Top all-time · #9790
Alexei Boronine
Personal blog · boronine.com · on HN as boroninedesignprogrammingweb
Alexei Boronine's personal blog at boronine.com covers design, programming and web. Since 2012, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 32 times, most often “Nix, the purely functional build system”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-06-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Alexei Boronine's writing on perceptual colour spaces, including his 2012 'Color Spaces for Human Beings' post and the HUSL/HSLuv colour-space tool, which the comments cite as a human-friendly alternative to HSL and HSV.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /husl/3 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2014-03-04
- Nix, the purely functional build system2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-02-11
- /2012/03/26/Color-Spaces-for-Human-Beings/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-03-09
What Hacker News says?
jacobulus might have been referring to certain color spaces that are optimized for human use instead of for computer manipulation, such as HUSL ( http://www.boronine.com/husl/ ). HUSL gives you a slider that actually changes the apparent brightness of a color to your eye: whereas HSL thinks that bright green is just as “light” as dark true blue, and HSV/HSB thinks that true blue is just as “bright” as white, HUSL co…
Comment linking /husl/
on “All RGB colors in one image”Submitted Color Spaces for Human Beings (2012) as a story · 23 points
HN discussionPlug: I made a color space derived from CIE LUV to help generate colors procedurally. http://boronine.com/husl/
Comment linking /husl/
on “How to Choose Colours Procedurally”Submitted Nix, the purely functional build system as a story · 6 points
HN discussionHere you go: https://www.boronine.com/2025/02/09/Instant-Workspace-Switch...
Comment linking /2025/02/09/Instant-Workspace-Switching/
on “Show HN: FlashSpace – fast, open-source, macOS Spaces replacement”Submitted Why JavaScript Still Sucks as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI also used yabai for this purpose but found a solution that doesn’t require messing with security: https://www.boronine.com/2025/02/09/Instant-Workspace-Switch...
Comment linking /2025/02/09/Instant-Workspace-Switching/
on “From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent”Submitted h2tunnel – TCP over HTTP/2 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionInteresting! I hadn't heard of HSLuv. The original writeup / blog post [1] seems more informative though on "why" (hsluv.org is not a very interesting landing page). I'm a little sad (disclosure: co-author) that we didn't make oRGB [2] more popular. Perhaps we should put some source code online? [1] https://www.boronine.com/2012/03/26/Color-Spaces-for-Human-B... [2] https://www.cs.utah.edu/~bratkova/research/project…
Comment linking /2012/03/26/Color-Spaces-for-Human-Beings/
on “HSLuv, a developer friendly perceptual color space”Submitted Nix, the purely functional build system as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHSLuv does a very good job at making color wheels human-friendly. https://www.hsluv.org/ https://www.boronine.com/2012/03/26/Color-Spaces-for-Human-B...
Comment linking /2012/03/26/Color-Spaces-for-Human-Beings/
on “Practical Color Theory for People Who Code (2016)”Submitted HUSL: human-friendly HSL alternative* as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou may find my Stylus plugin useful: http://boronine.com/colorspaces.js/
Comment linking /colorspaces.js/
on “I can style a whole app with only four hex values and SASS.”Submitted Why HSL sucks and what you should use instead as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI created HUSL as an alternative to HSL, particularly for programmatic palette generation. http://www.boronine.com/husl/
Comment linking /husl/
on “Paletton – Color Scheme Designer”Submitted Nix, the purely functional build system as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat page has a nice graphic clearly showing the problems with HSV and HSL. But the color scheme HSP it invents is not ideal. HUSL ( http://www.boronine.com/husl/ ) is a strict improvement, as you can see from its comparison table of HUSL vs. HSL. HSP fixes the “lightness” problem with HSL, and HUSL fixes that as well as the “hue uniformity” problem.
Comment linking /husl/
on “RandomColor – a color generator for JavaScript”Submitted Show HN: Syntax highlighting theme generator (based on HUSL, human-friendly HSL) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAs the link says, “it's not perfect, as it doesn't take into account the different visual acuity of the human eye in different color channels”. That is why HSV is not appropriate – its H, S, and V scales are only approximations of axes that categorize colors as humans perceive them. For instance, V (value) roughly corresponds to how light or dark a color is, but blue with maximum V is way darker than yellow with max…
Comment linking /husl/
on “RandomColor – a color generator for JavaScript”Submitted HTML5: Less Committees, More Competition as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> at the boundary of what can be done algorithmically with satisfactory results Mostly due to insufficient models of human perception of color. Our perception of color is not accurate, so picking complementary colors based on their actual wavelength will be less pleasing than picking complementary colors based on a perceptual model. I don't think any of the pickers you link to attempt this. One attempt with librarie…
Comment linking /husl/syntax/
on “Show HN: A Color Palette Generator I Built For My Senior Thesis”Submitted On the Joys of Coworking as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHey, I saw your page a while ago! Actually, I ripped it off to demo a project of mine [1] [1] http://www.boronine.com/husl/syntax/
Comment linking /husl/syntax/
on “Show HN: A Color Palette Generator I Built For My Senior Thesis”Submitted You Are Responsible For Your Privacy as a story · 1 points
HN discussionDoes the algorithm use HSL as its color space? I've seen many online palette tools that use HSL color wheels for picking colors. It never made sense to me why they wouldn't use a perceptually uniform color space like CIELUV. I actually made a color space derived from CIELUV specifically for the task of picking colors [1]. I never wrote a 'proper' palette generator using it, but I did make a demo that works pretty we…
Comment linking /husl/syntax/
on “Show HN: A Color Palette Generator I Built For My Senior Thesis”Submitted 3D Printing and the Age of Abundance as a story · 1 points
HN discussionPlugging HUSL [1], a color space created for this very purpose. http://www.boronine.com/husl/
Comment linking /husl/
on “Procedural colors for video games”Submitted Cult of Logic-less Templates as a story · 1 points
HN discussioncouple additional links/libs for human-friendly color models: http://www.boronine.com/husl/ http://alienryderflex.com/hsp.html
Comment linking /husl/
on “Chroma.js – A JavaScript library for color conversions and color scales”related: http://www.boronine.com/husl/
Comment linking /husl/
on “How To Avoid Equidistant HSV Colors (2011)”