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StevenBlack
hosts
Python2013–2026
StevenBlack / hosts

hosts

🔒 Consolidating and extending hosts files from several well-curated sources. Optionally pick extensions for porn, social media, and other categories.

Security & PrivacyCreative & MediaCommunication & Social
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
168Distinct people
244Mentions
5Explicit recommenders
31.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

🔒 Consolidating and extending hosts files from several well-curated sources. Optionally pick extensions for porn, social media, and other categories.

GitHub

Where it is used

The last source check was inconclusive. This does not establish whether a product uses it.

What people are saying

I am in the exact same boat. And lately it's the same sort of shit... My dad will get a text message on Facebook from a "friend" (usually a dead friend) and it'll say something…

dbg31415 used a recommendation phrase. 6 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:01:12 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year244 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-02-22 16:12:14 UTC to 2026-10-07 09:41:56 UTC.

0102030402013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 2 submissions, 2 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 38 mentions; 2 submissions, 36 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 18 mentions; 2 submissions, 16 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 28 mentions; 1 submissions, 27 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 41 mentions; 2 submissions, 39 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 27 mentions; 2 submissions, 25 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 21 mentions; 2 submissions, 19 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 19 mentions; 4 submissions, 15 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 22 mentions; 3 submissions, 19 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 0 submissions, 11 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC422
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC38236
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC18216
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC28127
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC41239
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC27225
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC21219
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC19415
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC22319
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11011
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606

What Hacker News says

7 sources
anthk¡Oct 11, 2024
A hosts file from https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts, not using JavaScript with LibreSJS + https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/workarounds-f... to browse on some pages which require JS. Also I use the News Waflle service from gemini://gemi.dev from Lagrange and Offpunk (a Gemini protocol client) which can cut down a web size to a 3% of the original. OFC no ads are shown. Before anyone jumps into me on the motto but news sites need money to run, blah, blah..., most newspaper sites in Spain have more than 700 tracking related cookies and tons of bloat in form of JS. I am not exxagerating. 700, FFS. Browse https://elindependiente.com from a web browser. Then, paste the full URL into gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/view and open any news. As a test under Lagrange or any Gemini client: gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/vi
Read the rest
ew?https%3A%2F%2Felindependiente.com Open any link, don't worry if you don't understand Spanish. Just scroll down to the bottom, and read the line on the saved up size. It varies between 90% and 99%. And that with a web scrapper and converter into Gemini. If we compared the whole size of the webs against the cut-down Gemini site (but with the whole news), the percentage of saved data wound't be lower than 98% for sure.
In Ask HN: What are you replacing uBlock Origin with?
autoexec¡Aug 30, 2024
> DoH and similar technologies don't override /etc/hosts. It seems that it does: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1544233 https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/issues/968 https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/e64073/dns_over_ht... https://www.liquidweb.com/help-docs/Fixing-Firefox-Bypassing... https://superuser.com/questions/437649/firefox-not-taking-no... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37452361/why-is-my-hosts...
In Chrome is entrenching third-party cookies that will mislead users
dualogy¡May 31, 2024
Well at least the techie crowd can still use /etc/hosts (or the equivs on Mac/Win) which, if frequently-enough (weekly, biweekly, even monthly is enough) updated with the https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts (or similar other projects if they exist), seems to "block" ads sufficiently well (no in-page DOM node removals of course, just network-unreachable image/script/iframe/popup URLs).
In Manifest V2 phase-out begins
hunter2_¡May 13, 2024
I think the problem wouldn't be the software itself (that's just a DNS proxy) but maintenance of the block lists. The lists used by pihole by default are decent but do cause problems at times, either intermittently [0] [1] or persistently (for example there's a certain cookie consent banner embed that gets blocked, and some sites embed a script for it in such a way that the site is unusable when the script can't load, a scenario for which the block list's maintainer has no sympathy [2]). When someone decides to pay for SaaS instead of installing their own instance, unless implementation/maintenance is difficult (and I'd argue it's not difficult in the case of running PiHole), that money is for support. But this would be a support nightmare. Also, typical SaaS runs over HTTP and has a GUI that can do user authentication, so that access is
Read the rest
gated by payment. PiHole runs over DNS protocol, which has no such authentication gate that I'm aware of, so if you stood up a resolver (akin to 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 but with ad filtering) it would be open to the whole world with no payment required. It would instead need to be an appliance the user puts on their own network (or flashes onto their router, or whatever), and anyone willing to do that would probably be willing to run PiHole for free instead. [0] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/issues/2514#issuecommen... [1] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/issues/2515#issuecommen... [2] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/issues/2257#issuecommen...
In Ask HN: Why isn't there a commercial Pi-Hole product?

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