[HN Gopher] Library of Juggling
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Library of Juggling
Author : tontony
Score : 111 points
Date : 2026-02-02 07:58 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (libraryofjuggling.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (libraryofjuggling.com)
| xnorswap wrote:
| I find it fascinating that it uses a 2-9 scale to grade
| difficulty.
|
| The rating is described as a rating "1 - 10"
|
| But every trick is actually graded 2 to 9. (
| https://libraryofjuggling.com/TricksByDifficulty.html )
|
| Presumably no-one ever wanted to define a grade 1, just in case
| an easier one was discovered, and similarly for 10.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Well, do we really even need to discuss juggling 1? I just call
| that tossing the ball around...
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _do we really even need to discuss juggling 1?_
|
| When I was learning to juggle, that was the first step - and
| for someone who's never really tried to juggle, or toss a
| ball up and down in a very consistent way, it's surprisingly
| hard. Honestly, probably not a 1 on the scale.
| thom wrote:
| Juggling is one of hobbies with the highest ratios of being able
| to impress random people versus the actual effort you have to put
| in, and I generally find I never forget 3-ball stuff I learned as
| a kid. It's also as good as a long walk for getting you out of
| your head when needed.
|
| Shout out to anyone that remembers the Mushy Pea juggling shop in
| Manchester many years ago, where I learned all sorts of circus
| skills.
| c22 wrote:
| I've also found it to be a magical incantation to silence
| crying babies. Sometimes I'll quickly flash (juggle for one
| round) three random objects to shut up a baby in public and
| their parents don't even notice.
| LanceH wrote:
| Juggling 3 is a skill that is way easier than people think
| until they do it. But the very next question is will be, "how
| many can you juggle?" as they apparently think juggling 4 is
| just 33% more difficult than 3.
| vunderba wrote:
| It's also fun that you can tweak it without the layperson
| even noticing the change in relative difficulty.
| Cascade pattern = easy difficulty Shower pattern =
| normal difficulty Box pattern = hard difficulty
|
| As someone who loves to run their hands up and down in the
| piano in grand sweeping arpeggios, I'm a huge fan of patterns
| where the perceived difficulty is higher than the actual
| difficulty.
| Someone wrote:
| For those wondering: to juggle 4 balls, you either have to
| decrease the time between catching a ball and throwing it
| again or increase the time a ball is in the air.
|
| Unless you start throwing feathers or balloons, the latter
| requires you throw higher. That requires you to either spend
| more time launching them up (bad for the 'decrease time
| between catching and throwing') or use more force (bad for
| throwing accuracy.
|
| Also, even assuming you juggle 4 balls keeping "time in hand"
| equal, you have to throw it higher by a factor of (4/3)2.
| That's almost 2.
|
| And even if you manage to make those throws with the same
| accuracy in angles, the errors in location by the time you
| catch the balls scale by the same factor.
| dsclough wrote:
| In my experience people can't even tell how many balls
| you're juggling after 3. 4, 5, 6, 7 all get "how many balls
| is that", silly stuff like 3 ball factory blows more minds
| than 5 ball site swaps
| munificent wrote:
| Also, with a three ball pattern, most of the time there's
| only a single ball in the air. With four, there are almost
| always two. The odds of a mid-air collision increase
| significantly, and go up as the number of balls increases.
|
| That also forces you to have much more consistent throws
| which, as you note, gets harder because you also have to
| throw higher which scales up any error in the force you're
| applying.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > you either have to decrease the time between catching a
| ball and throwing it again or increase the time a ball is
| in the air
|
| I think you might be thinking of _5_ ball juggling.
|
| 4 ball juggling (or at least it's most common variant, "The
| Fountain" [0]) is fascinating because it's really juggling
| two balls in each hand in a way that makes it appear
| similar to the standard cascade. Though this may sound
| "less hard" than what people initially imagine, it's a very
| different feeling than all the basics you learn using only
| 3 balls.
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(juggling)
| rantallion wrote:
| They're not wrong. Assuming alternating hands are doing
| the throwing (rather than both hands throwing a ball
| simultaneously), 4-ball patterns mean each ball is in the
| air for 4 beats, while 3-ball patterns only take 3 beats
| each.
|
| And once one realises that many juggling patterns can be
| understood by the number of beats each ball takes to
| return to a hand, one can then think in siteswap
| (https://juggle.fandom.com/wiki/Siteswap).
| thom wrote:
| Much easier to learn to juggle three clubs, and then swap
| them for knives. Really no harder than 3 balls but
| significantly more flashy.
| rantallion wrote:
| Don't forget about fire. Even the most boring of moves
| amaze crowds when half your equipment is burning.
| vikingerik wrote:
| Rubik's cubing is another. Most people here with enough logical
| aptitude to be programmers could probably learn a beginner
| method in a day or two. I'll pick up a cube anywhere I see one
| scrambled, solve it in a couple minutes, and then the last
| flourish is to leave it in the checkerboard pattern.
|
| I also juggle, and the result of the combination is that
| approximately every single person on Facebook has posted to me
| the video about solving cubes while juggling them...
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| The biggest difference about Rubik's cubing is that once you
| have mastered 3x3x3, 4x4x4, and 5x5x5 (which is just a slight
| variant on 3x3x3) all subsequent cubes are just natural
| extensions of these. A 17x17x17 requires no new skills that
| aren't already mastered in a 5x5x5, it just takes more time.
| The nice part of about this is you can really blow peoples
| minds by pulling out an 11x11x11 cube and solving it at
| though it were nothing.
|
| Even sided cubes are the hardest because they have issues
| with "parity" that are only uncovered near the end of the
| solve and can be quite tedious to fix (at least imho).
| vikingerik wrote:
| Right, cubing scales up much more readily than juggling.
| Although I've found the bigger cubes aren't quite so
| impressive because you can't do them as fast. I take 10-15
| minutes for the 5x5x5, and by then any observer has lost
| interest.
|
| But yeah, some people will be impressed just because it's
| bigger. They always say that it must be super hard. My
| stock reply: "It's like a jigsaw puzzle. Is 1000 piece
| harder than 500? Not really harder, it's just more of the
| same thing." Sometimes that gets a blank look, sometimes
| that induces enlightenment.
|
| My favorite cuboid variant is a 3x3x4. That blows people's
| minds when they see it's not symmetric, and they handle it
| and realize that it can't do certain turns (the long axes
| have to be 180deg not 90deg), but in fact that limitation
| makes it easier and I can solve it almost as fast as a
| 3x3x3.
| postsantum wrote:
| As a Java developer, I recommend Factory trick. Simple, but
| impresses people the most
|
| https://libraryofjuggling.com/Tricks/3balltricks/Factory.htm...
| ronjouch wrote:
| Sadly, doing the trick with a single ball yields a
| FactorySingleton and scores an extra Java point, but doesn't
| impress as much. We can't have nice things -\\_(tsu)_/- .
| mfsch wrote:
| Perhaps of interest: I came across this retrospective of the
| author of that site and how he moved it to static hosting a
| couple of years ago [1].
|
| I would also say that this library covers more or less the "lower
| half" of solo ball juggling in terms of difficulty. With lower
| ball counts (say <= 4), there are a lot of these patterns that
| have complex arm movements and can be difficult to explain with
| words, so having such a listing with animations and step-by-step
| instructions is very valuable. Starting with 4 balls, there's
| less and less time for moving your arms around and it is more
| about the sequence of heights of the throws, which are well
| described with just their numeric "siteswap" pattern and you can
| learn them just from knowing the number sequence. The site has
| only the most basic of those (e.g. 534) and even very common
| 4-ball (7531, 633) patterns are missing with hardly anything
| beyond that.
|
| [1]:
| https://ianconvy.github.io/projects/other/libraryofjuggling/...
| ragazzina wrote:
| The website is great, but I find the lack of hyperlinks
| maddening.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Are we looking at the same website? The one I'm looking at is
| like 40% hyperlinks.
| ragazzina wrote:
| I click on Box pattern. It says that before trying the Box,
| one should master the HalfBox pattern. I want to see how the
| HalfBox pattern looks like, so I try to click on HalfBox, but
| it's not a hyperlink. So I look to the left, where Box is,
| and try to look for HalfBox under Box. It's not there (it's
| not even under the letter H, because it's under the number
| 441).
|
| On the Box page, HalfBox is in a square frame on the top-
| right. If wikipedia were like this it would be unusable.
| flyosity wrote:
| What a great website aesthetic, takes me way back to when the
| Internet felt a lot smaller.
| nephihaha wrote:
| It takes me back to a time when I could find a wide variety of
| websites online. I love this kind of thing... Not something I
| would deliberately look for but great to stumble across it.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Those animations - the stick figures moving red balls - were all
| over Tumblr a few months ago, with people creating all sorts of
| interesting animations out of them. You can find them by
| searching for "juggling lab".
| columk wrote:
| I remember happily going through these each day after school
| until I could do everything.
|
| There wasn't much on YouTube at the time but I also think YouTube
| is a worse resource for pretty much all of these simple tricks.
| All you need is a slow loop to learn any ball juggling trick.
|
| There was also a similar site that let you input siteswaps.
|
| The noob gains once you get comfortable with 3 balls are
| addictive, compared to later patterns or tricks that can take
| hours, days or even weeks to pick up.
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(page generated 2026-02-02 23:01 UTC)