Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,666 posts.
Three years ago, I wrote a rant about the problems of our current UI paradigm. The complaints I voiced were hardly new or unique, neither was the text what I'd consider my best writing. It was, honestly, mostly a way to blow off steam. It seems I struck a nerve, though, because it's proven to be one of the most…
In the world of computing, we tend to abstract away complexity. Doing so seems liberating. It enables us to focus on the bigger picture. Unfortunately, in doing so, the fidelity of our understanding often decreases. We sometimes end up blinding ourselves.
A website for old Macintosh themes and some background.
Over the past few weeks, I've been experimenting with painting in watercolours using my AxiDraw plotter. Watercolour is a medium I enjoy painting in (by hand) as a personal hobby, kind of separate from my public art making, so it’s been interesting to combine it with code. I’ve thought about trying
I’ve been a paying Flickr member since late 2009, but this year was going to be my last. I believed this even after I forgot to change my billing settings and Flickr auto-renewed me into 2015, because it seemed chances were good that Flickr, a long-neglected and resource intensive property, would get the ax soon …
A habit for addressing two-way decisions.
Glimpse NX didn't have a great solution for missing menu, but this new 3D CAD application has
We first published our paper on relief shading using neural networks towards the start of October 2020, and now almost 2 years later, we are very excited to share Eduard .
There's a small house in the moddle of IBM's Code Page 437. Why?
I spent 24 days digging into the code of {Shan, Shui}* Chinese painting generator and lived to tell the story.
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…
In the last year or two there has been a slow but steady trickle of articles attempting to account for UML ’s lack of long-term success (if you have time for only one, I suggest Hillel Wayne’s article ). As fate would have it, I had some involvement in UML standardisation in the early 2000s, so I saw some of the…
When Pieter Omvlee was tasked with designing a simple drawing application as part of his computer science class at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, he set about creating a lightweight app that would fulfill his homework assignment. In the late 2000s, the vector drawing app market was a lot smaller than it…
Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were, we didn’t really think about turning everything light or dark. Sure, some applications were often dark (photo editors, IDEs, terminals) but everything else was light, and that was fine. What we didn’t notice is that light…
CSS has been undergoing a quiet renaissance lately. Lots of big features which previously required an external tool to use, are now native parts of the language, and its growing more and more all the time…
Whenever I watch videos of how things are made, I marvel at the cleverness of the manufacturing machines. Retired engineer Duc Thang Nguyen has created over 170
Butterick’s Practical Typography
One of the simplest and best-known computing devices on the planet is a fascinating study in interface design.
Artists say all colors are a mixture of red, yellow, and blue. But physics and TV screens and printers disagree. How does color really work?
I heard about VHS recently. It’s a tool for creating recordings of command-line tools, so you can create little demos and tutorials about how to use them. You can write a script to run comman…
I’d like to preface this case study by stating that my intentions behind redesigning Apple Music were in no way driven by indignation or…
Going “full CSS Zen Garden” with modern CSS.
Garamond is widely considered one of the greatest fonts ever made. But the things that make Garamond so beautiful also make it a problem.
In 1997 I received a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for work I had done on procedural texture. For example, the NYU Torch on the right is made entirely from procedural textures (except for the text along the bottom). The flame, background, and metal and marble handle…
