Top all-time · #1193
James Stanley
Personal blog · incoherency.co.uk/blog · on HN as jstanleyprogramminghardware
James Stanley writes jes's blog, a personal blog at incoherency.co.uk about programming and hardware. Since 2013, 57 different Hacker News readers have linked it 193 times, most often “Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (24) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
James Stanley's blog is linked for cryptography and privacy articles, the Sockfish chess-cheating proof of concept, and web projects such as the Nightdrive driving page and a Countdown practice game.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Nightdrive music called amazing; Countdown game called great; crypto and privacy articles called good.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 24 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2022-07-30
- FreeCAD vs. SolveSpace4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-05-23
- Autopatzer: My Automatic Chess Board4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-05-06
- Hiding Messages in Chess Games4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-10-09
- Nightdrive4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-09-21
- Mojibake Steganography2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-03-27
- Show HN: Hardbin: The world's most secure encrypted pastebin2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-05-18
- Someone Created a Tor Hidden Service to Phish My Tor Hidden Service2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-10-13
- Student Loan Deductions2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-08
- Hacker News is more interested in Bitcoin when there's a bubble forming2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-07-30
What Hacker News says?
Music version is amazing: https://incoherency.co.uk/nightdrive/
Comment linking /nightdrive/
on “Nightdrive”Submitted Nightdrive as a story · 1440 points
HN discussionThis gentleman made a great web game for the UK TV show, Countdown. Been using it for years... https://incoherency.co.uk/countdown/practice/
Comment linking /countdown/practice/
on “Nightdrive”Submitted Encrypted email is still a pain as a story · 544 points
HN discussionIt’s 11 o’clock at night and this is absolutely perfect. Bravo on the music version. https://incoherency.co.uk/nightdrive/
Comment linking /nightdrive/
on “Nightdrive”Submitted Cheating at chess with a computer for my shoes as a story · 519 points
HN discussionHah, cool, I had an idea for a similar project (although I'm not crazy enough to make 1000 pixels, or a robot to turn them for me). But I got as far as making a JavaScript simulation and realised I couldn't be bothered manually turning the beads https://incoherency.co.uk/beadboard/
Comment linking /beadboard/
on “Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display”Submitted Librem 5: First Impressions as a story · 296 points
HN discussionSometimes I wonder if it's a good idea to brute-force these kinds of "vanity" onion prefixes. Take a look at the addresses used in http://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/hidden-service-phishin... ; they brute-forced the same prefix with a different suffix. Would anyone really notice?
Comment linking /blog/stories/hidden-service-phishing.html
on “The New York Times Is Now Available as a Tor Onion Service”Submitted Someone Created a Tor Hidden Service to Phish My Tor Hidden Service as a story · 273 points
HN discussionIf you like SolveSpace but want something more powerful, you should try FreeCAD. Yes, it's harder to get started, and it's less fun to use, but it is more powerful. I wrote a comparison of the two earlier this year[0]. [0] https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/freecad-vs-solvespace...
Comment linking /blog/stories/freecad-vs-solvespace.html
on “Software I’m thankful for (2021)”Submitted Chess Steganography as a story · 224 points
HN discussionI quite like this guy's choice of green text and background shade of grey... from a post I saw here recently... https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/nightdrive.html But go with your choices, it can take time over a few sessions. Notice colours in the real world and notice ones you like.
Comment linking /blog/stories/nightdrive.html
on “How to build a personal webpage from scratch”Submitted I made a mechanical keyboard with 3D-printed switches as a story · 188 points
HN discussionI don't have a great single resource unfortunately. I'd like to put up a web page about it at some point. This is the github repo that contains everything: https://github.com/jes/scamp-cpu/ - some of the stuff under "doc/" might be what you're after (but some of it is just incoherent ramblings). I have some blog posts here: https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/tags/cpu.html And there is a video here, but it's not really v…
Comment linking /blog/tags/cpu.html
on “Advent of Code 2021”Submitted Home 3D metal printing: first results as a story · 187 points
HN discussionjstanley here on hn made such a cheating device as a hobby project: https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/sockfish.html
Comment linking /blog/stories/sockfish.html
on “Dear Chess World”Submitted Someone used my IPFS gateway for phishing as a story · 170 points
HN discussionThe worst part about web colour is that it's not even consistent. If you draw a PNG containing a rectangle with a given colour on to a page with background colour of the exact same RGB values, then it can look different. Here's an example: https://incoherency.co.uk/interest/colour.html And here's a screenshot of how it looks on my browser (Firefox 99.0, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS): https://img.incoherency.co.uk/3812 The squar…
Comment linking /interest/colour.html
on “Web color is still broken”Submitted I made a macro keypad with 3D-printed switches as a story · 150 points
HN discussionHis name is James Stanley. His personal blog is https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/ , and it has many good articles about privacy and cryptography applications, such as Tor and IPFS, some has made to the HN homepage. You can obtain such an anonymous physical phone number from his personal service, https://smsprivacy.org/ , by paying 0.003 Bitcoin, at the current market price, about ~12-15 USD, per day. Such a high cost…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)”Submitted The story of Max, a real programmer as a story · 130 points
HN discussionI actually don't really like the OpenSCAD-style interface. For me FreeCAD is the current state-of-the-art in CAD. But if you are into code-style SDF interfaces, I have some links on https://incoherency.co.uk/notes/sdf.html
Comment linking /notes/sdf.html
on “Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)”Submitted Scamp – a homebrew 16-bit CPU as a story · 129 points
HN discussionI'm working on a new open source CAD program for 3d printing based on Signed Distance Functions. Benefits of SDFs over the standard Boundary Representation (used in Freecad and similar) are that you can do "pattern" operations with domain repetition, which means making N copies of a feature is O(1), vs O(N^2), you can deform objects with domain deformation, which means if you have a closed-form representation of how…
Comment linking /blog/stories/frep-cad-building-blocks.html
on “Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)”Submitted Hacker News is more interested in Bitcoin when there's a bubble forming as a story · 124 points
HN discussionI'm James Stanley. I blog at http://incoherency.co.uk/ I already operate https://smsprivacy.org/ which is essentially a VPN for SMS. I don't have any way to prove I'm not logging your traffic, but I am a big believer in privacy and promise not to. If you don't trust me, you don't have to use it.
Comment linking /
on “VPNs Are Absolutely a Solution to a Policy Problem”Submitted Towards a Better Pythagorean Cup as a story · 113 points
HN discussionSomeone has already created a proof of concept for this: https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/sockfish.html
Comment linking /blog/stories/sockfish.html
on “Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times”Submitted Someone cloned my website and is using it to scam people as a story · 109 points
HN discussion
