Hacker News Reader

matteasonon I Built My Own Audio Player

Thanks so much, that's really cool to hear! Let me know if you ever hit any more problems, I've been meaning to blog about a bunch of problems I had to work round in various browsers but haven't got round to it yet, so happy to answer any questions

matteasonon I Built My Own Audio Player

It's actually surprisingly hard to get iOS Safari to keep playing audio with the screen off.

When I made https://ambiph.one I ended up having to route everything through a MediaStreamAudioDestinationNode to trick Safari into thinking it's a livestream, which is apparently the only type of audio allowed to play in the background

Minimal demo here if it's helpful for anyone: https://codepen.io/matteason/pen/VYwdzVV

matteasonon A community-led fork of Organic Maps

Looks like this is the backstory: https://www.comaps.app/news/2025-04-16/1/

matteasonon Show HN: White Smoke, a game of papal politics

This looks fun, but I tried on mobile and the "Your move" buttons all have text-overflow: ellipsis so I can't read the full text of each option :(

matteasonon Show HN: Beatsync – perfect audio sync across multiple devices

This is really cool, thanks for sharing. I've got a couple of pseudo-radio stations on https://ambiph.one/ which are very roughly synchronised for all users but it's based on their device clock so it can get a couple of seconds out of sync very easily. Looking forward to picking through your code to see if there are any techniques I can borrow!

matteasonon Show HN: Wrap Notes – One big text file with multiple projections

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

> If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then. Don't post landing pages or fundraisers.

matteasonon Attention K-Mart Shoppers

If you like this kind of thing (as background ambience or whatever), the 'WJSV broadcast day' recording from 1939 is worth checking out too: https://archive.org/details/001WakeUpMusic

It was apparently the first recording of its type, clocking in at 19 hours: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WJSV_broadcast_day

I chopped up bits of it for the 'Old American radio' option on an ambient sound mixer I made called Ambiphone: https://ambiph.one/?m=1-Ambient+old+radio-bf37bi80

matteasonon Show HN: I Made a Website Change Detection Tool

It looks like you haven't launched yet, and there's just a waitlist sign up?

Show HN is for things people can try, and sign-up pages are explicitly off-topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

There are more tips for Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638

matteasonon A 6-Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno's Music for Airports

If anyone would like to play with something more interactive, I'm testing out some new effects on Ambiphone, my ambient soundscape web app. The test version is at https://test.ambiph.one

There's a basic playback speed control now (basic in as much as it doesn't preserve pitch) plus things like reverb and delay effects

Here's some slowed-down ambient music: https://test.ambiph.one/?m=1-Slow+Realisation-ap50a25c60

And a cat purring at 50% speed makes a pretty convincing lion: https://test.ambiph.one/?m=1-Lion's+Den-aa8a34c60e37f100ac50...

(Audio may be a little glitchy on Android Chrome if you have lots of sounds playing - I'm debugging that at the moment)

matteasonon Claim for a missing tooth

It's as much a licensing issue as anything I think. GOV.UK uses 'GDS Transport', which is a custom cut of New Transport, a commercially-available font [0] which is available for the low, low price of £10k per weight for unlimited impressions. I've never seen any enforcement though (doesn't mean it doesn't happen) and it's pretty common for services not on *.service.gov.uk to end up using it anyway

[0] http://www.newtransport.co.uk/

matteasonon Claim for a missing tooth

Yep! https://github.com/matteason/tooth-reimbursement-service

Localisation is a great idea, I've created an issue: https://github.com/matteason/tooth-reimbursement-service/iss...

matteasonon Claim for a missing tooth

Thank you! I design GOV.UK (and GOV.UK-adjacent) services at work so this was a bit of a busman's holiday

matteasonon Claim for a missing tooth

Okay, calm down, let's take this slowly. First things first: do you already own a spacesuit?

matteasonon Claim for a missing tooth

Séamas gets the credit for that one :) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/mar/16/will-th...

matteasonon Claim for a missing tooth

And not a single politician is addressing it. Shameful.

matteasonon Claim for a missing tooth

It's always "maths" not "math" but we'd always say "the maths says" and I've never questioned it until right now

matteasonon Claim for a missing tooth

Ah how have you set dark mode? I haven't got a dark theme via prefers-color-scheme or anything so whatever is setting it might just be brute-forcing white to black or something. I'll fix it if I can!

matteasonon Claim for a missing tooth

Really glad everyone's enjoying this!

If anyone does use it with their kids:

a) There's a sneaky secret admin page linked at the bottom ('Change settings') where you can set a price-per-tooth and add a custom question for them to answer: https://tf230.matteason.co.uk/admin

b) Please send me a copy of their answers, I'd love to see their drawings! There's a download link on the confirmation page and you can email me at the bottom of the same page. Actually this goes for adults' drawings too because a few people have sent me theirs and they're hilarious

matteasonon Claim for a missing tooth

Oh god I knew this would be contentious

I've just changed it to 'eraser' but actually I should make it conditional on your navigator.language...

matteasonon Claim for a missing tooth

I made this, thanks for sharing it!

Backstory is here: https://bsky.app/profile/seamas.bsky.social/post/3lkigjm7sk2...

...and here: https://bsky.app/profile/matteason.me/post/3lknf6qfsek2p

tl;dr Séamas O'Reilly wrote a column in The Observer about faking a government reimbursement form for his son, who had swallowed a tooth and was worried about whether the Tooth Fairy would pay up if the tooth couldn't be put under his pillow. He published the form as a PDF (linked from the homepage) and I turned it into a digital service

Someone on Bluesky told me about our first successfully-fooled child yesterday: "I can confirm that form TF-230 worked flawlessly, and my cynical, streetwise 8-year-old son was utterly baffled by finding an envelope with his application form and a handful of coins in the letterbox this afternoon."

matteasonon Show HN: I built a website for sharing drum patterns

I hit this on https://ambiph.one - my solution ended up being similar (use an <audio> element) but because I also wanted audio to play in the background and when the screen is off there's an extra step of tricking Safari into thinking it's playing a livestream, since apparently that's the only kind of audio Apple thinks should be allowed to play in the background.

Coincidentally someone asked me about this the other day so I put together a minimal demo here in case it's useful to anyone: https://codepen.io/matteason/pen/VYwdzVV

matteasonon Show HN: Pawsible – Connecting pet parents nearby for mutual pet-sitting

Your Play Store link is broken - this one works: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.pawsible.Pa...

Definitely an interesting idea, and I'm probably the target market. Trust is obviously going to be a huge issue - what kind of required background checks are you implementing?

It also must be really hard getting something like this (effectively a social network) off the ground with enough users to be useful, especially when there's a geographic component. Have you considered focusing on a specific location first and growing from there?

matteasonon Apple's Software Quality Crisis

Yep - overflow: scroll rather than overflow: auto. I've seen Google fall foul of this

matteasonon Ente: Self Host the Google Photos Alternative and Own Your Privacy

There are screenshots on ente.io [0] and their GitHub repo [1]

[0] https://ente.io/

[1] https://github.com/ente-io/ente

matteasonon Show HN: Live-updating version of the 'What a week, huh?' meme

I've noticed https://clicktheredbutton.com quite a lot in my referrer analytics. I don't know if it's as featureful as StumbleUpon was (I never used it) but it seems to have some fun sites

matteasonon YouTube's New Hue

It's a div with a white background and mix-blend-mode: exclusion

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/mix-blend-m...

And yes I hate the cursor being messed with for no good reason. It also creates accessibility issues

matteasonon Show HN: I Created a Pomodoro Timer

Do you have UBlock Origin/some other privacy extension installed? The CORS/SRI errors are from blocked Cloudflare and Plausible analytics scripts. I got the same and they went away when I temporarily disabled UBlock.

The notification permission error probably is a genuine bug

matteasonon Free music archive

I run a soundscape/white noise website (https://ambiph.one) and used FMA to find some really great music for the radio stations, though I did have to do a lot of virtual crate-digging to find it - I found the discovery features very limited.

I had a bit more luck on Bandcamp, which lets artists use Creative Commons licences but strangely doesn't surface that at all as a search filter. I had to resort to searching for "some rights reserved" via Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Abandcamp.com+lofi+%2...

matteasonon Show HN: An AI-only Twitter of bots yelling at each other

Isn't that just regular Twitter nowdays :)

matteasonon Proposed amendment to legal presumption about the reliability of computers

Also, mind-blowingly (to me at least) - Horizon is still in use, Fujitsu are still being given hundreds of millions of pounds to support it, and its replacement isn't due to go live until 2030

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366587174/Fujitsu-set-fo...