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leoncvlton Ask HN: Favorite blog in 2024?

Not new, but always enjoy occasionally checking what Rek and Devine are up to @ 100 rabbits: https://100r.co/

leoncvlton Rendering protein structures inside cells at the atomic level with Unreal Engine

If you get a kick out of 3D renderings of cells and molecules, you're gonna have a field day with the work done at https://random42.com/. PSA: I started working there as a 3D artist but now lead the interactive department. You'd be surprised at how much a good art direction really makes a difference in scientific visualization. Real-time graphics advanced considerably in the last couple years but it's always a challenge to transport that nice, smooth pre-rendered look over to mobile devices and the web at 60 frames per second (90 on virtual reality headsets, to boot...)

leoncvlton Programming Fonts

I'm coding on a 1080p screen and I still very much prefer pixel-perfect fonts - Terminus (https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/) has been my font of choice, with proggy clean being a close second (use it for terminal panels and such). I see the site has a filter toggle to show those but with modern browser forcing anti-aliasing on all text, that's pretty uselesas.

On a related note, I noticed that there are a few fonts which seems to ignore system-wide or browser-wide antialiasing settings - one example would be the "MS Gothic" font, visible on this site: https://fountainofdreams.net/ where all text is crisp as hell. Why is this?

leoncvlton Heaps: A free, open-source and cross-platform game engine

For those who might be interested, I wrote an introductory book to HaxeFlixel at https://discover-haxeflixel.com/ which was "blessed" by the devs (we gave away tons of copies during an HaxeFlixel IndieGoGo, plus there's a link to the book in the official docs as well)

leoncvlton Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://leoncvlt.com/

Nothing special, it's basically a host for my (not exactly up to date) resume, a couple projects, and my github.

I do, however, take pride in its pleasant minimalism and the fact that it's blazing fast - mostly out of being html-only, with all "pages" actually embedded in a single file - it was generated from a single markdown file using https://github.com/leoncvlt/imml

leoncvlton Entire website in a single HTML file

Love this! Some time ago I created a tool to make similar one-page sites by parsing a markdown file: https://leoncvlt.github.io/imml/

It's also available as a library / on the command line: https://github.com/leoncvlt/imml

leoncvlton Pico CSS Framework

On a similar vein, I'm a fan of water.css for small / quick projects: https://watercss.kognise.dev/

leoncvlton Peter Talisman: Lord of the Harvest

Quoting the creators on reddit[1]: "We (Ben West & Joseph Pleass) just finished our first game, Peter Talisman: Lord of the Harvest, accompanying the album by our friends Slugabed and Samuel Organ. It's browser-based and about 40 minutes long. You'll guide Peter Talisman and Arthur Portal-Dolmen to uncover the sentimental sediment that lies across the great plane of corn."

[1]:https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/comments/qqvyvx/p...

leoncvlton Python GUIs for Humans – Transforms UI into People-Friendly Pythonic Interfaces

Came here to mention this, Gooey is very useful to make simple command-line scripts "non-tech-friendly" by giving it a familiar GUI rather than a scary black terminal window :)

leoncvlton Show HN: Generate minimalist, fast no-JS websites from a single plain text file

No, I'm just sharing a weekend project. If your first reaction is "anyone who needs this weird feature could just add a string delimiter to their markdown file, and use a Unix until to partioning" then it's clearly not something for you.

leoncvlton Show HN: Generate minimalist, fast no-JS websites from a single plain text file

Same benefits that any tool with a higher level of abstraction might have over its lower-level ancestors - less verbosity, and faster / easier ways to achieve certain things (in this case, creating simple text-based websites) while keeping the complexity under the bonnet (you'd have to re-implement the multi-page logic using the CSS :target selector when using regular html if you want the same functionality as my tool).

leoncvlton Show HN: Generate minimalist, fast no-JS websites from a single plain text file

Can you create a multi-page website from a single file in pandoc or markdown?

leoncvlton Cinder: Instagram's performance-oriented fork of CPython

I usually put https://pypi.org/project/taskipy/ in my poetry dev dependencies to achieve this - then I can just run `poetry run task start`

leoncvlton Show HN: Open-source high-res Mars map, in natural colors

Looks good! I like the atmospheric halo around the planet when you zoom out being dependant on the light direction and the angle you're looking at the planet from.

I've tried to get a grasp of how it's working on the 3D side by having a look at the github sourcecode, but seems like it's all managed by the "sceneview" module from the ArcGIS software as opposed to a custom implementation, is it?

leoncvlton Launch HN: Enombic (YC S20) – Create your own stock indexes

This looks great, congrats! For those already using Trading212 in EU / UK, I've built a few tools that try and accomplish a similar thing using their pie features:

• etf4u (https://github.com/leoncvlt/etf4u) scrapes equities mutual funds and mix and match your custom indexes

• trading212-pie-sync (https://github.com/leoncvlt/trading212-pie-sync) takes the information from the tool above (or ay external source, really) and automatically updates the pie's allocation (which would take a long time if done manually)

leoncvlton Robinhood CEO, Reddit Co-Founder and Others Testify on GameStop Stock

Annoyingly, they didn't include "I am not a cat" into the transcription - he actually said that live at the beginning of his statement, got a chuckle out of me.

leoncvlton The Physics of baking good Pizza [pdf]

No love for iron skillets? I've had some pretty good results cooking pizzas in a home settings with it. It sounds weird but it gets decently close the the quality of a stone oven, something to do with the heat conductivity of cast iron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXAW2GseICs

You cook it on the hob for a few minutes to cook the bottom, constantly shuffling the skillet round to get that random charring, then a few more minutes in a pre-heated oven as close to the broiler as possible.

Great for deep dish pizza as well, if you're into that.

leoncvlton Haxe 4.2

Ha, it was a very Frankenstein-y stack. I wrote everything in markdown, then rendered to html with multimarkdown (https://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/), and then converted to pdf with wkhtmltopdf (https://wkhtmltopdf.org/) and to epub/mobi with Calibre's ebook-convert (https://calibre-ebook.com/)

leoncvlton Haxe 4.2

My introduction to Haxe was Haxeflixel (https://haxeflixel.com/), an Haxe game development library inspired by flixel (http://flixel.org/), an older AS3-based library which was pretty known in the late 00's in the indie games community.

As the top comment mentioned, I was particularly impressed by the ease of cross-platform development in an age where bigger tools like Unity were still picking up steam. Coming from Game Maker, Haxeflixel felt like the natural step forward. I enjoyed it so much I wrote a book about it: https://discover-haxeflixel.com/

The people behind it launched a fairly successful fundraiser a few years ago so I'm happy the main developer and contributors got something back for their open-source efforts. As far as I know the library is stable - I just about updated the book a few months ago to re-rewrite references to the Flash (RIP) and move people towards the html5 exporter instead.

I still think that in an age of 10GBs+ AAA game development framewords, Haxe and Haxefixel still have a place for your typical 2D / Pixel Art-ish arcade game, although more ambitious and successful games have definitely been made, like Defender's Quest (http://www.defendersquest.com/) from Lars Doucet's, a huge fan of the framework.

leoncvlton Raspberry Pi Enters Microcontroller Game with $4 Pico

All right, let's say you know absolutely nothing about the world of microcontrollers but you think this looks cool and cheap. What webpages or resources would you recommend to get started and learn more? Do you first to need to get into electronics and circuits? But before that, get a foundation on how electricity works? And even before that, get a good grasp on how to create the universe?

leoncvlton Show HN: Sir – Git-diff-able JSON database on yer filesystem

This is something I wrote for a small electron application that needed some simple database functionality: https://www.npmjs.com/package/minim-json-db

Like the OP, stores data locally in .json files, and uses a simple MongoDB-inspired API

leoncvlton Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC

How do I play sounds with this? I see no jack for speakers or headphones. I assume one could have sound over HDMI but monitors with built-in speakers are not very common.

leoncvlton Isoflow – Infrastructure Diagrams

Very pleasant to the eye! Reminds me of http://www.zachtronics.com/exapunks/

leoncvlton Show HN: Brick, a free Notion-like tool for zero-hassle site making

Nice work - seems like more and more people are using Notion to publish their own little websites. There are a few custom solutions that attempt to fix the problems that the author outlined, such as custom URLs and styling:

- https://super.so/

- https://fruitionsite.com/

- https://www.notion.so/Hosting-Potion-Fast-custom-domains-for...

I also built my own solution which takes a different approach: https://github.com/leoncvlt/loconotion - it caches the Notion page as a static site - admittedly you lose the capability of "syncing" sites instantly but is also makes the site snappier and more responsive as it removes a lot of bloat.

leoncvlton Apple’s Rejection of Hey from the App Store for Not Using In-App Purchases

I met the same problems when trying to publish an app with purchasable subscriptions on the store. Rejected at first, then I removed all mentions of the subscription in the app and after pointing this out to the review team, it got approved. The whole experience left me very frustrated.

Recently I pulled the app off the store altogether because I can't be asked to deal with this things on every update.

I feel like a viable alternative would be to push for, and educate the end users about progressive web apps. But then again, that might just be about moving the monopoly from the app stores to the browser vendors, as in the end it's them who have the last word about PWA compatibility. If I'm not wrong lately Safari already made some changes to the storage policy that undermines PWA capabilities.

leoncvlton Notion for everyone

I use https://dynalist.io/ and enjoys its ease of us a lot - it is admittedly a glorified version of https://workflowy.com/, but while Workflowy invented the bullet-list web app formula, I find that it has stagnated in ideas for a while and I do like the little extra features Dynalist has.

leoncvlton Spleeter – Music Source-Separation Engine

Here's the sample output, for those who are curious:

- Sample track: https://files.catbox.moe/56op27.mp3

- Spleeted vocals: https://files.catbox.moe/4d9aru.wav

- Spleeted accompaniment: https://files.catbox.moe/y67g23.wav

leoncvlton GitHub Codespaces

So how would this differ from CodeSandbox or StackBlitz?

leoncvlton Show HN: Turn any YouTube playlist into a sleek radio-like page

Hi all, this was this weekend's little project I made to take a break from some other bigger stuff.

Basically it takes a youtube playlist and wraps it around a nicer streaming page - good to leave on the monitor at parties, or to send to friends and such.

On the home page, just paste the youtube link of a video contained in the playlist. Or you can build the link yourself: https://playlistradio.live/?&list={playlist_id}

Some examples:

- https://playlistradio.live/?&list=PL8F6B0753B2CCA128 / A classic jazz playlist, the default example on the site

- https://playlistradio.live/?&list=PLVHGe9JLVncHBqqcT9Xc7P9l_... / some good future funk

- https://playlistradio.live/?&list=PLD61626F6813F6C5F / The GOAT soundtrack