Felix Rieseberg Homepage

(felixrieseberg.com)

159 points | by rglover 3 hours ago

21 comments

  • KubaFYI 4 minutes ago
    I wonder how many millions of tokens it took.
  • illwrks 46 minutes ago
    I've seen a several AI-coded WebGL examples... I wonder if AI will mean the return of the Flash-style interactive websites.
  • kaeruct 1 hour ago
    Feels so strange to recognize what's out the window. I hope this cannot be used to find where they live!
    • jabron 11 minutes ago
      It's the view off the Warschauer Bridge in Berlin, nobody actually lives there.
  • einrealist 1 hour ago
    Is he even happy? The website mood is so sad.
    • swiftcoder 1 hour ago
      It's just themed on a Werner Herzog documentary (which are inherently pretty gloomy). But also, who can say for sure
    • kmoser 1 hour ago
      The stark landscape and accented voiceover seem to be inspired by the documentary Happy People: A Year in the Taiga by Werner Herzog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psnY17CImaQ
    • flohofwoe 1 hour ago
      Interesting, I find the 'mood' very cozy and welcoming. There's nothing nicer than a warm, dimly lit room with a computer (or in this case VCR) when it's cold and rainy outside :)
    • gilgoomesh 1 hour ago
      It feels like it's trying to evoke Bioshock vibes or a similar retro-punk dystopia.
    • ge96 1 hour ago
      Well he did use the penguin that walks off into oblivion
    • Aldipower 27 minutes ago
      You are the prototype of the jealous HN commenter.
  • dieter37 1 hour ago
    Excellent work, Claude.
  • joker99 2 hours ago
    Ah, the “good“ old times of interactive flash websites.
    • est 2 hours ago
      In retrospective

      https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...

      > In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices

      H5 animations performs much worse on all devices.

      Flash animations like Felix's can run well on a Pentium III processor with 64MB memory.

      • jeroenhd 51 minutes ago
        I disagree, Flash was a real battery sucker on Android. Native CSS animations were usually smooth in Chrome; Firefox still hasn't caught up entirely on that front I feel.

        Feeding animation frames through JS rather than letting the browser do its job does take a toll, but Flash freezing the entire tab while the browser plugin initialized is something I've resented the moment HTML5 came along.

        In the age of the Pentium III, Flash was state of the art, but it's been a couple of decades since then.

      • grebc 29 minutes ago
        I don’t know about a III but Flash was good in the early/mid 2000’s while I was attending university.

        Certainly was 10x better than what HTML was providing at the time, HTML really only jumped forward in this department when Steve banned it on iOS.

        I don’t miss it, however my friend at uni made some wicked animations in the adobe Flash editor, whatever it was called. He should’ve went onto animation etc but stuck to programming.

  • transitivebs 50 minutes ago
    an in-depth post about how he made it: https://felixrieseberg.com/made-by-mechanical-means/

    extremely fascinating details in here

  • jansan 26 minutes ago
    The view from his window is from Warschauer Brücke in Berlin Friedrichshain or nearby. I have fond memories living there and working on my software day and night.

    I love the website, but one thing scares me in his list of projects:

        08 Clippy   2025-now
  • sans_souse 2 hours ago
    I found myself inside a simulation simulating simulations of a simulation.

    And it was good.

  • 2845486124 2 hours ago
    I like this, is open source?
  • bigcheese1144 1 hour ago
    W.o.W.!

    the scary thing is that I love this slightly reactionary nostalgic design - mattering the content.

    It probably does tell more about me than any technology or approach discussed here.

    grrr...

  • fuddle 2 hours ago
    That's pretty neat.
  • sudo-bendg 41 minutes ago
    So good man
  • patrick_rtk 2 hours ago
    super nice website bringing to old time
  • nredd 1 hour ago
    that's slick as hell
  • tower-shield 2 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • arjie 2 hours ago
      It is a marvelous thing. A beautiful app platform. Suddenly, one day, I was no longer Linux user without app. Linux app was standard. Everybody has Linux app. I had dual-boot Linux computer to play Valorant on Windows and to live normal life on Linux. And I use Mac at work. And it is all glorious because I no longer think about which is which. And there are people who are saying it is not amazing, but it is. I can hit Ctrl-R and the application refreshes. What an astounding tool.

      For me the great app platforms:

      * the terminal

      * the iPhone/Android

      * the web

      And suddenly, the web is brought to the desktop and it is cross-platform. Everything is here on my Linux. It is the Year of the Linux Desktop and everyone is complaining about web platform. But it is web platform that has brought it here. Praise be the forces that made this happen. This man has a great website, and if he has made Electron then he is always welcome to me.

      • zelphirkalt 54 minutes ago
        Now we got desktop (electron) apps blocking our VPNs via friggin cloudflare. I have come to absolutely loath cloudflare's BS.
    • this_self 2 hours ago
      I can’t find anything better than Electron/Tauri for building cross-platform desktop apps. The browser engine is quite efficient and performant for building complex interfaces
      • zzzoom 2 hours ago
        You have an interesting definition of "efficient and performant".
        • vovavili 1 hour ago
          The core of Electron can be made quite efficient and performant. It's just that commercial app developers have few incentives to dedicate significant time and effort towards optimization when modern PCs are this powerful:

          https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2025-electronAintBad

        • jeroenhd 56 minutes ago
          You're missing the "for building complex interfaces" part. I would extend that to "for building complex interfaces with even basic accessibility features" though.

          And for what it's worth, Tauri and to a lesser extent Electron is actually quite efficient. It looks bloated as hell because it allocates all kinds of RAM pages it doesn't really use in case it needs to JIT extensively (which usually get compressed or swapped out anyway), but by default it's a decent UI framework.

          Tauri takes what, maybe 50MiB of RAM? It's not the most efficient way, but it's as efficient as a usable cross-platform framework gets these days. Electron is four times that, which is still better than the alternative on Linux (which was running the Windows application on Wine before Electron came along).

          Telegram is written in native Qt and takes about 1750MiB of RAM on my machine to show me a chat screen. The framework isn't the issue here.

        • flohofwoe 1 hour ago
          Native apps are not automatically more responsive or less bloated. Look at Xcode or Visual Studio vs VSCode. Performance is mainly the result of how much effort you want to put into optimization.
      • gumby 1 hour ago
        Certainly the user does not feel the same.
    • luis_cho 1 hour ago
      Electron might be a good example of worse is better.
    • tomhow 50 minutes ago
      Please post generic snarky swipes like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • codetiger 2 hours ago
      Electron was too good when I first saw it, and gave the "Javascript everywhere" for the desktop apps. Then quickly felt like a bloatware.
      • nxpnsv 2 hours ago
        Like it or not, it was a significant achievement
    • bronlund 1 hour ago
      To be fair; Node is involved in this too.
    • rbbydotdev 56 minutes ago
      if (when) a better solution arises it will be the dominant solution. long live electron
  • c7b 2 hours ago
    Fyi, autoplays sound. Generally an unacceptable UI decision imho.
    • __m 2 hours ago
      There is a button ”Enter muted” right below enter
      • c7b 2 hours ago
        I didn't click anything, the sound just started playing while there was a loading animation
        • Benjamin_Dobell 2 hours ago
          What browser are you using? IE6?

          Just kidding. But you must have clicked somewhere. Audio autoplay hasn't been a thing on the web for years (thankfully).

          • radiospiel 1 hour ago
            When you tap the screen on ipad while the page still loads (and doesnt show anything), it plays sound before you click enter
          • bowsamic 2 hours ago
            It auto played for me in iOS Safari with no interaction
            • pletnes 1 hour ago
              Not for me. So there’s that. But tapping anywhere on screen does start the sound.
    • flohofwoe 1 hour ago
      Hmm, here (macOS + Chrome) it starts with 'Sound off', says even so in the bottom right corner.
  • moecables 2 hours ago
    i like it
  • slambek 2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • xueyu 1 hour ago
    [dead]