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skgough

190 karma · joined October 25, 2019

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skgough··on We finally learned to center a div, then browsers added sidebars
I think the scrollbar-gutter property helps with this. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...
skgough··on PlayStation can delete all your digital games after 3 years of inactivity (EU)
> The main problem is that, ex. the Steam Controller, nobody can make a decent game controller except for console vendors and when the console vendors go down somebody will have to step up.

I used to only play on DualShock 4s and even skipped the DualSense because I just loved my DualShock that much.

I use an 8bitDo now and it is better in every way I care about. 8bitDo does not make consoles.

skgough··on On The <dl> (2021)
I believe IBM Generalized Markup Language evolved into SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) which was used heavily at CERN when Tim Berners-Lee was working on HTML, which is heavily derived from it. I find this interesting about HTML: some form of the markup language had been floating around for decades until Berners-Lee added hyperlinks to it.
skgough··on BMW Group to deploy humanoid robots in production in Germany for the first time
Hexagon is very prominent in precision manufacturing through their dimensional measurement robots (CMM Coordinate Measurement Machine) and other metrology software/hardware. This is most likely why they were chosen by BMW, as I imagine they already have a working relationship together, although the EU aspect could have contributed as well.

I wonder if this is a newly acquired subsidiary producing these robots (they've been doing a lot of acquisitions recently), or if these have been in development in-house for a while.

skgough··on Plumbing vs. Internet, Revisited
One counterpoint I can think of: most forms of electronic payment require the Internet now. Credit card transactions, Venmo et al. You could transition back to cash but there would be enormous switching costs and short-term chaos, and I could imagine paper-based transactions are also way less efficient in terms of transaction fees and literal loss of the cash.
skgough··on Fluid Glass
it's interesting that the drops tend to collect in straight lines. I wonder what's happening in the sim code to keep them from collecting into round droplets?
skgough··on Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy
It is strange to me that omarchy took off and not Regolith Desktop [1], which is a very similar project, and has been around a lot longer. I suppose the DHH effect is real. There is definitely a critical mass accumulating around the hyprland ecosystem. They seem to be forming their own culture separate from the wider FOSS community that I find concerning.

[1] https://regolith-desktop.com/

skgough··on AWS European Sovereign Cloud to be operated by EU citizens
It sounds like a natural expansion of AWS GovCloud offerings to me. Servicing the US government and it's contractors has been very lucrative for AWS. Taking that successful model into new markets makes sense.
skgough··on Show HN: Windows 7 GUI for the web
I don't think you could 100% nail the Win7 glass or Win11 mica material without having transparency effects that have access to the compositor pipeline. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get close enough!
skgough··on My Lights Run on Bash
HomeAssistant's dependency requirements are so complex as to make a deployment of it essentially read-only. Trying to mod it with HACS is so hard that I gave up even though I write python for a living. I can't recommend it to anyone that doesn't know how to use linux at an expert level. This detracts from it's mission IMO; I would like to tell my family to use it instead of Google Home or Amazon whatever but it is so fragile that I can't do that in good conscience.
skgough··on Selfish reasons for building accessible UIs
Another selfish reason: web pages just work a lot better when you use the actual HTML elements, especially when you compose them together. React projects often mix several component libraries together to make a comprehensive UI. All of these libraries behave differently in subtle ways. When you compose them together, the differences compound: focus is not restored to the button that opened a dialog when it is dismissed, there are 4 different blues used on the page, the date input doesn't use your country's date format.

When you use HTML primitives like inputs with associated labels, the new popover API, dialogs, details + summary elements, their behaviors are all made by the browser vendor and are designed to compose with each other. It really is a difference of night and day, and for free. We don't take advantage of the amazingly powerful tools we have been given.

skgough··on Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
factorio needs to be studied in general for the quality of the software, it's performance, and the UI.

The UI has the best productivity-focused design I've ever seen in any GUI application. And its a game. Absolutely incredible.

skgough··on Show HN: Windows 98 themed website in 1 HTML file for my post punk band
loving the decapitation queue in the console
skgough··on The Subjective Charms of Objective-C
Very cool that you can use the XCode interface builder to build the UI.

I wonder why this type of style hasn't caught on with React and friends? It would be really nice to be able to have an AppKit-quality UI programmable in React or Svelte.

I know I know mobile blah blah. But lots of web apps are complicated enough to only be useful on a large screen, like Figma.

skgough··on The Frontend Treadmill
HTML: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

CSS: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

JS: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

They even have courses for frameworks.

React: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

Svelte: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

Vue: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

skgough··on AI cracks superbug problem in two days that took scientists years
I'm getting the impression that this worked becaused the LLM had hoovered up all the previous research on this topic and found a reasonable string of words that could be a hypothesis based on what it found?

I think we are starting to get to the root of the utility of LLMs as a technology. They are the next generation of search engines.

But it makes me wonder, if we had thrown more resources towards using "traditional" search techniques on scientific papers, if we could have gotten here without gigawatts of GPU work spent on it, and a few years earlier?

skgough··on Undergraduate shows that searches within hash tables can be much faster
Maybe the best way to have the best of both worlds is to ensure well-established areas of research are open to “outsider art” submissions on the topic?
skgough··on Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
this plane doesn't look like it was made to produce a low boom. It has a very distinct von Karman ogive [1] fuselage and typical delta wings. I would guess that it's shape is primarily optimized for fuel efficiency at 1.5 mach or above.

If you take a look at NASA's low boom demonstrator [2], you can see that it's much skinnier and the nose is crazy elongated. This is intended to break up the bow shock into multiple parts, thereby decreasing the amount of energy each one has.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nose_cone_design#Von_K%C3%A1rm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-59_Quesst

skgough··on Blue Origin New Glenn Mission NG-1 (video)
Could you elaborate on that? Why would the exhaust reflecting off the shock wave cause damage to the nozzle?
skgough··on A couple CSS tricks for HTML Dialog elements
this is most likely due to the absolute positioning. position: absolute will use the top-left corner of the closest ancestor that is "positioned" as the origin for it's layout [1]. If you want that origin to be the top-left corner of the viewport, use position: fixed.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Containing_...

skgough··on Show HN: Mizu.js – Lightweight HTML templating library for any-side rendering
Can you talk about why separation of concerns is useful? I like it too, but I have a hard time trying to articulate why I prefer it over keeping everything in the same file. I've started working in a project that uses react and tailwind, and I've gotten pretty comfortable, but (ideological purity aside) it just isn't very enjoyable to use.
skgough··on Android XR
It would super cool if they eventually make this a part of the phone OS and all you would need to do is buy a headset and plug it in over USB-C. Same idea as Dex, different display form factor, but same computer.

Then with Android Auto, Dex, and XR, you would just need a single computer you can carry with you.

Seems like the end state for personal computing. Instead of buying separate computers, you buy human interface devices and plug them in over USB-C.

skgough··on Linux: We need tiling desktop environments
One feature of i3 and friends that I really relied on when I was using a laptop as my main computer was the tab mode. Being able to tab between windows on half of your screen while keeping your browser open in the other half was extremely useful.

I know BeOS had tabbed windows in the 90s in a floating window manager; it makes me wonder why this idea didn't catch on in the early 2000s.

Windows has started to add tabs to individual programs incrementally as part of their rewrites of core applications in the new GUI frameworks. Notepad got tabs and so did Explorer. So they see the utility.

Why hasn't tabbing been included as a core feature of the window manager outside of these niche tiling window managers for Linux?

skgough··on Apple explores robotics in search of life beyond the iPhone
This might be true on the user-facing side of things, but moving chip design in-house and transitioning their entire hardware lineup to the ARM ISA is a big innovation. M-line Macs can't be beat in efficiency or performance any time soon.
skgough··on GM to Cut More Than 1k Software Engineers, Mostly in US
All new cars sold in the US are now required to have backup cameras. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/02/backup-cameras-now-required-... If the car comes without an infotainment system, it will still have a backup camera regardless.
skgough··on Show HN: Plain Vanilla – a tutorial website for vanilla web development
HTTP 2 and above will use one connection to retrieve several files. Caddy [1] can act as a static file server that will default to HTTP 2 if all parties support it. No configuration required.

If you allow UDP connections in your firewall, it will upgrade to HTTP 3 automagically as well.

I highly recommend it

[1] https://caddyserver.com/

skgough··on My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website
The kid doesn't have to know that's it's CSS, and `style="background: url('animals.jpg')"` is more clear than just `background` because it explicitly states that this a networked resource that is being retrieved with the url() function. If you tried to set the `background` attribute to "blue" it wouldn't do anything, because you have to use the `bgcolor` attribute to color the background of the page. But the `background` property in CSS is a shorthand, so you can set it to a named X11 color, or a gradient, or an image file, and these all work.

The `<center>` element spans the width of it's container, is only as tall as it's content, and only centers the content contained inside it horizontally, but this isn't immediately obvious just from looking at the element's name. Using `text-align: center` instead is a much more obvious way to describe what the `<center>` element is actually doing.

Yes, this is more complicated, but it is more obvious, which, I think, is more useful when someone is learning a complex topic.

skgough··on My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website
I agree with you, but for shits and giggles, to modify this to be evangelist compliant, you could write this instead:

    <body style="background: url('animals.jpg')">
        <div style="text-align: center">
Which isn't much more complicated, and makes it clearer what's going on. I wonder if there is a transpiler like Elm that could take a single file written in a simplified language and gave you an HTML5 compliant webpage? You could argue that all the XML-but-not-actually-XML crap in HTML (angle brackets, closing tags, escaping special characters with HTML entities...) is also an impediment to beginners.
skgough··on Writing HTML by hand is easier than debugging your static site generator
For simple static sites with repetitive sections I don't want to write by hand, I find that building a simple generator in Ruby with ERB templates that loop over the rows in a SQLite table is the simplest way to do this. There's no dependencies to pull in, the ERB templates are already pretty close to HTML already, and there are plenty of GUI tools for SQLite files that make it easy to add rows by hand.
skgough··on SVG: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (2021)
Usually when I have to use text in SVG I give up and use HTML in a <foreignObject> [1] tag. The article mentions that SVG is in an awkward halfway point between being useful for humans or a compile target for vector graphics. Text is where this becomes really obvious. Trying to generate SVG with <text> elements in it that end up where you want them is hopeless, especially if you don't know what font the text will be rendered in. I prefer specifying the x,y, width,height of a box that HTML goes into in a <foreignObject> tag and letting the browser reflow the text as necessary within that space. But that's still often not perfect, and I have run into browser incompatibilities when doing any more than basic CSS rules on the HTML inside.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Element/for...

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