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jollyjerryon The Future of Email

It's frustrating not being able to send email for my hobby projects even if I follow all the rules and have the correct headers. I enjoyed reading jeremyevan's post on self hosting email, but it's only for receive and not send https://code.jeremyevans.net/2021-07-29-running-my-own-email...

jollyjerryon Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

It changed the cost/benefits for papercuts. Instead of thinking, that's annoying, but not annoying enough to fix, I can spend a few minutes running things specific to my configuration. Fixing bluetooth, fingerprint readers were recent ones.

jollyjerryon I prefer OG style websites – what are yours?

https://sfbay.craigslist.org/

My last use case for it was selling a car and giving away some free stuff. Sadly, those have been replaced by fb marketplace.

jollyjerryon I prefer OG style websites – what are yours?

Love rockauto, in the same vein, but not used daily is https://www.mcmaster.com/

jollyjerryon The MacBook Neo

This won’t happen, but I would love an Apple implementation of the Samsung Dex - phone soc that can dock into a laptop or desktop enclosure.

jollyjerryon Nook Browser

Lot of nostalgia today. This brings me back to compiling Camino, a gecko based browser, on my iBook G4.

jollyjerryon Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

I used to have a floppy and a mini-cd boot version of these. The mini-cd looks like a credit card and fit into a standard size cd drive. Reading the history of the project is a bit of a bummer, but still love the project ethos.

jollyjerryon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)

Correct and performant way to calculate historical value of a portfolio. I want a pure function, but taking a date as input is insufficient because users can edit holdings, and securities can split.

Weighing the tradeoffs of doing this calculation server or client side. That'll be an architecture shift away from my current set of background jobs fetching state and towards something more functional and on-demand.

https://jch.app

jollyjerryon Google Finance Beta

I was just chatting with a friend how it hadn't changed in years, but there's a new beta when I opened it up.

- dark mode

- 3-column responsive layout, interesting it hides the watchlist

- like the view transitions for expanding content

- improved charting

- removed portfolio and holdings. Likely unpopular, but I thought it was a good way to track investments across banks without a 3rd party aggregator

jollyjerryon Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

I like reading to my kids and try to read to them in English and Mandarin. My Chinese is conversational, but I have a hard time finding books for them because I’m not good at writing. Something like this with language learning tools would be awesome.

I also like making up stories when we go on hikes. Long, rambling stories about unicorns befriending spiders and flying to faraway lands.

jollyjerryon Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

Like the layout tiles you have for the photo thumbnails. Will dig through and learn some css. Have struggled with different size content to create a compact masonry layout.

jollyjerryon Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

Living in hongkong for a few months, and absolutely love exploring the different neighborhoods. I’d love something like this or walkscore but for local guides to contribute.

jollyjerryon Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

Radio is so much fun to learn. It’s liberating to learn for curiosity and joy rather than commercialization. The community is welcoming, and while not directly translatable for most paid work, it does teach general problem solving skills.

jollyjerryon Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

Financial independence tracker. https://jch.app

Redesigning investment holdings for wider screens and leaning on hotwired turbo frames. Thankful for once-campfire as a reference for how to structure the backend. The lazy loading attribute works great with css media queries to display more on larger viewports.

Enjoying learning modern css in general. App uses tailwind, but did experiment with just css on the homepage. Letting the design emerge organically from using it daily, prototype with tailwind, then slim it back down with plain css.

jollyjerryon Show HN: Lost $500 because I couldn't find a receipt – built SlipCrate

From a PWA, I'd prefer a push notification, but you'd get a different answer from each person you ask.

jollyjerryon Show HN: Lost $500 because I couldn't find a receipt – built SlipCrate

Looks good! Appreciate that it’s a pwa instead of an app because it’d be something I use rarely. My issue isnt with the app, it’s that I’d have to remember to upload a receipt and also to find it in this app if I needed it again.

jollyjerryon Ask HN: Has anyone else been unemployed for over two years?

3 years. Left work because I felt comfortable with finances and family life, but wanted to try something different. It’s been fun working on personal projects and sharpening old tools. Still figuring out what I want to do long term. Some ideas include becoming a CFP because I like helping people with their finances, working for a tech company in that domain, or expanding the personal project (jch.app) and building more community.

In a good headspace now, right after the first year was feeling lost on where to go next.

jollyjerryon Client side include feature for HTML

Ya, no need comments or updates to it either. But thought it was an interesting piece of web development that's come up in every web framework and server, but has not been pushed into the browser. Would be interesting as a js polyfill even.

jollyjerryon No CSS, No JavaScript. Longevity on the Web

Thanks for touching on accessibility. I believe that good accessibility leads to a better design. The nice thing about starting with HTML is there are good defaults.

I wrote another post about building a search form about progressively enhancing a search form (https://jch.github.io/posts/2025-01-30-building-modern-searc...). Starting with semantic <search> and <input> elements gives sane browser and screenreader behavior.

Perhaps my title came on too strong, but I'm not advocating against javascript. It's more about understanding capabilities HTML and CSS can handle, and what is better suited for JS.

jollyjerryon No CSS, No JavaScript. Longevity on the Web

The guide is concise and well written. I like how it builds in the same sequence I blogged about: HTML, CSS, JS, and introduces each in a small way with links for further study. I like how it starts with a static site, but I think the end of the guide could include an example for server side processing. It was clever to use 3rd party example like search with fetch, but an example with a small JS backend to process a form and persist to a database / file would tie it together. It sounds like server-side is out of scope for the framework, so perhaps a few examples of small backends and how to plug in?

When I was reading the header/footer section, it reminded me of this issue to push for first-class includes in web platform https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/2791

jollyjerryon No CSS, No JavaScript. Longevity on the Web

> Your Rails backend, on the other hand, will experience far more changes and API instability in the long run

I see this as different layers of stability. On the bottom is a solid foundation of web standards that's widely adopted and resilient to breaking changes. Layered on that is the web framework and language. Before ruby, I really enjoyed perl, so I've experienced the collapse of a language and community. Matz had some good insights drawn from the history of other languages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MM5b2F9zrM

Javascript is fascinating because of its evolution. Its initial popularity and wide install base guaranteed a lot of resources for it to grow. I'm excited to see whether wasm can bring more languages to the web.

jollyjerryon No CSS, No JavaScript. Longevity on the Web

Left out of the post, but the stack is rails, turbo, and stimulus. Hosted on a 2016 MacBook Pro with a dead battery in my closet

jollyjerryon Show HN: Ductape – Build back end integrations once, reuse them anywhere

Your explanation in this post makes a lot more to me than your site.

jollyjerryon MonkeysPaw – A prompt-driven web framework in Ruby

> Natural language as source code: Your intention becomes the program

Reminds me of Cucumber testing framework

jollyjerryon Show HN: We made a photo search engine for homes for sale

- I liked the 'surprise' button because I wasn't sure what to type in the search box. I'm so used to typing a location by default. - I like your examples in this HN post and also the categories below the fold. - I like that I can favorite things without registering an account. I've been experimenting with guest accounts and blank states on my site. - When I search for multiple words from the search tab, acts funny. "big windows" became "big". I tried a refresh and the autocomplete said "big windows", but submitting with enter filtered it to "Bath, UK". Maybe there's some timing issue here with fast submits? - I prefer the screenshots / pitch you have on the app store over the website. I like the idea of browsing and filtering, rather than starting with a specific search. Again, that first point that this is something different than location search and helping me understand what I'm supposed to do.

Beautiful site, well done! I love the idea. I'm based in the US.

jollyjerryon The subtle art of designing physical controls for cars

Appreciate the post and the discussion around it. As a car enthusiast, I enjoyed reading the specific implementations out in the wild today.

What stood out in the article was the attention paid to designing intuitive haptics. What our bodies expect in feedback when we turn a weighted dial. Doing it in software allows controlling multiple things, but I would still prefer a dumb dial per function, placed in close proximity to where the function acts. Seat controls near seats, climate controls near vents. Personalization stuffed into the screen and menus and profiles.

I did not think I would like auto climate controls until I lived with one. Even then, I would fiddle with it because I didn’t like the sudden high initial fan speed until I got used to it.

jollyjerryon Casio A-158 sensor watch, custom firmware

Added functions:

Simple Clock Daylight percentage Sunrise/Sunset Timer Face (Advanced Countdown) Alarms (16 alarms) Stock Stopwatch Moon Phase Pulsometer Alarm Thermometer Toss Up (rolling dice/flip a coin) Time Left (Days passed since my birth/Days left to 90years old) Secondary faces

World Clock (Dual Time) Tally Counter Save/load Databank (Emergency phone numbers +important passwords) Preferences Set time

jollyjerryon Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

I enjoy reading the daily news fetched from calibre and synced to my kindle e-reader. Love the e-ink display, and the ux for reading and navigating sections is great.

jollyjerryon Hy 1.0 – Lisp dialect for Python

This reminds me of Berkeley's CS61A when it was taught with Scheme. One of the projects was writing a schema interpreter for scheme. It felt silly, but was a great small project to show case recursion, trees, and blurring the distinct between data and code.

jollyjerryon Try Clojure

I still remember Professor Brian Harvey rolling out his terminal on a cart in Berkeley's CS61A and typing out commands in a scheme repl. Learning what a y-combinator was with Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and building my own scheme compiler with scheme.