Hacker News: mourner

Show HN: SunCalc v2 – a tiny JavaScript library for sun and moon calculations

mourner — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:47:57 +0000

SunCalc is one of my first open source projects — made the first commit 15 years ago and it had its share of wonderful uses ever since, but it's been somewhat neglected in recent years. Now that modern AI tools give me the ability to catch up on years of accumulated tech debt and user issues, I finally have the capacity to revive projects like this and keep them in excellent shape.

v2 is a new version that improves the calculations accuracy by 5x for the Sun and by 20x for the Moon, verified by an extensive test harness vs ground truth from US Naval Observatory, in addition to fixing a ton of issues and modernizing the distribution with ESM. Hope you enjoy it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586271

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by mourner in "Map Clustering Is Not My Favorite"

mourner — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:46:18 +0000

Nice article! As someone who implemented both clustering and heatmaps in Mapbox / Maplibre GL JS, just wanted to add that clustering isn't just a visualization technique — it's also a performance feature that can support other visualization types. It might not matter for 30k points, but for e.g. 300k, you can implement dot density with stacked opacity via clustering — use a tiny clustering radius, and style the dots so that opacity is a function of point_count. This creates an approximation of an unclustered viz that performs much smoother. Same thing with heatmaps — you can define heatmap-weight as a function of clustered source's point_count, and it will look nearly identical (aside minor shifts) as the unclustered one, but perform much better.

New comment by mourner in "My Astrophotography in the Movie Project Hail Mary"

mourner — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:37:27 +0000

Amazing achievement, congratulations! Can't seem to be able to read it though, it greets me with "Sorry, you have been blocked" CloudFlare page — is this a HN overloading the website, or did the host accidentally block IPs from Ukraine perhaps?

New comment by mourner in "MapLibre Tile: a modern and efficient vector tile format"

mourner — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 17:05:54 +0000

You can read more about why most web maps are like this and a quest to fix this in this article: https://www.mapbox.com/blog/adaptive-projections

New comment by mourner in "Late night pizzeria nearby The Pentagon has suddenly surged in traffic"

mourner — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 17:47:17 +0000

> Perhaps you see this conflict from the perspective of a sports fan

I see this from the perspective of a Ukrainian living in Kyiv. Your ignorance is mind-boggling, and after the laughable mention of "NATO biolabs" there's truly no sense in further conversation. These tinfoil-head "I do my own research" people are something else.

New comment by mourner in "Late night pizzeria nearby The Pentagon has suddenly surged in traffic"

mourner — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 14:47:05 +0000

Russian war industry just burns reserves for nothing — hundreds of billions spent on missiles and long range drones didn't achieve any strategic objectives, all those expensive modern tanks, armored vehicles and artillery systems gets demolished by $500 drones, russian soldiers mass switching from military vehicles to donkeys, horses, bikes & buggies. Russia is no longer able to defend their vast territory against Ukrainian long range attacks so their oil refineries and military factories explode every day. 150k+ verified deaths (with names) already vastly exceed any russian wars since WW2 and we know there are many times more unverified ones.

Sevastopol nuclear base is irrelevant to modern warfare, and the fleet (both ships and subs) is either on the bottom of the sea (like the flagship Moskva) or gone to hiding in Novorossiysk because they can't defend against cheap Ukrainian naval drones.

Capture of cities not on the agenda — of course every time they fail spectacularly at something they'll claim they didn't plan it anyway, lol. They attempted and failed the capture of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy & Mykolaiv, then had to flee from Kherson & much of the Kharkiv oblast, and they are no longer strategically able to attempt capturing any more — only slow creep over obliterated rubble of small towns by sacrificing a thousand people a day in meat grinders.

I can't believe you can be so delusional, it's just amazing what russian propaganda does to people.

New comment by mourner in "Late night pizzeria nearby The Pentagon has suddenly surged in traffic"

mourner — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 10:31:28 +0000

Soviet stockpiles nearly depleted, 1.5 million dead or wounded, Black Sea fleet practically destroyed, third of strategic bomber fleet destroyed, economy in downfall, no major cities captured in 4 years of all out war, gas and oil revenues plummeting, and there are STILL people saying “oh they just didn’t even start for real yet, just you wait”, gosh. Just laughable.

New comment by mourner in "Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient"

mourner — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 20:33:08 +0000

Yeah, I think I last updated that website even before I released the first version of Leaflet. Life is very hectic at the moment, but I do really want to get to it sooner than later and modernize everything.

New comment by mourner in "Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient"

mourner — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 20:01:43 +0000

Wrote it 14 years ago! https://github.com/mourner/suncalc/ It's a bit neglected but I'll do some upkeep shortly...

New comment by mourner in "Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient"

mourner — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 17:33:37 +0000

Author of Suncalc here — this is exactly the kind of stuff I love to see my code being used in, thanks for sharing!

New comment by mourner in "Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview"

mourner — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 17:19:27 +0000

The updated syntax looks brilliant — can't wait to try it out by upgrading some of my older notebooks! I was worried about the future of Observable since the Canvas announcement — it felt like notebooks were being slowly phased out, but I'm glad to be proven wrong.

Any timeline on bringing the new format to the Web editor? For me, the biggest draw of Observable is being able to instantly start exploring and visualizing some data without ANY setup (creating some local files, installing dependencies, launching a dev server etc.) — just click "New notebook" and off you go, frictionless. I hope this remains a priority.

Also worth mentioning the data viz community aspect, which I used to enjoy a ton — it's a bummer that things like being able to follow certain users and see their new notebooks in a feed were phased out, and that trending notebooks are now hidden under the Help menu instead of being featured on the user's homepage. This might be one of the reasons I stopped coming back to the platform as often, although I realize building a community is very difficult and hard to monetize — just thought I'd share.

New comment by mourner in "Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org"

mourner — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 13:50:24 +0000

Also worth checking out https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler, which maybe a bit less mature, but is much faster than Tilemaker.

New comment by mourner in "Standard Ebooks: liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover"

mourner — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 18:05:27 +0000

Wonderful project! One thing I wish the website would have is being able to find the right book to read out of this enormous list — e.g. showing / sorting by Goodreads ratings (which I realize you might not want to do), or at least having some kind of a "Featured" section with the most critically acclaimed / must read books of the project on one page.

New comment by mourner in "Skype Credit is no longer available"

mourner — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:20:55 +0000

I used it extensively until Microsoft did that absolutely atrocious “redesign” that tried turning it from a messenger into a flashy social app, making it an unusable ugly mess. Telegram was just starting to grow but I had to switch.

When Does the Barbell Tip Over?

mourner — Mon, 13 May 2024 19:53:47 +0000

Article URL: https://observablehq.com/@mourner/barbell-tip-over

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40347569

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by mourner in "A flat map with the least error possible: The Gott-Goldberg-Vanderbei projection"

mourner — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 16:02:07 +0000

The problem with map projections in the digital age is what works well on world scale doesn't on street scale and vice versa. As explained in detail in this post: https://www.mapbox.com/blog/adaptive-projections

New comment by mourner in "Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site"

mourner — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 09:19:44 +0000

Love Bunny too, wonderful service and great team. I wish there'd be an easy way to set up auto-deploy to Bunny Edge Storage on GitHub commit (to avoid doing so manually), but I guess it's not to hard to do through GitHub Actions.

New comment by mourner in "Mozilla names new CEO as it pivots to data privacy"

mourner — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 12:52:37 +0000

Got a bunch of PRs adding missing terms after the article, nice :) Thanks for the mention!

New comment by mourner in "Show HN: Trains.fyi – a live map of passenger trains in the US and Canada"

mourner — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 19:43:38 +0000

A lovely map — thanks for using Leaflet and keeping that little Ukrainian flag in the corner! Probably needs an attribution for the map added too (looks like it's Carto with an OpenStreetMap-derived basemap).

New comment by mourner in "Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?"

mourner — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 09:13:34 +0000

Not too fancy, but I built a math model & interactive visualization of my parking spot to understand how to efficiently park there without bumping into anything: https://observablehq.com/@mourner/kinematics-of-reverse-angl...

Discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891919