Hacker News: spython

New comment by spython in "Gradient.horse"

spython — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 13:10:13 +0000

Quite a few actually. Other popular animals: dinosaurs, cats, and snails!

New comment by spython in "Gradient.horse"

spython — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 07:37:49 +0000

Yeah, I too had probably an idealized image of HN - but I guess what makes the HN great is the moderation :)

And it's not like there are no beautiful horses being drawn - I observed quite a few ingenious horses and non-horses coming in in the last hours. But I'm surprised at the level of.. carelessness.

One way of dealing with it would be training a penis-drawing-recognition ai and only show other penis drawings to people who draw dicks. Though it would go against the whole idea of, well, having a moment together.

Substack traffic is hard to quantify, at least for me as I am only looking at HTTP referrers, and I had the feeling the referrer field was mostly filtered out. It is comparable to facebook and mastodon traffic, both in volume and in the sense that it is a slow burn - the link gets share in a small community, and then gets shared a few days later in a different one. In contrast to tumblr, HN and bluesky, where a spike in traffic comes sudden, a cultural moment is shared by many thousands of people, and then the attention mostly disappears the next day.

New comment by spython in "Gradient.horse"

spython — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 04:16:36 +0000

Oh no! Did you use all the colors available?

New comment by spython in "Gradient.horse"

spython — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 03:51:48 +0000

As a bit of an observation - the horses went viral on tumblr, bluesky and to a lesser extent facebook and instagram and smaller pages at different days, so I could observe how the drawing style and content changes:

- Most beautiful horses and least penises were drawn by tumblr users. Maybe because they've drawn a lot of penises before and got it out of their system : )

- Most penises: HN (but I guess it's my fault for saying there is a filter) followed by b3ta.com and twitter

- Most swastikas: twitter and, somehow, HN.

- Most generous buymeacoffee supporters: tumblr

- Most unexpected source of traffic: substack

- Hardest slashdot effect: bluesky

New comment by spython in "Gradient.horse"

spython — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 03:15:32 +0000

The filter does not show directly whether it's filtered out or not - it's silent, otherwise the game would be "trick the AI filter" and that's a totally different genre.

New comment by spython in "Gradient.horse"

spython — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 19:34:18 +0000

Hey, it's my project, nice to see it here! I wanted to do something that I liked in the early times of the web - something small, optimistic and whimsical.

The AI-assisted drawing moderation is inspired by drawafish.com and works quite well at keeping the horse parade family friendly!

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

spython — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:59:05 +0000

https://rybakov.com/ Though it's more about art and UX.

New comment by spython in "Roc Camera"

spython — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 20:41:33 +0000

Like a polaroid shot with an actually good lens. Also the whole performative part of making a photograph is of course much richer with an old, manual camera.

New comment by spython in "Roc Camera"

spython — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 08:22:09 +0000

Absolutely. Running around with a large format camera (Graflex) with an Instax back (lomograflok) and making photos and immediately giving results back to people changed a lot. Strangers were basically lining up to ask about the camera and have their photo taken. That was a really fun experience, and I noticed how much I missed that excitement - before camera phones took over such moments were much more common. Now I build/3d print my own large and medium format cameras, and that also makes it much more interesting, but the fun of instant photography with an ancient looking camera is just incredible.

New comment by spython in "Fuck up my site – Turn any website into beautiful chaos"

spython — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 11:21:20 +0000

Also, Pixel Piranhas: https://rybakov.com/blog/pixel_piranhas/

iPhone alarm times aren't looped, if you scroll enough you will reach the bottom

spython — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 14:54:38 +0000

Article URL: https://old.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1mujz7e/til_iphone_alarm_numbers_arent_in_an_endless_loop/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952267

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Seiko Incredibly Specialized Watch Exhibition (2024)

spython — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 22:51:36 +0000

Article URL: https://by.seiko-design.com/powerdesignproject2024/en/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44818780

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by spython in "RIP Shunsaku Tamiya, the man who made plastic model kits a global obsession"

spython — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 11:07:31 +0000

Which one would you recommend for a novice?

New comment by spython in "Pixel Piranhas"

spython — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 13:09:33 +0000

Absolutely, I feel like there is a lack of expressivity on the web – sure, I can upvote, comment, block/report or go away, but that's basically it. I can't frown, toss thing off the table, spit, grunt, roll eyes, look away, listen intently, nervously touch my face or fidget with my keys. At least not in any socially significant way. And as we spend so much time online, our expressiveness also kind of gets filtered down to the tools that are available. Not bodily expression but a few very limited gestures. So maybe we can imagine and create new gestures?

My other project was about a similar question - what if our emotional life gets reduced to the emojis provided to us by facebook? This was from 2018 so AI images were very new then :) https://rybakov.com/blog/zuckerberg_emojis/

And another, more productive approach was to look at gestures available in the physical library of Sitterwerk St.Gallen and translate it to the digital world. This was before tab groups landed in the main browsers (and tbh. the implementation is still not great): https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/

New comment by spython in "Pixel Piranhas"

spython — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 12:06:24 +0000

Yes, I remember a cute cat living on my desktop, chasing my cursor. Somebody on mastodon also linked to https://kickassapp.com/ - an asteroid game where you destroy DOM elements on websites, a project from 2011.

Somehow the web got very serious lately..

Pixel Piranhas

spython — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 15:08:23 +0000

Article URL: https://rybakov.com/blog/pixel_piranhas/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44550967

Points: 39

# Comments: 13

New comment by spython in "File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern, robust interface"

spython — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 10:02:54 +0000

ForkLift is really good.

New comment by spython in "Carving your space"

spython — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 23:20:23 +0000

A few times in my career I've been looking for exactly this role, a place that would value sense and design/ux sensibility as well as an understanding of what is technically possible. Larger companies don't hire for this role, because it does not have a name. You could write “Temple Grandin for the web”, but that is closer to magic, something non-scalable, a position that is created for a specific person. I ended up working in small teams, often in experimental research positions, but that too is very special and esoteric.

If the role had a name, not even a theoretical foundation but simply a name, then and only then it could actually exist.

New comment by spython in "A counter-intuitive guide to better leadership"

spython — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 21:57:26 +0000

You can calibrate your gut feeling, though. You do it, every day, as you go through life. You get a gut feeling that a specific person might be difficult, and you can override it consciously.

But I often find that the “gut” feeling is more often right, and the unexplainability of it comes from the fact that it takes hundreds of little things into account and models future interaction outcomes and presents the feeling you will have in the end as ”gut feeling”. Your own black box of neural networks in your gut.

New comment by spython in "A counter-intuitive guide to better leadership"

spython — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 20:18:51 +0000

Honestly, my gut is much less welcoming to the idea of me visiting McDonalds than my mouth.

My gut says “I will feel bad”, my mouth screams “tastebuds demand an experience!”