Hacker News: darekkay

New comment by darekkay in "Flickr: The first and last great photo platform"

darekkay — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:42:06 +0000

There's also Irys (from Alan Schaller). It's more open than Glass, as it's a freemium model, but it's also more closed at the same time, as it doesn't offer a web-based version. It's probably even more photographer-oriented than Glass. For something truly open, there's Pixelfed. All those platforms have their pros and cons, especially regarding the audience. Personally, I publish all my photos on my own website and syndicate them to (in order of preference): Glass, Pixelfed, Instagram, Irys.

New comment by darekkay in "Why Japan has such good railways"

darekkay — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 12:41:44 +0000

This sounds great, especially as it's linked to the IC card. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything similar for JR West or JR Kyushu, which I will be using in the next few weeks. Hopefully they will implement the same system in the future.

New comment by darekkay in "Why Japan has such good railways"

darekkay — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 01:51:59 +0000

But you still have to pick up the tickets at the machine. Additionally, my mobile phone internet is not recognized as "being in Japan", so I can't access the QR code needed for the ticket without wifi. You can work around it (save the QR code when you have wifi), but it all just seems so inefficient compared to all the countries where you can _book_ your tickets using a mobile app.

New comment by darekkay in "Which European countries have the best salaries after taxes?"

darekkay — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:18:25 +0000

Vacation is also never mentioned in those discussions or comparisons. 10 days in the US vs. 20-30 (+ 8-14 public holidays, depending on the state) in Germany is much more important for _me_ than the net income.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...

New comment by darekkay in "Modern CSS Code Snippets: Stop writing CSS like it's 2015"

darekkay — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 02:05:31 +0000

HTML vs. CSS is a separation of technologies. If HTML was really only about the content and the CSS was only about styling, we wouldn't have to write div soups to style our websites (.container-wrapper .container .container-inner { /* "separation" */ }) and we wouldn't have to adjust our HTML when we change the layout.

New comment by darekkay in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

darekkay — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 10:36:33 +0000

That's cool! A small idea: if I can resize the window (nice!), I'd expect the maximize button to work, too.

New comment by darekkay in "Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files"

darekkay — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 07:23:06 +0000

I've been maintaining my bookmarks as plain text (YAML) for years, which I then turn into a single interactive HTML file [1].

[1] https://darekkay.com/static-marks/

New comment by darekkay in "Seine reopens to Paris swimmers after century-long ban"

darekkay — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 21:20:12 +0000

Bonne chance!

New comment by darekkay in "Bots are overwhelming websites with their hunger for AI data"

darekkay — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 22:19:24 +0000

ai.robots.txt contains a big list of AI crawlers to block, either through robots.txt or via server rules:

https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.tx

New comment by darekkay in "Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law"

darekkay — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 11:30:11 +0000

There are web APIs for both.

New comment by darekkay in "Page is under construction: A love letter to the personal website"

darekkay — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 18:36:36 +0000

Check out the following:

- https://indieblog.page/

- https://blogdb.org/

- https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs

New comment by darekkay in "Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time"

darekkay — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 22:51:44 +0000

> the ability to read the whole content in the reader instead of having to go to the site. But that depends on how RSS/Atom exposes the content;

It rather depends on the amount of content the RSS _author_ includes in the RSS feed. There's nothing in the RSS/Atom protocol that prevents you from reading the entire article, but some website creators decide to truncate the feed content.

My RSS reader of choice, InoReader, has the option to download the original website which solves the problem. However, I have over 200 feeds and it's rare to find one without the entire content being included.

New comment by darekkay in "Uchū – Color palette for internet lovers"

darekkay — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 09:25:05 +0000

I've analyzed the palette with my own tool, a11y-contrast[1], and indeed the luminance is not uniform. I wrote [2] about why this might be a desired property of a color palette.

[1] https://github.com/darekkay/a11y-contrast

[2] https://darekkay.com/blog/accessible-color-palette/

Making the video that made Gorillaz

darekkay — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 20:50:53 +0000

Article URL: https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/making-the-video-that-made-gorillaz

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42870990

Points: 222

# Comments: 58

New comment by darekkay in "I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too"

darekkay — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 22:55:42 +0000

> 1000s of requests a day

Some RSS readers are quite aggressive with their polling time. At the same time, a single request may serve thousands of users. However, you can check your logs and get the actual number of subscribers, at least for popular RSS readers: https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/

New comment by darekkay in "I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too"

darekkay — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 22:50:18 +0000

I've once blogged about this technique, in case someone wants to learn more about it: https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-styling/

New comment by darekkay in "Is XYplorer really written in VB6?"

darekkay — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 08:23:57 +0000

I've been using XYplorer for 10 years now and it's fantastic. There are just so many features and quality of life improvements over the Windows explorer.

It's written by a single person, and they're very responsive. I've recently reported a bug with the search (the first that I've noticed in all those years), and it's been fixed within a day. I'm only worried about the bus factor a little.

I have a GitHub repo with some of my settings/scripts/notes for XYplorer if someone's interested: https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/tree/master/xyplore...

New comment by darekkay in "Is XYplorer really written in VB6?"

darekkay — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 08:11:05 +0000

Not the OP, but I've been using XYplorer for 10 years now. I have a sidebar with a few scripts. Here are the ones I use the most:

- Extract selected archives

- Flatten current folder

- Convert selected file(s) to various formats (e.g. JPG to WebP or vice versa)

- Optimize selected image file(s) (smaller file size)

- Prepare image file(s) for publishing on my photography blog: strip irrelevant EXIF, create two variants (thumbnail and a bigger picture); see my post: https://darekkay.com/blog/photography-website/#pipeline

- Prepare image file(s) for sharing - similar as above, but more for sharing vacation photos with my family on WhatsApp)

- Rename files to a certain format (e.g. images to "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss")

- Check selected file with Virus Total

- Start a weekly backup to my external drive

- Backup my server files to my local drive

- Create a rectangle "album art" file, see my post: https://darekkay.com/blog/resize-album-art-images/

Many of those are just shell scripts and apps that I run right from XYplorer, but it's way faster than through CLI.

I've documented some of the XYplorer stuff here (see also the "scripts" folder): https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/tree/master/xyplore...

New comment by darekkay in "Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you"

darekkay — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 08:21:51 +0000

Kagi Small Web (the index is open source) comes to my mind, even though it doesn't specifically focus on UI annoyances.

https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

New comment by darekkay in "Show HN: Struggle with CSS Flexbox? This Playground Is for You"

darekkay — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 12:22:01 +0000

When learning Flexbox, I've created a cheat sheet to look up the properties. Others might find it useful, too: https://darekkay.com/flexbox-cheatsheet/