snide

Ha! Thanks!

I think that's valid. I guess then what I'd look to create is something akin to Stripe Atlas + a content delivery platform for non-profit communities. I think it's a lot easier to just say "make it non-profit" without understanding how hard doing something like that might be for your average content creator.

OG founder of Giant Bomb / Comicvine / Whiskey Media here. I was also at CNET during the acquisition of Metacritic and helped build large portions of Gamespot and TV.com. I'm 10-years removed from these properties so I feel OK talking about them.

The sad reality is the Internet publishing is dead and as a business that business is nearly impossible to operate if you have any moral compass. In its place we have various traffic to ad scams and a creator economy built on the backs of a couple large platforms like Twitch, Reddit and YouTube. While the later option seems freeing for some creators, the reality is that soon those too will become hard to make a living from as those large platforms start slowly squeezing their creator class outside of a couple few who play nice. It's only slightly better than the journalism field because at least some of the personalities can shoot over to Patreon and work directly with their audience (albeit still tied to another large platforms).

I love this space, and it's where I grew up as a kid in the late 90s. I love community websites where I can engage with some experts. With video though, it's extremely hard to run independently. Hosting video for Giant Bomb in 2008-2012 meant home rolling our own streaming service, chat service and edge-based video platform. We had an all-star engineering team. We had one of the largest podcasts in the world and the hosting bills were killing us. Getting an audience with good content was easy. Monetizing it was very difficult. That's only continued over the years as I've seen various companies buy Giant Bomb (CBS, then RV, now Fandom) looking to pick up a premium brand that they could use to mask the giant volume of dead, but trafficked content they had in the background. The shill back then was was to sell Giant Bomb or GameSpot ads, but serve it on GameFaqs or Comic Vine (which had huge traffic at low cost). Various SEO tricks were pulled to hide traffic. For example, Comic Vine moved to a Gamespot subdomain to make this seem more legitimate. I anticipate similar dark patterns every time these sites are resold to cheaper owners. Likely, these brands will be used to promote a mountain of google-driven traffic in other properties.

The question I haven't been able to solve:

How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? How can it be audience driven instead? Is such a thing even possible? Right now good monetization strategies beget bad content. There's got to be a better way than cobbling together five platforms under a Patreon account, giving all of them 10-50% along the way.

Read the entire document. There's a big section on UX and Research.

Read the entire document. There's a big section on research.

"I'm also learning Javascript"

"There is nothing terribly complex about this algorithm — an understanding of basic trig is all that is required."

"After a 30-year hiatus, back to writing shareware, ha ha."

I LOVE seeing stuff like this. Keep hacking till the lights go out.

My entire linux Desktop feels this way! It's my favorite part of working in a barebones Linux distro like Arch. I've got to build everything from the ground up. Need a screenshot program? OK... let's pull in Flameshot. Where's it going to host that image? Well, let's create a watch folder and shuttle everything off to a GCP static bucket.

Window manager? I3... heh, let's build a bunch of scripts. Vim? Well... man, that's a whole ecosystem of tooling I an hack together and write against.

I do this as a designer. I'm actually not a fantastic programmer, I just like the flexibility of building tools that are specific to me. My entire desktop feels like a love letter to building cool things the way I want.

For me because in these sort of bespoke Linux setups I've found that temp / mem usage needs to be watched for spikes a lot more than something like my Mac. I run a fairly large typescript monorepo, and when I'm also running a zoom screenshare it's something I need to be aware of.

I'm running an arch setup, and because it's fairly barebones I needed to learn about temp / power control regulators like TLP.

I've shifted to Airbase for pretty much anything data sheet related. The ability to have more typical data-flow joins with an easier to manage UX that teaches folks along the way is pretty phenomenal. It grows as you need, but still remains relatively simple.

It's one of my favorite pieces of software from the past decade.

I don't get the hate on Electron. Is it often bloated? Yes, sure. Has it allowed some of these excellent third party apps to make the move to Linux? Absolutely. I've been utterly surprised and excited by how much better 1Password has gotten over the last two years on Linux. We're seeing real parity with the OSX side of the house. Would I love native apps? Again, sure. But I really don't care. It runs pretty fast on my machine and has never really gotten in the way.

Also, they have a nice CLI. I'm sure getting some of these features there is only a matter of time.

Author here. I agree with your caveat wholeheartedly. You've expressed it better than my "don't get in the way" comment. Don't take on critical path work is key. By all means fix things on the edges that are not time-critical or would not cause conflict during review.

For those interested in dystopian works on this subject I always recommend Super Sad True Love Story[0] by Gary Shteyngart. It's a little closer to the "Her-style" near future that is a lot more mundane.

What if you walked into a bar and everyone was pre-ranked on your phone?

What if news was replaced with streamers, and every friend group had a person who was streaming non-stop?

What if economy and finance stopped being about making capital and instead became about managing debt, at both the micro and macro level?

What do relationships look like in that world?

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Super-Sad-True-Love-Story-ebook/dp/B0...

For people that are looking for a nice search TUI, may I point you to Googler. It's made by the author of NNN and a couple other fantastic terminal tools. Highly recommend. It's amazing how clean you can make the interface

https://github.com/jarun/googler

Screenshot of Googler in action when it's nice and clean

https://snid.es/2021OCT/YG4OXAlXg4INZWPe.png

I'm going to give a fun alternative example.

I used to run some popular publishing websites around entertainment: gaming, movies, tech...etc.

I talked to our first users entirely through our message boards, which had PM systems built in. The regulars were there almost every day and I got to know them fairly well. We'd talk daily and I used the message board to show off new designs I was working on. Eventually they started their own fan podcast (this was 2008 or so mind you) and I'd show up as a guest to support their love of the websites. They'd be surprised I'd show up. Me? I was surprised they went to so much trouble to support my site.

Eventually we just hired a bunch of these early users at interns. One we hired permanently, and others we helped get jobs within the gaming industry. I don't see them that often in person anymore (I've since moved) but I'm happy to see them with their own thriving careers and consider a couple of them friends.

I sometimes wonder if the move away from message boards and towards larger communities like Reddit and Twitter would have allowed for this kind of clubhouse atmosphere. It's one of the bits of the old Internet I occasionally miss.

I was talking with a friend who worked at IBM in the heyday. He mentioned that a lot of the time, it wasn't so much that talent got used, it was that talent was not used elsewhere. Stiffing innovation is just as effective as breeding it when you're already on top.

Elastic | Documentation content architect | Remote | Full Time

Elastic is looking for someone to lead their docs team. You'd get to work on some of the most viewed technical docs in the world.

https://jobs.elastic.co/jobs/kibana/distributed-amer/kibana-...

For the most part yes. I think it's also harder because Facebook, YouTube and Reddit pretty much ate up community message boards. My original premise was that any magazine in an Airport had enough community to build a website around. We simply looked for communities that had crappy websites and tried to fill the space. It worked well then, but it wouldn't be a strategy I'd employ now.

Unfortunately I'm not a good person to ask. I didn't own a car at the time, which was part of the problem :D

I once started a social network around car culture. It did OK, and we got an exit offer, but decided to pivot to something else (which was the right move).

Anyways, the way we got our early users was nontraditional. We went in person to car shows, took pictures of the cars, making sure one of them was with a polaroid camera. We then handed the Polaroid to the owner of the car and asked if we could feature their car on our website. If they said yes, we wrote out a email/pass on the back of the polaroid and then went home and set up their account. This seeded our original social graph.

Harder to do these days, but don't forget about your legs. It's a lot easier to convince people in person than over a rote email.

We got on Techcrunch as well, but it didn't help nearly as much. Techcrunch is mostly good for the inner industry[0]

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2006/06/11/cnet-veterans-launch-boomp...

I play a lot of Digital Combat Simulator, which models a lot of these planes. At first I was interested in shooting things, then I was interested in the flying, but in the end I learned I was most interested in the computer systems and how these games are mostly virtual simulations of old computers. It's fun to see what changed over the years and between cultures. The MiGs are completely different than their Western counterparts. How you navigate from point to point is often completely different. It's also interesting how durable the UX of MFDs were in cockpit design. When I went for my GA license, it was funny to see how many newer models of planes had moved to "glass" cockpits. It some ways, it felt like putting wifi on your fridge. Most of the GA planes folks fly were made in the 70s.

3 months ago I made the switch to Linux (manjaro) with i3. I currently run off an Intel NUC, which works perfectly fine, but I have a Thinkpad now on the way. I figured I'd do a writeup because I'm a designer and that makes me a little bit of a freak.

First, I was already a vim user for 8 years, so I was used to config files and the terminal. I moved primarily after watching some videos about I3 / awesome WM and browsing the /r/unixporn subreddit. Primarily I liked the idea of designing my own OS from scratch, and the idea of being able to change ANYTHING was really intriguing to me.

I guess it's important to note that as a designer this wouldn't have been possible without tools like Figma and Framer being web based. Put bluntly, Linux native design tooling isn't up to par with what I had on a mac, and without Figma I wouldn't have been able to move over full-time. It's also important to mention that while I classify myself as a designer, I design 90% of the time in code, writing React + CSS. I realize I'm a little different and this likely sways some of my feelings towards linux.

In short, I've really enjoyed the switch. The window management alone has been reason enough. Being able to navigate my windows with key commands, and generally lay things out the way I see fit between polybar + i3 has been fantastic. Don't like a certain shadow? Change it with picom. Don't like seeing title bars on your windows? Change a config. I'm also a designer that believes in heavy focus (think tab focus in a browser) so every window gets a thick focus border. Everything is matched to a color-scheme that I like, and I mean everything. I don't feel like I'm using Linux so much as I've used Linux to build Dave OS.

I was able to migrate nearly $500 of annual tooling to home-made scripts and services that I run through GCP. For example. I used to use cloud app for screenshot / movie snippets. Any designer will tell you something like that is their bread and butter... "hey what do you think of this?". I moved it to Peek / Flameshot + a 40-line bash script that watches a folder and uploads it to a gcp bucket. It took me a half day of learning. At the end of it I had a funny realization... why have I been paying for these simple services for years and complaining about features they didn't have? Now I just add the features.

Performance is hit and miss. Everything I used to do in the terminal (which is where I spend most of my time) feels faster. In general, I had to drop apps and move command line. This was fun! I moved to buku for bookmarks, taskwarrior for todo lists...etc. What I loved about this was it forced me to engage more in the OSS community. I already do mostly OSS stuff for work, but I was in my bubble. Linux forced me out, and I found myself talking a bit more on Github, asking questions and the like. This was the thing that I've ended up loving. In general I've been amazed at the amount of support I've gotten from maintainers by just saying "Hey, I'm a designer, I'm not so knowledgeable about the guts of this code, can you help me out"?

Slack and zoom are slow. They are pretty resource intensive apps and weren't exactly speed kings on my mac, but they do feel noticibly worse on Linux. I'm hoping this is due to my hardware, but I suspect the apps just aren't as considered in Linux. I've really enjoyed AUR / pacman for package management and it feels like brew, but for everything. The one thing I think Linux is missing is a good calendar application that syncs with gcal. The terminal based ones are a little overweight and underdesigned, and I can't find a GUI one I like.

Anyways, I'll probably do a formal blog writeup at some point, and more importantly make some videos of my setup, since it's probably interesting for folks to see how a designer uses Linux, but I thought it'd be worth a quick post to let others know its possible.

Hardware wise I had no trouble with my mac, mostly because I already had my own custom keyboards and the like, but I'm excited about the new Thinkpad on the way more for it's power-to-price.

This might be true. I need to the two things out of my bar at the moment: (a) going to those 10 sites i always go to very quickly (b) to run a search on some linux/css/react thing. Chrome does really well there, no matter what config settings I change in Firefox.

For the deep history I'm a pinboard user and bookmark at least a dozen things daily with tags.

I recently tried to move to Firefox (again). I try to to this every couple years. I run into the same three blockers every time.

1. The omnibar completion isn't as good. Chrome figures out where I go pretty regularly, and autocompletes extremely well based upon habits. 2. The dev tools aren't as good. I mostly work in the frontend, and simple things like how you write css overwrites with tab completion is just not as good in Firefox. 3. I often run with lots of tabs. Although firefox lets you make tabs smaller, it's default method of "scrolling" tabs isn't as nice as chrome infinite method.

It doesn't help that I pair this yearly experiment with DDG as my search. With that pairing I often run into autocompletion / omnibar issues and find myself just banging !g to get myself out of it.

I really would like to switch, but the gap is too much for my daily tooling. I say this as someone who recently switched to Linux from OSX and really ran into no issues outside of having to spend a week setting thing up how I liked.

Nice to see NoClip getting some love on HN. I'm an unabashed Danny O'Dwyer fan and I think this community would enjoy all of NoClip's work if this is your first taste. His docs cover quite a few behind the scenes stories that I feel all us startup / programmer folks can relate to. His work captures the heart of what it means to be a creator. My dream is that one day he makes a doc about the community around Vim. It'll never happen, but a boy can dream.

Some of my favs

The untold story of Astroneer's development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfUjl4owxTQ

Doom: To hell and back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS6SBnccxMA

Mostly it's a combination of tools. We write a lot of custom color functions (using Sass). You can check the src here[0]. A common one we'll use is makeHighContrastColor(), which given two colors will automatically make the first one a 4.5 AA accessible contrast by adding tint/shade.

For palette generation, we do a lot of our work with tools like chroma.js[1] which can help with some colorblind math.

[0]: https://github.com/elastic/eui/blob/master/src/global_stylin...

[1]: https://gka.github.io/palettes/#/9|s|00429d,96ffea,ffffe0|ff...

I don't work on Chakra, I lead the team that builds Elastic's design library[0]. We take accessibility pretty seriously. In general this means:

- We make sure tab order and keyboard control is a equal level citizen.

- All our colors and palettes are backed by math, both for contrast and for color blind qualitative comparison.

- We build using semantic HTML and try to to avoid abstracting things like input controls and labels with too much magic.

- We test and build for screen reader support at the component level and then provide helpers for navigation. Usually, given the complexity, this means a decent mix of native html, aria, and hidden text to make things read correctly.

We do have some automated axe testing, but in all honesty, axes only gets the surface level spec and might cover 30% of what you need. The rest is really hand touched, backed by pretty strict review.

In general the bigger frameworks like ours are getting better at this stuff, but it's still fairly poorly considered in the industry overall. The specs are pretty verbose and poorly standardized against browsers. This make it very much like building a traditional visual frontend during the browser wars of the 2000s (I was there!).

Third party audits are normally done on the products themselves (in our case Kibana), not the framework itself. This ends up being an indirect method of auditing the framework though.

All our work is open source and documented. If you have any questions, please ask away. I love this stuff and web UI has been a 20-year passion for me.

[0]: https://elastic.github.io/eui/#/

I read East of Eden every couple years. I find it settles me and makes me believe in the goodness of Humans every time I read it.

I actually think this is excellent advice right now. I would add the caveat that I would target contributing to OS software that is maintained by a large company, not an individual. There are lots of them floating around.

This is by far the best way to get recognized at those companies that are hiring. I will admit it's a long sell, but it has fairly predictable results if you're steady with your contributions.

As a former college drop-out that made it into the industry this is the route I would have taken were I joining the workforce today when I was younger. Great way to learn on something real and get your foot in the door.

Note too this is possible for designers as well. There are lots of design libs floating around and contributions to those repos is so rare it's very easy to get stand out.

Somewhat related. I highly suggest the Goyo plugin for Vim if you want distraction free writing.

https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim

I think you might want to re-read the commit message :D