The code on the laptop in the stock photo at developer.bbc.com is user-editable | Hacker News Reader

The code on the laptop in the stock photo at developer.bbc.com is user-editable

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Very clever! Needs more syntax highlighting, though...

For anyone still confused, you can click into the code on the laptop screen there and edit like normal. They have applied matrix transform and blur via Cascading Style Sheets to make it all look cohesive.

Okay Cascading Style Sheets :)

Wonder if the site used HyperText Markup Language too

Here's all the possible code that are shown https://pastebin.com/YyQwU7XZ

I ended up with text from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game:

   THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
   Infocom interactive fiction - a science fiction story
   Copyright (c) 1984 by Infocom, Inc. All rights 
   reserved.
   Release 59 / Serial number 851108

   You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round
   your head. Or at least it would be if you could see 
   it which you can't.

>look at bulldozer It's one of those really big bulldozers that can actually crush other bulldozers, let alone houses.

Confession: I used to work for one of the larger "flash game studio's" back in 2008-ish. I coded one of their main titles and added various cheats and easter-eggs in the game without anybody knowing.

I remember one code making one of the characters go off on a rant on how "game development is a grind, don't do it, I hate my life." Something like that.

10 PRINT "BBC Developer Portal" 20 GOTO 10

Very nice Easter egg

They're all jokes:

C:\>

C:\> DOS

C:\DOS> RUN

RUN, DOS, RUN

Several are just ordinary code from BBC repos:

https://github.com/bbc/res/blob/master/lib/res.rb

https://github.com/bbc/audiowaveform/blob/master/src/SndFile...

The JavaScript one is some usage of this library:

https://github.com/bbc/http-transport-circuit-breaker

One of the snippets prints Fibonacci in the Chef programming language via a caramel recipe.

https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/chef_fib.html

Surely that's BBC BASIC

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_BASIC

And serious software developers having serious fun. They included the opening scene of Infocom's version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Probably since it was broadcast on BBC back in 1978. Six years later the game was released in 1984.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_th...

It also changes on page refresh!

I got a section of Jenkins' rebuild-plugin's rebuild action for the sony ericsson.

There's a spelling mistake in one of the comments, is it bad form to pull request a one word change on a 9 year old comment?

yes

Why?

Because it's a comment that has no bearing on how the code works. If you make another change to that same file, feel free to update the comment as well. PRs that do nothing but fix a typo in a single word in a comment are useless. Maybe if your PR has several cosmetic/docu type changes throughout once the codebase is stable and working, I could see a pass going through to clean up things like this. However, as asked, no, it is not useful.

Many people dislike commits that make changes to code that has no relation to the thing being done.

They stole the idea from the laptop on https://browsersack.com (desktop only)

That's the page - https://developer.bbc.com/login-required

The code is this:

https://pastebin.com/LskrDWzw

It can be one of several strings.

This is the kind of clever stuff that really got me into computers back in the early 2000s. Back then some people would have clever stuff like this in their forum sigs. You don't see it so much any more. Everything is so serious and corporate.

They also disabled the tab navigation into the textarea element. Very nice.

The person at the other desk, opposite, has one of those holes cables disappear into at a moment's notice. I used to carry a kitchen bag clip for that!

That's awesome!

That is brilliant

Works until you zoom on the page, then the text is not correctly positioned anymore.

Zooming in works fine for me: https://i.imgur.com/5QVBN7i.png

Sadly the .js file[1] backing that page is 860 kilobytes of minified unreadable gibberish, containing the various strings that can appear in the code editor hard-coded in the same line of text as minified React. I don't know how much of the file is frameworks and how much is responsible for making editable code, but shipping nearly a megabyte of JS to the browser feels sad.

I've noticed that the editable text in the laptop screen isn't as overexposed as the rest of the laptop's screen.

On that note, why is it so hard to photograph a screen with the right exposure? Automatic exposure always gets the brightness wrong, and even if you manually fix the exposure level, it's hard to reliably map black to near #000000 and white to near #ffffff and gray to near #808080.

[1]: https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/developer-portal-assets/l...

it's almost like they used a js compressor

Prettified: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tyingq/devbbcjs/main/main....

> I don't know how much of the file is frameworks and how much is responsible for making editable code

I don't think very much. This is a contenteditable <textarea> element with a CSS transform to project it onto the screen in the photo.

From digging through the minified js, there's just a small amount of code that sets it up and puts some canned text in there (of which there are a few choices, but still not a huge amount).

The colour space of a photo, is nearly always not the same as the colour space of a photograph.

What's the difference between a "photo" and a "photograph"?

> The word ‘photo’ comes from the Greek word for light.

> A photo may also be referred to as a ‘photograph’, this is a combination of the Greek words for light and drawing; A photograph is a drawing made of light.

Source https://shuttermuse.com/glossary/photo/

According to Wikipedia the two words mean the same thing:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photograph

Photo seems to be the more popular version lately which is hardly surprising:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=photo%2Cphotog...

Trying to assume as much good faith in the original comment, GP may have been talking about the difference between the original photo and the resulting published jpeg file.

You’re going to have a heart attack when you try to cat an executable on your local machine!

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