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marcinignac

29 karma · joined November 6, 2011

Computational designer and founder of http://variable.io/

http://marcinignac.com

http://nodes.io

submissionscomments
marcinignac··on War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history
Mercator police: please do not use projection that makes Greenland 14x bigger than reality and e.g. Russia 2x. See here https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mercator-map-true-size-of-c...

Robinson Projection would be much more accurate.

marcinignac··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
A github client / dashboard that can pull 20 of so repos for all internal and client projects in one UI so I can stay on top of project delivery and long standing bugs. It has global search, bookmarking and text based / minimalistic ui for maxium space utilisation and information density. It's read only so to comment on issue i click a link to open GH in new tab but helped me a lot to have this birds eye view on my company. Don't get me started on GH Project. I tried Linear many times but multi project / multi repo is just not their core focus and it shows.
marcinignac··on An information operating system powered by local files
> GalaxyBrain is an information operating system powered by local files. Write like a document, calculate like a spreadsheet. It lives between a note app, a wiki, a spreadsheet, and a task manager — a workspace where computation and structure are built into the page, not bolted on. Your pages are a folder on your computer, and any AI you point at that folder can work with them too.

So a bit like Obsydian or NotePlan but with app in single html file, first class document properties as values and focus on MCP/AI integration for automation.

marcinignac··on Show HN: Wildex – Pokémon Go for real wildlife
Dude... unstoppable ads as first thing experience I see after collecting first plant completely killed the vibe for my daughter.
marcinignac··on 72M Points of Interest
I really enjoy the exploration but I really wonder why people still use Mercator for data viz? Eg Greenland is not the size of Africa...
marcinignac··on Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time
I got set for my son after noticing he loves stacking Jenga blocks and generic Kapla gets 10x more usage than Lego.

Can it be that the moment Lego moved from mostly bricks to custom single use shapes for every kit the joy of combining them died? My kids build car, Dino, Harry Potter set once and then gather dust. Bridges, castles, towers and roads from Kapla get rebuild every day.

marcinignac··on CSS now has an if() conditional function
Proposed title change "Chrome now has an if() conditional function in CSS"
marcinignac··on GCP Outage
Can't wait to see how charts are going to look like here on the project we have developed for Maintel https://variable.io/maintel-digital-landscape/. It shows availability across multiple services as a landscape. Expecting to see a lot of spikes tomorrow.
marcinignac··on Mines: A simple mine puzzle game inspired by classic minesweeper
I wish it was responsive on mobile. Need to scroll right on iOS/iPhone.
marcinignac··on Figma Slides
Now the question is will there be offline mode that works with embedded videos so one can do a proper conference talk.
marcinignac··on Meta releases Intermediate Graphics Library
Filement is full blown renderer (with shadows, advanced materials, effects like transparency, postprocessing) with platform abstractions. IGL has only the platform abstractions and the rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
marcinignac··on Notes apps are where ideas go to die (2022)
If you are on mac/ios then https://noteplan.co/ is exactly that: notes + todos + calendar. I use it daily.
marcinignac··on Infinite Canvas
If you are on Mac then there is one called Muse (https://museapp.com/) by the authors of the site in this thread and it's as smooth as you would expect.
marcinignac··on Gmail’s fake loading indicator (2020)
Often longing for the old days of Flash websites with byte per byte precise loading bars that as slow as they were back then they actually meant something.
marcinignac··on Understanding onset of hot streaks in artistic, cultural and scientific careers
Many artists including myself struggle with never ending exploration and producing large body of work ending "in the drawer". While exploitation step is obvious when to initiate and how long to sustain it is less so.
marcinignac··on Nodes – JavaScript-based 2D canvas for computational thinking
I have used it for shader graphs and shadertoy like raymarching scenes.
marcinignac··on Nodes – JavaScript-based 2D canvas for computational thinking
They beauty of Nodes is that we are not limited by layout or connections. We have successfully used redux for centralised state management with change triggers distributed down the graph.
marcinignac··on Nodes – JavaScript-based 2D canvas for computational thinking
No need to invent new file format at the moment. Each node's code is just plain CommonJS module and graph structure is serialized to JSON.
marcinignac··on Nodes – JavaScript-based 2D canvas for computational thinking
We have nodes for saving high-res png/jpg images, image sequences for animation/video up to 4k, obj/gltf meshes, csv/json for data and so on that we used for various projects in the past.

We will have more news about availability at a later date.

marcinignac··on Nodes – JavaScript-based 2D canvas for computational thinking
Hi, one if the authors here. Happy to answer any questions.
marcinignac··on Ask HN: What do you use to organize your knowledge?
Wow. What I haven't tried before... One html file wiki (tiddlywiki i think). Something like 3 self written web task editors before DropBox happened. Mori (kind of evernote from the past), Google Wave (still missing it), made couple of money tracking apps with couchdb, remotestorage and other offline capable but syncing apps for personal use on mobile.

Currently

Notes: Plain text notes with markdown elements synced via DropBox edited in NvAlt on Mac, and Notesy on iOS.

Sketches: Moleskine notebooks of various sizes (mostly Reporter). Currently experimenting with even smaller ones (Cahier journals)

Visual References: After years of screenshots on my desktop and reference folders full of unnamed images I made lightweight pinterest clone https://github.com/vorg/kollektor

Articles: Pocket as 'todo readme' solution but currently working on and app for hyperlinking pdf's for computer graphics papers.

ToDo: Gave up on per project hierarchical task list as they always get old and dusty. So instead I split information into long living stuff and references (links, project requirements, hardware specs etc) that goes into notes. And one task list for MIT (most important tasks) daily similar to Autofocus system (Autofocus system - http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2009/1/6/autofocus-s...) + smaller ones for bug lists per project, TaskPaper for Mac, and TaskMator / Listacular for iOS. I even wrote custom editor for TaskPaper notes that takes advantage of fullscreen (think TweetDeck for todos).

Bookmarks: Everything after delicious got bought http://pinboard.in/ (but moving to Kollektor more and more)

Mindmaps: For notetaking (FreeMind on Mac, MindNode on iPad) and monthly planning where I list all my current projects, incoming ones, ideas, goals etc.

Limitations: - NvAlt search is fast but sucks if you have long notes (hard to search inside them) - Still haven't found good outliner for iOS. Taskpaper was promising but died (discontinued on iOS). - Plain text is cool and durable but missing possibility of dropping images here and there

Dreaming: - not sure if one size fits all will ever happen but something like pinterest mashup with workflowy with one data structure but multiple editing modes (list, outline, mindmap, spatial) - i'll call it RAM (Remote Access Memory)

marcinignac··on Enabling & using WebGL on iOS 4.2+
I put some video going through few WebGL enabled websites and it's looks very promising http://vimeo.com/31644717 The JavaSript performance itself for example in mesh building is really terrible. Trying to benchmark it against Nitro in normal Mobile Safari would be a good thing to do.