Plainwire - a Text-first News and RSS reader. Still in alpha. Please feel free to take a look. https://plainwire.live
Readit Newstinuviel commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026) · Posted by u/david927
tinuviel commented on Show HN: Safe-now.live – Ultra-light emergency info site (<10KB) safe-now.live... · Posted by u/tinuviel
I appreciate the idea, but as others have mentioned it seems like for something like this to be useful it really needs to be well thought out and tolerant to extreme spikes in traffic.
I might be wrong here but it looked like the responses from the server are chunked, which I _think_ precludes the use of a highly optimized cache response e.g. from a CDN. Assuming that's true (very open to correction of course!) I wonder why this would be.
The web app has a 5-minute cache on dynamic content - which balances info freshness with performance. The architecture supports the ultra-light, fast-loading requirements by design.
tinuviel commented on Show HN: Safe-now.live – Ultra-light emergency info site (<10KB) safe-now.live... · Posted by u/tinuviel
I see that you mentioned no images, but I feel that images would make it easier for quickly locating information. You can probably use some basic svg files to keep the file size small. E.g. a simple design of a building shaking to represent an earthquake.
Right now, I am seeing a flood of text that I have to carefully read. I don't think emoji's would help, because they can be more subject to interpretation. And the quality of the design varies based on the device's emoji font.
But it is an interesting concept. Maybe add a small note about bookmarking the page?
Thank you. Images would increase the page size. Intent is to keep this accessible on slow/overloaded connections.
tinuviel commented on Show HN: Safe-now.live – Ultra-light emergency info site (<10KB) safe-now.live... · Posted by u/tinuviel
Where does the weather data come from?
National Weather Service. https://api.weather.gov/alerts/active?point={lat},{lon}
Canada: https://dd.weather.gc.ca/alerts/cap/{province}/atom.xml
tinuviel commented on Show HN: Safe-now.live – Ultra-light emergency info site (<10KB) safe-now.live... · Posted by u/tinuviel
Local news needs timestamps… I see stale last-week weather news. Had to click and see date from last week in the article.
I've added them. Thank you.
tinuviel commented on Show HN: Safe-now.live – Ultra-light emergency info site (<10KB) safe-now.live... · Posted by u/tinuviel
This is an excellent idea, ill pass it along to friends in emergency management
Thanks! Could you gather feedback after you do, please?
tinuviel commented on Show HN: Safe-now.live – Ultra-light emergency info site (<10KB) safe-now.live... · Posted by u/tinuviel
I can't tell much about your infrastructure, but memcached would probably increase that by several orders of magnitude. The NGINX module is pretty simple: https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_memcached_module.htm...
Cloudflare with Cache-Control headers is even simpler if you're okay with adding Cloudflare as a dependency.
From an ASN lookup, it appears you're hosting on Oracle Cloud, so Cloudflare would also give you free data egress: https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/why-cdn-client...
Their Always-On feature would also help if Oracle has an outage.
I like the general idea, very lightweight and more likely to remain accessible when an emergency is overloading the mobile networks.
Thank you! I will implement this - the server code is in plain C with NGINX on top so I presume adding memached would be straightforward.
tinuviel commented on Show HN: Safe-now.live – Ultra-light emergency info site (<10KB) safe-now.live... · Posted by u/tinuviel
Probably won't break anything but you're missing <head></head> and your <footer> is outside your </body> :)
Thanks for noticing. This has been fixed.
tinuviel commented on Show HN: Safe-now.live – Ultra-light emergency info site (<10KB) safe-now.live... · Posted by u/tinuviel
This is an interesting idea, but the very first page I looked at was wrong (current weather in Alameda county shows as 72* - it's almost 30* below that here, and the daily high in the warmest areas is projected to be 65).
Next I looked at San Francisco, and oddly it listed a bunch of minor earthquakes in San Ramon - none of which are listed in Alameda county, which is actually next to (and parts of which actually felt) those tremors.
The weather API call has been fixed.
FEMA reported the earthquakes to be centred in San Ramon and not in Alameda. Will see how this can be handled.
tinuviel commented on Show HN: Safe-now.live – Ultra-light emergency info site (<10KB) safe-now.live... · Posted by u/tinuviel
Seeing how it hasn't survived the HN hug of death... Not sure how you've built it but consider putting it behind a CDN or something and caching the responses, esp since you're trying to pull live data
It was never down - it was being patched and redeployed based on feedback here.
Webapp is light enough to handle 10000 concurrent hits.