Hacker News: tholman

New comment by tholman in "Turn your best AI prompts into one-click tools in Chrome"

tholman — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 23:29:33 +0000

Tried to visit the first domain, baydailymedia, but doesn't seem to exist... I know its unsurprising and not against the rules or even spirit of showing off your new toy, but some humor in the aria tag "Video of user creating a protein maxing Skill" and then within the video, a fat "Video for illustrative purposes" "Results may vary" "check response for accuracy"

Second video seem's more real. And yeah, again not against the rules, but dropping onto website, no ads, prompting data out of it is very in the ethos of our current "lets just do an ai" to be relavent era.

New comment by tholman in "Nova Launcher added Facebook and Google Ads tracking"

tholman — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 04:29:58 +0000

For those out of the know, Nova Launcher is an Android home screen replacement... so hits home when the root of your phone existence gets shook piece by piece.

New comment by tholman in "The Bluesky firehose viewed in the style of a Windows XP screensaver"

tholman — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 02:45:17 +0000

Crashes like a Windows ME screensaver. Jokes aside, it's very fun to see open firehose access like this. I seem to recall that Dorsey had said that twitter limiting their api access was a mistake, hope we can keep this going.

New comment by tholman in "One year, 41M digits: How Luke Durant found the largest known prime number"

tholman — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 04:35:32 +0000

Fun hypothetical, or can someone solve? How long, would this regex prime check [1] (via hn 2009) take to run on this on todays average machine?

Hitchhiker's Guide's Deep Thought "42" was 7.5 million years, just for a guide-post.

- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=707236

New comment by tholman in "Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?"

tholman — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 23:59:10 +0000

I love a good useless program, I may have written more useless ones than useful. Here's a few of my faves from the last 10 years!

- A password strength page that insults you based on strength https://trypap.com/

- Minesweeper with 1 square https://onesquareminesweeper.com/

- Adding elevator music to "go to top" buttons https://tholman.com/elevator.js/

- CSS Animation library of obnoxious over the top animations https://tholman.com/obnoxious/

- A fake mosquito with the web audio api https://tholman.com/mosquito-js/

New comment by tholman in "Hotwire: HTML Over The Wire"

tholman — Sun, 02 Jun 2024 16:56:35 +0000

Here's the HN conversation from 2020 [1], a little closer to when this came out.

- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507942

New comment by tholman in "Console.delight"

tholman — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 02:03:03 +0000

We've come a long way from console.frog [2016]

- https://tholman.com/console-dot-frog/

New comment by tholman in "Google resumes transition to Manifest V3 for Chrome extensions"

tholman — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 19:54:09 +0000

I've got maybe 4 extensions that are manifest V2 that just purely don't seem worth upgrading/fixing up (my largest with 5-10k installs) due to the time/5+ year old code that has been working fine on the old apis... Has chrome done some outreach to the popular extensions, or maybe just gone past a point where they're happy to kill off the old and move onto the new? Or is this purely about ublock etc?

New comment by tholman in "Spain tech job market is facing a hiring freeze"

tholman — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 23:17:31 +0000

As someone that works in media/advertising, the first thing I check when I see something like this is their ads.txt [1] -- It looks like they're managed by ezoic whom you forward your entire dns and they inject ads in the middle (AI is mentioned, naturally). Definitely ruining this whole site's experience.

[1] https://samagame.com/ads.txt

New comment by tholman in "ChessMonitor – Analytics for Lichess and Chess.com"

tholman — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 21:53:22 +0000

Ahh, this is super nice!

One thing I'd love to know or see is common mistakes I make or the type of mistake/trap I fall into in the pivotal moments of games (some kind of fork/pin combo for me I suspect) ... and/or repeated mistakes I've made in the same position.

New comment by tholman in "Who employs your doctor? Increasingly, a private equity firm"

tholman — Sun, 16 Jul 2023 18:37:30 +0000

I'd noticed some strange changes at our veterinary office, where they'd usually give my dog a full round of shots once a year, suddenly they decided to break it up into multiple different rounds, meaning I'd pay 3 times instead of the one. After a little research I'd found that they'd been bought by a private equity firm, and on further inspection had found a lot (NYC) of practices had changed hands the last few years.

There's been some antitrust cases, but the FTC clearly can't block many. The changes are clearly costing everyone more money for no reason, but can anyone really block this?

- [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/06/...

New comment by tholman in "Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings"

tholman — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 00:04:21 +0000

- [1] Bloomberg Article https://archive.is/eTpi5 - [2] NYT Article https://archive.is/fUtnl

New comment by tholman in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

tholman — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 18:06:21 +0000

https://tholman.com/ - Largely JS experiments dating back 10+ years. Sometimes I scroll right back to the start and can appreciate the long journey I've taken from scrappy student to now.

New comment by tholman in "Ask HN: What RSS Reader do you use in 2022?"

tholman — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 18:22:01 +0000

Have been on the feedly train ever since google axed reader, was able to transfer all feeds via import ++ will help you get some kinda feed (can break with big site redesigns but has been pretty solid) from sites without RSS. Haven't needed to shop around at all since 2013.

New comment by tholman in "GitHub Actions Degraded Performance"

tholman — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 17:40:36 +0000

Four days in a row at GitHub with different outages, someone's definitely having a difficult on-call.

- https://www.githubstatus.com/history

New comment by tholman in "I made a Google sheet of local elections and it's been removed from Google Drive"

tholman — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 17:01:11 +0000

Am thinking that a few of the domains on the list expired and were snapped up by malware/scammer sites causing the spreadsheet to seem super sus to a machine scanning/checking urls.

New comment by tholman in "Do Kwon in more trouble"

tholman — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 05:22:01 +0000

Am I missing something, or is "kwon-artist" a racism-style play on words much like say, "kung-flu"? Cmon...

_edit_ ~ Sounds like I'm wrong here by the general sentiment, was taught not to use name's as puns :(

New comment by tholman in "The Owen Wilson Wow API"

tholman — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 02:36:59 +0000

As a wow amazed individual I had made this guess the wow to the movie game a couple of years back [1] ... this would have made that work a whole lot easier than the painstakingly slow sourcing I had done :D

[1] http://wowenwilsonquiz.com/

New comment by tholman in "It takes $420k per year to run Lichess"

tholman — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 15:00:55 +0000

Lots of people saying "You can improve costs here!" without factoring in the developer time/learning/upkeep dollars it would take to do that. Sometimes the best solution is the one you know that will be easiest for you.

New comment by tholman in "Heroes of Might and Magic"

tholman — Sun, 26 Dec 2021 16:39:45 +0000

Amazingly the source code for the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 expansions was lost for years, so they've not often been included in the HD ports. Someone has (apparently) dug it up on an old hard drive [1] though a few screenshots isn't a true proof.

Knowing that a huge organization has lost such a treasured codebase has insured that I backup almost every piece of code I ever write... after 10 years of development I dip back in every now and then and look at what younger me was working on, always brings a smile to my face.

1. https://twitter.com/diskblitz/status/920801845349466113