Hacker News: thesystemis

Daily code sketching in 2017

thesystemis — Sun, 14 Jan 2018 11:46:12 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.usejournal.com/daily-sketches-in-2017-1b4234b0615d

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16143869

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by thesystemis in "Ask HN: What's the one thing that let you grow the most as a developer?"

thesystemis — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 17:32:39 +0000

last year I made a resolution to do daily code sketches for fun:

https://www.instagram.com/zach.lieberman/

I have learned a great deal from the act of daily coding and treating code like a creative medium without any pressure on what I make or why. I found myself tackling hard challenges so I wouldn't get bored and learning a variety of new tricks to help make the sketching easier. I wrote about the process here:

https://medium.com/@zachlieberman/daily-sketches-2016-28586d...

I think daily activities are the best for growing -- short, concentrated, and limited in scope and can fit with the rest of your life.

New comment by thesystemis in "Daily Sketches in 2016"

thesystemis — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 08:30:13 +0000

thanks!

New comment by thesystemis in "Daily Sketches in 2016"

thesystemis — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 08:29:10 +0000

I just saw this thread... I wrote this article (and made the sketches here: https://www.instagram.com/zach.lieberman/) -- happy to answer any questions!

also if it's helpful to anyone, I do open office hours once per week and I am happy to talk to anyone about sketching, creative code or anything else:

https://medium.com/@zachlieberman/open-office-hours-124e1b79...

Open office hours

thesystemis — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 19:13:30 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/@zachlieberman/open-office-hours-124e1b799b0b#.iv7fctip5

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13279295

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by thesystemis in "Land Lines"

thesystemis — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 14:38:11 +0000

I'll take a look - thanks! note that we do limit the line somewhat since the best matches are curves, lines, etc and self intersecting lines don't match very well.. The best kinds of lines are like the ones in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6-LK9BOVTA)

New comment by thesystemis in "Land Lines"

thesystemis — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 12:14:16 +0000

sorry! this is a bug based on how many events the mouse is firing and I've open an issue for it -- I will take a look at the app with a gaming mouse and work on a fix.

New comment by thesystemis in "Land Lines"

thesystemis — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 06:11:32 +0000

thanks -- do you know what graphics card that is? also you can try enabling "Override software rendering list" in chrome://flags/ -- I don't have a great handle on what gpus are blacklisted, but I know there are some that are.

putting this in the address bar can give you a lot of info as well "chrome://gpu"

New comment by thesystemis in "Land Lines"

thesystemis — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 05:05:33 +0000

I'm not on the data arts team (I collaborated with them on this) but I'll ping them to answer.

This was a passion project, they approached me with a set of data -- satellite images, and we discussed different ways of visualizing them, etc.

New comment by thesystemis in "Land Lines"

thesystemis — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 04:53:43 +0000

fixed! thanks!

New comment by thesystemis in "Land Lines"

thesystemis — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 04:52:05 +0000

thanks! I am using a metric from the dollar gesture recognizer

http://depts.washington.edu/madlab/proj/dollar/index.html

which gives a value for how close to polylines are (it normalizes them and does some distance calculations)

the way the vp tree works is you provide a set of data and a metric for distance (in my case, the data was the polylines and the metric was from dollar) and it computes the structure. As long as the metric observes some basic principles (I think it's called triangle inequality) the spatial division will work and you can do a fast search for nearest neighbors.

New comment by thesystemis in "Land Lines"

thesystemis — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 04:46:29 +0000

I think that's a great idea... I will take a look at that. here's a hack in the meantime someone put together for doing that:

https://gist.github.com/spite/90e3dbf8e117660f6788a5748ae06c...

New comment by thesystemis in "Land Lines"

thesystemis — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 03:08:09 +0000

no it's a really good question! I think this just has to do with the line detection algorithm and it tending to find more curves than sharp angle lines -- this is what the matches look like when you draw a Z:

http://imgur.com/a/YErmM

they are not as good as when you draw a curve and I think it's just trimming based on general poor matches. I've found if I round the Z or make the angle less extreme I can get better results.

New comment by thesystemis in "Land Lines"

thesystemis — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 02:55:34 +0000

the matching is based on the input (lines from the line detection) and we do some tricks to try to get better matches if the results aren't great. One trick is for matches that aren't super great, we start to trim the line slight from the start so if the first pass is a bad match, we try 95% of the line (ie, the last 95%) then trim is some more, etc.

another thing to note is that the app progressively loads data in the background so you get better results after the first minute or so once all the data is loaded -- the app launches with only 20% of the overall data.

New comment by thesystemis in "Land Lines"

thesystemis — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 02:43:01 +0000

there's actually no backend! the matching is done client side.

here's a technical write up:

https://developers.google.com/web/showcase/2016/land-lines

the trick for making it fast is vantage point trees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantage-point_tree) which help with nearest neighbor searching through extremely large data sets.

New comment by thesystemis in "Land Lines"

thesystemis — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 02:29:59 +0000

sorry to hear that! can you provide more info about your platform? this app uses webgl and we check for webgl support when the page loads.

New comment by thesystemis in "Daily sketching in 2016"

thesystemis — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 02:22:42 +0000

this is a write up of a year of doing code based sketches -- last year I started to do a sketch per day here:

https://www.instagram.com/zach.lieberman/

I am happy to answer any questions about this if it's helpful

New comment by thesystemis in "Land Lines"

thesystemis — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 02:12:47 +0000

also another tip -- you can click on the city name in the left corner to load the same view in google earth (if you are curious about what you are looking at!)

New comment by thesystemis in "Land Lines"

thesystemis — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 01:55:52 +0000

thanks! that's great to hear

New comment by thesystemis in "Land Lines"

thesystemis — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 01:55:25 +0000

the line is limited to a certain lengths since simpler lines (curves, etc) provide better matches