Top all-time · #3863
Chirag Mehta
Personal blog · chir.ag · on HN as chimewritingcultureprogramming
Chirag Mehta's personal blog at chir.ag covers writing, culture and programming. Since 2007, 20 different Hacker News readers have linked it 92 times, most often “Every Color Has A Name”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite Chirag Mehta's Name That Color tool, which names a colour from its hex or RGB value, and use it for naming CSS colours and sharing colour names. Comments are about the tool, not writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Chirag Mehta - Personal Web Log - 'blog - Chime Softwares - Indian Blogger live from Saint Petersburg, Florida, St. Pete, FL
Most-linked posts?
- Every Color Has A Name4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-01-14
- /projects/ntc/3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-04-12
- Water sounds simulated with sine waves2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2007-10-21
- /stuff/sand/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-11-10
- /2018121800302 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-01-02
What Hacker News says?
Just found these: [1] Original Fark thread: https://www.fark.com/comments/1826196/Draw-lines-to-alter-fl... [2] My attempt to show others how to run this offline: https://www.fark.com/comments/1826196/17784666#c17784666 [3] My comment about the rehosted/recompiled 960x640 version: https://www.fark.com/comments/1826196/17784943#c17784943 [4] I'm smiling at Finger51's comment: Works great in FF1.5! [5] My original blo…
Comment linking /200512302250
on “Sandspiel – A falling sand game built in Rust and WebGL”Submitted Share HN: I wrote an app to help my paralyzed cousin type significantly faster. as a story · 240 points
HN discussionWow! This thread brings back some fond memories. Long ago, I came across a tiny Java applet linked on Fark to a Japanese forum post. Everyone loved it but I found it annoyingly small. It was barely 300px x 400px. I had been coding my senior thesis in Java and had recently learned how to use a Java decompiler. So I downloaded the applet, decompiled it, spent a few minutes figuring out exactly where the dimensions wer…
Comment linking /stuff/sand/
on “Sandspiel – A falling sand game built in Rust and WebGL”Submitted Signs that (business/life coaches) just want your money as a story · 59 points
HN discussionI had a similar experience about shipping pallet being fully loaded fixing server connectivity issues almost two decades ago: https://chir.ag/tech/?49
Comment linking /tech/?49
on “The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining”Submitted Every Color Has A Name as a story · 42 points
HN discussion> Something happens to companies as they get larger... I think promotion happens. When you're a fresh grad right out-of-college and the Managing Director says "client is our #1 priority", you take it to heart. That's your new mantra now. Nine years later, when the same Director, now promoted to the Board says the same line, you groan inside because you know exactly how often he calls his clients muppets. Slowly you…
Comment linking /200804242130
on “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs”Submitted How to distinguish between tools and raw materials, and more importantly, why as a story · 21 points
HN discussionThis is very well done and looks beautiful. What an iPhone app is made to look like. For everyone who is wondering how he got the hex, and names, etc. there are links in the bottom of the coneapp.io page. Here are the links: > The Resene RGB Values List is copyrighted to Resene Paints Ltd, 2001. Name That Color by Chirag Mehta Resene RGB Values List: http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Color/resenecolours.txt Resene…
Comment linking /projects/ntc/
on “Show HN: My first native iOS app – Cone, a real time color picker”Submitted Name that Color as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI've been using this resource: http://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/ in naming CSS colour variables for years. It can often help with that gray-700/800/900 or gray-light/lighter/lightest issue where another colour needs to be added to the palette between existing values.
Comment linking /projects/name-that-color/
on “Show HN: Colors.lol – Overly descriptive color palettes”Submitted Dear HN: I made a library to let you add a Google-Suggest like search to your site easily as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIronically, the Name That Color website reports the name of color #80881E is Trendy Green ! http://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/#80881E
Comment linking /projects/name-that-color/
on “Parody Color Pitch Deck”Submitted 13 kinds of money - which one do you have/want? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI use a similar app called Name That Color — https://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/#6195ED I like sharing descriptive names with designers instead of naming everything "light blue" "dark blue" "not quite as light but still not dark blue" etc. This new thing is tons of fun but seems a bit less practically useful.
Comment linking /projects/name-that-color/
on “A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors”Submitted Name That Color as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI guess I'm doing it for the end-goal's sake. I really do want people with disabilities to be able to communicate better, including my own cousin. As long as my bills are being paid (regardless of the source of income), I don't need any rewards. I'm not a saint or anything - I just don't want to deal with the overhead of funding, grants, scholarships, sales, marketing, clients, customers. I want to make a usable, in…
Comment linking /projects/ktype/
on “Goodbye to academic research”Submitted Name That Color as a story · 1 points
HN discussionCall me naive but I completely believe sama and yishan. Everyone's trying to find the "real" reason because we're all so used to companies lying or trying to save face in every non-positive situation. Too many times the boy has cried wolf and nobody's willing to believe that this time it's the truth. CEOs stepping down for major screwups citing "spending time with family" has made us question if anyone ever voluntar…
Comment linking /200804242130
on “Why Did Yishan Wong Resign as Reddit CEO?”Submitted Pride as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI wrote something very similar in the same exact month: http://chir.ag/20070725 - Buy Less Stuff. I honestly don't remember if I was inspired by PG's essay or it was just a coincidence. Like 'bcowcher', I even mentioned Fight-Club. So where am I today 3 years later? I still haven't bought a lot of stuff. But I got married in 2008 and now my house is full of my wife's stuff. However, she started to get rid of a lot o…
Comment linking /20070725
on “Stuff”Submitted Building an awesome home surveillance system as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou can name the color too - http://chir.ag/projects/ntc/ It's not an exact match of course but I did my best to make it as close as possible.
Comment linking /projects/ntc/
on “Show HN: What colour is your IP address?”Submitted Name That Color- Finds a color's name by Hex value as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Unfortunately, in our efforts for global domination we quickly discovered the performance limitations of the project as it stood, as well as my personal knowledge with Three.js and WebGL. In short, the expanded version of London ran at a horrible 20–40fps depending on the system you viewed it on. You got a lot farther than me when I tried Three.js before hitting performance problems. I was trying to make a WebGL 3…
Comment linking /projects/wh/bins/bins.php
on “ViziCities Dev Diary #1: Visualising Cities in 3D using WebGL”Submitted Water sounds simulated with sine waves as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI use MBA (4GB RAM upgrade, 128GB SSD) for doing a lot of XCode development. XCode4 runs very smoothly and I've never had any speed issues with running the iOS Simulator. It's light, doesn't heat up, and is very stable. I gave up my http://chir.ag/stuff/5lcd.jpg setup for a single MBA and I couldn't be happier (my electric bill went down by $125/month). From personal experience I know that I'm more productive on 5 L…
Comment linking /stuff/5lcd.jpg
on “MacBook Air is enough for a work machine”I'm definitely in the minority running Windows (x64). Here's a video of my rig: http://www.vimeo.com/9954310 Picture: http://chir.ag/stuff/5lcd.jpg * LCD1: Communication (chat/im, email) * LCD2: Test browsers (IE, FF, Opera, Safari), Photo Editor * LCD3: Main browser (Chrome) * LCD4: Text Editor (EmEditor), SFTP * LCD5: Media (music, video, audio controls) I'm about twice as more productive on this setup than on my…
Comment linking /stuff/5lcd.jpg
on “HN Members' Workspaces”"There have been many competitive versions of Life written over the years." Mistaking "Conway's Game of Life" for "Cellular Automata in general" can produce sub-optimal results. The same thing that makes Life so interesting is that from its simple rules, extremely surprisingly things result. In some sense it is in the class of maximally interesting "suprisingness" as it is Turing-complete. But this same surprisingne…
Comment linking /stuff/sand/
on “Automata: Like the Game of Life, but with violence”Here's one I made (and maintain) that doesn't need a database: http://chir.ag/projects/geoiploc/ but it only does Country name, not city/region. My file is updated once a day and is basically one giant PHP array. It works quite well for parsing through logs and I've used it on many of my hi-demand sites with some caching.
Comment linking /projects/geoiploc/
on “IP Address Geolocation database”
