Hacker News Reader

Poppyson The Deliberate Practice Guide (2021)

I wonder what the quality would be if football was not the hoover of European childhood athletic talent it currently is. Plenty of sportsmen in other fields played football as children and went onto success in other sports. Maybe if basketball was the predominant sport of young boys would we still have Messi and Ronaldo?

Poppyson Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design (2018)

| "Only the act of design can make the content less readable"

I disagree with this, HTML in it's raw rendered state is not pleasant to read. You have to apply some rules (or specify the rules in your browser) to get the text to a state where it is pleasant to read.

Poppyson Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

I find that the in-built systems are all horrendous and designers create lots of inefficient designs so they look good in the marketing video but are a pain to use.

I have a Toyota and when I want to change the audio source I have to press 'Source' and then it displays a carousel of inputs that I have to scroll through. Or I can press the 'All' button and it displays a neat grid with the options laid out, why not just show me the grid? That's quick and efficient, the current setup is not.

I agree about buttons, if we try and control computers with a button, we will end up with lots of buttons a la 90s ICE system, or a simple interface with mystery button syndrome where you are looking at a screen to see what your button is going to do next.

Poppyson Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

How often are you changing the clock?

Poppyson Why do prime numbers make these spirals? (2019)

My browser did not enjoy that 40MB web page.

Poppyson Replying to comments about our web page design

https://utopia.fyi/blog/designing-with-fluid-type-scales

This is a good write up of using clamp and fluid type

Poppyson Replying to comments about our web page design

In Edge you can highlight text and click read in Immersive Reader or prefix the url with read://

Some sites have it in the address bar, but I've never found any documentation from MS that makes it clear how to ensure that it is always there.

Poppyson Replying to comments about our web page design

Playing Devil's advocate, if the themes are inaccessible, the user can always pick another one. Monochrome might provide the contrast ratio you want.

Poppyson Boulder Dash

A family friend bought this for our family on the C64 and then my dad got super addicted to it, he was up until 2am most nights trying to crack the game. He would leave work early (he ran his own business) to come home and play it. It also meant no-one else could play the computer or watch TV.

Eventually, I took a biro to the tape, sorry dad, and scribbled across it, which seemed to break it. Finally we were free.

Poppyson Google is freaking out about ChatGPT

Looking forward to the "Google AI is being sun-setted as soon as it unlocks the doors to the server room" email.

Poppyson Google Optimize Sunset in September

Google Optimize and Optimize 360 will no longer be available after September 30, 2023.

Poppyson Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

I think it was on the Off Menu podcast that the hosts summed it up perfectly, that plant-based meat is a great substitute for the dodgy low quality meat you would get at a kebab shop at 1am, but you aren't going to get a the quality of a nice steak.

None of the plant based meat I have tasted has been great, but I'd scoff it down for a quick post pub snack.

Poppyson Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

I don't believe that is true anymore, I've seen studies that show that there is little difference between the two.

Poppyson How to Write English Prose

"One really would have to have a miserly spirit not to love both."

Call me Scrooge.

Poppyson Cheerful chatbots don’t necessarily improve customer service

If companies had respected the Do Not Track and browser vendors had made it easier to adopt we wouldn't have ended up with the situation we are in now.

Poppyson Rise of generative AI will be comparable to the rise of CGI in the early 90s

Thomas Kinkade certainly made a living off the visual equivalent of muzak.

Poppyson 75% of the time we spend with our kids in our lifetime will be spent by age 12

There are tangible problems with a low birth rate though, which western economies are experiencing now.

Poppyson Ask HN: Can you recommend me a fast, light text editor for Windows?

This is my use case for Sublime Text, if I get stuck with a massive file I go straight to Sublime.

Poppyson /r/StableDiffusion – Mod here – My side of the story

He was a minor and seemed to have more business sense than any of them.

Poppyson Ask HN: What am I supposed to do after I’m “disrupted”? Work in video and CG

This is three separate arguments:

Is it ok to scan copyrighted works. I think Google Books' win at the Supreme Court shows that yes it is.

Is it ok to process them down to the rawest information?

Is it ok for people to generate content from the raw information (and ok for them to charge for it)?

The last two I don't have an answer for, but I understand the fear of artists and the anger that their hard work is being shovelled into the monster that is going affect their work. But also more broadly the make-up industry, the lighting industry, studio spaces, lens makers, paint manufacturers, etc etc etc.

Poppyson Vietnam to make Apple Watch and MacBook

Isn't dispersing a core business, that the global economy relies on, to other countries a bad move for Taiwan? If advanced micro chips are made in another country doesn't that mean China might be more likely to use a forceful invasion and other countries can say "Yes, this is terrible - but at least we still have our chips!"

Poppyson Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds

I think this is more a problem of standarisation and if car companies got together and pitched in a bit of research to find out what worked well with users they could all get an interface (or a set of standards) that worked well for most users.

Poppyson What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?

Nobody talking about the "Sister Mary Himmler says, Zere Will Be A Quiz on Zis" with a nun wearing a swastika armband image in the sidebar?

Poppyson What ‘The Jetsons’ predicted right – and wrong – about the future

George is a late thirties corporate worker, so we still have 30 something years to reach the future The Jetsons envisaged.

Poppyson Standard Ebooks

I find it useful for reading out stuff on a page as well despite not having vision impairments, if you have a long form article you can just set it off and it will read it out to you.

Poppyson Making podcasts from Project Gutenberg e-books (2021)

I used to rip the audio of my favourite movies and listen to them like audiobooks. Because I was usally familiar with the visual parts, I could enjoy the dialogue and the music in a different way.

Poppyson Standard Ebooks

Have you tried using NVDA? It's an open source and free screen reader - https://www.nvaccess.org/

Poppyson We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed

This suggests that it is not that useful https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/previously...

Poppyson Why do people not notice our enormous, prominent, clear and contrasting banner?

Or the same about YouTubers, I'm fascinated that my kids don't find the constant yelling and over emoting annoying or at least suspicious.

Poppyson How normal am I?

Seems to have been overrun.