News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

orangegreen

Re:Styling Tables the Modern CSS Way on Wednesday July 24, 2024 @10:02AM (#41057233)
Alright, shameless plug. I spend a ton of time trying to style this table of city data I had as nicely as I could. Getting CSS tables to not overflow in containers is a nightmare. I had to use a bit of Javascript to get the scroll shadows working using Intersection Observers.

I like HTML tables but getting them to do what you want can really be tricky.

Check out my table: https://caldwell.org/projects/data/city-index

Re:FDA Approves First Covid-19 Vaccine on Monday August 23, 2021 @11:11AM (#28277017)
It's not really about you. It's about preventing other, more vulnerable people from getting sick. Living in a society means giving up some of your freedoms in exchange for security, and getting vaccinated as a way to help other people should be part of that exchange.
Re:SWE interviews should be paid on Sunday August 22, 2021 @01:24PM (#28267496)
Or, once companies start paying for interviews, they start outsourcing all of their work to interviewees, never hiring anyone. I don't think this would ever actually scale well, but if there's any way to exploit labor, corporations are going to figure out how.
Re:Don't attach tooltips to document.body on Saturday August 21, 2021 @10:47AM (#28257429)
I agree, I hate how long it takes for the title attribute to show up when hovering over elements. It takes a few seconds, where any decent tooltip will take maybe 0.5 seconds or so to show up. I'd love to be able to style the title attribute for length of time to show up.

Fortunately tooltips are pretty easy to make these days. You don't need Javascript at all to make a nice tooltip. But again, it's a tooltip - it's been done so many times before that it'd be nice to have a native browser version.

I wonder if using a color e-ink display would make the art look more appealing on a wall.
Re:Mailable Live Animals on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @12:19PM (#28211565)
One of my favorite YouTube niches is turtle unboxing videos.
Re:The age of the à la carte internet on Friday August 13, 2021 @10:03AM (#28168958)
I am very happy many news sites are now behind paywalls. There is now less of an incentive to drive revenue via clickbait or "picking a fight" as many tabloid journalists are wont to do.

There appears to be some kind of concern that this will put people in their own subscription bubbles. Please. Having a subscription to your city's newspaper or subscribing to a documentary streaming service is a far healthier way of ingesting content than getting put into algorithmic engagement bubbles via social media.

To be fair, most print newspapers were subsidized not necessarily by costing money or traditional advertising, but by classified advertising. Maybe news sites can figure out classifieds next.

Re:Assembler CSS, a modern utility-first framework on Thursday August 12, 2021 @11:14AM (#28157359)
I'm not sure why utility frameworks are so popular. It seems like Sass solves most of the problems of vanilla CSS. Writing Sass is not only quicker and more powerful than regular CSS, but you can also create your own utility classes very easily with loops.

Moving CSS into HTML does not makes much sense either, as it's far stylistically cleaner to separate CSS and HTML into their respective files.

Plus, if you have two elements with the same or similar styling, re-writing all those utility classes over and over seems extremely cumbersome. Why not just write the class name and use it everywhere it needs to be used? .button or .button-primary is far simpler than writing out inline CSS over and over again.

Re:The World of CSS Transforms on Monday August 09, 2021 @11:30AM (#28118139)
What did people do before CSS transforms?

I've been making an app with React Native and react-native-svg and even though react-native-svg supports transformations, I've had to do a lot of transforms with trigonometry (i.e. rotating a shape around a center point, then getting the new bounding box, which requires things such as Math.atan2).

It's made me really appreciate 1. how much easier front end web development is and 2. how far we've gotten. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate web methods like getBoundingClientRect() or element.closest(), and how easy it is to make animations with CSS and move things around with transforms.

Re:Apps Getting Worse on Sunday August 08, 2021 @06:32PM (#28110768)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y

This is the TED Talk you're talking about.

Re:New Laptop: Thinkpad P14s on Friday August 06, 2021 @11:34AM (#28088579)
I've bought numerous Thinkpads and I still can't find myself using them daily because of the awful trackpads. It's not even the tracking, it's the amount of force you need to put on the trackpad to get it to register a click. Also the lack of media keys on Thinkpads is outdated and annoying. If Lenovo fixes these two things I'd gladly use a Thinkpad as my daily laptop.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions...
You can use eBay if you don't want to use Amazon. Plus, you can even sell your stuff on eBay when you're done using it. I've never been an Amazon customer and don't plan on ever being one. I buy most things used too, saving lots of money along the way.
Re:Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it on Thursday July 29, 2021 @09:57AM (#27996601)
Does anyone know any good alternate search keywords when trying to find "Best x under x?" Content marketers already know that people search "Best x" when doing shopping research, so I wonder if there are alternative keywords that have less spammy results.
Re:To H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks with Facebook on Saturday July 24, 2021 @10:50PM (#27946280)
What I really dislike now about YouTube's algorithm is its insistence on showing short videos. I do not come to YouTube to watch 30 second videos. If I want to watch short videos I'd go to Instagram or Tiktok. Yet, no. I am bombarded with short videos.

I removed the videos from showing up on the home page with some CSS, so now I solely rely on related videos for non-subscription content. Those seem to be delivered based on engagement so they're usually longer. Unfortunately, half the time they're hour long videos.

Come on YouTube, just give me a 5-10 minute video.

A good start up has a good business plan. Making money from your business can be a very interesting endeavor. But you have to at least be interested in the product in some way, or else you'll eventually give up.

Phil Knight started Blue Ribbon/Nike as reseller of Onitsuka Tiger shoes from Japan. He was clearly in it for the money. But he was also a track runner and believed in the product himself.

You also really don't need to change the world with a product. Just make something you want yourself, or something that adds value to people's lives. It doesn't need to be a billion dollar idea. Just something useful.

How does one launder money / evade taxes with high end art?
Re:Runway – Create impossible video on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @08:41PM (#27767357)
The auto-rotoscoping feature seems very useful if it works well. Auto-rotoscoping in After Effects can be extremely finicky and usually requires frame-by-frame touch ups. This would be very useful for people without green screens.
I've never been an Amazon customer. I like to buy things in store. If I want something that isn't in a store, I will buy it from eBay. eBay also tends to have better prices than Amazon.
On the bright side, maybe this will push more people who find this appalling to install Linux on their computers.
Re:Mathematically inspired typefaces on Sunday June 27, 2021 @08:46PM (#27656914)
If you want a more manual solution you can get the Chrome extension Stylebot [1] and add this custom style for nytimes.com:

    #app > div > div {
        position: unset;
        overflow: visible;
        height: unset;
        width: unset; 
    }
    #app > div > div > div:last-child {
        display: none;
    }

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbm...
Re:Reddit’s disrespectful design on Saturday June 26, 2021 @10:56AM (#27642398)
You can get around all of this by using old.reddit.com
Re:Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess on Saturday June 19, 2021 @10:38AM (#27560768)
Reminds me of how almost any corporate logo redesign works. Company makes a new logo, everyone is outraged by how awful and horrible it is, then we get used to it.

The Discord logo redesign was one of those logos that elicited a very odd amount of outrage for what it was. Multiple video essays were made about just how terrible the logo is [0].

It's really not a bad logo at all. It's a minor change. But once you get used to something, any change seems to be perceived as a threat. After a few months, I bet most people will get used to the new Safari UI and forget what they were even mad out.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=discord+new+log...

Re:What is the Fourth Dimension? (1884) on Saturday May 29, 2021 @11:17PM (#27330308)
0th dimension: a point in space

1st dimension: a line in space

2nd dimension: a plane in space

3rd dimension: an object with mass (width, height and length), represented as a point in time

4th dimension: a time line, where the third dimension can travel on

5th dimension: a time plane, representing the events of infinite time lines.

6th dimension: third dimensional time space, which, honestly, gets kinda confusing, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the infinite possibilities of time planes. As in, time planes have time lines that actually happen, but 3d time space are what could happen? I'm not entirely sure.

And on and on. My visualization of dimensions is that it infinitely repeats itself based on point, line, and plane.

Re:What is the Fourth Dimension? (1884) on Saturday May 29, 2021 @08:54PM (#27329652)
Time is the fourth dimension. Pretty simple.
Had the same issue on my 16" before I spilled coffee all over it and broke it.

A lot of the time kernal_task would take up like 400% CPU, which was because plugging the power cable into certain thunderbolt ports (on the left side) would overheat the computer.

Even then I was consistently getting low performance, my fans were on all the time, and my computer was burning hot trying to power a 4k monitor and a 1080p monitor.

After my 16" broke I got an M1 Mac Mini and obviously have not been having the same issues. Now my computer feels fast again. My old set up felt like I was using a Macbook Air or something.

Re:Twitter previews Ticketed Spaces on Friday May 21, 2021 @05:51PM (#27240414)
+1 point for the web. I'd like to see the day mobile web apps have as good UX/speed as app store apps.

Older »