Ask HN: What's the coolest website you know?
The definition of cool is, of course, at your discretion.
Edit: I mean: it's one of the very few websites that actually provides sources of information. It's insane it's that rare these days. And most important facts are just placed in visible and easy to spot place, no need to dig through author's life story, thanks for subscribers etc. before getting to the point.
OpenStreetMap is, along with every other geo data project, limited by the common coordinate systems we have for storing and retrieving geospatial data -- and these are almost always planetary, not universal.
I hope there are lots of copies of it in government survival bunkers around the world.
I wonder if they keep an offline copy on ISS?
- Archive.org
- SciHub
- OpenStreetMaps
- Library Genesis
- TikTok (/s)
https://geizhals.de is a German search website that allows you to very narrowly specify all kinds of things.
Searching for a mainboard with minimum 4x SATA ports and 64GB RAM support in mini ITX format? Easy peasy.
For example, take a look at the laptop category and its filters: https://geizhals.de/?cat=nb
I wish every e-commerce website was built like this.
My only criticism of geizhals is that you can't see items that aren't for sale anyonger unless you search for their names directly. For example you can't use geizhals to get a list of 5k monitors models sold in the last years (most of them are no longer on sale).
Something like a "discovery" view would be nice where you could specify your requirements beforehand and then look for e.g. compatible parts that could be interesting.
Here are some filters I find interesting to use.
You can filter HDDs by recording technology: https://geizhals.de/?cat=hde7s&xf=8457_Conventional+Magnetic...
Similarly, it's possible to specify the storage cell type for SSDs. https://geizhals.de/?cat=hdssd&xf=16325_3
For RAM you can specify which memory rank you want and the actual ns operation times for most primary ram timings: https://geizhals.eu/?cat=ramddr3&xf=15554_10.6%7E439_dual
Sadly I don't buy through them very often, as they only show stores for Germany, Austria, Poland and the UK.
It reminds me of the GSMArena's Phone Finder (https://www.gsmarena.com/search.php3?) which also allows specifying very narrow search criteria. But it is specific to phones and tablets only.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Content_Ind...
I've seen people shopping for hardware on reddit say that the navigation is clunky and confusing, and IIRC they said the products are price-gouged?
I'd be curious to know what other users here with an eye for design think of it, and if they know of similar websites, as I've been working on a hardware e-commerce store (mainly for my own use) that uses a lot of the same principles of no-BS shopping, I'm supposed to present it to my mentor next week
Also, a lot of the speed is pretty standard with most frameworks, they did a good job of blending in the slow loading bits into something that feels fast. Overall It's a great website and I'm sure it makes lots of sales
Also they have the best return policy. If you don’t like it, send it back and they will reimburse you without asking a single question.
Lastly, part of the no-BS aspect is that no brands are given most of the time. You need test leads for a bench top multimeter? They offer whatever length or specs you want, and any of the ones you choose will be high quality and most likely made in the US (in my example, all their test leads are Pomona brand). The ability not to have to sift through Amazon reviews or decide whether a premium brand is worth it is easily worth the extra cost.
Sometimes I forget how good we have it in Europe. In the EU we have a pretty close to universal [0] 14 day no questions asked return period for all online purchases. You occasionally get a crappy retailer who tries to push back but one link to this document stops that pretty quickly.
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/c...
I think these people are used to shopping from Amazon and Home Depot. They can get their bolts and random specialty items and it comes cheap. When you’re talking about a quality, precision piece of hardware, one where you know the manufacture and have reliable dimensions (and probably even a CAD model) it comes at a price. And if you’re working On something that matters, especially if this is your business, you’re willing to pay for that.
Also Thorlabs. Everytime I'd open their shipment, it'd include Lab Snacks™. I wrote about it here [1]. Both are awesome companies to deal with.
https://www.rockauto.com is like also.
I'm a huge fan of their website.
And man, the UI is brilliant. Straight and to the point - just enough complexity to handle what they're selling, without the clunkiness of Amazon's UI.
Everything looks satisfyingly clean and useful. I almost never buy anything from them, but sometimes I end up the site and go down a rabbit hole.
At the end, concludes with:
> Mechanical watches are not as accurate as digital ones. They require maintenance and are more fragile. Despite all these drawbacks, these devices show a true mastery of engineering. With creative use of miniature gears, levers, and springs, a mechanical watch rises from its dormant components to become truly alive.
And to an extent, I can agree that figuring out and building such a tiny mechanic is truly genius. But so is figuring out the digital electronics devices, even if they seem much less sexy.
What we should really be thankful for are those geniuses who figured out all those technologies and put their powers in the hand of the mere mortals.
I don't need to be able to understand the inners of the computer, but can still make use of its power to the benefit of others.
Bret Victor's visual / interactive explanations of certain ideas or papers.
Two that I like in particular are his redesign of Strogatz's paper on small world networks and the 'ladder of abstraction'
http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt...
http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming
One of the most inspiring pieces I've ever read.
Seems like the viewport is fixed so zoom is disallowed. (Sites should never do this.)
-- Worth mentioning that many sites will be difficult or unusable in a text mode browser, so I recommend Browsh which renders them (in Firefox?) and then converts the image to colorful, pixelated terminal art—it supports mouse and everything! (The word "recommend" is a bit strong here, but if your internet is bad enough and you need to get something done, it may be the only way to do it.)
I had to actually plan my media downloads ahead—I'd collect a list of podcasts / lectures to download and then fetch them all when I had access to decent wifi. Eventually I made an elaborate series of bash scripts with a php frontend to extract audio from youtube lectures and convert it to Opus, to save money on my fast but expensive mobile data.
I even set up my own internet radio station, an Opus proxy for Lofi Beats to Relax and Study... as they say, necessity is the mother of invention... or at least the mother of reading a bunch of icecast manpages... Wouldn't want to repeat the experience, but it was very educational!
Right now I'm on a metered connection (5GB/day), so I set my Steam download speed low enough to spread a 12GB download over 3 days... brings me back to the old days hahah.
https://fabiensanglard.net/ a personal website with interesting side projects and lots of technical details
https://paulstamatiou.com/ photography, technology and design with in-depth articles and detailed travel photosets
https://www.arun.is/ a visually-rich blog that dives deep into how design and technology shape our lives
https://ciechanow.ski/ detailed explanations and illustrations of technology
https://simone.computer/ a personal website designed like an old computer
https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ The world's biggest collection of classic text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era IBM PCs and compatibles
Lets you listen to the full audio of three Apollo missions. Not only the official mix, but also behind the scenes stuff, like flight dynamics officer, computer supervisor, etc.
Not only is it interesting to hear what engineers on a mission sounded like in that somewhat early NASA environment, but it's also a pleasant background track.
I knew nothing about mechanics before starting this series and I'm very impressed by how informative and professionally made the content is. Well worth the price tag (currently discounted as it's still in prerelease, but lots of videos have already been published.)
(Note: I have no affiliation with the creator of this course and have nothing to gain by promoting him; I'm just a happy customer.)
No, I'm not trolling. This is one of the coolest websites I've ever seen, despite it being a personal blog and having no fancy animations. ps: the coolest "site", not the coolest content of the site. While it is very good too in this case.
Ken Fern's Plant databases https://theferns.info/
U2-3 - The Famous 1000 copies of U2's first ever release https://www.u2-3.com/
Dana Countryman's Virtual Museum of Unusual LP Cover Art (may contain some albeit low quality NSFW artwork) http://www.danacountryman.com/danacovers/danacovers.html
One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age - Digging through the Geocities Torrent https://blog.geocities.institute/
and finally, The End Of The Internet https://hmpg.net/
I've kept a bit of a running list on my site here: https://jason.nabein.me/#links
What Unseen64 and HiddenPalace find and preserve is seriously invaluable in this area of interest.
By far and away my favourite site of all time.
It’s a beautiful example of representing complex data in a manner that’s easy to digest, viscerally understand, even.
It’s also the first time I heard of the Misery Index, which was fun to learn about.
https://river-runner-global.samlearner.com/
Click on any spot on Earth and see where a raindrop there will flow until it reaches an ocean.
Lots of great sites among the RIT profs.
It’s a solar powered, self hosted version of Low Tech Magazine. The articles are always interesting, but there’s also a ton of good information about efficient website design as well [0].
This is my favorite website ever, because, quite simply, you can do anything at Zombocom.
For those who don't get it, in the late 90's there was a distinct sense that internet websites might just solve all of the world's problems, and we just hadn't imagined yet how it was going to happen, and most people hadn't really been online yet.
…
…
is yourself.
wasn't it more of a parody of those long and elaborate flash intros that websites used to have?
For people who had never really used computers, and had not been online, the buzz about how the Information Superhighway was going to change everyone's life was enigmatic at best.
This led to all manner of fantasy, and a yearning to make the connection and discover what was going to happen - to be a part of it, to converge - with, or without, a good technical understanding. There's something of this irony in Zombocom.
There's a great 80's Neue Deuetsche Welle song by Paso Doble with which I am practically obsessed, which captures some of the very weird fantastical dream-con-fusion of human and machine, love and logic, flesh and silicon. For the non-tech artists, it was (is?) a rich place to play:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l5Pyg_pSYw&list=PLHgJlrCztl... "The modules are going crazy -- Man, I'm totally in love"
* Nietzsche Source. Searchable, digitized collection of the complete works, as well as scans of original manuscripts, etc! http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB
* WebSDR - control a short-wave receiver located at the amateur radio club ETGD at the University of Twente, complete with chatbox: http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/
[1] https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....
Wholesome, fascinating insight into the inner thoughts of some people, and shows us how tenuous the human connections we make on the internet can feel sometimes.. how lonely some of us can be.
To reach a port, we must set sail.
---
This is what I got when I first clicked through it. There are some very interesting motivational messages in there, as well as some very sad ones, many people grieving or pining for a lost love.
All reviews by Danny Yee
Would you say we all need to be single minded specialists/experts?
https://dannyreviews.com/mypubs.html#nonfiction
I'm also struck by the quality of his writing. These are some short and light reviews. Very thoughtful.
> …so that we may be able to return our inherited material and spiritual wealth to the public
I like how insane this Norwegian mail order website is.
You might also enjoy Yvette’s Bridal Formal. It’s the good, old, weird, outsider art web that you just don’t get now. Didn’t really get it then either but this is something special.
Search for your favorite bands using the bar at the top right corner. Find the associated playlist on Spotify via "The Sound Of X" where X is the genre name.
If you have (or would like to have) diverse musical tastes this is the best way to do it!
Surely there's a better way to find new music. I'm still looking — serendipity is about the only means I have found.
This site for its depth on a niche subject (nike missiles): http://ed-thelen.org/
and for military telecom: https://www.electrospaces.net/p/index_15.html
similarly, for another niche (very old computers): http://bitsavers.org
Evan Amos pictures of game consoles on wikipedia are pretty cool because of how comprehensive they are. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Evan-Amos
nostalgia http://16colo.rs
thrillingly designed, and amazing what can be done in WebGL
It’s super fast with their jump to reference/declaration. Still curious what’s actually driving it. Looks like some sort of lightweight git/VCS browsing app. Does anyone here know more about it?
Without a doubt, one of my favorite sites to go reading through. I find every article fascinating, and love that it's still got that retro look and hasn't changed in years.
Each element has its own micro-interaction on hover.
The interactive elements help so much in explaining complex ideas. An example post that is incredible is: https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/
OK I'll bite... There's a very cool five letters dot com which exists since forever (I just checked on the Internet Wayback Machine and it has a copy of the site in 1998!). I'll say what it is but I'd rather not link it directly as I wouldn't want HN to kill it (and its owner deciding to pull the plug, you never know you know).
It's basically called "lost.com" (but in another language) and there are just two lines of text saying:
Lost on the Internet? Don't worry, we're going to help you
* <--- You are here
Focused on Nintendo Switch, written in rails AFAIK.
Hasn’t changed in 26 years.
https://www.spacejam.com/2021/
This is just amazing.
If you like a science-based approach to futurism this guy is the absolute best. His channel on YouTube is amazing.
I know it’s on HN a lot but I just love the application of his sphere of deep knowledge (military history) to pop culture.
Barely related but equally cool project: https://supp.ai/
They where also responsable for a lot of local business websites in the 90's. That's how they financed the cult.
The coolest cellular automaton I've ever seen. I can fiddle with this all day and get absolutely no work done. Beautiful and stimulating 10/10
Honestly, my Internet life would be miserable without HN. I learn so much stuff in here.
Works pretty well, can answer almost any question :-)
I also recommend checking out Dan Russell's (lead researcher on the Google Search team) blog. https://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/
So let me contribute with 2 other sites, maybe not the "coolest" but I think they will be of interest to some fraction of the people here (for those who dont know them)
- http://www.astronautix.com/ A labor of love of just 1 person, almost of 80000 pages! on humanity space programs,you can spend hours and hours reading about obscure soviet prototypes, NASA suits, the Chinese space probes, etc
- https://www.centauri-dreams.org/ A very active (and long) blog about interstellar travel. Despite the fact the subject is now more fiction than science the articles discussed and reviewed are about actual science done by actual scientists (many good guest posts too)
One of the most complete sources of baseball stats including game logs. Yes much of the data is from other sources (MLB, Retrosheet.org, etc) but they really ties things together nicely and I can spend hours on the site.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/19738001/2Advanced-V5-Websit...
This was more of a demo page, the original website is long down unfortunately.. Back in the day I'd get excited every time I'd load it! This site is all about esthetic and nothing about the content. I'd say many people decided to become web designers just because of this particular work.
It was hurting my slow DSL back then..
Go figure, I work on interactive web stuff and film stuff geared towards the web. I can still hear the first piece of music that would play in the background of 2A v2 in my head 20+ years later, and still occasionally listen to Eric's trance mixes on Soundcloud.
I also liked joke sites like getyourasstomars.com or typicalmacintoshuser.com :D
http://www.ruffandtuffrecordings.com/SELECTIONS
I even use it a lot on my own, I really enjoy the music I find.
I post updates to my twitter account usually as well @djwinterman
The list has many different genres and moods to it.
(Refreshing the list will load random videos)
I'm thinking of making it a carousel page of some sort soon.
Visual essays with data, that could only exist on the web
A music network state (if you are into new forms of music).
It's a personal website, but is full of amazing visualizations, educational content, and it basically has a demo scene demo to music on the front page, all hand coded in WebGL. It's just cool, in a delightful, personal, artistic way, and I love it.
I think it's run by a Ukrainian guy, they showed pics of cars on their street being bombed, it was wild
It's the most fun news browsing experience of any news site I use, the content is relevant and interesting, and it's non-profit and ad-free.
Thank me later :-)
Now I'm down a rabbit hole of Racer Trash. This remix of Alien is brilliant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5cQh_APsow
https://www.twoyoutubevideosandamotherflippingcrossfader.com...
Shows you satellites that will be visible from your position in the coming hours / days.
Incredibly cool tech stack too.
I just checked it and now it's some religious thing
Fun fact: Whenever I want to remember the name of this project, I just look for it on the front page of https://hn.algolia.com thanks to one of the most upvoted HN posts of all time, "Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195
i actually found out about this site after finding a very cryptic pamphlet at a bar. the site has hundreds of pages.
I'm considering getting an offline copy of wikipedia and libgen. I already have an offline copy of hacker news.
The official website for registering .no domains. Still the most modern website I have ever seen.
A game company that hired Waterloo co-ops once upon a time.
Covering net art since at least 2001. Maybe not as cool as it was then.
I believed them, such well written tables and sliced images… colspan your way to the end of the world
Allows you to simulate electronic circuits and also has bunch of other tools.
Fun and well curated science toy store
Its in german... and a giant treasure chest full of little humour
Watch television from the 90s.
It's a new open discussion site where each post is a live chatroom.
Fast and convenient, everything is one click away. Easy selection of the amount of news you're ready to absorb. Shows where you left off. Default colors are great with already followed links clearly visible. Default order is chronological contrary to https://news.ycombinator.com.
P.S.: no affiliation with it :)
- lambda-the-ultimate
- c2.com