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hailpixel

701 karma · joined March 5, 2007

Founder of Useful Books, Lyst, Founder Centric, and Fuzzwich (S07). VP @ Seedcamp

YC Badge: 0x9f3c73b54ee1eaff7e5f0575d70ca412f6225ef5

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hailpixel··on Pantone Color of the Year 2026: Pantone 11-4201 Cloud Dancer
Default HN theme background color.
hailpixel··on Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization
I LOVE when people geek out about the most simple mathematical things*, especially discovering the animation power of the trigonometric functions... or any of mathematics underlying modern interactive stuff. It's one thing to know what they do, it's another to understand the power of that tool.

* I wrote a similar article around making "blobs" a while back: https://www.hailpixel.com/articles/generative-art-simple-mat...

hailpixel··on Show HN: Dev atrophy test – Can you still code without AI?
Always love a fun quiz, but some of the example answers are just incorrect. Eg: `document.example('example')` to select a HTML button element. Others are to rigid to allow the true breadth of correct answers.

Ya'll might want to switch from V0 to claude code.

hailpixel··on My approach to running a link blog
Simon's site runs on Django: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog, which is unsurprising as he is one of Django's co-creators.

But I agree with you, a great use case for a Next.js-esque static site.

hailpixel··on Show HN: A Marble Madness-inspired WebGL game we built for Netlify
I also went for 0% speedrun challenge.
hailpixel··on Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs
AskUI could be a solution. It's also not just in browser, but the whole desktop: https://github.com/askui/vision-agent
hailpixel··on Sci-fi books that you may never have heard of, but definitely should read
I love this genre, and there is such a plethora of interesting reads. I think one of the most interesting, in terms of presenting technology's role in varied societies, is A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. Great read if you are bored of the classic space opera.
hailpixel··on Cellar Door: a quest to find the most beautiful word in English
In case you missed it, the current leader is `tRNA`: https://www.cellar-door.co.uk/leaderboard

Which, isn't even a word, but I enjoy the internet doing classic internet things.

Edit: It is now `no`. Amazing.

hailpixel··on Show HN: Product Hunt for Music
Amazing, history does repeat itself. One of the companies in my batch (S07) was iJigg (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ijigg), which had the 2007's version of this interface: single upvote, player, and all. It did well and then petered out as many hyper-niche apps did at that time.

Best of luck with this version!

hailpixel··on Gigantic Aluminium Spiders
You know, I like giant industrial projects and all, but based on the headline I was expecting something a little more exciting.

Anyway, neat crane idea.

hailpixel··on My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing (2023)
Love this article. I wrote basically the exact same technique almost 10 years ago. At the time I called it `lazy-easy` and still use it today. Sometimes you just want some nice smooth animation without all the state management: https://www.hailpixel.com/articles/lazy-animation-with-lazy-...
hailpixel··on John Locke's recipe for Pancakes (2021)
The main reason you prepare crêpe batter long before you want to use it is two fold: 1. Allows a bit of gluten development (like cold ferment in bread) 2. And (i believe) most importantly: it allows all the air that was incorporated during whisking to escape, resulting in an even batter

Always wondering if you could just stick it in a vacuum pump...

hailpixel··on Ask HN: Best tools for self-authoring books in 2023?
Honestly, whatever suite of tools allows you to organize your research, thoughts, and easily write text. Remove as much friction as possible. When we wrote The Workshop Survival Guide (https://www.workshopsurvival.com/), we used post-it notes on a wall and google docs. It allowed for a fluid collaboration.

On a more meta note, how you approach writing your book is probably more impactful than your toolchain. If you're working on a book that educates (rather than, say, entertains), I'd like to share the writing framework that my longtime collaborator, robfitz, describes in Write Useful Books (https://www.usefulbooks.com/). Basically, treat your book like a product, find your audience, and test your subject matter with them as your craft your prose.

* Disclaimer: Rob and I run Useful Books, a community and toolset for non-fiction authors.

hailpixel··on Why Tailwind CSS Won
I love tailwind, and I've been writing CSS professionally since CSS2.1. I have often debated with many developer friends why it has performed so well, and this article really missed some big reasons:

1. It's works extremely well with the current component-focused UI frameworks (react, svelte, etc). Subsequently, the verboseness that is often a complaint isn't an issue at all, but a feature.

2. Does everything out of the box, and very easy to customize.

3. And, most importantly, it allows for easy art direction. Does one button need to be a slightly different size or color for this one specific element? Chuck an extra modular class on it. No need to build a complex cascasding or edge cases. (Shout out to `tailwind-merge`)

Point 3 for me speeds up production work immensely. Also, not being in JS has shrunk bundle sizes by a small amount, which is always welcome in this era.

hailpixel··on Generating Fashion Using AI
I love that the author shows the whole workflow. It highlights how much tweaking and work it takes to achieve a polished output. Still amazing how easy it was to chain the networks together.
hailpixel··on Bumblebees kept in isolation make up for it by being more social later
it's me.
hailpixel··on Ask HN: Your admittedly useless side projects?
You can't just share this and then not linked to the project. Bandcamp please!
hailpixel··on Happy 15th birthday Hacker News
Oh wow, I've been on here a long time.
hailpixel··on Pollinator Pathmaker
This is surprisingly delightful! Something so simple as trying to match what I find aesthetically pleasing and what is a productive, bug friendly garden is a very fun task. Like an organic Factorio.
hailpixel··on Back to EU
An expected result from a sad, populist ideology shoved through under the guise of "winning". GDPR has plenty of flaws, but overall is a positive force for personal data privacy. Ironically, it's the business-to-business context — where the legal fees and fines are high — where this is being tested. And the UK is definitely losing.
hailpixel··on Show HN: Mmm.page – Drag and drop personal website creator
I love this app's approach to responsive design: just show the "safe" area and let people throw elements where ever. So liberating.
hailpixel··on Products I Wish Existed
> 1. Trinet for full-time remote/distributed workers.

[Boundless](https://boundlesshq.com/) is a startup that is tackling this exact problem through automating the entire "employe(e/r) of record" process.

hailpixel··on How to launch, startup playbook and cost calculator
I'm not sure what this site is trying to be. The playbook just contains generic steps of a lean / startup process. The calculator seems to be a deal funnel for a consultancy which again is loose and amorphous.

Who's the audience here?

hailpixel··on Quick, Draw
The network guessed some of the "correct" answers far to quickly. For example, with just an L shape (|_) it guessed suitcase. Feels like the model is suffering from overfitting.

Fun though.

hailpixel··on What it takes to launch an app
Hi! I'm the author of this article. Despite having been in the software game for a while I still completely underestimated the work. Hopefully this is a useful record for other people launching their weekend project.
hailpixel··on Show HN: I've created an iOS version of Colordot, a color picker for humans
Three years ago, I made a color picker which acted how I think about colors: https://color.hailpixel.com/. Here's its iOS cousin. Bonus: you can also use your camera to grab colors.
hailpixel··on A Beginner’s Guide to Recurrent Networks and LSTMs
If this feels like jumping in the deep end, I highly recommend Stanford's online course on this subject:

http://coursera.org/learn/machine-learning/

hailpixel··on The answer to the eternal question: “Where do I find a technical cofounder?”
Sorry about the page timeout, I'm sorting about that out now.
hailpixel··on Dopplr is shutting down
It was a startup and was purchased by Nokia in 2009.
hailpixel··on HTML5 color palette tool
That is a much smarter way of doing it! This was a weekend hack that I threw together. If I readdress the app, I'll probably rewrite the layout to work that way. Thanks for the suggestion!
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