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tholman

679 karma · joined September 7, 2011

Am here https://tholman.com/ & am elsewhere.
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tholman··on A grandmaster who got Twitch hooked on chess
I've been loving this boom for a ton of reasons.

Hikaru does an amazing job of sharing his knowledge and skill without spilling over the top with information about why certain moves are theoretically better than others 30 moves down the line than only a small percentage of people would understand. The skill gap is insane, but he makes it feel approachable.

Its been fun watching the pogchamps series for the most part because himself and Botez (and a few others) can share their knowledge without being affronting or elitist, but instead exploring and explaining why certain good moves are sometimes hard to find or don't feel natural. Simplifying the language and using arrows on the board to show moves, rather than just blasting chess notation at the screen. You can see them holding back when a player makes a certain move, and then openly assess the goods and bads.

They've shown behind the scene training sessions on pogchamps too, showing a little into the world (again at a much lower level) how you would begin to prep and build your chess opening repertoire that is approachable for someone who is learning.

And then at the end of the day, its also just fun to watch someone who has an insane amount of talent be a complete boss in their field. Honestly feels like the top players are scanning a QR code and know what to do without a second thought [1]

...

To pin onto this for those who enjoy chess but perhaps don't like the stress of online play, I've found the puzzles on lichess [2] to be a great way to learn and be challenged by the game.

- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-pePy_1_Ts&t=50

- [2] https://lichess.org/training/

tholman··on Let’s Draw Together
The glitch.com "this is the free tier and you need to upgrade" is uncharacteristically brutal considering how chill they are as a company.

You can see the source here https://glitch.com/~multiuser-sketchpad ... and can "remix" to fork your own version of the project.

tholman··on A one-line package broke `npm create-react-app`
Hmm, I had some problems with a nested `is-object` dependency when updating some deps last week, I wonder if it’s related.
tholman··on Bouncing DVD Logo
Some shameless plugs, My take on the matter - http://tholman.com/special-screen-savers/1/ ... and a 5ish minute segment at a conference talk, explaining the math of corner hitting, and my solutions https://youtu.be/iGPzwotXgfk?t=415
tholman··on Uniqlo robots pick up packaged T-shirts and put them in a box
I can’t read the article at all, it’s a paid publication. Are people who are voting for this all subscribers?
tholman··on Musical Chord Progression Arpeggiator
Definitely cheeky. All work on CodePen is by default MIT. Looking at the first demo on the homepage, the act name is “cpmirror”, so fair to say people looking to jump on making money from others work is a big incentive... but also, what’s new I guess :(
tholman··on Musical Chord Progression Arpeggiator
This is straight up lifted from this demo - https://codepen.io/jakealbaugh/pen/qNrZyw (previous HN convo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13273901)

Actually, this whole site is pretty strange. Lots of code and open source projects just kinda copied into an app library.

tholman··on Hellvetica.ttf – Kern in Hell
Haha, thanks for the shout out. Here was the HN convo for smelvetica - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17925352

Yeah, like a lot of people mentioned here, I didn’t really fight the takedown. Didn’t really have a lot of interest wasting any time with people who’s sole job was to ruin the fun. And on the flipped side, found it even funnier that they felt it hurt their brand at all.

tholman··on A website coding itself live
The inspiration in particular is this demo, if you want to see how it's all working. - https://codepen.io/jakealbaugh/pen/PwLXXP
tholman··on What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?
Late to the party, but worth throwing the browser rebuild of tiberium wars out there.

- https://www.adityaravishankar.com/projects/games/command-and...

tholman··on AMP for email is bad
There are absolutely no standards at all when trying to code emails, it takes hours trying to make something that remotely resembles the same thing on every engine (Microsoft outlook rendering emails with their ms word engine, google doing all sorts of different things on desktops vs phones) - and hours more of testing and tweaking css and markup hacks to make them readable. Although this is another puzzle piece to scatter the landscape, I can’t say I’m against someone actually trying to lock some standards down on the email platform.

The counter is that we don’t need all the css and pizzazz in emails, but we’ve come too far to realistically go back on that.

tholman··on Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006
Google will also happily surface a stackoverflow article from 2010 about how to solve a js problem... frustrating the top 3 answers will be with jquery, when its not the approach someone would take in the last 5 years.

Definitely frustrating, but also showing some need to retire specific pieces of the past away from the top recommendations.

tholman··on H-1B Employer Data Hub
The Green Card process has definitely slowed down. I recently physically lost mine (with my whole wallet) and the process to get a second card printed, again, I've been approved and had it for years... is 2 to 13 (not a typo) months. Stuck, unable to leave the country until then, lest they not let me back in again.
tholman··on No Tuition, but You Pay a Percentage of Your Income if You Find a Job
Up until recently, if you left the country, Australia had no real way to make you pay back the loan since they wouldn't track your income and would see no tax return. Last year new rules came into place to claim back income from people who had left without paying their loans, and will claim a % of your income (before tax, I believe) if your income is > $13,968 ... I ended up paying the whole loan in one sum so I didn't have to keep double reporting incomes, so I guess the system has worked.

> https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Study-and-training-suppor...

tholman··on Why Love Generative Art?
Here's something I've been working on ~ https://generativeartistry.com/ ~ aimed at getting people started with generative art using the <canvas> ... its less about the tools, and more about learning general techniques that will get you creating.
tholman··on Puppeteer: Headless Chrome Node API
One of the biggest wins here is this little tidbit:

> When you install Puppeteer, it downloads a recent version of Chromium (~71Mb Mac, ~90Mb Linux, ~110Mb Win) that is guaranteed to work with the API.

A lot of the chrome interface libs about at the moment require you to maintain your own instance of chrome/chromium and launch the headless server with your command line, or require a pre compiled version, that can quickly get out of date (https://github.com/adieuadieu/serverless-chrome/tree/master/...). Having this taken care of is a blessing.

tholman··on Show HN: Get colour palettes from pictures
The JS library Color Thief is a nice open source alternative - http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/color-thief/ (https://github.com/lokesh/color-thief/)
tholman··on Show HN: A visual guide to the most popular CSS properties
Great clean guide. Here's a couple more that often offer extra tidbits of certain properties.

- https://css-tricks.com/almanac/ - http://tympanus.net/codrops/css_reference/

tholman··on The New York Public Library’s release of 180,000 copyright-free images
Some of these collections are really amazing -- These old clothing getups - http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/collection-of...

And the maps, wew, great stuff.

tholman··on Scroll Slow. Have Fun
For wanting to look more into the math/art behind this, they're based on Moiré patterns - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3%A9_pattern
tholman··on Ask HN: MacBook Air for Web Development?
Seriously, yes.

I bought the cheapest Air I could get (4 gig, 13 inch) and its been a dream. In the end my logic really was that, If what I'm creating (for the web) doesn't perform fantastically on this laptop, then its not worth shipping out.

So no regrets here.

tholman··on Pixel Shaders: Proposal for an Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming
The demo chapter is fantastic, I'd definitely be on board to buy/fund this if it came up.

Is there a way I can subscribe for updates?

tholman··on Ask HN: How important is a degree?
As a developer from Australia, I wouldn't be allowed an American (E3) visa without having a relavent degree in my field... so despite feeling that studies didn't teach me a whole lot, I'm rather glad I have the piece of paper in the end.
tholman··on Show HN: Discreet Twitter buttons
Thats a very good point, using a font had the advantage of malleability when building them (colors, size etc) ... but now that they're finalized, I should shift them over to images.
tholman··on Show HN: Discreet Twitter buttons
Sorry about that, had some CORS problems with the fonts... should be fixed :)
tholman··on ZenPen
Currently they last forever, since all the contents is stored in the url hash. I guess there is a possibility that will change, since it does have its length limitations.
tholman··on ZenPen
You almost completely described the github issues/features list :) - https://github.com/tholman/zenpen/issues?state=open
tholman··on ZenPen
You set an amount of words you wish to reach, and a small progress bar appears on the right hand side, which slowly grows as you write more words... Although I'm just finding out now that it sometimes gets obscured by people's scroll bars, and is a little hidden.

My UX certainly needs a bit more thought here.

tholman··on ZenPen
Sorry if it seems misleading. The shared page here isn't actually the front page, but rather something little I show when the user clicks the little question mark on the bottom right... so the links where hacked in manually.

In retrospect, this wasn't the best idea, since the links also break the "quotation" functionality on the page. Lesson learned ;)

tholman··on ZenPen
Oh nice, I really like this. Especially the transition between markdown, and the rendered text. Will be interested to see where you go with it :)
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