Hi, I'm David | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I'm David

davidtidman.com

123 pointskristiandupont83 comments

I put an interactive cat on my resume and I'm pretty sure it literally got me the job. (https://pkunk.org/resume/) A little fun goes a long way!

Does it move? I tried clicking on it and nothing seemed to happen.

Use the up/down/left/right arrow keys. It's not very fancy. (Mobile not supported either.)

Aww, firefox makes the page scroll with arrow keys :( I'm not sure if I would override that though, maybe have alternate controls like "wasd" or something similar.

P.S. I looked at the code for the cat and I really like it. Nice and simple.

Thank you! I made a library out of it (http://yobert.github.io/catify/) if you want to add it to something of yours!

That's so cute!!!!! I think I'll add it to my personal site, ty :D

Bravo! You get a star.

esheep inspired at all?

I was amused when it dropped from the top and I played around resizing the window to make it fall. Casually dropping "use arrow keys to move cat!" under hobby programming was a lovely way of revealing that and rewarding the reader.

Thanks! I've never heard of esheep, but have been inspired by some desktop hacks over the years. (Remember that roach program for windows?) The cat animation was lifted from an old DOS game called Alleycat that I loved.

Wasn't aware of the roach program or Alleycat so thanks for the pointers. I can see why you were keen to liberate the cat now I've seen it :)

My esheep query seems to have been taken extremely negatively. Rereading it a day later, it does seem to be dripping with snark, though that really wasn't how it was intended. I remember eSheep fondly as a kid, so it was the first thing I thought of when I saw the cat - along with more fondness for someone who'd brought similar to the web. I think some of my early forays into programming were directly attributable to me trying to surreptitiously inflict it on friends and family.

your cat does not go up!!! what should I do?

I gave it a shot.

The cat doesn't fly. The cat jumps. Place it under a line of text and jump up to it.

At least it works on my machine.

Yeah you have to work your way up the text to find your way back to the top :D

Reminds me of Felix the desktop cat from the Win 2000 era, which would walk around on your windows.

Reminds me to the old MSDOS "Alley Cat" game: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Alley_Cat_1984

That was my first thought, the theme song came rushing right back. I found it on YouTube https://youtu.be/uZDG4dlU5uY but I think my PCjr was slower than the machine that recorded this because the song was much more sparse back when I played the game.

Yup! I fired up DOSBOX and did a screen recording, and then paused it frame by frame so I could trace the pixels in GIMP. :D I adored that game.

It's really nice, thank you for sharing it!

Reminds me of Neko, the Mac/Windows desktop toy from the early 90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)

There is an Android Easter Egg game featuring this for those that don't know.

'sudo apt install oneko' still works in lots of Linuxes I think

That's fun! Took me a second to realize it walks on top of the text.

I like your site. It's simple and fun. I also like the way you handle company rebranding with strikethrough :P

Might I suggest that you submit it for listing on https://1mb.club? Looking at Pingdom's tools, it judges your site at 48K: https://tools.pingdom.com/#5f15f825e1000000

Either that, or give me permission to list it for you (:

Sure! You can list it! Thanks! It is hosted from my house's comcast though, so it might get slow... :D

Is pkunk a Star Control 2 reference?

It is! That game 100% dominated my childhood. What a work of art.

They don’t make them like that anymore!

Cool resume, you know what's weird? I saw this post earlier while working and tonight I was randomly looking at an old DOS game compilation video on Youtube. One of the clips was of a pink and blue cat game called Alleycat that I decided to find a longer video of because I liked the style. I came back here because I swore I just saw that cat earlier today and now saw your comment further down to confirm. I've never heard of the game or seen your resume until today, fun coincidence, or my unconscious mind noticed the cat.

That's super fun. I feel like it's a very specific animation, so it makes sense!

It's a fun idea. I'm working on something similar for my personal site (a little interactive 3D sandbox with threejs and bullet physics).

People saying that it's not small or that it doesn't load fast enough are kind of missing the point... it's supposed to be a showcase of some skills this person has, not a tiny fast site.

But when someone clicks on a link from a mobile browser and nothing happens - it leaves the viewer with the impression that things are broken when in reality the exposed use case was just not considered (or not deemed important). This also tells a great deal about the author in my opinion.

True, that life is short and they are decent at cost/benefits.

Then it's lucky the author has done well in their career despite it :)

As an aside, if the author is around, you could make 90% of the site's font rendering become immediate very easily. The biggest things would be self-hosting the FA and Google Fonts stuff, and moving the TypeKit include to an async JS approach.

After that, you could restrict the preloader progress bar to just the balloon portion.

Broken on mobile Safari :( I see the balloon for a second and then the screen goes black

Same on Firefox and chrome on Android for me (though Firefox flickers the last frame rather than black screen)

It works on Firefox on Android if you switch to the desktop site.

Working for me on iOS 12 (which I didn’t expect), did it break in an update?

Man, I am glad they built this instead of them saying "Ah, load times are slow, scrap that idea." like it seems like a lot of people in this thread would do. Very very cool.

I may be wrong, but I've realized there are at least 3 classes of hacker:

1. The back-end PenTester who builds and destroys with nothing but terminals.

2. The engineer who transforms mundane objects into brilliant fixes, or fixes what everyone doesn't realize is broken.

3. The on-the-spectrum genius savant who makes mind-bending experiences that redefine how we see reality.

If I use Ctrl+ to try to make the text large enough to read, parts of the content go off the page, and I can't see any way to get them back.

Beautiful work, but effectively unusable for me.

Very nice balloon animation.

Rarely do I visit a personal homepage that heats up my laptop.

I dunno, try opening a couple of parallax / animation heavy websites and just stay on them scrolling up and down. I have had the fans revving up from that plenty of times.

They're usually business websites, I find.

This produces an unsettling flickering effect on Firefox Mobile (nightly).

Baloon just sits there, saying 'soon' while all of it strobes.

Same on non-nightly

I wish Apple phones wouldn’t constantly crash when loading WebGL graphics libraries. I’m working in BabylonJS right now, and not only will the page crash on iOS Safari, but there’s no way to debug it. It (frustratingly) runs fine inside of the iPhone Simulator on MacOS, which is the only way I’ve been able to access devtools or crash logs.

And I’ve successfully rendered BabylonJS on iOS in the past, so I know it’s not just me.

I’m working on another website at the moment using pixi.js, and I’m dreading the battle I’ll be facing with Safari.

Does anyone here have advice on how to better deal with WebGL + iOS debugging? OP and I seem to be faced with the same problems…

Is it a problem with BabylonJS? ThreeJS stuff always works fine for me.

If you have an iPhone, you can physically connect it to your computer and inspect its elements through Safari's DevTools. It's a little unintuitive, but I wrote a walkthrough on how to set it up here (see the second section) [0].

I don't know why they make this so hard, ha!

[0]: https://mtm.dev/iphone-localhost-mac

Hi David. Your website is a blank black page.

What browser are you using? In my machine it's fine in Chrome, Firefox and Edge.

It's broken on all mobile browsers I think

Works just fine on an iPhone X. The point of tech demos isn’t to let the person know if it works on a Motorola Razr. You’re not always the intended audience.

I have an iPhone XS and it is broken for me

> Works just fine on an iPhone X.

Doesn't work for me on my iPhone X. Crashes after load to a full black screen. So... Which iOS-Version are you on? Mine's 15.0.1

"Hi, I'm david" -- Black page.

"Show HN: Cool tech demo in webGL or whatever" -- Oh, it doesn't work for me. I'll try it on another machine.

The black page shows in the latest Firefox available in Debian stable, which is 78.14.0esr.

Works in Firefox 92 on Ubuntu 21.04 for me. Took a while to load though.

Android chrome, at the moment.

was like that for me too, I believe app[hash].js is the culprit, a 5mb download. It's a very pretty site, and I wish I could do this shader / unity / 3d stuff

Yeah seems to be a few models don't like to play ball with GLTF/FBX models, apologies for that, and thanks for the heads up

I saw a loading bar. Then a 3D balloon for 1 second. Then a black screen and broken webpage.

iOS Safari latest version on iPhone SE.

Edit: I’m providing a quick issue report. Not a criticism. Sheesh.

Dang, you can do some pretty slick stuff with Three.js if you're good like this guy

The interactive rendering looks cool and fits his area of expertise. The underlying library appears to be PixiJS [1].

[1]: https://pixijs.com/

Pixi is only used for the preload screen. I used GLSL, JS + Three.js for the rest

I don't know how, but that was more like the digital version of bubble wrap to me than the clickable bubble wrap I've encountered.

I thought it's a troll website because it took forever to load, not really cool IMO.

Not so nice. If it was in the kilobyte range, or accessible, or fast, but neither it is.

This is super cool, but am I the only one where chrome cuts off the very top of the wesbiste? Can't see the first line under my bookmarks...

yep, position:absolute will do it

try to press [Ctrl]+[-] or [Ctrl]+[WheelDown] couple of times

Not sure if anyone has the same issue, but it doesn't load well on firefox on android. I even enabled the scripts...

What have you done? Now I'm sitting here through my sprint planning and poking that balloon.

It worked nicely for me, very cool.

Wow that took a long time to load.

Took a while to load and the font could be a bit larger, but cool stuff. Love Bristol btw!

The balloon animation was great, but text fade in animation and was even better imo.

O dear I popped the ballon.

But like lazarus, it rises again (with a different message.)

The third one seems indestructible...

very nice.

Does anyone know how is something like this balloon built?

Is this a library?

Or some sort of physics simulator?

I modelled the balloon in C4D, extended and tweaked the Ammo physics lib (ported from Bullet) and brought it all together with GLSL & JS using Three.js. Hope that helps

<3 Thanks! Cool work!

The top of the page is cut off on my 13" monitor.

Seems to crash on my Samsung S20 Ultra.

Very cool animation!

Hi, David.

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