Poline – An enigmatic color palette generator using polar coordinates

https://meodai.github.io/poline/

149•zdw•3d ago

Comments

onli•5h ago

Doesn't seem to work on Firefox - I tried with adblocker and tracking protection disabled. Console complains:

Uncaught SyntaxError: The requested module 'https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/highlight.js/11.7.0/e...' doesn't provide an export named: 'default'

jansan•5h ago

Works on my Firefox on Windows.

The website is awesome, however, I am not sure if the palettes are very useful.

PaulHoule•5h ago

Or rather, they're ugly.

nemomarx•5h ago

>"poline" is an enigmatic color palette generator, that harnesses the mystical witchcraft of polar coordinates. Its methodology, defying conventional color science, is steeped in the esoteric knowledge of the early 20th century. This magical technology defies explanation, drawing lines between anchors to produce visually striking and otherworldly palettes. It is an indispensable tool for the modern generative sorcerer, and a delight for the eye

I'm not totally sure I understand this intro - what's different here compared to normal color science palette makers?

I do like the visual presentation and animation a lot though.

caseyohara•4h ago

What don't you understand? It defies conventional color science and is steeped in the esoteric knowledge of the early 20th century.

It is a very nice palette generator, but I really dislike all the talk of magic/mysticism/sorcery/witchcraft. It's a dang color generator, ease up on the dungeon master language.

macrocosmos•4h ago

It defies explanation. This is followed up by an explantation.

cardiffspaceman•2h ago

Defied unsuccessfully.

nemomarx•4h ago

It feels a little bit ai generated there, or maybe just padded out marketing copy - more adjectives and superlatives than I'd expect from a technical site at least. Telling you how to call it to get a "mesmerizing" palette for example

I can handle some purple mysticism prose but I did want like a comparison of a few palettes from this polar system vs some traditional plane ones. If the creator reads this thread that's my note

epiccoleman•3h ago

on the other hand, i like the "theme" - i'm a sucker for that mix of "wizardry" metaphor with programming stuff.

I'm reminded for instance of this fun little post:

https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview

humanfromearth9•3h ago

It's enigmatic, hence you don't understand.

sram1337•3h ago

There's no science behind it. You're reading ai generated text.

My guess is the prompt was something like this:

"describe a color palette generating tool that uses the magic of polar coordinates to make pretty color palettes"

haiku2077•3h ago

It's not AI generated; it's a joke by the creator, as explained here a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34665584

nemomarx•2h ago

Ah, thanks for the cite!

hinterlands•42m ago

It is AI-generated. I'm sure the author provided the prompt and liked the result, but it is the output of an LLM.

SkyBelow•3h ago

It feels a bit satirical or otherwise done for fun, especially with sections like the following.

"And thus, the tome of "poline" has been written. Its mystical powers, steeped in the arcane knowledge of the ancients, now reside within these pages. May this compendium serve you in your quest for the ultimate color palette."

Either way, I wasn't expecting to encounter Poe's law inside a color palette maker.

koprocezar•5h ago

Nice one!

basisword•5h ago

Nice. Hard to generate an unpleasant palette with this at all.

jonathaneunice•4h ago

It's cool.

Though I am unsure if I am a sufficiently modern generative sorcerer to appreciate its eldritch, enigmatic nature.

mock-possum•4h ago

What a fun project! I feel like you really bury the lede in terms of what kinds of palettes are generateable- the first interactive demo at the top of page mostly only makes bruises, but later on your get full on saturated rainbows!

basisword•3h ago

Wow, I didn't even realise you could scroll down! Much more flexible than I first thought.

rambambram•4h ago

Hats off! I never experienced a colorcombo generator that only turned up good palettes.

ChrisMarshallNY•4h ago

Nicely done, but I'm a bit puzzled by all the alchemical stuff (which, to be fair, is probably the point).

bogdanoff_2•4h ago

I'm impressed by the naming of colors at the very end.

meodai•23m ago

thanks! Collecting them has been my hobby for the past few years: https://github.com/meodai/color-names

altairprime•4h ago

Previously on HN (2 years ago) with creator’s replies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34662722

pseudocomposer•3h ago

Super cool! If the author/creator happens to be reading, I’d suggest that, when the user is at the top of the page (ie on first load), the default demo wheel’s should animate between a few different curves. At first glance (before scrolling down), it looks somewhat primitive, and less interesting than it really is.

kazinator•3h ago

It makes sense. When you have complementary colors in the palette, you need to include more darks so that in your design you can separate the two. This is achieved because the line has pass near the centre.

Teever•3h ago

The favicon updates to match the palette. That's a nice touch.

stevenhuang•2h ago

What an obnoxiously unclickable interaction on mobile. A very strange choice of ux for something that insists to be so prominent on my screen that follows my scroll, yet clicking on the palette does nothing.

james_marks•1h ago

This is the most beautiful thing I've seen in a long, long time.

meodai•1h ago

thanks! that means a lot

meodai•1h ago

To those not into the mythical vibe: I totally get it. I stumbled onto something that looked good by accident and thought it’d be fun to lean into the mystical theme — especially since there’s no real science or theory behind it (that I know of). Mostly, I just wanted an excuse to build a fun website around it.

And to everyone else — thanks for the kind words, really appreciate it!

gnulinux•48m ago

I love the "old internet" vibe with the new internet look. I think it's a very creative idea, I wouldn't mind the haters too too much. I love it!

__MatrixMan__•1h ago

I'd like to configure my editor to use something like this to generate a unique color palette for the syntax highlighting for each project so that if I have files from multiple projects open at the same time they look different. Maybe base it on a hash of the git remote.

Andrej Karpathy's YC AI SUS talk on the future of the industry

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Fuzzing for Porting Programs

Show HN: Workout.cool – Open-source fitness coaching platform

Writing documentation for AI: best practices

My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

Show HN: I built a tensor library from scratch in C++/CUDA

Homomorphically Encrypting CRDTs

Poline – An enigmatic color palette generator using polar coordinates

Yes I Will Read Ulysses Yes

Terpstra Keyboard

Introduction to the A* Algorithm

MiniMax-M1 open-weight, large-scale hybrid-attention reasoning model

Is There a Half-Life for the Success Rates of AI Agents?

Attimet (YC F24) – Quant Trading Research Lab – Is Hiring Founding Engineer

Framework Laptop 12 review

Scrappy - make little apps for you and your friends

Revisiting Minsky's Society of Mind in 2025

Locally hosting an internet-connected server

I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia using machine learning

Show HN: Trieve CLI – Terminal-based LLM agent loop with search tool for PDFs

After millions of years, why are carnivorous plants still so small?

Building agents using streaming SQL queries

Should we design for iffy internet?

A different take on S-expressions

Spatializing 6k years of global urbanization from 3700 BC to AD 2000

The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

Real-time action chunking with large models

Spherical CNNs (2018)

Reasoning by Superposition: A Perspective on Chain of Continuous Thought

Show HN: Free local security checks for AI coding in VSCode, Cursor and Windsurf

Poline – An enigmatic color palette generator using polar coordinates

Comments

Andrej Karpathy's YC AI SUS talk on the future of the industry

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Fuzzing for Porting Programs

Show HN: Workout.cool – Open-source fitness coaching platform

Writing documentation for AI: best practices

My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

Show HN: I built a tensor library from scratch in C++/CUDA

Homomorphically Encrypting CRDTs

Poline – An enigmatic color palette generator using polar coordinates

Yes I Will Read Ulysses Yes

Terpstra Keyboard

Introduction to the A* Algorithm

MiniMax-M1 open-weight, large-scale hybrid-attention reasoning model

Is There a Half-Life for the Success Rates of AI Agents?

Attimet (YC F24) – Quant Trading Research Lab – Is Hiring Founding Engineer

Framework Laptop 12 review

Scrappy - make little apps for you and your friends

Revisiting Minsky's Society of Mind in 2025

Locally hosting an internet-connected server

I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia using machine learning

Show HN: Trieve CLI – Terminal-based LLM agent loop with search tool for PDFs

After millions of years, why are carnivorous plants still so small?

Building agents using streaming SQL queries

Should we design for iffy internet?

A different take on S-expressions

Spatializing 6k years of global urbanization from 3700 BC to AD 2000

The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

Real-time action chunking with large models

Spherical CNNs (2018)

Reasoning by Superposition: A Perspective on Chain of Continuous Thought

Show HN: Free local security checks for AI coding in VSCode, Cursor and Windsurf