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Mechanical Watch
Interactive article explaining how a mechanical watch works.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,666 posts.
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Moon
Interactive article about the Moon
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Sound
Interactive article explaining how sound works.
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GPS
Interactive article explaining how GPS works.
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Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible
Slack has just recently rolled out a “WYSIWYG text input” widget to its Web browser interface. (Apparently, the phased rollout started at the beginning of November 2019, but it’s just now starting to hit the workspaces that I participate in.) The user experience of using this new input method is really, really, really…
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Gears
Interactive article explaining how mechanical gears work.
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The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
A lot has already been said about the absurdly large corner radius of windows on macOS Tahoe. People are calling the way it looks comical, like a child’s toy, or downright insane.
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It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
Looking at the first principles of icon design—and how Apple failed to apply all of them in macOS Tahoe
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Internal Combustion Engine
Interactive article explaining how an internal combustion engine works.
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Cameras and Lenses
Interactive article explaining how cameras and lenses work.
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I regret my website redesign
Mistakes I made working with my first design agency.
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In loving memory of square checkbox
History of checkboxes and radio buttons in user interfaces
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Google Maps' Moat
Over the past year, we’ve been comparing Google Maps and Apple Maps in New York, San Francisco, and London—but some of the biggest differences are outside of large cities.
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AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
Why AI-generated event posters all look alike — and how naming a design style and era, from Bauhaus to punk fanzine, gets far better results.
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Show HN: Web Design in 4 minutes
Learn the basics of web design in 4 minutes with this interactive tutorial.
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Fast
Rarely in software does anyone ask for “fast.” We ask for features, we ask for volume discounts, we ask for the next data integration. We never think to ask for fast. But software that's fast changes behavior. Developers ship more often when code deploys in seconds (or milliseconds) instead of minutes. AI code…
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The Tyranny of the Marginal User
why consumer software gets worse, not better, over time
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I designed a Dieter Rams-inspired iPhone dock
Dieter Rams and his friends (Dietrich Lubs and Ludwig Littman) designed many great looking alarm clocks.
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4.2 Gigabytes, Or: How to Draw Anything
In our world, we can do anything that we want to do here. Any old thing. - Bob Ross, The Joy Of Painting Season 29 Episode 1
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Hardest problem in computer science: centering things
Somehow we forgot how to center rectangles and must find our way back
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This Page is Designed to Last
The end of the year is an opportunity to clean up and reset for the upcoming new semester. I found myself clearing out old bookmarks—yes, bookmarks: that formerly beloved browser feature that seems to have lost the battle to 'address bar autocomplete'. But this nostalgic act of tidying led me to despair.
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The Daredevil Camera
Once upon a time I was reading a Popular Mechanics article, the title of which eludes me. Something about playing different music for different parts of a…
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Sanding UI
One of the ways I like to do development is to build something, click around a ton , make tweaks, click around more, more tweaks, more clicks, etc., until I…
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Reddit’s disrespectful design
An overview of Reddit's adversarial and seemingly counter-productive changes.
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Text editing on mobile: the invisible problem
Whenever I explain my research at Google into mobile text editing, I’m usually met with blank stares or a slightly hostile “Everyone can edit text on their phones, right? What’s the problem?”
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Apple's New Map
Four years in the making, it covers just 3% of the U.S.’s area and 4.9% of its population:
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Apple Photos app corrupts images
The Apple Photos app sometimes corrupts images when importing from my camera. I just wanted to make a blog post about it in case anyone else runs into the problem. I’ve seen other references to this online, but most of the people gave up trying to fix it, and none of them went as far as I did to debug the issue. I’ll…
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Draw SVG rope using JavaScript
Transforming a SVG path into a rope drawing turned out to be a surprisingly fun problem to solve. I'll walk you through the process and show you a few tricks that made it work.