Hacker News: stankot

Show HN: Monorail – Turn CSS animations into interactive SVG graphs

stankot — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 20:39:39 +0000

Hey HN,

I needed a few simple graphs for a blog post [0]. Instead of slapping together a few SVGs and moving on, I decided to write a whole library to parse CSS keyframe animations and convert them to interactive graphs.

It ended up being a rabbit hole, with a lot of caveats. But it was fun to make, and I'm really happy with the graphs it produces.

I'm not sure how useful it will be for others. If you end up using it, I'd love to see how - feel free to reach out.

It's open source [1] under the MIT license. Written in TypeScript with no dependencies.

Let me know what you think!

[0] https://muffinman.io/blog/css-image-glitch/

[1] https://github.com/Stanko/monorail

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44437812

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Show HN: Bard – An Experiment in Robot Poetry

stankot — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 19:36:49 +0000

Hey HN, This is a small project I made for a meetup (Creative Coding Amsterdam's poetry afternoon). With all the hype around LLMs these days, I wanted to create something silly and fun.

I ended up with Glitchy BARD, which generates crappy poetry. It uses source text transformed into n-grams, while rhymes rely on the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary[0]. For the voice, I used the native SpeechSynthesis API instead of a fancy AI one.

Everything runs on the client, but you can share a song via URL, which includes the random number generator seed.

It's open source[1], though the code is a bit chaotic as I was experimenting a lot and never cleaned it up. A blog post about the CSS glitch effect[2] even gained some traction on HN.

I'd like to turn this into a proper talk, mostly because it was so much fun to make and touched a lot of different areas - language models, rhymes and poetry, pixel art (which is a pain do to on web), speech synthesis, CSS animations... I gave an internal presentation at my company and got very positive feedback.

So let me know what you think and if you have any questions about BARD, please shoot.

[0] http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict

[1] https://github.com/Stanko/bard/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44221907

edit: link formatting

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44427023

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by stankot in "Show HN: I made CSS-only glitch effect"

stankot — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 09:48:00 +0000

I've figured it out. The error means that this call fails:

    const animation = animationElement.getAnimations()[0];

As Firefox supports `getAnimations` since 2020, I figured something else is messing up with it. I've tried to enable "reduced motion" in the system settings and it broke the animation!

It is because I had force-disabled all animations on the site when this option is enabled.

I patched it, it should work now. Thank you for your help!

EDIT: typo

EDIT2: I also added simple error handling to display a message if parsing the animation fails.

New comment by stankot in "Show HN: I made CSS-only glitch effect"

stankot — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 14:12:52 +0000

Go for it, and share a link!

New comment by stankot in "Show HN: I made CSS-only glitch effect"

stankot — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 21:37:09 +0000

Thanks for checking, I’ll try to see what is going on.

New comment by stankot in "Show HN: I made CSS-only glitch effect"

stankot — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 17:47:25 +0000

That is weird, because it is HTML/CSS only. Do you see anything that would help me debug it? Could it be that an add-on (content blocker) messes up with it? I don't have an android device to test. I don't see any issues on desktop and ios though.

New comment by stankot in "A simple 16x16 dot animation from simple math rules"

stankot — Sat, 10 May 2025 15:32:42 +0000

Tixy is amazing! I built something very similar:

https://muffinman.io/pulsar/

I wanted to create animations for my LED matrix screen, and I couldn’t find tixy anywhere. Only after I built pulsar I found it again.

Another similar project is https://sliderland.blinry.org/ which uses HTML sliders.

Fun stuff!

Ask HN: How do you ensure you don't get locked from your email?

stankot — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 22:05:26 +0000

Big parts of our digital lives depend on our email address (personal, professional, financial…). I’m wondering how you've secured yourselves to prevent getting locked out of your email?

Of course, using my own domain is a no brainer, but I’ve heard horror stories of people getting kicked from their domains.

It feels like we are always at some company’s mercy, a mail provider, a domain service or something else.

I’m definitely overthinking, but it was triggered by a large financial institution that doesn’t support adding a recovery email.

I’m curious how you folks handle this, thanks!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43757010

Points: 7

# Comments: 8

CSS-Only Glitch Effect

stankot — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 21:22:15 +0000

Article URL: https://muffinman.io/blog/css-image-glitch/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43575607

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by stankot in "Kagi for Kids"

stankot — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 22:26:48 +0000

I stumbled on this some time ago and saved it for when my kid grows up enough. It is a collection of a few thousands kid friendly videos. I think their curation is pretty good, but check it out for yourself.

https://thekidshouldseethis.com/

New comment by stankot in "Show HN: Image comparison slider in 6 lines of JavaScript"

stankot — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 16:29:24 +0000

Thank you! There is nothing wrong with large libraries. But you are right, there is something very satisfactory in solving a problem in a few lines of code.

Bunny Jumps Again

stankot — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 22:09:02 +0000

Article URL: https://muffinman.io/blog/bunny-jumps-again/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143780

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by stankot in "Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI"

stankot — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 22:13:00 +0000

Thank you, you made my day!

New comment by stankot in "Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI"

stankot — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 19:44:16 +0000

Thanks for the tip! Does it make paper shiny and stiff?

New comment by stankot in "Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI"

stankot — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 17:38:17 +0000

This is awesome! I’ve seen it but forgot to bookmark it, thanks for sharing it again.

New comment by stankot in "Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI"

stankot — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 17:05:57 +0000

Sure, I think the hard part is creating hand drawn animation. If you can draw or generate it, the rest is fairly straight forward.

I have an idea for somewhat different flip animation, stay tuned :)

New comment by stankot in "Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI"

stankot — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 10:30:51 +0000

Actually that's my usual approach, but you should see the vector output from these. I tried doing it and than went back to cleaning up the raster images.

New comment by stankot in "Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI"

stankot — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:43:16 +0000

For me, pen plotting is a lot of fun. There is something so satisfying in bringing digital work to the physical world.

As for the text, I have it on my todo list to create a few single line fonts, for some time now. The obvious one is my own handwriting, ideally with some randomness built in. I would like others to be less conventional to sprinkle them in my drawings, or like you mentioned, to create some pieces that are text only.

New comment by stankot in "Show HN: I made a tiny book using a pen-plotter and AI"

stankot — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:17:48 +0000

That is correct. I use AxiDraw SE/A3 and I love it. One of the best purchases I ever made.

Show HN: The Tiny Book of Great Joys

stankot — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 20:23:49 +0000

Hey,

I want to share a personal project: I made a tiny pen-plotted book for my wife. I did everything myself—drawings (with some help from Midjourney), plotting, cutting, and binding. I even used a 3D printer to make a helper tool.

It's absolutely over-engineered, but I enjoyed it a lot. Multi-disciplinary projects, especially those with a physical output, are a lot of fun for me.

The post covers the process in detail, but if you're interested in anything specific, let me know.

Cheers!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43040821

Points: 1

# Comments: 0