Hacker News: ianthehenry

New comment by ianthehenry in "Terpstra Keyboard"

ianthehenry — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 17:46:37 +0000

Well the only moving part in a typing keyboards is a mass-produced switch that you slot into a PCB. There are mass-produced hall effect switches that can provide velocity sensitivity, but it's a pretty distant comparison. The keys on a lumatone aren't anything like buttons; they're weighted mechanical arms with significant travel -- much more like a piano key than a keyboard key. And it has 280 of these! The degree of mechanical hardware in this thing makes it seem not really comparable to a PCB with some switches slotted into it.

That said! There are people making DIY isomorphic keyboards using hall-effect keyboard switches. None are commercially available right now, but see e.g. the MidiHex at https://gullsonix.co.uk/. You could make one for a fraction of the cost of a lumatone -- but of course it would be a very different instrument.

New comment by ianthehenry in "Tuxedo No. 2 – Cocktail recipes"

ianthehenry — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 02:22:13 +0000

I like this website a lot and used it as the base recipe book for a program that will tell you what cocktails you can make with the ingredients you have, but also what cocktails you are “one ingredient away from.” https://github.com/ianthehenry/mixologician

It’s a little datalog script - input is a text file, output is a text file. I’ve used it a few times to decide what to pick up at the store!

New comment by ianthehenry in "Why Janet? (2023)"

ianthehenry — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:55:48 +0000

https://github.com/ianthehenry/janet-module/blob/master/init...

This is a very very barebones version of this, but it’s not too hard to construct environment tables dynamically

New comment by ianthehenry in "Why Janet? (2023)"

ianthehenry — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:54:14 +0000

The `import` macro extends the current environment with prefixed symbols from another environment. But the environment is a first-class object that you can hold and manipulate and use in arbitrary ways — `require` is the lower level primitive that `import` is built on.

New comment by ianthehenry in "New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste"

ianthehenry — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:10:36 +0000

And a Blue Planet II video of a brine pool, stronger content warning for much more horrifying death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwuVpNYrKPY

New comment by ianthehenry in "Shaders: How to draw high fidelity graphics with just x and y coordinates"

ianthehenry — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 15:32:19 +0000

The next chapter is about SDFs, but it is not available yet.

https://www.makingsoftware.com/chapters/rays-and-sdfs

New comment by ianthehenry in "How functional programming shaped and twisted front end development"

ianthehenry — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 14:47:40 +0000

Bonsai is a frontend framework that models data as an explicit graph, separate from any “component hierarchy” or DOM structure. State can live anywhere in the application graph, whether or not it’s associated with DOM nodes, and you eliminate all of the “move this state to the parent to share it” ceremony by just having “components” return their views and “outputs” at the same time (if they want).

It’s pretty great and hard to imagine going back to a React-like component hierarchy.

New comment by ianthehenry in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)"

ianthehenry — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 21:04:10 +0000

I'm working on adding something like https://graphtoy.com/ to my lisp-based 3D art tool https://bauble.studio/. It's really useful to visualize functions like this, especially when writing animation curves that vary over time.

It's easy to add it as a plain overlay over the screen if you're graphing a function, but I really want it to be able to plot arbitrary expressions with free variables where it just infers the axes, so you can just see values overload in the orthographic view (press alt-q to see that). That way you can just write something like (ss p.x 0 10 | graph) on any expression and visualize it as you go. I haven't quite figured out how to make it seamless though...

New comment by ianthehenry in "Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen"

ianthehenry — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 06:33:04 +0000

If this kinda thing piqued your interest and you want to play around with this idea, paste the following code into https://bauble.studio/:

    (def octaves 4)
    (def lacunarity 2.00)
    (def persistence 0.50)
    (def period 100)
    (def height 40)
    (plane y (fbm octaves :f lacunarity :gain persistence perlin p.xz period * height)
    # try s/color/shade on the line below
    | color (ss p.y -20 0 blue (ss p.y 0 20 green white))
    | slow (20 / height)
    | intersect (sphere 200))

(Using the terms from the article.) You can right-click and drag those numbers to see how the parameters affect the result in realtime. Also an easy way to compare perlin and simplex noise. Procedural terrain is fun!

Also while this uses 2D perlin noise -- you're just changing the height of a plane -- you can create some pretty detailed neat "rocky" terrain effects by using 3D perlin noise instead. Change "p.xz" to "p.xyz" to see what that looks like.

New comment by ianthehenry in "Building Bauble"

ianthehenry — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 17:51:03 +0000

okay, that's helpful. the "undefined is not an object" bit is definitely a function of the "failed to create webgl2 context" error -- it tries to reference it unconditionally. no idea why it can't create the graphics context in the first place, though (and not much to do without one)

New comment by ianthehenry in "Building Bauble"

ianthehenry — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 16:45:59 +0000

huh, that's no good. it works fine for me on safari 18.1. would you share the line that it's raising on? no other errors before that one?

New comment by ianthehenry in "Building Bauble"

ianthehenry — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 14:41:59 +0000

I ordered them from sculpteo — the only service I could find that would do it. Very happy with everything I’ve gotten from them. It is very very expensive if you want to make anything large, but for small jewelry-scale stuff it’s not too crazy. The balloon is seven custom parts so that was pricey ($250 total?), but the other two models were around $50 each.

Building Bauble

ianthehenry — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 22:22:15 +0000

Article URL: https://ianthehenry.com/posts/bauble/building-bauble/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42660942

Points: 205

# Comments: 26

New comment by ianthehenry in "Janet for Mortals (2023)"

ianthehenry — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 16:55:48 +0000

It's complicated; Calvin Rose was the original creator of Fennel ("fnl"), but I understand it was just a little side project that he made over the course of a week or so in college. Phil Hagelberg found the project years later and thought it was cool, took over as its maintainer, and basically turned it into the Fennel you know today. So it's like, kind of, I dunno, both things are kinda true.

New comment by ianthehenry in "Janet for Mortals (2023)"

ianthehenry — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 16:44:08 +0000

hi, i am the author of this book and i agree with you. it's not a good connotation. i chose it because: 1. it is kinda memorable (look there are so many programming books with exactly the same name) 2. the language is named after an immortal being who guides mortals through the afterlife in the fictional property the good place, so there's some kinda connection. but i agree the implication that janet is somehow "hard" to learn or that the author is somehow "on a higher plane" is bad. i waffled on this a lot but never came up with another title i could stand and ultimately just pulled the trigger. (but note that i left myself some wiggle room with a neutral domain name.) i hope the tone of the book itself helps to counteract the title, but ya know who knows

New comment by ianthehenry in "Janet for Mortals (2023)"

ianthehenry — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 15:09:04 +0000

delete the contents of the script and then refresh — you’ve loaded an old version of bauble before and have the old tutorial cached in localStorage :/

New comment by ianthehenry in "Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?"

ianthehenry — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 21:27:08 +0000

hey thanks!

New comment by ianthehenry in "Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?"

ianthehenry — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 16:59:46 +0000

Thanks! Here's the source:

    (color r2 (vec3
      (fbm 8 :f (fn [q] (rotate (q * 2) (pi * sin (t / 100)) + [t 0]))
        (fn [q] (cos q.x + sin q.y /)) q (osc t 30 30 10) | remap+)))

Basically taking the function (1 / (cos(x) + sin(y))) and adding it to itself 8 times, each time scaling and rotating the input a little more (:f).

I'm curious if it looks the same on all GPUs because it kinda relies on floating point precision errors to give it that film-grainy textured effect. And it definitely divides by zero sometimes.

New comment by ianthehenry in "Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?"

ianthehenry — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 13:30:12 +0000

Oh yeah if you clear localStorage like from dev tools, Bauble will re-save the script before refresh, putting it right back where it was. But if you like cmd-a backspace to empty the contents of the script and then refresh it’ll load the default.

New comment by ianthehenry in "Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?"

ianthehenry — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:14:59 +0000

Depending on the data, maybe? SDFs aren't great at rendering large numbers of enumerated objects -- something like a point cloud would be prohibitively expensive, so I wouldn't think to use them for like traditional graphing.