people are building with it. Though, the fact that you can use it only through desktop apps really seemed wrong and prevented me for trying most examples, so I wrote a simple client, then I wrapped into some class, and I ended up creating a python package that abstracts some of the async uglyness. You need: * one of those MCPconfig JSONs * 6 lines of code and you can have an agent use the MCP tools from python. The structure is simple: an MCP client creates and manages the connection and…
2025 · github.com
- 22PA
Hello everyone! My friend Ori Kabeli and I have been playing around with GPT-4 Vision as a way to control websites and complete complicated tasks online. We created a small proof of concept python package called pywebagent. pywebagent allows performing high level tasks in websites, accessible to developers as simple python functions. It is highly experimental, and only sometimes works, but we think it still might be useful to all you tinkerers out there. Feel free to contribute! Example Use Case: You can order things from amazon with one line of code. pywebagent.act(…
2023 · github.com
- 23RA
2020 · github.com
- 24OD
Hey HN! We built DNS Directory (https://dnsdirectory.com), a free, searchable database of public DNS servers with live monitoring every 10 minutes. We needed to find an up-to-date list of DNS servers used by carriers around the world for a proxy fingerprinting / web-scraping project but we were shocked to find that it didn’t exist so we built it ourselves in an internal Hackathon We’re adding more features but so far we: Test 77K+ servers every ~10 minutes Allow filtering by uptime, location, security features (ad blocking, malware protection, DNSSEC) Show info on IPv6…
Dec 2025 · dnsdirectory.com
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