871
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,346 posts.
872
The cats sitting on a fence in early builds of Windows 8
Something to look at when all is lost.
873
Medieval Photoshop
Manipulating and enhancing images may seem something that is particular to the current digital age. The Kattendijke Chronicle, a late fifteenth-century manuscript from the Low Countries, contains fascinating examples of analogue image editing.
874
What made World of Warcraft's environments so compelling?
Texts on this and that.
875
Adobe XD, where did it go wrong?
From love to disillusionment with Adobe XD. Why I had to jump ship, and what went wrong for Adobe’s design tool.
876
Aspect-ratio is great
Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like a lot of the time learning new CSS features doesn’t involve just learning a what a single property does, more like getting to grips with a collection of properties and how they work together — even learning a whole specification. That’s certainly not a complaint from me: it makes…
877
My mental model of how alpha opacity works is wrong (2020)
When plotting overlapping elements with a defined alpha (opacity), I had always thought about it as an additive process with results clamped to not exceed 1.
878
Settings are not a design failure
The systematic thinking in our industry is that settings are the result of design failure. As designers, our goal is to create product experiences that don’t require any adjustment by the user. So offering customization options is often seen as a failure to make firm product decisions. I think there is a…
879
A UX designer walks into a Tesla Bar
I borrowed a friend’s Tesla 3 yesterday. About 5 minutes into the ride, the windshield started fogging up. I couldn’t find the defroster on the large control screen Teslas are so famous for. In desperation, I tapped the CAR icon but that took me to the settings screen which ended up being a dead end. Frustrated, I…
880
There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code
Everyone seems to be striving for ‘clean’ code at the moment. You can’t read a blog post without the author telling you how clean their approach is. Engineering teams get together and discuss which of the possible solutions is the cleanest. Other developers assure you that they practice ‘clean code’.
881
Stop Brainstorming
Why brainstorming doesn't work - and why to do nothing instead
882
AirPods don't “just work”
AirPods are a fantastic product. However, the small annoyances that occur when using them don't allow it to fall under the category of Apple products that "Just Work".
883
Why does the "chart increasing" emoji show in red?
It's a small but persistent emoji query: one that finds new life whenever there's a new development in the "stonks" discourse: why is the upward line on 📈 Chart Increasing displayed in the seemingly-counterintuitive color red? The answer to this question is actually quite simple, but is an
884
Click and Swap, our alternative to Drag and Drop
At Contentsquare, we gather hundreds of metrics about user interactions on the websites of our customers. Having all this information can easily become cumbersome and hard to exploit. To make user…
885
886
Designing for a right to repair
Designing from cradle to grave is no longer good enough. We need to postpone that grave as long as possible. This is how to design for a right to repair.
887
GPS
Interactive article explaining how GPS works.
888
Losing our product to button syndrome
Fighting a pandemic in the world of software
889
Welcome to Waifu Labs v2: How Do AIs Create?
How does an A.I. generate waifus and husbandos? Utilizing the power of machine learning algorithms, see how we taught an A.I. to make these magic anime portraits in the form of generative art.
890
Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue
Why we need to revisit the origin of blue hyperlink While musing over my recently published article, Why are hyperlinks blue, I was left feeling a bit blue
891
CSS Gradients that avoid the “gray dead zone”
Have you ever noticed that gradients tend to look a little gray and washed-out in the middle? This happens because of a mathematical quirk with RGB colors. Fortunately, we can work around this quirk, and create beautiful, lush, saturated gradients.
892
Making nice-looking and interactive diagrams for your PCBs
I have always liked pinout diagrams like this: Arduino Nano Pinout. Source: http://www.pighixxx.com/test/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/nano.pngThey work quite well, there is all the information and they look nice. However, they work only when you have pins on two sides of the PCB and once you squeeze too much information…
893
Nvidia tool generates full 3D models from a single still image
Bringing together the world’s brightest minds and the latest accelerated computing technology leads to powerful breakthroughs that help tackle some of the biggest research problems....
894
How to design a house to last 1000 years
At last, we’re finally ready to put together the design for our house. A fully specified design, with every detail and system described, is well beyond the scope of this newsletter (not to mention the scope of my knowledge). But we can give a high-level schematic design, laying out the basic building systems and how…
895
Grok {Shan, Shui}*: Advent of understanding the generative art
I spent 24 days digging into the code of {Shan, Shui}* Chinese painting generator and lived to tell the story.
896
897
The state of external retina displays
The monitor story for Apple computers in [nearly] 2022 is basically would you like garbage, or would you like to take out a home equity loan?
898
Penrose: From mathematical notation to beautiful diagrams
Materials from our SIGGRAPH '20 paper.
899
How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes
When I was building the spatial “tool for thought”, Jade, one frequently requested feature was drawing arrows between blocks, so we could make mind maps, flowcharts, etc. Here’s how I made it.
900
Notches Gone Wild
This holiday season we have a special gift for Mac users everywhere, especially ones with a new MacBook Pro and notch. We’re proud to announce the immediate availability of Notchmeister. So what does Notchmeister do? Think of it as a fun way to spruce up your notch. Or as a screen saver for something you […]