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varrock

638 karma · joined February 23, 2018

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varrock··on Baltimore's Key Bridge struck by cargo ship, collapses
Thank you for breaking it down like this. As someone without an engineering background, your explanation (along with some Googling for terms and definitions) really helped me grasp what happened.

You got me wondering:

> the whole bridge failed because the impact didn't exceed the impact strength of the bridge's material

When I first read this, it initially threw me off. The cargo ship's impact not exceeding the strength of the bridge sounds like a positive thing, but upon closer reading of your comment, it sounds as if it was the catalyst to the entire bridge collapsing.

So, how do engineers balance these properties of impact strength and tensile strength, especially considering large ships channel through these bridges near their pylons frequently? How much engineering goes into the possibility of large structures hitting their pylons?

varrock··on Show HN: magick.css – Minimalist CSS for Wizards
This is a great example of how a font can really compliment the style you're going for. It fits so well that you hardly notice it at all.
varrock··on Storybook 8
> Haven't used MSW, but don't people use it for mocking APIs? Isn't that apples and oranges?

At first, I was confused by what OP meant, too, but I think the point is that if you can mock your data easily, then getting your app into the desired state is straightforward enough that Storybook becomes unnecessary. At least, that's how I interpreted it.

varrock··on From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate
Would either of you mind expanding on this? What kind of roles have you held?
varrock··on You don't need JavaScript for that
The article linked by the commenter above addressed your concern. They mention the toggle should have an _immediate_ state change. I really liked the iOS airplane mode example the article used:

> When turning airplane mode on for iOS, Apple provides immediate results by changing the cellular bars in the upper left-hand corner to an airplane icon.

To summarize, it sounds like the toggles you've experienced haven't led to an immediate state change, which likely identifies them as better candidates for a checkbox like you mentioned.

varrock··on $20k bounty was claimed
Specifically for reviewing a pull request in GitHub, wouldn't the "Hide whitespace" setting reduce some of this noise? I could be mistaken, though, but that's how I interpreted that setting.

0: https://github.blog/2011-10-21-github-secrets/

varrock··on Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson (1910)
> Douglas Downing's Trigonometry Made Easy is also a really great book for non-maths people.

> but this book really helped connect trig in an intuitive way.

To me, understanding math in an intuitive way is actually how "maths people" think about math. The numbers and formulas are just a means to an end to get there.

varrock··on Stanford is a platform
The advice in this blog post is specific to college, and the author of this post is in their last year; they certainly have the qualifications to give advice catered to incoming college students.

For what it's worth, I've been out of college for a bit, and I've had very similar sentiments towards college as the author, but they came to me much later than they did for the author.

I might also resonate more with the article because I was one of those people who fell into the trap of following my peers instead of prioritizing what I was actually interested in.

varrock··on Just normal web things
I'd argue the link is the most influential and historic element of the web. Its behavior should rightfully be preserved.
varrock··on Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO’s recent remarks
> The really impressive thing is... if you follow a user profile link to a comment and vote, the vote doesn't count.

I've been a Reddit user for a while, but I never knew this. I tried doing a quick search, but it dates back to 2015 when it seems they were actually disabled all together from the profile page [0].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/2nzzhg/if_i_go_throug...

varrock··on Fluent 2 Design System
> The other thing that drove me nuts is lack of care for low-res (aka full HD) displays, where rounding and thin borders leads to visible artifacts in common controls. A designer who uses high-end mac devices will never see these things. UI/UC Design isn’t meant for museums, it needs to be built in dialog with the real world application.

I can't quite picture what you're describing, but I'm curious. Do you have any references to this somewhere?

varrock··on AI clones teen girl’s voice in $1M kidnapping scam: ‘I’ve got your daughter’
> The standard of human interaction will either be meeting IRL or signing communications biometrically.

From a convenience standpoint, it seems like we've gotten so technologically advanced that we are starting to move backwards. Is there a name for this type of phenomenon?

varrock··on Thoughts on Svelte
I just had to do this in React, and you're correct in that it makes you write logic around the lifecycles in ways that feels like I'm abusing their lifecycle methods. It's a lot of the reason Framer Motion and React Transition Group exist.

However, seeing the way Svelte does it sounds like a dream. I wish that could've been all I reasoned about last week.

varrock··on Why take a compiler course? (2010)
These are precisely the type of "ahas" I hope to experience, too, when I begin studying computer science. I've been taking introductory college math courses at my community college to fulfill some prerequisites, and a way for me to stay disciplined in my studies is knowing that concepts like the ones you mentioned are coming. Thank you for sharing!
varrock··on The <Dialog> Element
It also doesn't trap focus within the dialog.
varrock··on Calculators now emulated at Internet Archive
Can you further expand on uploading text docs? I'm not sure I understand why that helped you. Also, what did you get your degree in?
varrock··on Smartphones wiped out 97% of the compact camera market
> For historical reasons we now call hand computers phones

Recently, I've been wondering why the name "phone" has stuck around for a device that has evolved with many more features than that of a telephone. I'm not going to pretend I know a lot about the history of these technologies, but I just find it fascinating that we've kept this identification to something that really provides so many core utilities. I'm curious to know more about the historical implications you alluded to.

Alternatively (and maybe quite a stretch), could I argue that our smartphones are just providing telecommunications to other services, namely, the APIs that they interact with to serve us things like GPS functionality, audio, etc., hence the name "phone"?

varrock··on Ask HN: Hobby coding that doesn’t feel like work
On this note, contributing to open source was the best "experience" I've ever gotten as it related to my day-to-day job of maintaining a large, but still growing, project.
varrock··on Baseball Pitches Illustrated
I'm not the author, but I thought these were nice illustrations showcasing the various pitches used in the sport of baseball. If I wanted to understand a bit more intricacies involved in the game, I would find these helpful.
varrock··on Wearable Muscles
I'm curious: what do you consider best practices for font-size and line-height, as well as margins between paragraphs? I've recently revamped my website and used an online type scale tool [0] to get my typography, but margins don't seem to be as plug and chug.

0: https://type-scale.com/

varrock··on Angular v14 is now available
I've worked at a consulting firm as a dev where we used React for our all of our projects. Given the nature of the industry, we had a fairly high turnover rate with new devs constantly onboarding and older devs moving out. That, coupled with lack of engineering culture, resulted in our project architecture unfolding into what felt like a variety of different brain dumps in a codebase that was difficult to reason with.

It's my opinion that Angular would have safeguarded those projects from a scattered architecture with its opinionated framework, and ultimately resulted in less overhead associated with onboarding new resources and getting them up to speed.

The types of companies you listed aren't necessarily known as being engineering focused, and for a React project to really scale, I think that you need a good engineering culture to make that happen. Choosing Angular alleviates some of that work, and that's exactly what some companies need.

varrock··on Ask HN: If you used to be socially awkward and shy, how did you improve?
Ironically, I have done exactly the two tips you mentioned, and I can confidently say that my life has changed drastically. In fact, so much so, that when I catch up with people who knew me even two years ago, they usually make a comment.

One thing I was initially afraid of when deciding to move was “running away from my problems” only to realize I’m in the exact same situation as before. Well, that was actually very true. I still felt like the same “awkward” person despite moving across the country. But here’s the difference; I was actually motivated to fix it.

Being in a new city opened my eyes to how much I wanted to explore, but also how much I was holding myself back. Ever since moving, I’ve lost my fear of being myself, have a partner, and found a higher paying job.

My main point here is that while you can’t run away from your true inner self, a new environment can certainly change your perspective and direction. I also want to note that I’m making it sound like it was as easy as moving, so to be transparent, it wasn’t easy. It took a lot of self discipline and discomfort, but it was worth every second of doubt.

varrock··on Ask HN: Developers who switched careers, what are you doing now?
When I first stumbled on a senior engineer browsing HN at my very first internship, I assumed it was a hut for developers. However, the more I've browsed this place over the years, the more I realize the community is much, much larger than that. There are some very insightful people from many industries contributing to this site.
varrock··on Show HN: Web page that parses and explains the label on a bike tire
May I ask what you’re doing in your deployment script?
varrock··on If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)
I understand, which is why I mentioned it being a hypothetical. Maybe I shouldn't have used myself as an example. It's not something I'm worried about. I've only shared the blog with close friends. That's my intention moving forward.
varrock··on If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)
I've always wanted to blog because I love to write. However, I've been very hesitant to do so because of exactly what you described: the grind culture. I've felt immense pressure to make every post academic, but I realized that the blog should be for me first and foremost. In fact, my first blog post ever is describing the purpose behind my blog and _why_ I started it. It will help keep me accountable.

However — I do wonder about this hypothetical: my blog (for whatever reason) blows up. Would I start to feel pressure to deliver content that starts trending towards "grind culture"? Or would I still be able to blog _for me_? I'm sure this is what some other content creators have faced before, especially in the YouTube community. If anybody has had this experience, I'd be curious to hear what you did.

varrock··on LeafletJS: a JavaScript library for interactive maps
This got me wondering if my favorite game as a kid, RuneScape, also uses Leaflet on their world map for Old School RuneScape (the version I am more familiar with). It turns out they do. Cool!

https://oldschool.tools/world-map

varrock··on TikTok overtakes Facebook as most downloaded app
> For TikTok I feel it's still at the stage where the makers, above all else, just want to be seen.

This sounds like what YouTube used to be like. I wasn't around much for it, but I can only imagine how fun it must have been in the early stages.

varrock··on Life before smartphones (2020)
This is great from a social aspect, but society favors having a smart phone to get things done. The cons might outweigh the pros from my perspective.
varrock··on Ask HN: How do you track comment threads in HN?
Which is precisely why this is my favorite message board on the Internet. I love that I never have to collapse comments in HN threads because they're witty or off-topic.
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