Top all-time · #4224
O! Mr Speaker!
Personal blog · mrspeaker.net · on HN as mrspeakerprogramminggames
O! Mr Speaker! is a personal blog at mrspeaker.net about programming and games. Since 2009, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 82 times, most often “Syntax highlighting for writers”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Mr Speaker's posts on tools and small projects: an HN bookmarklet, a jQuery pronunciation post, a Flappy Bird bot bookmarklet, and a jQuery iPhone reference.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Syntax highlighting for writers3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-03-23
- Flappy Bird: Type to jump3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-02-11
- "Diff for HN": Update and highlight changes3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-04-11
- (Nearly) Getting Started with ClojureScript2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-02-18
What Hacker News says?
Holy. Crap. That is mind-boggling. I remember back in 2006 I thought I had taken things too far when I wasted many, many hours of my life figuring out the Line Rider file format: https://www.mrspeaker.net/2006/11/15/line-rider-file-format/ But this is about 10 levels beyond that! Only now do I see I didn't take things far enough by half - this is beautiful and... complete. Just amazing!
Comment linking /2006/11/15/line-rider-file-format/
on “I spent eleven years working on this Line Rider track”Submitted "Diff for HN": Update and highlight changes as a story · 234 points
HN discussionI remember someone had made an early iPhone game out of UI elements (around 2009 ish?). I thought it was such a cool idea, and spent a bunch of time messing around with "ui-elements-as-graphics". My favourite thing I came up with was sine-wave scrollbars: https://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/sinescrollbars/
Comment linking /dev/sinescrollbars/
on “I keep making things out of checkboxes”Submitted Flappy Bird Typing Tutor as a story · 212 points
HN discussionAlso kinda like XBM, a file format that was happily supported in the browser - and you could create the images in JavaScript! http://www.mrspeaker.net/2005/03/27/xmb-images/ - unfortunately, IE was first to discontinue it in 2006 ( http://www.mrspeaker.net/2006/09/04/the-end-of-xbm/ ), and Firefox followed. My guess is it was too obvious of a security hole vector for an image format that no one actually used ;)
Comment linking /2006/09/04/the-end-of-xbm/
on “Replacing Photoshop with NSString”Submitted Even my grandmother got immutability as a story · 53 points
HN discussionThat's why I made a more future-proof version of their "Join the cause" banner code: http://www.mrspeaker.net/2011/03/05/ie6-final-countdown/
Comment linking /2011/03/05/ie6-final-countdown/
on “Microsoft made their own IE6-countdown site.”Submitted Code like you're Notch as a story · 44 points
HN discussionI'm guessing it's drawing based on linked spring physics (and reflected) because I did something similar in 2009: http://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/canvas/springs.html (view-source for code ;)
Comment linking /dev/canvas/springs.html
on “Silk”Submitted The simple genius of Flappy Bird as a story · 41 points
HN discussionMany years ago (back when machines weren't so good at image recognition, and we were still better at something) I made "humans.txt": solve simple arithmetic expressions to ensure your services are being consumed by your intended audience - and not bandwidth-wasting humans. https://www.mrspeaker.net/2010/07/15/humans-txt/
Comment linking /2010/07/15/humans-txt/
on “Humans Not Invited”Submitted Reducing Map: jQuery vs jQuery vs JavaScript as a story · 36 points
HN discussionDamn, I was hoping they'd implemented the humans.txt captcha to keep out humans: http://www.mrspeaker.net/2010/07/15/humans-txt/
Comment linking /2010/07/15/humans-txt/
on “Google humans.txt”Submitted Why don't we expire passwords on the web? as a story · 23 points
HN discussionHere are some of the various HN tools and interfaces I have collected over time: hckr news - http://hckrnews.com/ Sortable HN - http://hnsort.com/ hnvue - http://www.hnvue.com/ HackemUp - http://www.mrspeaker.net/2011/04/11/hackernews-bookmarklet/ Search Y Combinator - http://searchyc.com/ WWHNS (What Would Hacker News Say) - https://github.com/marcua/wwhns/ HNSearch - http://www.hnsearch.com/ Visual Search - http:/…
Comment linking /2011/04/11/hackernews-bookmarklet/
on “Show HN: HN Trends - like Google Trends, but for Hacker News”Submitted JQuery 1.4 iPhone reference app as a story · 23 points
HN discussionHe he, reminds me of the password generator I made concatenating 3 words from the list of the "500 most common passwords": http://www.mrspeaker.net/2009/01/09/make-secure-passwords/ The top 500 list has an awful lot of naughty words - so the phrases are pretty easy to remember ;)
Comment linking /2009/01/09/make-secure-passwords/
on “Xkcd Password Generator”Submitted Typesafe Console: A post-mortem of an interesting project as a story · 17 points
HN discussionHere you go: http://www.mrspeaker.net/2009/11/12/how-to-pronounce-live/ A definitive answer to this very important question.
Comment linking /2009/11/12/how-to-pronounce-live/
on “Differences Between jQuery .bind() vs .live() vs .delegate() vs .on()”Submitted Conventional Interfaces: map/reduce and friends as a story · 13 points
HN discussionMaybe they could site the Star Wars prequels too... There were iPads all through the stupid racer scene. http://www.mrspeaker.net/2010/01/29/ipadme/
Comment linking /2010/01/29/ipadme/
on “Samsung cites Kubrick's "2001" as Prior Art in Patent Case Against Apple”Submitted Making Google+ like Twitter as a story · 11 points
HN discussionI did it with a JavaScript JPG encoder - not randomly flipping output bits, but randomly flipping bits during the encoding: http://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/jpgcrunk/ (Though I kind of have a feeling I pushed my project when this article was posted originally! [Edit: ha, yep, I sure did - someone linked the original discussion below])
Comment linking /dev/jpgcrunk/
on “The Art of PNG Glitch (2015)”Submitted (Nearly) Getting Started with ClojureScript as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI put up the "part one" here: http://www.mrspeaker.net/2011/12/30/colorising-sprites-in-ca...
Comment linking /2011/12/30/colorising-sprites-in-canvas-part-1/
on “"Another World" (game) Code Review”Submitted Selling Swift: what a fool believes as a story · 7 points
HN discussionNeat AI approach to play it. When this first blew up 5 or so days ago I threw together a simple javascript bookmarklet that played the game at: http://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/game/flappy/ It's really poorly formatted and has unused code in it but it was fun to automate and watch. http://pastebin.com/yTmdWgfC To use it just install the bookmarklet, click on it and then start the game. Press space to make it die.
Comment linking /dev/game/flappy/
on “Hacking Flappy Bird with Machine Learning”Submitted Hacking Mac applications as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI was always interested in glitching images - but was frustrated with the checksum/read errors. I took a slightly different approach with JPGCrunk ( http://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/jpgcrunk/ ): instead of modifying the image then trying to display it, randomly mess with the internals of the encoder (I used a JavaScript implementation so it was easy to modify https://github.com/mrspeaker/jpgcrunk/blob/master/scripts/en.…
Comment linking /dev/jpgcrunk/
on “The Art of PNG Glitch”Submitted Sine scroller with HTML scrollbars as a story · 7 points
HN discussion
