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on Gopher (inofficial)
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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient
jama211 wrote 9 hours 4 min ago:
This would be cool on a fake window for your house, like a screen in a
basement
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote 13 hours 38 min ago:
My sky is blue and orange right now though and your site shows black.
chrz wrote 15 hours 45 min ago:
Fully black web page for me here. Well its correct
CodeVerseEx wrote 21 hours 20 min ago:
Very cool concept. Would be great if there’s an option to tweak the
gradient before copying, so devs can match it exactly to their design
needs.
leokennis wrote 1 day ago:
Should anyone appreciate it, this Shortcut for your iOS/iPadOS device
will set your wallpaper to the current sky based on this nice tool: [1]
Just make sure that your last (or only) iDevice Home Screen is set to
type “image”.
[1]: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/c8ba254a0272453cbe39357b144d0...
Biganon wrote 1 day ago:
Not often does a project make me think "adorable", and it's a
compliment. Just lovely.
fastasucan wrote 1 day ago:
This might be a stupid question, but is it the background of [1] that
shows the current sky? I am a bit confused since neither the post or
the github repo says so outright.
Edit: I think its this link: [2] OP - put it in the HN post and first
on your github repo! Good work.
[1]: https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html
[2]: https://sky.dlazaro.ca/
tcumulus wrote 1 day ago:
Very cool! Might be interesting to combine this with cloud data or
sunset forecast data from Sunsethue to create some sort of sky/sunset
simulation. Well done!
mcintyre1994 wrote 1 day ago:
This is really cool! And from skimming your code, TIL about Math.hypot!
jama211 wrote 1 day ago:
Ok this is incredible, it was exactly right, I did a double take!
kylegalbraith wrote 1 day ago:
Tid bits like this are why HN is still the best corner of the internet
most of the time.
This is really cool. I’ll probably see if I can make it my new tab
background in Chromium.
natewww wrote 1 day ago:
that is really cool, thanks for sharing
ComputerGuru wrote 1 day ago:
Ahhh you’re not taking light pollution into account!
dddgghhbbfblk wrote 1 day ago:
I'll have to check this out tomorrow. I can tell you that black is not
very accurate for my current conditions (midnight in Manhattan) but
curious to see how it does in the day!
lazystar wrote 1 day ago:
sunsetting in the monroe, wa area. only a month left to live out here,
gonna miss it dearly
meatjuice wrote 1 day ago:
This project looks amazing and fun. However, the website did not seem
to take the cloudy weather at my current location into account, which
is a bit of a disappointment.
jclarkcom wrote 1 day ago:
Very cool. We are launching a sensor that mounts on the inside of your
window and measure the sky color for a small cone of the sky and
transmits this to our skylight and window fixtures inside (see
innerscene.com) so they can replicate exactly the same thing indoors.
You could potentially use a computer monitor to do this, but it
generally doesn't provide great light due to using RGBs instead of
wide-spectrum sources.
One issue with the current code is it doesn’t model clouds, haze, or
smoke so the rendered sky can differ from what you see outside
(numerous HN comments notice this). You can partially correct for this
by using semi-realtime satellite imaging but hard to get super accurate
which is what pushed us to develop our own sensor. There are various
CCT sensors on the market already but they only measure
directional+diffuse+reflected light which is typically ~7500k but the
sky color goes up to 40,000k.
Here is a plot showing the color of the sky as it changes during the
day from real sensor readings. Each one is 30s apart, so it change
change quickly. [1] A bit more info as well:
[1]: https://www.innerscene.com/built_pages/cs_specsheet/cct/cct_me...
[2]: https://www.innerscene.com/SpecHelp/CircadianSky/cct/cct.html
jaharios wrote 1 day ago:
I refreshed the page, enabled js, refreshed again and again and finally
I gave up thinking it is not loading because it was hugged to death.
While reading the comments here it dawned on me that it was just a
black background because it is night outside and the paged worked fine
from the start...
ryukoposting wrote 1 day ago:
Would be cool if it considered current weather conditions. The sky is
presently much grayer than what the site showed me.
j45 wrote 1 day ago:
Neat tool, would love to be able to set the location when the
registered IP location isn’t accurate.
joeyh wrote 1 day ago:
This reminds of of a web page that did this for Ithaca NY circa 1995.
The page was a static hardcoded shade of grey.
mgdm wrote 1 day ago:
I have been meaning to do it for ages! I got as far as finding a paper
on the topic and reading it and then forgetting all about it. Nice
work.
dehugger wrote 1 day ago:
Is this all done server side? I was shocked to inspect the page to
discover zero js or even a stylesheet. Not so much as a single div.
Very impressive.
verelo wrote 1 day ago:
Feels like this would be great for fake skylights…
sudosteph wrote 1 day ago:
Looks pretty Carolina blue to me. Good job.
cloudfudge wrote 1 day ago:
As an old-timer who's not up on all the latest whiz-bang web stuff, I
have to ask what is the astro/cloudflare/wrangler magic that allows the
following to work:
const { latitude = "0", longitude = "0" } = Astro.locals.runtime.cf
|| {};
I gather you're using some cloudflare feature wrapped in astro to
provide lat/long but I don't see the actual plumbing that gets it to
you (and I did try to spelunk through a decent amount of documentation
to find it). Can you elaborate?
dlazaro wrote 1 day ago:
There is no visible plumbing because it kinda is magic! Astro
provides adapters for different server runtimes (e.g., Vercel,
Cloudflare, Netlify), and it's basically just plug and play. The
Cloudflare adapter exposes a bunch of bindings [1] through
`Astro.locals.runtime`, which can be accessed during each request.
The `cf` binding contains incoming request properties [2], including
latitude and longitude.
These bindings (or at least some of them) are also mocked when
developing locally, in a non-Cloudflare-Workers environment. [1]
[1]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/wrangler/api/#supp...
[2]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/reque...
Theodores wrote 21 hours 24 min ago:
Any ideas on how to do this without the Cloud flare magic, so
entirely in the client?
Just based on time will suffice, with latitude approximated to
somewhere such as London?
cloudfudge wrote 1 day ago:
Great explanation; thanks.
gregsadetsky wrote 1 day ago:
You can enable a feature in Cloudflare which will inject the
approximate user's lat/lng (based on their IP (and other factors?))
as an HTTP header added to the original request: [1] "This Managed
Transform adds HTTP request headers with location information for the
visitor's IP address, such as city, country, continent, longitude,
and latitude."
[1]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/network/ip-geolocation/
tinco wrote 1 day ago:
21pm in The Netherlands, the sky is a clear blue down to a baby pink
right now, however the app shows a black to dark red. Other people are
saying it matches exactly for their location so maybe there's some sort
of bug?
croisillon wrote 1 day ago:
during the day it was good here, now that it is night it's a bit off
for me too
cwmoore wrote 1 day ago:
I like this, but I’m newly concerned about the unitary horizon.
yonatan8070 wrote 1 day ago:
Very cool, though I opened it at night so it's just black. Is there a
way to adjust the time it renders to see what it would look like at
different times?
fmbb wrote 1 day ago:
It’s way too dark for this time of year at this time of day here at
60 degrees north.
But it looked very cool earlier today when it matched!
therealfiona wrote 1 day ago:
Works in Hawaii.
cwmoore wrote 1 day ago:
Even at sunrise?
sheerun wrote 1 day ago:
Bit darker blues, please!
mourner wrote 1 day ago:
Author of Suncalc here — this is exactly the kind of stuff I love to
see my code being used in, thanks for sharing!
gregsadetsky wrote 1 day ago:
Hey, small note that your excellent [1] is showing an error due to
the Google Maps API token having expired.
I know that you deeply know map tech :-) but if I may make a
suggestion - you might consider switching from Google Maps to
Protomaps? [2] Cheers
[1]: https://suncalc.net/
[2]: https://github.com/protomaps/protomaps-leaflet
mourner wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, I think I last updated that website even before I released
the first version of Leaflet. Life is very hectic at the moment,
but I do really want to get to it sooner than later and modernize
everything.
sheerun wrote 1 day ago:
Author or contributor? Great work, by the way, I love such shows
mourner wrote 1 day ago:
Wrote it 14 years ago! [1] It's a bit neglected but I'll do some
upkeep shortly...
[1]: https://github.com/mourner/suncalc/
card_zero wrote 1 day ago:
Useful, saves me looking at the thing.
michelreij wrote 1 day ago:
Beautiful, thank you!
SeanAnderson wrote 1 day ago:
Oh nice, this is actually something I very specifically wanted for [1]
! I was trying to have the background sky for the ant farm be
reflective of the user's current environment, but I didn't do anything
more than a naïve approach. Maybe I'll work on adopting your approach
at some point :) Still a bit torn on if the whole thing should be
Rust/WASM or just the core simulation in Rust and defer as much as
possible to JS/HTML.
[1]: https://ant.care/
cgijoe wrote 1 day ago:
Ooh, how about this as a live desktop wallpaper!
rafinha wrote 1 day ago:
Same!
cosmicgadget wrote 1 day ago:
That is awesome but now I want to check what my SF bros see when they
look up.
DonHopkins wrote 1 day ago:
Why doesn't it respect dark mode??? ;)
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote 1 day ago:
Wait a few hours
mushufasa wrote 1 day ago:
would love this to be a desktop background -- linux or macOS
Leftium wrote 1 day ago:
I use a built-in MacOS wallpaper called Solar Gradients[1]
It looks very similar!
[1]
[1]: https://youtu.be/0mf8YaWN5qE?t=1m21s
nathandaly wrote 1 day ago:
I just did some googling and found at least one app to do exactly
this on Android. This is now my phone background!!
(I used this, but it does leave a small "please purchase" banner at
the top, until you pay: [1] )
[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nuko.livew...
xattt wrote 1 day ago:
This would be an awesome background for a smart home dash!
fudged71 wrote 1 day ago:
It would be awesome for a fake window in a basement
101008 wrote 1 day ago:
Put my phone against the window and I had to call over my wife to come
to check it: it matches 100% (clear sky right now). It's amazing,
congratulations
esafak wrote 1 day ago:
More sophisticated than I expected. It relies on a research paper:
[1]: https://github.com/ebruneton/precomputed_atmospheric_scatterin...
gdubs wrote 1 day ago:
Well, that's delightful. Works really well here in the Pacific
Northwest :)
jhardy54 wrote 1 day ago:
Super neat. Looking forward to checking out your implementation and
learning about this!
djoldman wrote 1 day ago:
@dlazaro, I believe that style={{backgroundColor: bottom}} is not
needed in:
is not needed.
dlazaro wrote 1 day ago:
I actually included that so the tab and status bars are themed on
iOS/Safari. Here's someone else's writeup on that:
[1]: https://medium.com/@evkirkiles/coloring-the-webkit-browser-b...
doughecka wrote 1 day ago:
Wow, this works in chrome on Android as well
djoldman wrote 1 day ago:
Today I learned! Thanks
peterldowns wrote 1 day ago:
That's a cool thing to know, thanks for sharing. Great job on the
sky site!
i_love_retros wrote 1 day ago:
Curious why a celebration of HTML needed a full stack javascript
framework?
ascorbic wrote 1 day ago:
Astro is a great way to write HTML
dlazaro wrote 1 day ago:
I'm sure that's your totally unbiased opinion ;)
ascorbic wrote 1 day ago:
I was a fan of Astro long before I became a maintainer. That's
why I joined!
dlazaro wrote 1 day ago:
A server is needed to calculate the sun's position from latitude +
longitude + time, and then render the gradient. I could use HTML
templating in some other language/framework, but I used Astro because
that's what I'm familiar with and it's very easy to deploy to
Cloudflare Pages.
nnnnico wrote 1 day ago:
it's beautiful. btw, could this be all done in client side js?
didnt look at the implementation, probably server is used to
resolve location?
wonger_ wrote 1 day ago:
(not author) from the source:
const { latitude = "0", longitude = "0" } =
Astro.locals.runtime.cf || {};
To do it client-side, you would probably have to call some
less-reputable IP geolocation service, or settle for
navigator.geolocation which has a permission popup
mcteamster wrote 1 day ago:
Depending on how "approximate" is acceptable, I've found that
using timezone names can be a good proxy for location. As most
users have their timezones set correctly it's more consistent
and private than IP or GPS.
I've made a library for my own use cases that does this ( [1]
), but it's also pretty straightforward to parse the city/state
name out of the timezone and look it up somewhere.
[1]: https://github.com/mcteamster/virgo
mlhpdx wrote 1 day ago:
Which direction am I looking? Deeper blue to the north.
dlazaro wrote 1 day ago:
It's always facing the sun (although it doesn't include the sun
itself).
nhinck3 wrote 1 day ago:
Opened this up and sat there for a good 20 seconds waiting for
something to happen... only to remember it's midnight here.
socalgal2 wrote 1 day ago:
Suggestion for the author, I don't think there are any outdoor places
where the sky is black. I don't know that gray would be any better.
Stars? Some night clouds? or maybe even still a gradient?
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=58e7983bf9f21fcd&udm=2...
dlazaro wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe someone smarter than me could add stars to the night sky, so
it's not just black.
nativeit wrote 1 day ago:
I was just thinking about how to slice up a star map projection,
and apply it as an overlay. I don’t do such things often enough
to do it quickly, although I can imagine how it could be achieved.
I’d imagine someone working in game dev probably could whip up a
mechanism for applying coordinates to a star map fairly quickly,
but realizing it in pure CSS would probably require exporting all
the slices to a folder as SVG squares that are labeled with
coordinates, and then using a bit of JS to stitch it all together
in the rendered page.
mpetroff wrote 1 day ago:
I wrote a simple web-based night sky viewer a while ago [1],
which renders the 750 brightest stars from coordinates in a data
file (along with the moon). It uses D3.js to do fully client-side
SVG-based rendering for interactive use, but it could be
simplified to render server side to an SVG file. I think the main
complication is that by adding stars, a projection needs to be
decided on, and you'd need to consider the aspect ratio of the
browser window.
[1]: https://github.com/mpetroff/nightsky
nisten wrote 1 day ago:
i put my laptop next to the window and it was spot on wtf
what got me the most is opening chrome dev tools and seeing nothing
there
ianbicking wrote 1 day ago:
I'm around so much wildfire smoke lately that my sky expectations have
changed...
I wonder what it would take to account for weather?
craftkiller wrote 1 day ago:
That'd be a pretty large introduction of a dependency. The sky can be
calculated with just lat/lon and the current date+time. Adding in
weather would mean querying some external weather service.
ryandrake wrote 1 day ago:
Awesome. I remember much earlier in my career I was working on a 3D
turn-by-turn navigation software, and one of my tasks was to draw the
sky in the background. The more senior guy on the team said, just draw
a blue rectangle during the day and a dark gray one at night and call
it job done. Of course, I had to do it the hard way, so I looked up the
relevant literature on sky rendering based on the environment,
latitude, longitude, time of day and so on, which at the time was
Preetham[1] ("A Practical Analytic Model for Daylight"), and built a
fully realistic sky model for the software. I even added prominent
stars based on a hard-coded ephemeris table. It was quite fast, too.
Well, the higher ups of course hated it, they were confused as to why
the horizon would get hazy, yellowish, and so on. "Our competitors'
skies are blue!" They didn't like "Use your eyes and look outside" as
an answer.
Eventually, I was told to scrap it and just draw a blue rectangle :(
All that to say, nice job on the site!
1:
[1]: https://courses.cs.duke.edu/cps124/fall01/resources/p91-preeth...
nkrisc wrote 19 hours 25 min ago:
That sounds really cool but I have to reluctantly agree with the
senior: a cartoonish day/night sky is better than a half-implemented
realistic one. I say “half-implemented” because it sounds as
though yours didn’t account for local weather and cloud cover,
which is reasonable but then incomplete. Even if you did, well,
it’s turn-by-turn navigation. I expect the sky color to be selected
for ideal contrast with the important UI elements to reduce the time
spent looking at it while driving.
GuardianCaveman wrote 21 hours 36 min ago:
I identify so much with your sentiment and this type of overthinking
overbuilding .
maddmann wrote 1 day ago:
Haha it sounds you applied the opposite of the YAGNI principle
building this.
bravesoul2 wrote 1 day ago:
The thing here is programming the job can be much more dull than
programming the hobby. Occasionally (twice a decade) there can be a
collision where you get to do something really cool like that at
work. The higher ups want a realistic sky because their market
research said it'll boost an OKR by 10 basis points. And then you are
in luck!
That said there are niches where jobs let you do cool stuff all the
time. Hard to find. Probably why gaming jobs are notoriously
underpaid and overworked.
crazygringo wrote 1 day ago:
This is why specifications are important, and why design is
important.
The reality is that we have certain conventions that are immediately
understandable, and that too much visual complexity results in
confusion rather than clarity.
If the sky is hazy white when I expect it to be blue, I'm confused as
to whether it's the sky or if the map is still loading. It's adding
cognitive complexity for no reason. Stars similarly serve no
functional purpose at night.
What you built sounds great for an actual planetary view like Google
Earth. And it sounds fun to build. But it's an anti-feature for a
navigation view. When you're navigating, simplicity and clarity are
paramount. Not realism.
wkjagt wrote 1 day ago:
Also, any fanciness you add in your product is something you need
to then maintain. Even after the developer that built it leaves the
company.
carlosjobim wrote 17 hours 50 min ago:
It takes thousands of years for the stars to have changed
positions in a noticeable way, and my best guess is that the
customers will not use their car GPS for so long that this will
bother them.
crazygringo wrote 17 hours 16 min ago:
Very funny, but in case you're serious, it's not the stars
changing...
...it's the software frameworks. A new screen size. A different
color depth. A bug when the graphics library is upgraded for
antialiasing. Etc.
carlosjobim wrote 16 hours 30 min ago:
That's not going to be an issue with devices already sold.
And if developers of future devices can't handle it they
should probably be fired from their job.
crazygringo wrote 13 hours 27 min ago:
It's not a question of whether future developers can
"handle" it. It's a question of whether the additional time
required to maintain it is worth the cost. Maintenance
isn't free. It takes time, and every little bit adds up.
Also, devices already sold often get updates, so it's not
even just about future devices.
dylan604 wrote 1 day ago:
> This is why specifications are important, and why design is
important.
Also the phrase "know your audience". No sense in casting pearls
before the swine.
resonious wrote 1 day ago:
Though sometimes the higher ups might not be the same as (or
understand) the actual audience.
In this case the higher ups may have been confused due to, say,
looking at the app while indoors (and from the perspective of
"let's judge this developer's work"), while the actual users
would see it in a vehicle alongside the real sky (and from the
perspective of "let's see how easy this is to match up with
reality").
dylan604 wrote 1 day ago:
Ah, I see the confusion. You think the users are the dev's
audience! /s
resonious wrote 1 day ago:
I suppose this is the lesson OP learned!
edoceo wrote 1 day ago:
I wish more people knew it. So many times frustration of
the system is directed at devs. They couldn't figure out X?
Why is Z feature so shit? Etc.
That's a management thumbprint on the deliverable.
johnfn wrote 1 day ago:
Oh come now. You are being no fun.
Waterluvian wrote 1 day ago:
I’ve had similar issues at work where people really overdo
something and it’s difficult. On one hand you never want to kill
that joy and passion someone has. That’s a great characteristic.
But projects have scopes and too often instructions like “just draw
a blue rectangle” get ignored.
ryandrake wrote 1 day ago:
Totally. It was a harsh but needed lesson on the realities of
getting work done in a commercial environment.
benrutter wrote 1 day ago:
Ironically, I'm in the South of England wih clear blue sky, and the
site thinks I have a much darker and beautiful reddish sunset. Im
fairness, it's probably only out by an hour if that.
thebruce87m wrote 22 hours 37 min ago:
Maybe it is out by an hour due to BST.
marcosdumay wrote 1 day ago:
Yep, if you have to draw the Sun, you better draw it yellow. If you
have to draw a cloudless day sky, you better draw it blue.
That doesn't apply to every single instance of those, but if the sky
isn't the focus of your application, a realistic one is just a
distraction.
dylan604 wrote 1 day ago:
> Yep, if you have to draw the Sun, you better draw it yellow.
This one always gets me in how dirty the sky must have been "back
in the day" in order for people to see a yellow sun. I've never
looked into what gas would be needed to make the sun look yellow,
but it must have been hell to breathe.
card_zero wrote 1 day ago:
Nah, the ancient Egyptians, and other cultures, depicted the sun
a lot, and never made it white. Red, quite often, gold, very
frequently - warm colors. If you paint a white sun people say
it's the moon.
withinboredom wrote 1 day ago:
The walls were black for a reason in big cities. All those
chimneys and coal everywhere.
teaearlgraycold wrote 1 day ago:
To be honest I don’t think anyone wants that kind of functionality
- maybe in the satellite view but not in the vector map.
jbverschoor wrote 1 day ago:
Whipping down the innovator with the stupidity whip. Great management
idiotsecant wrote 1 day ago:
This is a wildly unprofessional attitude. Programmers are
craft(wo)men. They employ their craft toward creating things people
pay them to create.
We aren't painting sistine chapels, we are running the plumbing in
the sistine chapels basement. The job doesn't exist to give you
emotional fulfillment. A mason doesn't insist that a client who
needs a warehouse must pay him to spend a week detailing corbelled
brick cornices. He makes a CMU wall, in the cheapest and most
efficient way that still gets the job done.
It's profoundly disrespectful when we build monuments to our own
ego instead of just getting the work done and it speaks to a
professional immaturity of the highest order. That was one of the
hardest lessons I learned as a fresh engineer and I see so often
others that are just learning it. Sometimes people never learn it.
sgarland wrote 1 day ago:
> We aren't painting sistine chapels, we are running the plumbing
in the sistine chapels basement.
Sure, but in plumbing - or any trade - there is a huge spectrum
of quality of work. Tons of little details add up that confer the
person’s skill level to anyone checking it out in the future.
> It's profoundly disrespectful when we build monuments to our
own ego instead of just getting the work done and it speaks to a
professional immaturity of the highest order.
When I insist that something must be done a certain way, it’s
not for my ego, it’s because I know that a year from now, I
will be called upon to fix it during an incident if I don’t do
it right this time. I am so absolutely sick of hacky bandaids
being thrown on the ever-increasing pile of tech debt. To me,
it’s profoundly disrespectful when product tells engineering
that yet again, they will not yield time to fix the backlog, and
to ship New Feature X.
ChrisMarshallNY wrote 1 day ago:
I've been in the developer's shoes. I've also been in the manager's
shoes.
It's not that simple. There's possibly better ways to deal with it,
but for safety-critical stuff (like a navigation display in a
vehicle), simple is much, much better. In many cases, there's
actually laws and liability stuff involved.
I once spent six months, developing an "un-asked-for" WiFi control
app for a digital camera, and had it nuked. It worked much better
than the shipping app (which was enjoying a richly-deserved
one-star rating in the app store).
The considerations had a lot to do with the corporate Process (note
the capital "P"), which I sidelined. I thought I could do better,
but the people with the hands on the brake, thought different. I
didn't kiss the right rings. That's a very real consideration in
any corporation.
As a manager, however, I did go to bat for employees that displayed
initiative. In some cases, I was successful. In some cases, not so
much.
hobs wrote 1 day ago:
There's so much decision making in companies that comes down to
some dingus in management decided that it would Be Bad On
Purpose. Fighting that battle is something you can try a few
times in your career if you want, but it usually leads to burnout
or a resume generating event.
woah wrote 1 day ago:
It sounds like the developer spent a lot of time implementing
something that nobody wanted. Drawing the sky accurately may be
cool, but it wasn't required in this case. It's also not
innovation. It's been done before.
This is like if you were renovating your house and the drywall guy
spends a huge amount of time building up round corners, but you
just wanted regular square corners. Then on some drywall forum
they're bitching about how "all clients are stupid" or something.
alwa wrote 19 hours 27 min ago:
And, from the sound of it, the developer confused truth with
beauty. Sometimes we’d prefer to see the sky the way we wish it
were rather than the way it is.
That’s an aesthetic call, not a “who can do the math” cal…
“Good news, I accurately simulated the particulate load in the
local atmosphere—so now you authentically can’t read the text
on a given smoggy winter morning!”
(FWIW, grace for management decisions notwithstanding, I think
what gp did is awesome, and would switch on full realism mode
every time :)
ryandrake wrote 1 day ago:
A foundational, core theme about making commercial software, that
repeats over and over and I slowly got accustomed to is: companies
really don't want these kinds of micro-innovations. 90% of
companies are just looking at their competitors, making a checklist
out of those products, and asking engineers to check the boxes and
go home. They don't care about little details, about craftsmanship
and polish, about lint warnings, about "oh, that's a nice touch,"
or even quality beyond "will the customer return the product?" They
just want people to poop out software as fast as possible so
everyone can get bonuses and drive around on their jetskis on
Saturday.
If you're the kind of developer who likes to "sand and finish the
back side of the cabinet," either you need to find a very rare,
special company, or do it at home as a hobby.
cyberax wrote 1 day ago:
> They don't care about little details, about craftsmanship and
polish, about lint warnings, about "oh, that's a nice touch," or
even quality beyond "will the customer return the product?"
I worked at large companies, and there are reasons beyond that.
I've been on the both sides of this fence.
Senior engineers feel the pain of supporting all these features.
You created a new streaming API prototype that provides a gradual
response, progressively displaying details of the 3D model?
Great. But it's 15000 lines of dense code without a lot of
explanation. Who is going to support it once you leave the
company? Is it secure? How does it work with kiosk-type browsers?
Can you write a formal proposal so we can start the review
process?
Oh, I see that you're already leaving the company :(
And that's also why startups are often so much more successful
initially. They just don't care about the long-term support and
YOLO a lot of functionality.
jbverschoor wrote 18 hours 41 min ago:
Sure.. but all there prototypes don't have to be released. It's
part of innovation. And maybe you'll even find a new product or
a competitive edge.
jbverschoor wrote 1 day ago:
But it's exactly the thing that makes software "delightful". It's
also a huge boost to the developer's appreciation, motivation,
productivity, care for the product.
But yeah, if you only care about checking the feature boxes.. Go
ahead, make shit software with miserable people, but be sure to
prepare to go out of business.
philipallstar wrote 1 day ago:
The point is a real skybox is not great for satnav software.
It's probably actually worse than a stylised mode, with a
predictable colour background for anything that's going to sit
on top of it.
jbverschoor wrote 18 hours 43 min ago:
That's exactly not the point.
Where do you think innovation comes from?
It comes from tinkering.
zarzavat wrote 1 day ago:
You should have added a duck.
otikik wrote 1 day ago:
I understood that reference
darknavi wrote 1 day ago:
A past coworker who worked on Cobalt[1] told me that they spent
entirely too much time implementing stars in the sky of the game with
some amount of real(ish) star system physics behind them.
I can understand people removing polish things like that if there are
usability concerns, but those small things add up to a lot in an end
product and are a joy to find and explore.
1:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_(video_game)
dylan604 wrote 1 day ago:
The last thing you want is to receive a message from Neil Degrasse
Tyson about how wrong your sky was
[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=neil+degrasse+tyson+gives...
edoceo wrote 1 day ago:
And pointed out Jon Stewart's globe spinned backward
pava0 wrote 1 day ago:
Cobalt was a really interesting game, too bad it never got any fame
netsharc wrote 1 day ago:
Not even as an easter egg?
You could've sold it with telling them Vincent Van Gogh's paintings
had the location of stars accurately, you were inspired by those
paintings to reproduce the sky color accurately.
j_bum wrote 1 day ago:
Fun (but not fun) story :)
hoppp wrote 1 day ago:
Seems to work :)
siva7 wrote 1 day ago:
how i missed this small hn posts. thanks
nnnnico wrote 2 days ago:
incredible <3 not much else to say
throwanem wrote 2 days ago:
> the little-known meta http-equiv="Refresh" HTML tag
Oh, don't mind me, I'll just be over here in the corner laughing
ruefully as my bones crumble to dust: back when I started, if you
wanted a page to refresh on its own, this was the only way.
Beautiful work! A splendid example of formal minimalism at its best.
mintplant wrote 1 day ago:
Of course, the "http-equiv" means that this tag is supposed to stand
in for an equivalent HTTP header, so you could accomplish the same by
sending a "Refresh: 60" header :)
js2 wrote 1 day ago:
There was also server[-side] push:
[1]: https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/cgi/ch06_06.html
throwanem wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, if you wanted to deal with configuring Apache. Or getting
your hosting provider to do that. If you knew to ask, and didn't
mind waiting, and your hosting provider knew how...
dudus wrote 1 day ago:
Not sure what you are on about. Adding an HTTP header to a
request is one of the easiest things to do.
urquhartfe wrote 1 day ago:
I think you are the one who doesn't know what they are on
about.
First, the header must be added to the response, not the
request.
Second, in many environments (managed hosting etc.) there is
not an easy way (or indeed a way at all) of adding headers to
responses.
bapak wrote 1 day ago:
What are you talking about. Any non-static hosting will let
you specify headers with a plain php function. Any baseline
shared hosting offers that kind of control and has done so
for the past 20+ years.
KTibow wrote 1 day ago:
> Second, in many environments (managed hosting etc.) there
is not an easy way (or indeed a way at all) of adding headers
to responses.
It's getting better. Most serverless hosts (including
Cloudflare, which this site uses) follow the (req: Request)
=> Response pattern, which by definition allows sending
headers.
dylan604 wrote 1 day ago:
is that something that could have be done in the dot file for
server override? what was it, .htaccess or something?
astrange wrote 1 day ago:
Ever tried doing it in nginx? You'll find `add_header`
doesn't work at all the way you think it does.
And it doesn't allow overrides in dotfiles since that's not
performant or secure.
throwanem wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, if you wanted to deal with configuring Apache. Or
getting your hosting provider to do that. If you knew to
ask, and didn't mind waiting, and your hosting provider
knew how...and was willing to do it, a condition I forgot
to add in my last comment here, but which applies equally
there. (User-provided .htaccess files were the source of a
number of relatively high-profile early CVEs, as I recall.
Apache grew a number of options for trusting their content,
and I want to say before very long you could not rely on
anything working past simple HTTP-Basic credential
management.)
Oldschool shared web hosting was a shockingly deprived
environment by modern standards, which is why my Linode
account turned old enough a few months ago to buy a drink
in a bar: $20 a month in 2004 was amply worth gaining a
degree of control over web server configuration which is
broadly the default assumption now.
Since I was also administering some shared web hosting in
my own right at the time - partially overlapping with my
web design work targeting shared hosting, since some
customers preferred to BYO - I don't blame admins for being
difficult to work with; we all had good reason to be, with
the afterthought security typically was everywhere in those
days. But you begin perhaps to see why bypassing the whole
rigamarole with a hint to the client was attractive.
dylan604 wrote 1 day ago:
but that was the point of the dot file to allow vhosts to
change the default server settings without needing access
to the root config. maybe they weren't designed
specifically for vhosts, but that was my main use of
them.
throwanem wrote 1 day ago:
Yes. If the main Apache config was set up to allow it
to read a dotfile, and if configured not to ignore the
options you wanted to use, that is what the dotfile
did. That's why, if you wanted an option easily
portable across hosting providers, you used the meta
tag instead. Which is my point, and my only point, and
not really up for debate by some pettifogging rando
with nothing better to fill a Saturday night.
dylan604 wrote 1 day ago:
Wtf, seriously. I was just asking. Sorry if that
resulted in me pissing in your cheerios. Just because
a question was asked doesn’t mean it was
challenging your knowledge. I was just asking to
clarify based on personal experience. If you don’t
have time for questions or feel personally slighted
that someone would have the gall to question the
written word of the almighty throwanem, then posting
on the internet is probably something you stop doing
throwanem wrote 1 day ago:
It isn't a question of "challenging [my]
knowledge," it's a question of you acting like kind
of a jerk. I realize you don't see yourself as the
one starting an argument here, and I have observed
your manners likewise lacking on many occasions on
this website before. Your opinion of the matter is
not well qualified. You're being an ass. Knock it
off.
I realize you're probably not accustomed to being
called on your lousy behavior. I doubt you will
need to become so. But just for once, here we are.
You don't bother to find out what you're talking
about before you speak and then you want your hand
held on points that were already clarified, had you
but bothered to catch up. I don't tolerate that in
candidates, I won't tolerate it in colleagues, and
I see no very pressing reason to tolerate it here.
radicalriddler wrote 8 hours 28 min ago:
You're like the caricature of what other social
media platforms represent HN users to be.
throwanem wrote 42 min ago:
Not really, that's more like N-Gate (pbuh, rip)
[1]
[1]: http://n-gate.com/hackernews/
skrebbel wrote 1 day ago:
I can’t wait till they hear about framesets
dlazaro wrote 1 day ago:
Thank you! And umm, not to make you feel ancient, but I think I
wasn't even alive yet when `setTimeout(() => location.reload(), ...)`
first became widely available.
throwanem wrote 1 day ago:
Oh, don't worry about it at all, and I don't just mean in my own
case. Every generation learns to age graciously or otherwise,
partly through experience, and for me it's a regular source of joy
to see you young 'uns independently rediscover things I long since
quit bothering to remember.
phatskat wrote 1 day ago:
Honestly it’s kind of cute, I had all but forgotten about
http-equiv
stephenlf wrote 2 days ago:
Fantastic. I’ve always wondered why the sky wasn’t blue around the
horizon. Fascinating stuff.
verandaguy wrote 1 day ago:
There's two main reasons for this:
- First and most impactful: as the earth curves down and away from
the observer's horizon, your line of sight goes through a thicker
slice of the atmosphere.
Looking straight up you might have 100km of atmosphere until space
(the distance is made up here, but I'm using the Kármán line as an
arbitrary ruler), but looking out towards the horizon (assuming a
perfectly spherical Earth), it's much, much more than that 100km, so
the light will scatter off of (and/or be filtered by, depending on
angle and time of day) more particles in the atmosphere, affecting
the colour of the sky.
- The compounding factor here is if there are environmental factors
that boost the particle count in the air, and especially particles
that'd stay in lower layers of the atmosphere. Where I am, we've been
dealing with wildfire smoke of varying strengths for a few weeks.
Today's gentle enough, but it's bad enough that my gradient goes from
rgb(115, 160, 207) at the top of the sky to rgb(227, 230, 227) at the
horizon (which is shockingly accurate).
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