News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

simulo

Re:"Direct manipulation vs. interface agents" (1997) on Sunday September 20, 2026 @01:20PM (#49777846)
»Should users give up complete control of their interaction with interfaces? Will users want to risk depending on “agents” that learn their likes and dislikes and act on a user’s behalf?« from November 1997, Interactions Magazine
Re:Penpot: The Open-Source Figma on Thursday November 27, 2025 @09:16AM (#46069482)
Penpot took it from CSS.
Re:Don't forget these tags to make HTML work like you expect on Monday October 27, 2025 @08:35AM (#45720293)
Oh, good to know that it depends on locale, I always wondered about that behavior!
Re:Show HN: TypeScript for the Browser on Friday July 25, 2025 @07:47AM (#44682082)
If you are interested in TypeScript for the browser, you might also like --erasableSyntaxOnly option of typescript >5.8. The only tool needed for it is the typescript compiler itself, so toolchain is kept to a minimum.
Re:Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things on Friday January 10, 2025 @08:17AM (#42655354)
Bruno Latour’s "The Pasteurization of France" is about Louis Pasteur and the creation and success of germ theory. It does explain it not by focussing on Pasteur per se, but by showing how different groups of people adapted it for different goals.
Re:Why shouldn't you give money to homeless people? on Tuesday November 05, 2024 @09:53AM (#42051906)
> Not because I think it's helping him in the long run, but because it could help him feel better now.

Very much this: The long run is vague, and the only sure thing is that we will be dead. But this is a small thing one can do now.

Re:OOP is not that bad, actually on Thursday October 24, 2024 @03:19AM (#41932884)
These examples (dogs,cars...) are badly used in most programming books, but they can make sense if you show them in context of a small game or whatever else actually draws you an (inter) active virtual car or animal (which made OOP click for me, using processing). Printing "meow" and "woof" in the terminal, however, only makes sense as a demonstration if you already know what it should demonstrate.
Re:Leonard Cohen: The Anti-Rock Star on Monday September 23, 2024 @05:23PM (#41630745)
That's a terrific track. Awesome intro riff, too.
Re:Ask HN: Resources about math behind A/B testing on Saturday August 10, 2024 @09:19AM (#41209264)
For learning about the basics of statistics, my go-to resource is "Discovering Statistics using [R/SPSS]" (Andy Field). "Improving Your Statistical Inferences" (Daniel Lakens) needs some basics, but covers a lot of intesting topics, including sequencial testing and equivalence tests (sometimes you want to know if a new thing is equivalent to the old)
Re:Ask HN: Changing my mind about JavaScript on Friday August 09, 2024 @05:45AM (#41200285)
I second both resources!
No, afaic it does not.
Re:The Nature of Code (2nd Edition) on Friday May 03, 2024 @03:02PM (#40251074)
I guess mainly recreation and, particularly, teaching.
Re:The Nature of Code (2nd Edition) on Friday May 03, 2024 @02:30PM (#40250743)
I read his "learning processing" many years ago. It was the book that made programming made sense to me. The explanations are excellent, the outcomes interesting and it helped me to see why object orientation makes sense after fruitless attempts of understanding it using examples of different types of cars that print "wrooom wroom" to the terminal.
Re:Everything Is a Linear Model on Sunday February 18, 2024 @12:41PM (#39421145)
I knew the linked-in-the-article https://lindeloev.github.io/tests-as-linear/ which is also great. A bit meta on the widespread use of linear models: "Transcending General Linear Reality" by Andrew Abbott, DOI:10.2307/202114
Re:Flowblade: Open-Source Video Editor on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @04:00AM (#39025184)
I’m pretty happy with kdenlive, too.
You could ask for feedback on https://discourse.opensourcedesign.net/ where quite some UX designers in open source projects hang out. I personally remember nokias flowella fondly, but I do not know if it does the same as wireflow.
Re:PysimpleGUI on Saturday December 09, 2023 @07:35AM (#38581443)
Since some comments point out that the design looks old: I agree.

However, the framework’s author describes the usecase as building simple UIs for what otherwise would be used via the command line or for building UIs for cases when people can't or don’t want to learn a more complex framework (this could include HTML/CSS/JS, which is quite complex, if you do not know it yet!).

Re:Ansel on Friday November 24, 2023 @07:49AM (#38403443)
I also throught of ART as a fork of RawTherapee, also forked with the aim to make it easier to use.

I wondered if that is something hard to avoid: Over time features get added, usability worsens. This might be general, but it could apply to FOSS in particular, which often takes a modular approach (cue UNIX philosophy) and rarely includes structures where potentially useful features are rejected in order to keep the whole experience simple.

Re:Frutiger Aero on Friday November 17, 2023 @03:00AM (#38300785)
Depends on perspective - graphic designers and typographers might find "Frutiger" to be the obvious part and wonder what "Aero" means.
Yes, I loved that, too. More abstract, also short, no pressure: Proteus.
Re:The Decline of Usability (2020) on Sunday September 10, 2023 @11:55AM (#37457044)
This is very similar to what Grudin suggests in his HCI history "From tool to partner": Apple used to be very usability and research focussed in the 80s and early 90s, but turned away from it with Jobs and went more look-driven — and had great success with it. Other companies followed. (Which does not mean that companies ignored graphic design before, but it was the more utilitarian parts of graphic design that were important focussing on distinct shapes, readability etc.)
Re:Molly Holzschlag has passes away on Wednesday September 06, 2023 @09:47AM (#37405078)
> Just send them an email from the contact link?

I guess – this is what I did.

Re:Molly Holzschlag has passes away on Wednesday September 06, 2023 @08:35AM (#37404200)
that would be fitting, I thought the same.
Re:Molly Holzschlag has passes away on Wednesday September 06, 2023 @04:24AM (#37402584)
That is sad. She was with the web from its early days (her first book on the subject is from 1996), taught a lot of people, and bridged several communities: design, web standards, and accessability
Re:Firefox 1.0 New York Times Ad on Sunday August 27, 2023 @05:23AM (#37280914)
I vaguely remember even seeing Chrome distributed as bundleware.
I'm fascinated by the very mid-90s graphic design and typography.
Re:Moodle: Open-Source LMS on Monday July 17, 2023 @04:40AM (#36755601)
> tries to deliver video heavy content

Video content seems not to be its main concern, but I can imagine that it is hard to scale if people want to use it to deliver video.

Re:The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) on Monday June 12, 2023 @03:07AM (#36289464)
David Graeber on "Tyranny of Structurelessness": "[Many] completely misread Freeman’s essay, and interpret it not as a plea for formal mechanisms to ensure equality, but as a plea for more transparent hierarchy."

Older »