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wonger_on Creating the Aetheryte Radio

Neat post, neat site

This broken link made me sad tho: https://radio.haze.cool/public/jungle

I was looking forward to jungle radio

wonger_on Website that plays bangers from Indian barbershops

See also the Indian / Sri Lankan region of https://radio.garden

I love music from that part of the world

Indian metal crossover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi106DZJhuQ

This vocal percussion style is called konnakol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLCGKP6d55E

See also Nusrat Ali Fateh Khan, not too far away

wonger_on Software is about people, not code (2020)

Anywhere we can read some of your story? I'm always curious about devs that went into sales, or sales from a dev perspective

wonger_on Where .env Went Wrong

I'm working with .env and secrets and teamwide configs for the first time, trying to understand solutions from first principles.

Are these valid observations so far?

- .env is the simplest and oldest / most boring solution. Secrets are passed to teammates by DM?

- .env.example seems like a nice home for documentation about secrets

- but I'd rather avoid writing sensitive credentials at all -- instead, teams can use a cloud-based secrets manager and the project fetches secrets at runtime. Is this ever a hassle / any downsides? How standard is this practice these days? I hear this also helps updating secrets so you don't have to e.g. tell every teammate when you rotate a secret. Generally not a fan of introducing a network call and a saas dependency, tho

- non-sensitive environment variables also need a home. I don't like the idea of cluttering the project with a .env.local or worse like .env.development.local

- I hear lots of secrets and config management happens in container orchestration, but what if I barely have a container in the first place? I guess docker compose is one of the simplest tools at this layer?

I guess I'm just looking for a safe, simple solution for a small team, and maybe the problem is that every team does things differently, and that many tools are marketed towards huge enterprise teams.

wonger_on Show HN: Fine-tune an 8B model on a 4 GB laptop GPU

Could you describe more? Your process, resources, use cases, user feedback

wonger_on Diátaxis

Ah ok, thanks for clarifying contrived vs real. Like a videogame tutorial I suppose.

wonger_on Diátaxis

Another documentation model: Fabrizio's seven actions [0]. People read docs to appraise, understand, explore, practice, remember, develop, and troubleshoot, usually in that order.

It feels so natural and obvious compared to Diataxis' forced abstractions, where I'm still left wondering "what's the difference between a tutorial and a how-to guide?"

But! I'm glad for anything that helps people organize and maintain docs.

[0] https://passo.uno/seven-action-model/

wonger_on Why Don't People Use Formal Methods? (2019)

For other interested spectators, I found this post by the author to be a good example of architectural changes in pgrust (along with motivations): https://malisper.me/the-four-horsemen-behind-thousands-of-po...

wonger_on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)

Neat, I'm also planning a lil newspaper hobby project. I'm curious:

- what paper size are you going to use? Like full broadsheet size or zine size?

- and how many pages of content do you think you'll have, given that size?

- black and white, or color?

- where will you get all your content? Designing puzzles, experiments etc seems like it would take a long time

- do you recommend any printeries?

- anywhere we can follow your progress? I'd be super excited to see a first mockup

FWIW, as a web guy, I'm leaning towards designing my content in HTML + CSS and exporting to PDF at a certain page size, probably using playwright.

wonger_on TK, or the secret to effortless writing (2024)

True, but have you ever sliced your LATKE with a POCKETKNIFE?

wonger_on On The <dl> (2021)

Seems like div is the only recommended wrapper element:

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/grouping-content.html...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

EDIT everyone replied at once lol. I'm surprised too about div.

Also, screen reader support: https://a11ysupport.io/tech/html/dl_element

wonger_on Always Be Blaming

I too wish for better tooling for browsing repo histories.

I'm imagining a UI similar to 5-D chess (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Mul...) and maybe like debase (https://toaster.llc/debase/index.html)

wonger_on HTML Lists

Closest thing I know of is https://github.com/kristoff-it/superhtml#diagnostics

  SuperHTML validates not only syntax but also element nesting and attribute values. No other language server implements the full HTML spec in its validation code.

wonger_on Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

Good ideas. It's nice to hear a non-frontender's perspective.

For font sizing and spacing, I always recommend https://utopia.fyi. It generates CSS variables like:

  --step-0: clamp(1.125rem, 1.0739rem + 0.2273vw, 1.25rem);
  --step-1: clamp(1.35rem, 1.2631rem + 0.3864vw, 1.5625rem);
  --step-2: clamp(1.62rem, 1.4837rem + 0.6057vw, 1.9531rem);

  --space-s: clamp(1.125rem, 1.0739rem + 0.2273vw, 1.25rem);
  --space-m: clamp(1.6875rem, 1.6108rem + 0.3409vw, 1.875rem);
  --space-l: clamp(2.25rem, 2.1477rem + 0.4545vw, 2.5rem);

that you can copy-paste across projects. Note this is not a fixed scale (1em 2em 4em), but it grows with viewport size, so bigger screens can have bigger text and looser margins. No more breakpoints; only choose min and max supported viewports, and the rest is interpolated.

I do wonder about interpolating line heights, though. Does anyone who uses utopia.fyi have a good way to manage that?

Re organizing spacing and layout rules, I still struggle with that. One day I'd like to see what https://every-layout.dev/ recommends.

wonger_on When life gives you lemons, write better error messages

Very interesting idea! Adaptive UX seems under explored.

wonger_on Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics

Have you ran into any issues with handling inputs? Like how vim Ctrl+P would maybe be intercepted by the browser Ctrl+P shortcut for print.

And have you run into any other issues, maybe like performance?

I feel like web-ified terminals get nerfed pretty hard and I'm not sure if/how people overcome that.

I like the idea of customizing multiplexed terminals with on-the-fly JavaScript, tho.

wonger_on Show HN: An index of indie web/blog indexes

Maybe a fourth? https://shellsharks.com/indieweb#:~:text=Webrings

wonger_on Show HN: An index of indie web/blog indexes

You can do both, because some people like having per-site color controls.

Like I prefer to read prose and literary website content in light mode while keeping my OS in dark mode.

Admittedly it's a niche use case.

wonger_on Introduction to Atom

A decent technical comparison: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/

Mostly about Atom requiring IDs and timestamps, and having an overall cleaner and less ambiguous spec

wonger_on Why I still reach for Lisp and Scheme instead of Haskell

Not Lisp, but for those interested in editing programs that are running in production:

I read some Erlang article saying that hot swapping is not actually very useful in production because of some reasons, and instead a blue-green deployment is preferred. Can't find the link atm. This was close: https://learnyousomeerlang.com/relups

Compare to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42405168 Hot swaps for small patches and bugfixes, and hard restarts for changing data structures and supervisor tree.

wonger_on A ShaderToy-like playground for ASCII art

https://github.com/ertdfgcvb/play.core

And don't miss the about page either: https://play.ertdfgcvb.xyz/abc.html

wonger_on Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

Yeah, I've been grappling with the definition of creativity too. There's a gamedev talk [0] on creativity that gave me useful perspective. Here's what I wrote elsewhere:

---

i've been thinking about raph's definition of creativity [0]: permuting one set of ideas with another set of ideas

(or trying an idea in new contexts)

this is a systematic process, doable even by machine once enough pattern libraries have been catalogued.

on a small scale, there's sprint.cards [1] or oblique strats [2]. on a large scale, there's llms...

it's freeing to approach creativity as a deliberate practice rather than waiting on some fickle muse. yet it's a bit disappointing to see idea generation so mechanical and dehumanized.

i am comforted by the value of mushy human abilities surrounding the creative process:

mostly 1) taste, the ability to recognize pleasing output,

...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyVTxGpEO30

[1] https://sprint.cards/

[2] https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

wonger_on Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

This stack overflow thread had a pretty good list of terminal plotting tools:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/123378/command-line-unix...

gnuplot, feedgnuplot, eplot, asciichart, bashplotlib, ervy, ttyplot, youplot, visidata

And there's a lovely ASCII plot in the AWK book: https://dn790008.ca.archive.org/0/items/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC...

wonger_on Work with the garage door up (2024)

Yes, and and it might help to have a second stream for those smaller things -- a microblog, notes, or TIL section of your site (I call mine nuggets).

It helps relieve the pressure from full-length blog posts. A place to let yourself drop below a certain level of quality/polish/length. Anything to move beyond a stagnant blog / writer's block!

wonger_on Show HN: Algorithmic String Art, accessible to all

I liked this person's writeup of a string art algorithm: https://michael-crum.com/string_art_generator/

wonger_on Zero-Copy Pages in Rust: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Lifetimes

Ah my bad! Didn't scroll down far enough. Shame. Maybe the fi ligature messed up their spacing.

wonger_on Zero-Copy Pages in Rust: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Lifetimes

You're probably seeing an Android bug. The default Android monospace font borks the spacing of box-drawing characters. It's been like that for several years. EDIT the same thing might happen on some niche Linux distros

wonger_on I learned Unity the wrong way

> Before AI, I got a lot of interviews. Companies would talk to anyone with a reel. Today a beginner can send out fifty applications and not even get a first call. The thing that saved me may not be available to people starting out now. I do not have a clean answer for what to do about that. I only know that interviews were the best school I ever had, and I feel for anyone who is being shut out of that classroom.

wonger_on Spending 3 months coding by hand

Yes mostly in between jobs: https://www.recurse.com/who

Unless you can swing a six week sabbatical and return to your current job

wonger_on Ask HN: Easiest UX for Seniors

I like the AAA WCAG recommendation. I'd also recommend from my casual experience listening to lots of old people...

- a large font size by default, and maybe a font size slider on the homepage. Test everything at 200-300% scale as WCAG recommends

- don't change the UI! Or change as little as possible, at least for existing users. Which kinda upturns the whole always-updating nature of web SaaS but I think it can be done

- hire a good designer who can streamline your UX and screens and keep only the bare minimum features

- maybe offer human support? Like a phone number? Probably unreasonable for you tho

Wish I had ideas for simpler login and auth.

Have you found any successful design strategies in your 10 years? Any insights from user testing?