Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

I just took a fortnight off work with the intent of getting away from my laptop, but accidentally ended up making a listings site for London's independent / arts cinemas. As far as I can tell no such thing currently exists, and I feel like it should.

Obviously the main thing is getting the listings data, which as far as I know (mostly) isn't readily available any other way that scraping the cinemas' websites, for which I set this up as a separate-ish project[1]

[0] https://filmhose.uk

[1] https://github.com/Joeboy/cinescrapers

Love these tiny, locally focused ideas!

Nice! No Garden Cinema? It's the best cinema in London! (And their website is great, I would imagine easy to scrape)

You should do all kind of events by event type, not just movies. Concerts, workshops, open lectures... london.eventhose.com. Then you should find volunteers for other cities to do the same.

Time Out should have long done that but instead they stopped their print edition.

It's on the quite long list[0] that I haven't got around to yet. I'll try to get it done today.

[0] https://github.com/Joeboy/cinescrapers

Just finishing the London indie cinemas is an ongoing challenge! But yeah it'd be great to branch out to other places, and cover other types of events.

I've added a PR for this - https://github.com/Joeboy/cinescrapers/pull/4

Hope you didn't start on it!

(By the way, it wasn't too easy to scrape in the end…)

On the one hand that's awesome and it's really great to have a contribution! On the other hand, I unfortunately just added it myself. But it's there now, anyway :-)

More PRs very welcome if you're in the mood!

Hey I'm doing something similar for NYC! But focused on screenings with special appearances only. There's a lot going on here. Happy to share notes.

[0] https://filmspotlight.org/

Ah no/great! I would have let you know before I tried but wasn't sure how far I'd get. Glad it's there and thanks for adding it.

I'll add the Peckhamplex now.

Neat. Just notice that the ICA has a Genesis P. Orridge bio through your site, so will likely go and see that. Thanks!

Thank you so much! Just merged and deployed.

Cool! Yours is much prettier than mine.

Pretty can get in the way sometimes. I like your site, it's easy to ingest the information quickly. I might simplify the design of mine to make it more usable. There's a reason why hackernews is still looking like this!