HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

latentflip

56 karma · joined November 13, 2009

submissionscomments
latentflip··on How I trained sheet reading using the Web MIDI API
This is great! I'm learning to read sheet music and play the piano at the same time and have found the same problem: I'm just memorising the music, not _reading_it.

Just this weekend I tried jalmus, but couldn't get it running and ended up trying to write something kinda similar to this:

https://mobile.twitter.com/philip_roberts/status/61775984704... Mine just does one note at a time though and I didn't know about webmidi, so was using node with electron shell for midi access, definitely gonna switch it over to webmidi now though, thanks!

latentflip··on Videos about JavaScript
That's interesting given there's no licensing certainly on my video :) I will be asking scotlandjs to update the Vimeo page to ensure there's a Creative Commons non-commercial license specified as I'm not _super_ excited about people charging for access to my work.
latentflip··on An Introduction to Reactive Programming
To add another resource to the list, I gave an introductory talk to bacon.js and FRP last year which has similar diagrams to these which I animated with d3 if anyone'a interested: http://vimeo.com/m/68987289
latentflip··on Introducing Ampersand.js
With regards to "major version 4" we are doing our best to follow semver, where backwards incompatible changes require a bump in the major version.

So yes and no, this is a work in progress (what isn't) and we will constantly be pushing to make the docs better. We've been working hard over the last couple of weeks to get this into some form of a publicly releasable state, but yes it's not perfect :)

If you want to help us out, feel free to submit PRs or issues on github. The main site is at http://github.com/ampersandjs/ampersandjs.com while the API references are generated from their individual readmes, all available in that github org.

latentflip··on Introducing Ampersand.js
Yup, we are basically targeting ie9 as a minimum, though some pieces will be okay in lesser browsers.

Obviously that will mean some people can't use it, but hey, trade offs right :)

latentflip··on You can build cool stuff with WebRTC in five minutes
We've fixed it now, sorry about that!
latentflip··on You can build cool stuff with WebRTC in five minutes
And we're back, demos should work again at http://talky.io

Thanks everyone.

latentflip··on You can build cool stuff with WebRTC in five minutes
As is typical, the day someone posts simplewebrtc to hackernews is the day our demo app (talky.io) goes down!

We're on it and should have it back up really soon.

Sorry!

latentflip··on Donut math - How donut.c works
Don't forget the ability to explain it well in writing!
latentflip··on Myths About Introverts
This list is taken from this article: http://www.carlkingcreative.com/10-myths-about-introverts which is based on the guy reading this book: http://www.amazon.com/Introvert-Advantage-Thrive-Extrovert-W...

I read the book myself recently, and I can highly recommend it if you feel that you sit anywhere on the introvert spectrum.

It covers the "science" behind introversion, how introverts vs. extroverts think and respond to stimuli and neurochemicals. (I put science in quotes as I don't know enough about the brain to know how scientific the discussion is but I found it useful and interesting nonetheless).

It then goes on to look at how this affects introverts' interactions with themselves, others, and in social situations - with some thoughts and guidance on how to better integrate into an "extroverted world" without just trying to be more extroverted.

I have definitely found it helpful and it's made me think a lot about who I am and how I react to life as an introvert.

latentflip··on Ask HN: How to develop logical skills?
The best tip I've been given for practice is to actually sit with a piece of paper and write out your thought process whilst solving these little problems.

It's feels a bit laborious at first, but I find it makes for much more effective practice than getting to the answer in a roundabout way, and not really knowing how you get there.

As in hackerblues' comment, sitting and explicitly writing: "If I write a 5 in this cell then the column will contain two 5s. Therefore, this cell can't contain a 5." is more effective than bumbling around and just getting it right, particularly when practicing with simple examples.

latentflip··on Ask HN: What do you want for Christmas?
I'll third that. I was dubious for a while, decided to get one for my birthday. Definitely the right move, fantastic device.
latentflip··on Ask HN: Can you mimic this scroll behaviour for browser/OS?
I haven't tried, but I think this should be very easy to implement as a Google Chrome extension, if it hasn't been done already.

Just had a quick look, and there is this extension: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/eochlhpceohhhfog...

That could be a pretty good starting point to build one that scrolls based on the mousewheel rather than choosing an option.

latentflip··on Ask HN: Help, I need to talk in front of a big audience & I'm scared, what now?
I've been pitching quite a bit recently to various sizes of audience (although nothing as big as 2000 people) but meykey take away (perhaps unsurprisingly) has been practice, a lot.

More specifically:

- Practice in front of a mirror, this really helped me focus on my body language (reduce arm waving, and feet shuffling and the like). It also made me realise I don't look like a complete idiot or anything when I speak, and I actually look perfectly normal, which was a big boost of confidence.

- When you get bored of practicing the full talk, do more rapid run-throughs, focussing solely on the key-points. For an ignite talk that might be just one word or phrase per slide. It's quite energising to blast through your talk like that, particularly just beforehand, and it really helped me remember the main points for each slide.

Good luck!

latentflip··on An Awesome Book
A man's still gotta make a living.

Also, for every book sold he's giving away a copy to a child somewhere in the world: http://veryawesomeworld.com/foundation.html which seems like a pretty decent thing to me.

latentflip··on Life Hack - The 30/30 Minute Work Cycle Feels Like Magic
If you are on a Mac, SelfControl (http://visitsteve.com/work/selfcontrol/) is perfect for this.
latentflip··on Managing progress to profitability: Dashboards for startups
It's a great start, but for some reason the page won't load past the metrics diagram on my iPhone.

Maybe it's just my phone being stupid, but you might wanna check for a fixed height CSS bug or something?

latentflip··on Ask HN: Help improve and monetize a (charitable) site for Movember
We are not officially affiliated with movember.com we just like the cause.
latentflip··on Ask HN: Help improve and monetize a (charitable) site for Movember
Ouch, thanks for that. Fixed.
latentflip··on ShowHN: Qwiki for your web accounts (GitHub, HN, Netflix, etc)
I can seem to repeat the bug if I: - Open Safari - Install Verbal Juicer - Edit one of the plugins - Quit Safari whilst the code-editor is still open.

When I reopen Safari and try and edit an extension, I just get "undefined".

latentflip··on ShowHN: Qwiki for your web accounts (GitHub, HN, Netflix, etc)
I stumbled across that later, much easier :).

I seem to be getting a weird bug where after a while the code editor window pops up with 'undefined' in it and I can't do anything further. Uninstalling and reinstalling the extension seems to fix it, but I lose my plugins. Sorry I can't provide much more detail than that, if it happens again I'll see if I can figure anything else out.

An even more awesome feature request than porting it to Chrome for me would be letting me use JQuery in the plugins.

p.s. If this functionality was wrapped up into a slightly more stable standalone app, with really basic alarm clock functionality, I would pay for it in a heartbeat.

latentflip··on ShowHN: Qwiki for your web accounts (GitHub, HN, Netflix, etc)
For anyone else looking for the plugin sources, they are embedded in the Verbal Juicer homepage.

With Firebug/Webkit dev tools, navigate to: body > #appsCode and the plugins and you can copy-paste into verbal juicer's create window.

For UK users, changing the weather code from google.com to google.co.uk seems to be all you need to do.

latentflip··on ShowHN: Qwiki for your web accounts (GitHub, HN, Netflix, etc)
This is awesome, please port it to Chrome.

Also, any chance you can release the source for the page plugins you've already written? A couple aren't working for me (for example I need the weather to search google.co.uk not google.com) and it would be nice to be able to just make a quick edit rather than starting anew.

latentflip··on Enterprise Javascript is...
That's the first example I got when loading the page, and that's exactly what I thought: for big projects namespacing seems sensible enough. So I thought the site was a collection of design patterns, rather than anti-patterns.

Left me very confused when the next example was declaring all your functions globally.

latentflip··on Brilliant design: RCA student radically improves the UK plug
I saw this when it first did the rounds on Twitter a while agi, and I have wondered about it since; I'd love to get my hands on one.

The FAQs on his site claims it will be released this year: http://www.madeinmind.co.uk/faq.php - I sure hope so.

latentflip··on HackerFollow: Follow HN Users
Nice idea, and I can see myself using it but...

The "come up with a secret phrase" thing is a nice idea, but I must've sat for 10 seconds trying to work out what was actually being asked for, and then I had no idea what phrase I could use that I wouldn't forget, but that nobody else would have chosen.

latentflip··on ShoutKey - Temporary URL Shortener by jazzychad
A friend of mine wrote an article on his blog about generating pronounceable hashes for just this purpose: http://peterbraden.co.uk/article/pronounceablehashing

Not necessarily a better solution than this, but an interesting alternative I thought.

latentflip··on Ask HN: Review my startup, ActiveInbox (GTD Gmail plugin w/ $20k donations)
To add to my feedback:

I really like it so far. It's nice to be able to archive emails and get them out of my inbox but know I won't forget about following up on them.

The archive/skip and go to next buttons are good, but I wish there was a delete and go to next. I have a lot of junk to get through :)

latentflip··on Ask HN: Review my startup, ActiveInbox (GTD Gmail plugin w/ $20k donations)
It's a really minor thing but on this page: http://www.activeinboxhq.com/install.html

In Chrome the dialog box on the page says: "This extension can access: Your data on gmail.com, google.com and 3 other websites". But when it popped up in my chrome it said "4 other websites".

It's not a big deal, but it briefly weirded me out when I don't know what those sites are, and when it's different to what I was expecting.

Will let you know what I think of the actual app once I have had a play.

latentflip··on How I handle my mail
I started experimenting with something similar (although got nowhere) as a helper for getting back to Inbox-0 from an overflowing inbox.

The concept was fairly similar, go through the inbox and sort it into piles of important, replied, unreplied, deletable, twitter statuses etc, and then the user could deal with archiving/deleting/following up more quickly.

This looks like a much better solution however, something running the whole time and stopping me getting into that mess.

Page 1 of 2Next →