Hacker News Reader

asukachikaruon Tell HN: Happy Fathers Day

That's beautiful! Thank you. I also reckon there probably won't be a "that day". Just a lot of small things and one day maybe I'll look back and think it's not that bad.

asukachikaruon Tell HN: Happy Fathers Day

This is my first father's day as a father.

It isn't easy, I have been struggling immensely (plug: I wrote about it at https://asukawang.com/blog/leap-of-faith ), but now she's seven months old and it has been a lot better.

I look forward to all the things I could do for her. A home-made jukebox with NFC tags on cassettes I once saw on HN really interests me, but I reckon a 3D printer would be necessary or at least very handy and there's not a lot of room left in my house. Also I prefer a non-bambu lab option (such as Prusa) but the price gap is kind of significant. Still have time to figure this out I guess.

asukachikaruon Nintendo announces price increases for Nintendo Switch 2

It's relatively mild for EU and US, but for JP it's a 20% increase. Finally going to get one after the announcement.

asukachikaruon Joby kicks off NYC electric air taxi demos with historic JFK flight

According to the guardian’s report[0], yes. 45dB compared to 100 dB for a heli.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/28/electric-air...

asukachikaruon Have a fucking website

Then it's twice the work. For a mom-and-pop restaurant, putting food on the table (pun intended) probably already cost them 24 hours a day.

asukachikaruon Have a fucking website

On one hand, I totally agree, as I'm all for indie small web. Haven't used Facebook and Instagram for years. On the other hand, it's not (small) business owners deliberately choose to not have a website, it's customers saying it's too much friction for anything outside of FB or IG. For some people if you are not on IG you do not exist, no matter how nice your website is.

asukachikaruon Ask HN: Most beautiful personal blog UI you have ever seen?

- https://henry.codes/

- https://www.fev.al/

- https://hugo.blog/

I just like this type of typography.

asukachikaruon Good software knows when to stop

Similar thing happened to Diablo II recently as well. Blizzard added a new class and couple of quality of life updates, after not touching it for over two decades other than the pretty authentic resurrected remake. Some of the QoL updates such as loot filter are very long overdue (integrated by competitors and have been asked by the community for years). Blizzard even sent surveys looking for player opinions about further updates for this 25 years old game. All these while D4, the one that should be their flagship product has its expansion announced. I believe there is something other than nostalgia that makes D2 superior than all successors. I don’t believe current Blizzard is capable of adding contents without breaking that authenticity though.

asukachikaruon Doing the thing is doing the thing

No matter how much preparation and training one does, if they haven’t run the marathon, they haven’t run the marathon.

asukachikaruon Treating anxiety as a bug in legacy code (engineering approach)

I tried many tricks (pomodoro, meditation, atom habit, you name it) to fight lack of discipline. TLDR: non really worked, to the point that I’ve accepted that it’s part of my character.

The one that kind of worked, at least for a while, was external reward. I set point for each task or habit I want to achieve, and the longer the streak goes the more point I earn. Point can be used as currency for rewards. I monitored my motivation against the tasks to iterate on the point distribution design. It worked great for six months in which I regularly slept and waked up early, did spanish vocabulary anki sessions, and no phone during remote work (“no phone for two hours” task,) etc., until I used all my point for a M2 IPad Pro which was the ultimate reward I set for myself from the very start.

asukachikaruon Ask HN: Share your personal website

Thanks for doing this! My website:

https://asukawang.com

asukachikaruon Video Game Websites in the early 00s

http://classic.battle.net/war3/ still works. Every time I need to check some OG WC3 data for nostalgia or any other reason I use this instead of fandom.

asukachikaruon Video Game Websites in the early 00s

The manuals as well. Loved the WarCraft III and Diablo II ones. They were legitimately part of the game experiences as lore was told there. Now the publishers don’t even bother to include a single sheet.

asukachikaruon Self hosting my media library with Jellyfin and Wireguard on Hetzner

This is my bottleneck too. I'm all for paying artists, and the hustle of setting up self host doesn't bother me (maybe not for my wife though, who is way less tech-y than me and is in my spotify family plan.) But the benefit of tens of millions of music, a search away, is simply too much for me to give up. I do my annually retrospective in music, and Billie Eilish was my back-to-back favorite artist of the year. Without streaming service, I probably wouldn't have tried her music at the first place.

asukachikaruon Strange.website

His portfolio / blog site is aesthetically my favorite blog of all time out there.

https://henry.codes/

asukachikaruon Ask HN: Does reading HN make you happy?

No, but unfortunately I'm addicted to dopamine hits and HN is the most "organic" one, compared to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, you get the idea. HN is the one makes me the least depressed.

asukachikaruon Ask HN: Working in a language that isn't your native one. How hard was it?

I have been working in a foreign language environment for more than a decade. Probably still sound like a child from time to time.

For some context, my (self observed) fluency of the language is around CEFR C1 level. No issue at all in every day conversation.

Listening / reading for the most part was not a problem i.e. I'm able to understanding and critically thinking about what people are saying in real time.

Speaking was more challenging for me. It took me about three years until the first time I felt I was close to expressing myself without major pause-and looking-for-words. Now it's a lot better, I can and frequently speak in meetings with or without preparation, but my level of expression is still limited, compare to my colleagues.

I feel like speaking for business is similar to children learning any language: I listen to what other adults are saying in what context to what opponent, and I try to mimic that. After several years I got enough vocabulary to get by in day to day tasks, including meetings, writing docs, discuss code designs, etc.

asukachikaruon Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

How about 1000 hours of chess? Or 1000 hours of warhammer? Or D&D?

One may say you make social bonds playing them, but that stands true for video game as well. Speaking for myself, I definitely spent more than 1000 hours on summoner's rift; 15 years later me and my league friends still playing LOL together and chat about all kind of things on a daily basis.

asukachikaruon Ask HN: What are examples of awesome open source project websites?

https://animejs.com/

This is a js animation library so there may be some home advantage but very well made nontheless.

asukachikaruon Slow social media

Never thought about it but banning non personal accounts sounds like a good start. I doubt such social media would gain any meaningful popularity though.

asukachikaruon Building my childhood dream PC

Past threads

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44021824 May, 2025 (86 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44023088 May, 2025 (0 comment)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44026363 May, 2025 (1 comment)

asukachikaruon Exploring the Japanese Toilet Culture Museum

Never figured there was one for Lixil too, seemed quite nice. I recommend a similar one: Toto Museum[1], located at Kitakyusyu, Fukuoka. Been there a couple of times, although I don't recall there were activities such as workshops mentioned in the article, but a fun experience nonetheless for me.

[1]: https://jp.toto.com/en/knowledge/visit/museum/

asukachikaruon The elegance of movement in Silksong

I also played Elden Ring recently. I wish I could share your dopamine rush because I never had one during the playthrough. Certain bosses caused so much frustration that the net sense of achievement for the game was negative for a decent margin. I've also played Dark Souls and Sekiro and I found them better on this aspect. After beating them after an extended period of struggling, my thought was not "I finally got it" but rather "I hope there aren't more bs like this".

Shameless plug and possibly spoilers: I wrote about this in my blog https://asukawang.com/blog/bitter-masterpiece.

asukachikaruon Show HN: I created a free, one-stop navigation hub for Game Developers

Cool idea. Unfortunately, the low contrast between text and background makes it very hard to read.

asukachikaruon Ask HN: Do you still self-host a blog? What's your publishing stack?

Hosted on GitHub Pages, built with React. For now I'm using nextjs, but a self-made static site generator is on the roadmap.

asukachikaruon Ask HN: How do I build a new social network?

Albeit the effect may very depending on the amount of the fee, I find it hard to imagine fee would stop the bot problem. World of Warcraft requires fee for accessing the most recent expansion, as well as the subscription, but it is swarmed by the bots all the same. IMO as long as there are traffic aka money, there will be bots.

asukachikaruon Show HN: Instantly Translate Manga – TranslateManga

There seems to be an obvious mistake in the landing page example. The word `ガキ`(kid / brat) is translated as oyster. I guess the AI mistook the katakana `gaki` into hiragana `kaki (かき)`. You may want to take that into consideration.

asukachikaruon Show HN: Japanese City Name Generator – Using a Simple 3-Layer MLP

Because Japanese words aren't simply a string of random characters, like a string of eight English alphabets doesn't suddenly make it meaningful city names such as Reading or Brighton.

asukachikaruon 50 years of travel tips

> If you hire a driver, or use a taxi, offer to pay the driver to take you to visit their mother. They will ordinarily jump at the chance. They fulfill their filial duty and you will get easy entry into a local’s home, and a very high chance to taste some home cooking. Mother, driver, and you leave happy. This trick rarely fails.

Never tried this so I may be biased but in Japan I can hardly imagine this work out more than one out of ten times.

Other than that many great advices. Looking forward to try the laser out and no reservation ones someday.

asukachikaruon Privacy Pass Authentication for Kagi Search

I subscribed to kagi's $5/m plan since last March, and my usage until now is around 3.3k searches, with the monthly distribution similar to yours. Some months it's more, some months it's fewer.

Currently I'm debating with myself if I should go for the $10 plan. I'm all down for supporting kagi, but surprisingly I didn't use as many searches as I thought.