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- Hacker News
- This webpage is nonsense.
First example I saw was already wrong. COBALT BLUE is not known since 1830 but its ANCIENT.
This webpage is some low effort english centric world and wrong and probably just AI slop.
by iberator - by nonethewiser
- Lost a solid 20 minutes to this. Something about a weird, evocative color name makes you picture the shade before the swatch even loads.by momoraul
- I wanted to check if the information on this page was correct. I started searching and found this site [0], which looks very similar. I thought it was made by the same person, but it's not. It's just another website designed using LLM.
One advantage of LLM is that you can quickly and easily generate a "pretty decent" website. However, there is a drawback, that there is a high chance that a page with a very similar design(and similar idea) already exists somewhere.
by plastic041 - I don't think it is a case that llm happens to create similar stuff. Either both are made by the same person or one is a copycat of the other.
What are the odds of both websites showing the same color today (Cochineal and 胭脂)?
And both use Roman numerals MMXXVI ? It makes no sense to use that in a "Chinese" color website.
by johanyc - I have an acquaintance who is a professional artist[1]. He has some great stories about colours/paints/pigments. I suppose it's akin to tales of who created a particular programming tool/compiler, or when a language weirdly added gotos (PHP!). It's great to hear experts opine on their craft. Not sure we have that here, but still.by pbhjpbhj
- Cool idea, but unfortunately low-effort AI slop. The colors are covered in vibe-coded patterns that obscure the actual color, much of the writing is wrong and soulless. The prompter writes on the site that he uses AI to support in writing, because as a man with a day job it would be "impossible" to write all this himself. I'd urge him to write in his own words, starting with a minimal subset of colors and slowly building up a library. It could be a "one entry per day" challenge, or even just "one entry per week". Why is everyone in such a rush?by TonyStr
- What vibe coded patterns?by Infiniti20
- I was excited about the website up until I clicked into my first color and read the page. Terrible slop writing. Makes me question the author's judgement in general.by vortegne
- Why isn't my favorite color on the list: Unforeseeable Fuchsia?by lutusp
- > Most of what you can read about historical color on the web has been rewritten three or four times from the same Wikipedia paragraph, with the citations dropped along the way. What you are reading here is an attempt to put the citations back.
That implies the entries also are based on the Wikipedia paragraph, though I think the author means they do their own research. The entries I looked at list several high-quality entries in a bibliography at the bottom but don't cite any of the text. Also, I don't know who wrote these - do they have any idea what they are talking about? Is this LLM output?
If anonymity ever worked (almost never in scholarship), it may not work anymore due to LLMs.
by mmooss - > Known generative-AI crawlers are disallowed in robots.txt. This is a research catalogue assembled from primary sources; it is not training data, and a model fine-tuned on these paragraphs would launder out exactly the part — the citations — that gives the prose its value.
This reads like distaste for LLMs - but generally website reads (and is designed as!) very LLMy.
by lekevicius - Their VanDyke Brown looks more like a Burnt Sienna to my eyes, but that might just be my screen.
You may also enjoy the Chromatopia book : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40554590-chromatopia
The author produces a very nice range of oil colors under the Langridge brand in Melbourne, downunder... its nice to keep these artisanal practices alive.
Would be handy to have the standard pigment codes. Ive been gradually moving away from using heavy metals such as Cadmiums. Haven't found the perfect red, although Napthol Red PR170 and Pyrrole "Ferrari" Red PR254 are pretty close to primary for mixing from a limited palette.
Its really surprising how you can get gorgeous brick-red browns and deep purplish blacks from mixing a near primary red and primary blue.
by jgord - This is the kind of note I was hoping for. Standard pigment codes (PR170, PR254 etc) are a good call and I wanted a proper Color Index field and this pushes it up the list. I will also take another look at the Van Dyke Brown swatch. You may be right that it reads too close to burnt sienna. Chromatopia looks like a lovely book and thanks for the Langridge pointer, glad those artisanal makers are still going.
- Here in Northern Europe there seems to be something of a renaissance of traditional linseed oil paints, both because of people being more environmentally conscious and wanting to avoid VOC's and microplastics, but also because there's plenty of scare stories of people rotting their houses after painting them with more modern but less breathable paints like the usual alkyds or acrylics.
Not saying it's not possible to be successful with the modern paints, but they demand a different style of construction that allows air to flow on the backside of the facade.
by jabl - For a word nerd exploration of how colours are defined in dictionaries, check out 'True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color' by Kory Stamper. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/237693038-true-color
- Ooh, cool. Will check it out :-)by susiecambria
- That's pretty cool. In a similar but very different vein: A few years ago I took twenty years of daily satellite imagery and computed the mean color for countries and the world https://www.landshade.com/
But in doing that you really do notice how everything concerning colors is just a bit arbitrary. You get raw reflectances from a scientific sensor on a satellite with specific spectral bands and sensitivity within those bands. And then you try and map this scientific sensor to the sensor that is your eyes, to try and emulate what we would actually see if shot up into space.
There's some really cool science around that if you're a color nerd: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003442571...
by jcattle - Landshade: Nice work. Would be cool to be able to find similar ones across the globe, compare selected country color profiles, etc.by rendx
- The web has its own storied color, albeit a tragic one. Rebecca Purple is a named CSS color, which was added in tribute to Eric Meyer's daughter, who very sadly passed away at a young age. That shade was her favorite color.
https://medium.com/@valgaze/the-hidden-purple-memorial-in-yo...
by danielvaughn - When I learned of this it hit me at the time that the web is made of real people, built by real people.by NetOpWibby
- Meyer has continued to mark anniversaries in the life Rebecca would have led, most recently a week ago on what would have been her eighteen birthday: https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2026/06/07/eighteen/by DicIfTEx