Ask HN:What Web Stack? - <AUTHOR>

If you were going to found a web based start-up tomorrow, what stack would you develop in?  I hear alot of discussion here and there of various web stacks on HN, but I haven't ever seen a comprehensive debate on their relative merits. <comment><USER2> The best stack to use is the one you know you can build to a point of getting traction/profitable with. The toughest barrier to startup success is getting traction/profitable, not the stack you use. Technology, esp. in the realm of computers, works such that there is almost always a workable solution given enough time or money, both of which come a lot easier once you've solved the hardest barrier which I've just outlined.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think if you're planning on building anything complex, the question is answered by whatever front-end framework you are most familiar with.

Anything complex will require back end services with may be written in whatever language/framework is best suited for the task. Tie it all together via REST and message queues and find the best solution to each problem.

</comment><comment><USER4> GWT for client side code + Wicket for server generated markup / stateful pages + Google Guice + Hibernate (or MyBatis if you prefer a more low level but simpler API) + PostgreSQL. This does everything I need.

All the modern Java tooling goodness minus the J2EE nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm already doing a research on 3 big names in the web framework competition (Yii, Django and Rails), and would like to share my experience in a longer animated movie.

My observation is that it generally depends on what kind of people you work with (their experience and their geekiness matters the most), you prefer stability over bleeding-edge, what support you expect from the community, and more importantly, what the technical requirements are for your application.

The language itself (PHP/Python/Ruby/other.) has almost the least impact on what you should choose, in my opinion.

(The movie won't be available till next year, sorry.)

</comment><comment><USER6> _If you were going to found a web based start-up tomorrow, what stack would you develop in?_

Depending on the details, probably some combination of:

Groovy on Grails, Tomcat, HornetQ, CentOS Linux, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcache; with the possibility of falling back to plain Java (or even going native with C++) if necessary for performance critical stuff. If absolutely necessary, maybe Thrift for cross-platform RPC.

Note: I'm not making any claim that this is objectively the best stack available in any universal sense. But it's what would be best for me, based on what I know and am productive in.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you were to itemize the merits and pitfalls of each technology and how well each plays with the others, the list would get long quickly. The question can't be answered without knowing the problem and the people.

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe a good place to start is here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_f...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_frameworks)

</comment><comment><USER9> LAMP with PHP. Not the best and everyone will have their opinions but it's what I'm most familiar with and what will get the job done the fastest. Everything else is secondary.

</comment><comment><USER10> Node or Flask + jQuery + MongoDB + Backbone.js + Underscore.js. But I'm a student so I can fuck around without worrying too much.

</comment><comment><USER11> The best web stack is the one you're most familiar with and/or have the most fun working with.

</comment><comment><USER12> Honestly, it depends on the task, really.

I'm comfortable in a few languages / frameworks, and each has their merits. If I'm building something with a dataset that I think Django's ORM will work well for me, and having its admin will be a benefit, then Django it is.

If not, almost certainly I'd drop into Tornado + Jinja, and an appropriate backend store.

For some other tasks, PHP might be the right answer.

I'm doing a lot with Django right now, so I'm probably more fluent in it than anything else, but Tornado is really sexy. Kind of a toss up for me.</comment>


Storage servers, market research - <AUTHOR>

I am wondering what sort of demand is here among HN'ers for renting 24 and 36 drive servers (supermicro 4U with enterprise drives and hardware RAID) in Netherlands (Amsterdam), on 1gbit (expect 300mbit average outgoing) or 10gbit (expect 1500mbit average outgoing) connections.<p>I am currently looking to pivot to selling dedicated servers but wanted to get a feel for demand, there seem to be very few dedicated providers catering for bulk storage servers. <comment><USER2> You should probably hint on a price range.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haven't finalized that yet, but cheaper than the small competition for storage servers

1gbit connection, 24 drive for €400/ month ex VAT no setup 10gbit connection, 24 drive for €800/ month ex VAT no setup

OVH are sold out for same and want €942 ex vat [http://www.ovh.ie/dedicated_servers/hg_xxl.xml](http://www.ovh.ie/dedicated_servers/hg_xxl.xml)

Gorrilaservers in LA want $900 a month for similar

Thats pretty much all the competition on this high end with 24+ drives</comment></comment>


FBI Director Doubles Down on Tying Scrutiny of Police with Rise in Violent Crime - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/10/26/451992173/fbi-director-doubles-down-on-linking-scrutiny-of-police-with-rise-in-violent-cri <comment><USER2> Holy Crap, Comey really did do what the title says. Police operate better when nobody knows exactly what they're doing? I don't think so. That's unamerican, Mr Comey. I call upon you to resign, as you are clearly unwilling to uphold the constitution.</comment>


Updated Gmail app in Android Market - <AUTHOR> http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/updated-gmail-app-in-android-market.html

<comment><USER2> I'm really disappointed that they chose to implement Priority Inbox before they implemented the much asked for "Send As" feature.

<comment><USER3> Google is a big company - There's probably people working on both simultaneously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Disappointing at a first glance. First, it was difficult to install. I had to uninstall the Gmail 2.2.1 I had installed, and then reboot before the install from Market would take.

Then, the main thing I hoped for to be fixed was not: still no way to change the sender to one of the addresses you have confirmed for new messages. Worse, it seems to have reverted so that even replies to other addresses are changed to the main account.

I have to think this is a problem for many users. Is this somehow difficult in a way that is not apparent?

<comment><USER5> I completely agree. Particularly frustrating since I'll read an email on my phone, think of a reply, but need to wait until I get to a computer to send the response for fear of confusing the recipient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like this comment from the post:

 _"[...], so Gmail updates aren't tied to Android version releases anymore." and "The Gmail update requires Froyo (Android version 2.2),[...]" just makes absolutely NO sense._

[http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/09/updated-gmail- app-i...](http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/09/updated-gmail-app-in- android-market.html#c7597976412529003756)

<comment><USER7> They meant future Android version releases. Meaning that we won't have to wait for new Android release until they update Gmail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I cannot see it in the Market. And the direct link inside the market does not work also. Is it somehow limited to only a few countries? I am in Germany, I have Froyo on two phone ith Market and the old gmail. One is Cyanogen on a Milestone and the other is a self-made build Froyo on a Nexus One.

</comment><comment><USER9> For Froyo only.

</comment><comment><USER10> Love this update. Used to have to scroll all the way to the bottom to reply. Now I can do it from the top of a thread. Thank you, Google.

</comment><comment><USER11> I definitely preferred the old version. It now requires two clicks to reply all or forward, rather than the original one.

<comment><USER12> you can have default "reply to all", but I kind of agree</comment></comment>


Microsoft Explains Why the Start Menu Needed to Die - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394101,00.asp#fbid=STAXx2f_Lig <comment><USER2> So... The Start Menu needs to die, therefore make it a whole frigging screen instead of a popup menu.

Very similar to the New Explorer thing: most people don't use 80% of explorer menu features, so put them in the ribbon where they take up even more space.

I don't get this line of reasoning.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know about you guys but what I took out of that article is that Microsoft is secretly/stealthily tracking its users? How do they know if someone is using the start bar "11 percent less than before"? Not only that, it goes on to even say:

 _Instead of navigating through the nested menus within Start, or even searching for apps and documents through the live search function, users began to pin apps to the Start menu or the taskbar for even quicker access. Microsoft data found that most users (above 40 percent) didn't pin a single app to the Start menu, with steadily declining numbers pinning 1 (20 percent), 2 (15 percent), and so on._

It doesn't say anywhere in the article that it was a focus/user group and it sounds like it was generalized to refer to every Windows user so how did they collate all of those data? Shouldn't someone be raising some privacy concerns?

Disclaimer: I've not used Windows since XP. I'm a *nix user.

<comment><USER4> Windows has opt-in telemetry data. Many of their product do too. So there is some bias to those that opt-in, but I've heard that they still get tens of millions of user data.

<comment><USER3> Ok, makes sense. thanks for that ken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel old when I say this, but: most Microsoft changes make me angry. I don't understand why my desktop path needs to be changed 3 times between ME -> XP -> 7 (for example).

With that being said, I found W7 to be pretty intuitive. I don't use the start menu for much other than quick access to programs that I don't want to clutter. The start menu is on the corner, and easy to click. It's easy to de- click if I need to, and I don't need to minimize anything to access it. This will be a sad day.

<comment><USER6> I hear you: the UI is shuffled each time, but it still seems to run slow and complicated, and programming windows is ... more work than I care to take on, if there is an alternative. (this from somebody who had been using DOS / Novell / Windows / Borland dev stuff for about 10 years before ever picking up Linux -- MS totally lost me just before the underwhelming release of '95)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a bit scared and annoyed of this new interface. I use the start menu such an incredible amount that having it bring up an entire new screen would undoubtedly interrupt a lot of the workflows I'm used to.

It seems everyone is converging on mobile, as if it's going to replace the desktop. It's not. Desktop will always be here, and to pretend it's going away and force tablet interfaces down everyone's throat is a pretty bold/stupid move in my opinion. Then again, I'm biased because I'm not a complete moron when it comes to computers. Maybe 99% of the market will LOVE not having a start menu.

Is my monitor a touch screen? No. So let's not pretend it is. I don't care about pretty interfaces or big video buttons that play when I hover over them. I want something I can launch programs with. Is it really hard to do something like

if(is_computer) { show_useful_start_menu(); } else if (is_tablet) { show_retarded_start_menu(); }

I understand I'm the minority, but if they do away with the start menu, I'll probably stay on windows 7 forever.

<comment><USER8> Doesn't it matter what they ultimately replace it with? To me the Start menu seems like a clumsy catchall from a bygone era when people were still transitioning from DOS. It's grown bloated over the years and it's original design purpose is long gone. Yes, you use it all the time, because there's so much essential stuff crammed in there, but can't you imagine something better?

<comment><USER6> Sadly, "Program Manager" was better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh dear. I remember using Winders 3.0/3.1. They had this thing call "Pogrom Manager" (or something like that). In it, you could make a bunch of little boxes, each of which held several things you could click on and run. It was actually fairly useful, when you weren't just using winders to switch between mess-doss apps. (and frankly, Dr. Dos did a good enough job app switching if you weren't actually running any gooey apps)

Then, out came winders 95 with its fancy pants "start" menu, and some Rolling Stones song about making a grown man cry, or at least some part of that song. I didn't really like the start menu, too much chasing things down multiple levels of moving targets.

So now, start menu will die. Die, start menu, die. Only to be replaced with something that looks much like Pogrom Manager, only with more pixels and bits per pixel to dress it up nice. Just goes to show you the MicroSlop can admit a mistake, even if the mistake is old enough to get a driver's license.

</comment><comment><USER9> I somewhat agree with Microsoft, but if, and only if, they provide another easy way to run commands and see all other applications... Either way, I think Windows 7 is too different from Windows 98 to ever go mainstream. People just want a better looking Windows 98.

EDIT: Meant Windows 8, not 7

<comment><USER10> "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". (Not) Henry Ford. The sentiment still applies.

Or are you saying that already?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I actually found one change to the Start Menu the enabling change for me: Typing the name of something and (often) just getting the application that I wanted to start. Just saying what I want and let the machine to the finding for me just feels like the way things should be done to me.

I'm finding it hard to believe that people are actually pinning infrequently used things like the Control Panel to the task bar or is there another way to access it that I don't know of? Isn't that leading to visual clutter? Users never cease to amaze me.

<comment><USER12> I actually found one change to the Start Menu the enabling change for me: Typing the name of something and (often) just getting the application that I wanted to start. Just saying what I want and let the machine to the finding for me just feels like the way things should be done to me.

> So they ripped off OSX Spotlight (which stole it from Quicksilver/etc) - > I've used spotlight to launch apps with 3-4 keyclicks since forever:

OSX: CMD+space,Fir<return> = Launch Firefox and Win7: WINkey, Fir <return> = Launch Firefox

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I actually found the Start menu incredibly useful in Windows 7. Admittedly it was a usage pattern they indicated: I would pin commonly used apps to the Start Menu and would rarely if ever open up beyond that.

I would also use the auto-complete to find things as a second (distant) use case.

One thing that always annoyed me about the Start Menu was how companies would use it. For example, shortcuts notwithstanding I would have to go:

Start > Programs > Firaxis > Civilization IV > Civilization IV Beyond the Sword

The part that really annoyed me was putting the company name in there. I don't care. In fact it may not even be obvious who the company is that makes something you want to use.

I actually bought a copy of Windows 7 retail version for the explicit purpose of using it from computer to computer for years to come, probably in XP-like time frames (ie 5-10 years).

Microsoft needs to realize that these infrequent _expensive_ upgrades (largely for features nobody cares about) are a decade out of date.

Honestly, there's _still_ nothing wrong with XP. Microsoft just went out of their way to kill it by deliberately not supporting it with things they definitely could've. One of the great things about XP was the low resource requirements (minimum 128M of RAM). IIRC 64-bit Windows 7 is at 2GB minimum now. For what exactly?

<comment><USER14> I actually found the Windows 7 Start Menu killed a primary bit of usability that I'd been relying on: The ability to have folders of links in the start menu.

I use nearly 20 programs on a regular basis, and another 20 I use occasionally and would like the be able to find without digging through the Program Files menu, and I don't want to clutter the task bar with all of them. The way I have it set up in six folders on the top of the Start Menu (NOT inside "Programs", but above Programs), I can pull any of them up with a Ctrl-Esc and few hits of the arrow keys.

The text search feature works great when you can remember the name of the app you're looking for. My brain doesn't always work that way, though. Since I have the various apps sorted by category, I don't have to look through more than about 6 at a time to find the one I need.

I'm actually using a "Classic Windows Start Menu" app that replaces the new Windows 7 Start Menu with one that behaves the way I've come to depend on.

Until I found the Classic Start Menu app, I was getting stuck on the search line a lot, trying to remember what some tool was called. No fun.

<comment><USER15> Just an FYI. You can create a folder and place multiple folders of links into that folder. Then create a toolbar on the taskbar pointing to that folder. Then reduce the toolbar to the smallest possible size. You will find that you can now traverse the multiple folders of links by highlighting them. No need for any extra apps.

<comment><USER14> Did that. That was my first attempt at fixing this problem.

Doesn't work for me, since I can't get to it from the keyboard. If there's a keyboard shortcut to open it, then I never found it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> After getting hooked on a keyboard-based launcher like Launchy (<http://launchy.net>), I pretty much stopped using the Start menu entirely.

</comment><comment><USER17> I can sort of see why they do it, and it might be good enough for many people, but it makes me think what happens to the rest of the programs. For example I have maybe 5-7 programs I use daily, but every now and then I might need another program. Do I need to clutter my desktop or go search the program files?

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm not suprised startmenu lost usage in win7. It is because in windows 7 they kindof made it less user friendly you must operate startmenu in small box in bottom left corner and not like before where you can expand menu on whole screen. and you can't change it to classic start menu.

</comment><comment><USER19> Now will they kill the registry?

</comment><comment><USER20> This makes sense to me. Many people, including myself, just dump icons on the desktop. Every time I open the start menu it seems like I am digging forever to find what I want.

</comment><comment><USER21> I love that MSFT is building a UI in response to actual data, but something about these posts and the resulting UI seems cold and methodical.

Maybe it's just the writing style that's throwing me but the leap forward in a consumer facing OS that iOS delivered felt like a more organic process.

Reminds me of that quote from Jobs : "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

As a result I wonder how much of Apple's process was reactionary from data / focus groups vs. from Steve / Ives "gut"

<comment><USER22> And yet, to me at least, the Metro UI itself doesn't feel at all like the sort of result you would expect from a product designed by focus groups. As with the ribbon (which I'm also a fan of), it feels like they worked with focus groups to identify pain points, used genuine inspiration to come up with a design solution, then used more user testing to refine that solution.

Honestly, it feels like Apple has been playing it too safe with their UI work the last few years, while Microsoft is doing real innovation. (Hardware, of course, is an entirely different matter.)

<comment><USER23> I agree with your hardware comment, I wish PCs wouldn't look like Macs. So cold and austere. I hope with the ultra-lights, PC manufacturers start experimenting with alternative materials, like Asus did with their bamboo line.

I've also always wondered why the CPU isn't stuck on the back of the monitor where it can be provided with better airflow.

As far as the ribbon, I have to disagree, it seems such a hodgepodge to me, and though I like WP7, I don't think it has a warm inviting feel, it's just cool.

iOS always felt boring and cold to me.

<comment><USER24> > I've also always wondered why the CPU isn't stuck on the back of the monitor > where it can be provided with better airflow.

That would result in increased latency between the CPU and the rest of the system. Put the the motherboard and memory on the laptop's monitor and it would start getting too top-heavy.

<comment><USER23> I was suspecting something like that, though with the weight of laptops these days, I suspect the top heavy will become less of an issue. I'd guess HD,keyboard,trackpad and ports are the majority of the weight in the lower half.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> the best feature of win7's start menu (desktop search) is still there in the win8 start screen, but I have to admit that accessing it with any frequency starts to feel a bit too alt-tabby

<comment><USER10> Yeah, it's like they have 2 OSes in there. I love the new "tablet UI", but it's jarring to have to switch "home" from one application to start another. They need to include have a search box in the traditional "desktop" somewhere.

<comment><USER26> Hit the Windows key, start typing - just like in Windows 7. The UI is different, but the results are the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> For years, Microsoft jammed the Start Menu where it didn't belong (Windows CE), now they're stuffing a tablet interface where it doesn't belong.

I'm extremely suspicious of their interpretation of usage statistics. As a "power user" I habitually decline any offer to track my behavior. Also, as discussed in the previous article about Explorer changes, do the statistics speak to the number of people who choose other methods, or to the lack of UI discoverability? Clutter up the desktop of your freshly-bought PC with enough partner icons, and the Start Menu gets lost in a sea of visual information.

The new interface reminds me of the old app-launchers/menus in the pre-Windows days.

<comment><USER28> Are you sure that's the data they're basing all this on? Terribly unscientific for them, if so.

<comment><USER27> No, not at all. But that's the problem: to my knowledge, they haven't disclosed much about their methods of collecting data, nor how they've come up with their percentage numbers. Since Microsoft seems to be ruled by politics and pet projects, I'm extremely suspect of the objectivity of their statistical analysis.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: CutSpel – English spelling reform in your browser - <AUTHOR> http://www.cutspel.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. If anyone has any questions or suggested improvements post away.</comment>


WorkSmart is becoming the benchmark for how people will work in the future - <AUTHOR> https://www.crossover.com/worksmart-productivity-tool <comment><AUTHOR> I sure hope it doesn't become the way people will work in the future. It's total surveillance, it takes your picture every 10 minutes and records mouse activity and pages you're on (according to Glassdoor reviews).

<comment><USER2> What employers really should care about is productivity, not these kind of poor proxies for productivity, like the classic butts in chairs.

Why not just take a stab at that directly? Granted it's not easy, but could you really do worse than this?</comment></comment>


Chrome 81: Near Field Communications, Augmented Reality, and More - <AUTHOR> https://blog.chromium.org/2020/02/chrome-81-near-field-communications.html <comment><USER2> Oh, the time has come:

> This version of Chrome removes TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1. TLS (Transport Layer > Security) is the protocol which secures HTTPS.

<comment><USER3> Firefox did the same with the release yesterday:

[https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/74.0/releasenotes/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/74.0/releasenotes/)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, and the first thing I did this morning is to reenable it in order to access 5-year old cable modem. The "on-for-all" or off-for-all" feels kind of dangerous, it should be something I can enable for 192.168. _._ for example, and not for the whole world. As a matter of fact, for the local network it should be a default "on". IMHO, YMMV

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting MS<>Google partnership on the design front. Wish they had redesigned `<select multiple>` though. That's one component that really feels stuck a million years in the past

<comment><USER6> <select multiple> is in desperate need of a redesign. I made multi.js ([https://github.com/fabianlindfors/multi.js](https://github.com/fabianlindfors/multi.js)) to fix this but hopefully browsers will take the matter into their own hands.

<comment><USER7> Native multi-selection is the worst. The fact that you have to hold down a modifier key to make multiple selections is a usability nightmare. I have rarely seen a person who knows how to use the native browser widget.

Even when you do know how to use it, it is just too easy to make a mistake. If there were 5 options already selected and you want to add a sixth, so you click it but you forgot to hold down the right key. Now the 5 previously selected options are gone with no way to get them back.

In general I like using native widgets because mobile browsers do a lot of work to make native widgets usable on phones, but <select multiple> is so bad on the desktop that I always replace it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Found a Web NFC site to try it out:

[https://webnfc.app/](https://webnfc.app/)

<comment><USER9> Author here. Let me know if you have questions.

<comment><USER10> can you write a tag multiple times with one interaction?

<comment><USER9> Depends on what you mean with an interaction. Technically it would be possible to stack write operations, so you could just keep a tag to a close proximity of the adapter, and keep writing messages one after another.

With the webnfc.app, you can only write a single NDEF message with single record of either URL or Text, during single interaction.

<comment><USER10> I mean, if the nfc event is triggered, this code

for (i=0, i<10, i++) writer.write(i)

does it write ten times the tag? overwriting every number?

<comment><USER9> The NDEFWriter write()-method currently returns a promise which is resolved on a successful write operation and rejected on a failed write operation, so you would need to use async-await to be able to loop those writes like that. Here is a reference to the Web NFC API Write-operation: [https://w3c.github.io/web- nfc/#writing-to-an-nfc-tag](https://w3c.github.io/web-nfc/#writing-to-an-nfc- tag)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> But why are Browser gaining so much power, even to drive peripherals besides audio and video?

That's fundamentally wrong and insecure

<comment><USER12> >But why are Browser gaining so much power

I'm confident that soon enough there won't be such a devision as web app and mobile app anyway. That's why imo.

<comment><USER13> Curious if you're aware that mobile web usage dropped from 14% to 8% from 2014 to 2016[0]? And that according to Alex Russell[1], Google's internal telemetry has it well below 7% now. It seems to me that the opposite is true, that the irrelevance of the web on mobile will keep the web app versus mobile app division around essentially forever (web apps will be popular on desktop, and native apps on mobile). (Unless I was misunderstanding and you were saying, what's the difference? E.g., Facebook is Facebook, whether it's a web app or a native app.)

[0]: [https://www.flurry.com/post/157921590345/us-consumers- time-s...](https://www.flurry.com/post/157921590345/us-consumers-time-spent- on-mobile-crosses-5)

[1]: [https://vimeo.com/364402896](https://vimeo.com/364402896)

<comment><USER12> That's sort of proves my point. Many apps these days are just a web app with a launcher for your homescreen.

Lets say we have [https://dynalist.io/](https://dynalist.io/). If you are going to open their web app in Safari and then open their iOS app - you will notice that UI is identical. Because it is the same UI! In one case you have to access it via a browser and the app is just the same frontend delivered to you as an iOS app.

PWA or something similar - is the future. Hence all those APIs in browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is this the one that will disable extension manifest v2?

That's the only update I'm watching out for because I'll have to switch to another browser at that point.

I was going to start using Edge everywhere but now probably Brave after reading this - [https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-deemed-most-private- brow...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-deemed-most-private-browser-in- terms-of-phoning-home/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Meh, only NDEF NFC protocol is supported. A little bit too restrictive. There are so many devices out there that could be configured from an authorised website but many of them use a proprietary binary tag format.

Hope they open it up a bit in the future. Just like they did with webUSB and webBT.

<comment><USER16> Don't be the "meh" guy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A. It unrelated but all of Google's blog posts are unreadable on my iPhone. The text doesn't appear, I just see the title. Hope it's just me and google did t actually real safari compatibility.

<comment><USER18> iPhone 11, 13.3.1, no issues here. I do also run AdGuard, though that would typically break sites like this.</comment></comment>


Christopher Nolan: The power of people and why 2001 should be preschool viewing - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/la-en-mn-christopher-nolan-20180104-htmlstory.html <comment><USER2> > _It's become very fashionable in the last couple of decades to forget what > good government can do, what good union organizing can do. The idea that > benevolent capitalists will just take care of us and the people on top will > magically distribute wealth and happiness and security to us little people … > no. It's time we wised up. Strength comes from community in all things. > Dunkirk is one of those stories._

This reminds me of something that Hany Abu-Assad, a Dutch-Palestinian film director[0], once said in an interview. He was asked how it is possible that from countries like Iran, with its oppressive regime, we get such amazing directors as Abbas Kiarostami, who created beautiful humanising movies. After a brief moment of contemplation, Abu-Assad answered "society is stronger than the system."

> _Would you say "Dunkirk" is your most hopeful film?_

> _Well … yeah. "Interstellar" is pretty hopeful. But then again, the whole > world has ended. There is that. [Laughs]_

Funny how one can interpret that both as "doesn't sound very hopeful to me", and "the more impossible the odds are that were overcome, the more hopeful the message inherently is".

WARNING: INTERSTELLAR ENDING SPOILER BELOW

What makes Interstellar especially tricky here is that on the one hand, saving humanity (and presumably as much other life as possible) from extinction _when the entire planet is dying_ is about as big a challenge as it gets, and therefore makes the film feel very hopeful, but on the other hand the ending also implies that the universe is predeterministic, and that can be viewed as the _opposite_ of hopeful.

[0] [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0009463/?ref_=tt_ov_dr](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0009463/?ref_=tt_ov_dr)

<comment><USER3> How does the ending imply that the universe is predetermined? I might've missed that.

(It's also not surprising if it did because it's modern scientific dogma that the world is deterministic. Even if you take into account quantum uncertainty, as Hawking points out, it is determined probabilities. ).

<comment><USER4> (moar Interstellar spoilers)

Well in the end of the movie it turns out that the future humans built the tesseract (I believe it's called) and the wormhole, leading the humans to survive and in the future built the tesseract and the wormhole, leading the humans to survive and in the future built the tesseract and the wormhole... you get the idea.

It's a time travel movie, and the whole thing becomes a paradox - if the humans didn't survive they wouldn't have developed to be able to make wormholes and time travel magic, but they did survive because of time travel magic.

So which came first? It's a paradox. One explanation is that there was nothing that actually came first but everything just happened as it should and there was no other way it could've happened, thus, predetermination.

But yeah, time travel paradoxes, fun stuff.

<comment><USER5> Cooper actually says "a people built this", not necessarily insisting it was humans or descendants of humans (though that was my impression too the first couple watch throughs).

The other thing to keep in mind is he does not actually have any way to know who (or what) built the tesseract.

Just like how Brand earlier states the spacetime curvature hand she shakes hands with is "the first handshake" (implying first contact with an extraterrestrial), but it actually just turns out to be Cooper. The characters are confident of things they think are right, without actually being totally reliable narrators.

<comment><USER6> Well, that's... incorrect. Cooper actually says, "They're not 'beings.' They're us," and later says, in response to TARS saying that people couldn't build the tesseract, "No, not yet, but one day. Not you and me, but people." I really don't see any wiggle room in the actual events for claiming Cooper believes they are anything but human; or at least _beyond_ human. But he sees them as an extension of humanity.

Whether Cooper is right may be an open question, but the film heavily implies it. That 'first contact' turning out to be Cooper may be evidence of wrongness, but we don't necessarily need that since we know the characters are not omniscient, and in the context of the film it implies that there aren't any aliens. There are also no signs of any other life, despite several habitable planets. Frankly, the film doesn't even make sense if "aliens did it"; any message of hopefulness about human spirit would fall apart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I loved movies as a kid and I felt 2001 was such a classic I made my family watch 2001 last year. (every kid should know what "Dave" refers to in a calm computer voice) Here's the comment's I got.

"There sure is a lot of music"

"This looks like a computer game"

"Those are aliens!" (a blip of crystals in the sky during the transition for Dave, little genius)

"They were happy about making tons of colors instead of a movie"

"They sure like red and green"

"Creepiest movie we've ever seen. It was boring, boring, boring, then scary."

"I should have known as soon as the monkeys, stupid, stupid." (from patient wife)

(I wrote all these down right after the movie)

<comment><USER8> Whenever I get this reaction from my kids about something classic I feel indignant but most of all I feel old. Changing tastes in pop, trends and fashion can do that but the rejection of highly regarded things hurts the most.

<comment><USER9> 2001 and most of Kubrick's other films are definitely part of "the canon" of films that everyone who appreciates film as art should see. Unfortunately, you can't just do a surprise screening of these films for your family or other audiences and expect them to be receptive.

They will need to "discover" these things on their own. The best thing you can do is to make sure they have opportunities to see this stuff and to talk it up when possible.

One of the best pleasures of being a teen is discovering, on your own, how rewarding a great film can be and developing "a taste" for films, music and other aesthetic experiences. You simply can't force this stuff.

<comment><USER7> It wasn't a surprise screening. I had been talking about watching it as a family for a few years. And my family enjoys movies that most simply do not. One of my kid's friends all said interstellar was boring, and he loved it. 2001, I think, is just a bit long in the tooth. If it's redone (properly, shot for shot, in the right spirit) with updated effects and sound, I think it would be way more impactful for modern audiences. (the monkey suits really require forced suspension of disbelief today, where in the past they did not)

I even explained the theory behind the movie, Dave ending up in an environment he couldn't understand, like an animal in a zoo. We discussed this movie, it wasn't a throwaway experience.

And to be blunt about Kubrik, he and the film makers were self indulgent in a few places. Where it wasn't art, it was conceit.

<comment><USER10> "If it's redone (properly, shot for shot, in the right spirit) with updated effects and sound, I think it would be way more impactful for modern audiences."

Yeah, as much as some people would like to jump on us for being "uncultured" if we say so, there have been certain unavoidable changes in the world that fundamentally change how a modern person can't _help_ but see the movies. 2001 wants to send a message that this is a very high-tech world, and went to a lot of effort to do so, and I'd say is certainly an integral part of the foundation of that part of the movie. But how is my nine-year-old supposed to get that on a _gut level_ when he turns off 2001, and picks up Mario Odyssey, something that is in some sense literally millions of times more advanced than the technology shown in the movie, and is real-time interactive to boot? The context has fundamentally shifted.

Even I, growing up in a time and seeing it for the first time when at least the difference was less glaringly obvious, can't help but now see a weird and thoroughly unintentional disharmony between what the film is trying to portray the world as, and what the images actually say to me now. It doesn't "ruin" it, but it would be silly to claim that it is doesn't affect the movie experience at all, either, when so many other similarly-sized details are routinely understood to be important.

<comment><USER11> 2001 can never be remade. It's a singular vision, and it's photography is still extraordinary, and it's special effects still fine.

The weakest part was the hominid/monkey costumes. But in those scenes was also the amazing shot of the leopard. A modern director gets you more realistic hominids, burt you lose the amazing framing, coloring, and composition of the leopard scene and a hundred others.

And the story is definitive. It says exactly what Kubrick and Clarke wanted it to, no more, no less. There is no perspective a millennial can add to it without utterly ruining it.

<comment><USER12> You are partly missing the point. 2001 was made for an audience that doesn't exist anymore. If Kubrick somehow made the movie today, it would not look the same,and possibly could be made to all. Not because "reeeeeee millennials",but because it was a work of art made for a very specific time and place in history.

<comment><USER13> I dunno. Transhumanism and the singularity are a thing, and the AI that is good and not trying to take over but nonetheless has poor consequences is something they will be coming to newspaper headlines soon.

The only part that seems dated is that the future of humanity is outward looking instead of innards. (Meant "inwards", but that one's pretty good, Android.)

<comment><USER14> I mean the stewardesses on the space ship feel very much of the era the movie was made, if I'm remembering it right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The inability of adults to get totally absorbed into experiencing a movie (or a book) is a clear obstacle of enjoying the experience. Allowing the experience to wash over you without analyzing it while experiencing gets harder. Getting 3d or perfect reality virtual reality hardware is not going to fix that.

If you can do it as an adult, 2001 is great and Inland Empire from David Lynch is amazing. Inland Empire speaks directly to the unconsciousness and goes past of any explanation. You walk out from the theater wondering what happened. It's like you have been injected with something. The experience that lingers has no explanation.

<comment><USER16> I've seen 2001 at least 10 times in my life and I love it to death, but I got to see it in the theater once and it was like I'd never really experienced it at all before. You can't appreciate the incredible sound design until it's absolutely filling the air around you. Not just the music, but the klaxons and the moments of dead silence.

<comment><USER17> Yeap. Never had the chance to see 2001 in a theater, but I've watched _Apocalypse Now_ after having seen it on a TV, and it was a whole new experience. The helicopters scene was overwhelming.

<comment><USER18> I saw Apocalypse Now in our high school film club when I was 16 in 1981/82 - was completely blown away by the introduction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _It's about the idea of community, what we can achieve together, as opposed to this cult of individuality that we live in right now. Whether you're talking about Silicon Valley billionaires or politicians, I think we're living in an era that over-prizes individuality at the expense of community._

This seems terribly relevant. And it's interesting coming from a director - the leader of creative communities behind the camera while commercial success often depends on the individual standing in front of it.

<comment><USER20> > And it's interesting coming from a director

It's incredibly interesting to me, coming from _this_ director, as I class him as one of the best, up there with Kubrick, and I also will discriminate on movies based on directors and screenwriters more than any other factor, because that's how I have found quality.

<comment><USER21> This I disagree with. There is a sort of Nolan cult, which I think is undeserved. He is a fine film-maker, but his dialogue is often stilted, the scores overstated and the characters under-developed - and while he is a decent cinematographer, his pictures aren't something that he will be remembered for.

His films are good and incredibly entertaining, but Kubrick is on a completely different plane.

<comment><USER22> I suppose I'm in the cult. About the only complaint I can lodge against Nolan is that the exposition is heavy handed in a few of his films, which he spoke to in the article, and I agree he was forced into that position with the intense story he's often trying to communicate in a film's runtime. He's also not a cinematographer, and has generally worked with Wally Pfister or Hoyte van Hoytema.

I would disagree if you're saying the cinematography won't be remembered; van Hoytema's work on _Interstellar_ and _Dunkirk_ is something I remember quite positively even while typing this comment. I would also disagree on character development, as Nolan directed Robin Williams into one hell of an antagonist in _Insomnia_ , a spectacularly underrated film.

<comment> aaron-lebo His stories are often lazy, too. The notion of a magic machine that lets everyone wifi and have dreams inside dreams inside dreams together is fun but absurd. The same with the end of _Interstellar_. Too conveniently we've got a magic wormhole which saves him and drops him a few feet away from a ship around the ring of Saturn. The first half of TDK is incredible, the second is very anti-climatic (maybe not his fault).

Check out anything by Roger Deakins for world class cinematography. Nolan is just good. If you are looking for a director who people might one day consider in the realm of Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson might fit it, but he's got a lot of "weird" movies (even his masterpieces) which don't give him the same wide appeal. [0]

Williams was great in just about anything he was ever in, I wouldn't attribute that to Nolan. The greatest directors elevate their actors (see the crazy stories about Kubrick and The Shining). Nolan works with great talent, but the performances often leave a lot to be desired, this is uncontested even by fans.

Nolan makes movies with interesting themes and he never really does anything bad. But for him to be even be discussed in the same thread as Kubrick shows how overrated he is. I say this owning _Interstellar_ (the teaser gives me chills) and I thought Dunkirk was great simply because he toned it down and worked within something realistic. Given 20 years and a _Jurassic Park_ , we might see Nolan the same way we do Spielberg today, but Kubrick? Forget about it!

[https://www.theringer.com/movies/2017/12/22/16809404/there-w...](https://www.theringer.com/movies/2017/12/22/16809404/there- will-be-blood-paul-thomas-anderson-10-years-daniel-day-lewis)

<comment><USER22> > Williams was great in just about anything he was ever in, I wouldn't > attribute that to Nolan.

I don't know, I might. You don't even see Finch for half the film, only hear him, and the villain left an impression on me not unlike Kiefer Sutherland's villain in _Phone Booth_ (an otherwise unremarkable film). I can't think of another villain role that Robin Williams performed, probably because nobody was brave enough to take that kind of risk with a heavyweight positive actor -- _Insomnia_ came out a few years after _Good Will Hunting_ and _Dead Poets Society_ , which helped establish his mastery of drama, but nobody wanted to make him the bad guy. Nolan did, and it was very satisfying to watch.

(I take that back, _One Hour Photo_ was great, too. I knew I was forgetting one.)

<comment> aaron-lebo Check out _One Hour Photo_ for villainous and creepy Williams. Mostly it's impressive how many weird roles he was willing to put himself in.

I don't recall seeing _Insomnia_. I'll have to, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think Christopher Nolan is the best all-around modern director. His movies are huge critical hits: most of them are in the IMDb Top 250 (most directors would be happy to have one film up there). His films are also huge box-office hits, which means that the audience, not just movie nerds, like his movies.

I think the distribution for films is bimodal, one huge peak for box- office/mass-appeal hits, and another smaller peak for critical hits/film-nerd- appeal hits.

Nolan would be right in the center between these two distributions: he pushes cinema forward while keeping it accessible to all.

<comment><USER17> IMDB isn't really a good meter of critical opinion, its score is based on the opinion of its users. Rotten Tomatoes is the one that aggregates opinions of the critics. That said, his movies usually get 80%+, which is pretty good.

<comment><USER24> RT has some questionable ratings.

On some new movies the rating is very high, but it goes down sharply.

IIRC one of the Fast and the Furious "movies" had a stupidly high rating, which is now more sane.

[https://www.rottentomatoes.com/franchise/the_fast_and_the_fu...](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/franchise/the_fast_and_the_furious/)

IMDB seems to suffer from this less.

The only useful thing on RT is their one line blurb.

<comment><USER17> Are you seeing the main rating (the Tomatometer) or the average? The Tomatometer is just the ratio of ratings over 50%, not an average of the ratings.

If you see Furious 7, for example, it has a Tomatometer rating of 80%, but the average is just 6.6/10.

(Note: you have to open the movie page to see the average rating)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I love Nolan's films, the first one I saw was Memento when it came out. I was quite blown away.

Interstellar is (by a country mile) the film that really does it for me, and is the one I'll watch two or three times a year. The strange thing about Interstellar is that after having watched it the first couple of times, every subsequent viewing gets me fairly emotional. I never ever shed tears when watching films, and I've seen a lot of movies in my 51 or so years on this planet, but this is the one that gets me welling up inside and a bit teary eyed. So well done Mr Nolan you've managed to crack a fairly hard (film) nut.

<comment><USER26> INTERSTELLAR SPOILERS

The scene where Cooper comes back from the time-dilated planet and has years of messages to catch up on really makes me emotional. McConaughey really kills it in this movie.

<comment><USER25> Jeez that scene is truly heart wrenching. I wasn't awfully keen on McConaughey films previously, but you're right, there's something about this role where he knocks it out of the park. I then watched Dallas Buyers club, he nails that as well.

<comment><USER26> Watch True Detective Season 1 if you haven't already. McConaughey and Woody Harrelson both put on amazing performances.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, I forgot to mention I watched that as well; really, really top notch viewing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > _That's outstanding. And that's the thing. It's become very fashionable in > the last couple of decades to forget what good government can do, what good > union organizing can do._

In my opinion this is missing the problem. Government, in a democracy, is decided by the masses. I think people, as individuals, are generally quite intelligent. But I also think people, as groups, are quite stupid. Mob mentality is very much a real phenomena and it's something we've not come even remotely close to growing out of. Similarly for tribalism.

In the instance he's referring to ( _film critics associations boycotted Disney after Disney blacklisted writers from an influential publication, leading Disney to rescind the blacklisting_ ) you had a very small and very well informed demographic working together. That has very little to do with the democratic process. Most people do not know much about any given topic, and so when you query the masses on anything the majority opinion is going to be heavily influenced by marketing and 'propaganda.' What people do or think is not really based on reality, but who presented their argument in the glossiest case.

So to bring this theoretic into the practical. Imagine you ask people about a certain hotkey issue, in most recent times perhaps it would be Trump's tax plan. Many people would have extremely strong opinions one way or the other. Now ask people to actually describe, without handwaving, what the plan actually was. People, for the most part, are going to be completely ignorant. We, collectively, form strong decisions about things we don't even know the basic fundamentals of!

I don't know how this can change in practical terms. It's the nature of a democracy. But that just kicks the can to another problem. If we can't come to informed decisions on an individual policy, how are we supposed to be expected to come to informed decisions on candidates using every resource available to make us believe that they are who we, collectively, want in office? As tools and technologies for directing the masses in one way or another become ever more effective, this disconnect between reality and mass opinion is only going to increase.

</comment><comment><USER28> 2001 is the most polarizing movie I've ever experienced. People either absolutely love it or hate it.

Except my wife. My wife may be the only human being on Earth to not feel one way or the other about it.

(I absolutely love the movie, but I'm not going to argue with you if you find it a bore. I totally get why some would feel that way)

<comment><USER29> It's visually beautiful, ahead of its time, but the pacing makes it extremely hard to watch today.

<comment><USER30> I feel the pacing, particularly in the HAL scene with long pauses between words, dramatically builds up the suspense.

<comment><USER31> I agree with you, but then I think the same can be said of movies such as "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", wherein the pacing was awesome back in the day, when you had to actually be somewhere to watch a movie, but now when everyone can stream to their own private space, 'tis a bigger challenge. I watch a lot of 70's movies with this slow, boring pace ..

<comment><USER32> That's probably not primarily a factor of needing to be somewhere to watch a movie as much as it's a factor of changing expectations set by other media: the effect was frequently commented on as early as the 1980s, and widely attributed to, among other media factors, the impact of MTV and music videos.

<comment><USER33> I've also seen it commonly attributed to Star Wars. Star Wars, for better or worse, completely and almost single-handedly changed the pacing of sci-fi movies in the 70s. You can almost spot Star Wars as a line in the sand and tell which sci-fi films predate it, which postdate it, and which got stuck being released too close for comfort (the multiple editing cut fiascos of Blade Runner and Star Trek: The Motion Picture seem to be in part due to the pull of pre-Star Wars pacing versus changing film audience expectations).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _" I understand you showed "2001" to your children when they were very young, like 3 or 4?"_

That makes me feel better about my son seeing "Return of the King" 6 times in the cinema when he was 5.

Mind you - he does now want to become a movie director... :-)

</comment><comment><USER34> Many people can't handle the pacing of older sci-fi movies. I remember watching the Andromeda Strain with my wife when we were teenagers. She said it was the most boring movie she had ever seen.

<comment><USER35> That is completely true and at the same time terrifying. What does that say about how our brains have changed? Maybe it's not a problem, but if it is a problem I'm afraid it might be a big one.

<comment><USER34> I think it's a conditioning thing. I don't like some modern movies because it seems like every scene is meant to be a money shot. You have to build atmosphere to tell a story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting on _Dunkirk_ ; I was skeptical of why someone would make a war film in the present day, but it sounds like his intention in expressing what it means to people is good.

On this subject previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15004843](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15004843) , me Britsplaining the meaning of Dunkirk.

</comment><comment><USER36> I would say that my childhood would be lost if it was not for the fact that I did not had any TV. Or more correct to say is that children now do not have childhood as people had 30 years ago.

Rarely you will see someone who know the trill of climbing 40m high tree(age of 7). Swimming in lake while thunderstorm rages around you. Grabbing red coal with hand. Eating baked stolen potatoes in middle of forest where you got lost. Making an failure of bow to hunt. Starting a fire, then living the consequences. Giving no shits about drama and other people's feelings. Slicing up toad to see what is inside. Running from crazy animals. Crossing the voltage wires for shits and giggles. No child died in our village from these bullshits, just got smarter.

Movie will do that for you and tell you how to feel. They will provide you with fake imagination and experience.

<comment><USER17> We're awake for over 5400 hours each year. There's time to defy death and still watch a 30m TV show after dinner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > It's about the idea of community, what we can achieve together, as opposed > to this cult of individuality that we live in right now. Whether you're > talking about Silicon Valley billionaires or politicians, I think we're > living in an era that over-prizes individuality at the expense of community. > It's the Silicon Valley billionaire as opposed to the union. We've steered > too far in one direction. We need to be reminded of the potential of what we > can do together.

Said the universally-acclaimed multi-millionaire Hollywood blockbuster director in his interview for LA Times

That said though, I like the message and also respect the man and his work. That just struck me as a little hypocritical :) although as a storyteller I suppose he is in a position to change narratives like that

</comment><comment><USER38> I thought the headline was confusing and hard to parse, and sure enough when I click through to tfa I see "2001" is quoted. Strictly, the film is titled "2001: A Space Odyssey".

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder what he hopes his children will take from it. I know he says its just something you experience, but there is also a lot of meaning behind the movie, and I wonder if he saw something specific in it that he believes is a valuable lesson for his children at 3-4

<comment><USER40> he wants his kids to be astronauts and they say no because they know it annoys him lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> My problem with Dunkirk was all the stranded and starving soldiers looked like Versace models with fresh 2018 haircuts and Burberry topcoats.

</comment><comment><USER42> Christopher Nolan is the Elon Musk of hollywood except he completes his projects in time.

<comment><USER43> Wow what an insult to Nolan. Why would you hate on him like that?

<comment><USER44> How do you infer insult from this remark?

<comment><USER45> I suspect it depends on whether you view Musk as an unparalleled world- changing genius, just a good businessman with an instinct for good fields to invest combined with a talent for hiring the right smart people, or an overhyped hack who got lucky (anecdotally my personal feeling is that most people on HN seem to fall into these categories with ratio 5:1:3)

Either of the last two could conceivably be considered an insult given the difference in jobs, and creativity and control inherent in the task of directing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Build "magic," gravity-defying structures–with Legos, kite string, and physics - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/wait-that-table-has-no-legs/ <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity)

This has been a "thing" on reddit for a couple of weeks now and with lots of people being bored right now the results were quite diverse and interesting:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/lego/comments/g2230l/lego_tensegrit...](https://www.reddit.com/r/lego/comments/g2230l/lego_tensegrity_structure/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/EngineeringPorn/comments/g05lld/i_b...](https://www.reddit.com/r/EngineeringPorn/comments/g05lld/i_built_my_own_tensegrity_table/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/g44sz8/my_first_attem...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/g44sz8/my_first_attempt_at_a_tensegrity_table/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/fcnum5/finally_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/fcnum5/finally_finished_my_tensegrity_design_with_a/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/fh5cvo/thought_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/fh5cvo/thought_a_tensegrity_table_was_a_bit_boring/)

etc.

<comment><USER3> From Wikipedia there was a link to the SUPERball robot[1], pretty cool. But I wonder about the longevity of it, I assume they could use multiple wires per "strand" in case one breaks, but dust and sand seem like they could be big issues over time.

Still, pretty cool!

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkzeE6BVNIk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkzeE6BVNIk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recall seeing this "tension based" coffee table a while back. I'm glad I was reminded of it, it's super cool.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7pI0cHJQtY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7pI0cHJQtY)

</comment><comment><USER5> There's a great book I can't recall the name of that puts forth the notion that we commonly make the mistake of modeling the human body as a compressive structure, when it is just as much or more a tensegretic structure.

We aren't piled bone on bone like a concrete block house.

Fascinating idea.

<comment><USER6> I hadn't heard that applied at the level of the body, that's interesting!

Back when i was a cell biologist, i was very excited to read an argument that cells had tensegral structure:

[https://jcs.biologists.org/content/116/7/1157](https://jcs.biologists.org/content/116/7/1157)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a (work-in-progress?) monograph about the mathematics of tensegrities! Neat application of representation theory outside the standard examples from chemistry!

Connelly & Guest 2015, "Frameworks, Tensegrities, and Symmetry: Understanding Stable Structures"

[http://pi.math.cornell.edu/~web7510/framework.pdf](http://pi.math.cornell.edu/~web7510/framework.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> Would you enter a building held up by tensegrity? I feel that to build the next generation of super massive structures in the 21st century we will have to use tensegrity concepts.

<comment><USER9> If it was properly engineered, sure, why not? It would be no different in principle from driving over a suspension bridge.

<comment><USER10> I assume all buildibgs I enter are properly engineered, but sometimes they're not. Two cases that come to mind:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse)

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/04/17/the_citicorp_t...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/04/17/the_citicorp_tower_design_flaw_that_could_have_wiped_out_the_skyscraper.html)

Both were essentially caused by people making assumptions. You would think such things would be thought through, but sometimes they're not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I need this on my desk.

<comment><USER12> it could be your desk

<comment><USER12> with the tension members on spools it could be adjustable sitting/standing</comment></comment></comment>


Create JavaScript, CSS Interactions With Zero Lines of Code - <AUTHOR> http://interactions.webflow.com <comment><USER3> Let me preface this by saying: I have the upmost respect for the Webflow developers and designers...they've created a highly-functional web app with the purpose of enabling creators...the process to make such a full-featured web-browser product with such a range of capability is astounding.

That said, I disagree with the implication that Webflow, and similar products, solve the problems of code, e.g., the phrase "Do xyz without writing a line of code". Knowledge of code does constrain non-developers, but in the end, that is not the _hard_ part. To use a quick example: the mechanics of baking responsiveness into a new site from scratch is significantly easier than the conceptual process of "What information and features should be prominent, or excised, in the mobile view of our website?"...and in my opinion, that latter problem is something that people can get into without knowing how to write code.

So despite the technical strength of the Webflow product, I don't think that it makes things easier in the end. Instead of "code", a newbie has to learn a whole new interface, a whole new set of iconography/terms (used for buttons, subheads, etc.), and last but not least, a whole new set of quirks inherent to the Webflow program. And when they become experts at this, they have spent 50-90% of their cognitive ability mastering Webflow, and the remainder understanding the creative and technical process of web development.

At some point, isn't it just better to learn _some_ code? Not 10 years worth, but something in between that and "0 lines of code". I've used Webflow, and I'll repeat again, it is an excellent web product in execution and design...but the problem it attempts to tackle is just too _big_ , and the abstractions it offers may ended up hindering creators in the medium-to-long run.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the founder and CEO of Webflow, and I can't agree enough with your statement that code is not the hard part. That's why we're trying to create tools for designers to help them focus on the hard parts (content, usability, etc).

I love what Bret Victor says about this in his Magic Ink paper [1]. Replace "information software" with "web applications" as you read it:

"I suggest that the design of information software should be approached initially and primarily as a graphic design project. The foremost concern should be appearance—what and how information is presented. The designer should ask: What is relevant information? What questions will the viewer ask? What situations will she want to compare? What decision is she trying to make? How can the data be presented most effectively? How can the visual vocabulary and techniques of graphic design be employed to direct the user's eyes to the solution? The designer must start by considering what the software looks like, because the user is using it to learn, and she learns by looking at it."

The act of creating a solution IS the hard part, not tweaking CSS properties or knowing how to integrate Bootstrap components just right. All those things should just get out of the way and let creatives do the important work, without bogging down in the implementation details.

In case you're interested, I wrote a bit more about this on our blog a while ago: [http://blog.webflow.com/designers-will-rule-the- web](http://blog.webflow.com/designers-will-rule-the-web)

[1] [http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/](http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/)

<comment><USER4> I absolutely agree with all of you say -- which is why "without code" is misleading / unhelpful.

A better tagline for the web interactions site would be: "Don't code website interactions; design them."

<comment><USER5> As long as "without code" is the copy that converts better, then it doesn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The most important thing to keep in mind is this is for designers not coders -- I haven't looked at this deeply enough to know if it is good yet, but my guess is if you read hacker news comments it isn't for you because, well, you probably code=).

Yes, these sorts of editors often create horrible leaky abstractions. Yes, these editors often confuse product folks into thinking that coding isn't necessary or important or hard. But that isn't its goal -- the goal is to make the common stuff easy to do for people writing / designing simple site content -- fades, positional, simple triggers. There is no reason to write code for this stuff.

If you don't believe me, imagine drawing something without showing the picture. Word documents without wysiwyg. Photo editing without Photoshop. In this video ([http://vimeo.com/64895205](http://vimeo.com/64895205)) Bret Victor brilliantly shows what a powerful interactive editor can do. For the web, no amount of manual css typing can beat what a great editor could do. Whether this is that editor remains to be seen, but the idea of editors is a good one.

<comment><USER7> Actually I think Webflow can be a useful tool for if you're a developer who wants to learn how to design a prototype. I struggle with visualizing a new site without a mockup or style tile for reference. Webflow's UI is intuitive - everything you do has immediate visual feedback and directly translates into clean CSS/HTML. The previews of media queries affecting content is nice too. So it's very easy to reverse engineer how to make a good design, the same way you would reverse engineer some source code.

But with that said, I am not a paying customer. When I need to make a site then I just sign up for a free trial and export the code to continue the project. Their individual plan doesn't really make sense for me and I think it's too expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is amazing, and I really intend to use it. I am a developer but I just suck at front-end (CSS, mostly) and I have a much easier time learning back- end stacks. I haven't used WebFlow yet but is it fairly easy to use it to create bits and pieces to put into my entirely separate website?

Also for a person like me, it would be great if there was some sort of "explain" feature where Webflow would give me a peek at what's going on so i could slowly learn. For example: "This fade-in was achieved using the CSS3 fade animation with the following line of code: ...". I know that's a niche feature, but I think there are a lot of design-challenged coders out there who would like it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nifty looking tool!

The home page is missing a link to pricing. I couldn't find pricing until clicking through to the Features page.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sure it demos well, but it's closed-source. Vendor lock-in sucks, full stop. And the time investment spent learning it won't pay off bc those skills won't carry over to the vast majority of other future projects that don't use it.

Building a site on bootstrap (from source, ie integrating bootstrap's less files as dependencies in your webapp via grunt and bower) is defensible; becoming entirely dependent on the capabilities of something like webflow, imho, is not.

I suppose if you're a designer in a hurry to build a pretty, throwaway site (eg a microsite for an event) then this might be worth your while. But if you're building something for the enterprise, anything you or your team might want to maintain and extend, I think it represents an unacceptable level of knowledge debt, to rely on site-generating tools like this.

YMMV of course. My views are skewed towards the UI architecture needs of a multi-million-dollar global company.

/$.02

</comment><comment><USER11> The headling should be "...without _writing_ any code". Zero lines of code implies there is no generated code at all. That would be truly amazing.

</comment><comment><USER12> More than half of the examples didn't even work in my browser - <USER2> 34.0.1847.116, Windows 8.

<comment><USER13> same here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So you can only make websites that are hosted in webflow. I cant send the website to my own server?

<comment><USER15> Incorrect - you can download the source from within the editor. I've been happy with the results so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not interested in SaaS unless there is an offline version. I like to own my software not rent it.

<comment><USER17> you can try HiveMind (crudzilla.com), it is something you can download and run locally or put in the cloud such as a digital ocean box...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I tried sharing the site's link with someone who opened it on a mobile device and was unable to see it - "doesn't work on my phone". Does this mean that a site built this way would not work on mobile devices or just not on Android devices?

</comment><comment><USER19> Lack of scroll animation support for touch devices seems like a deal breaker, no?

<comment><USER20> None of the scroll animations work in Firefox either. Not just touch based devices. Didn't leave a very good impression on me.

<comment><USER21> Kyle from Webflow here. Are you on the latest version of Firefox (28.0)? The scrolling animations are working for us.

<comment><USER22> Same issue here. FF 28.0 on OS X (10.8) and none of the animations are working.

Works fine on Chrome and Safari

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Very significantly broken for me on Firefox 31 (nightly):

> TypeError: F.timing is undefined

</comment><comment><USER24> It's a good looking product.

What does this offer over something like Wix or Weebly?

<comment><USER15> I've tried Wix briefly, but so far I've only explored Webflow in depth. Comparing the two, I get an immediate sense that Webflow is a better fit for my workflow. And as long as I'm happy with the generated code, I probably won't be looking into alternatives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> None of the examples worked on my ipad (gen 4). I like the idea, but it seems to me that it needs to work or at least degrade gracefully on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER26> Pricing missing? Why list "try free for 14 days" when there is no price listing?

That makes me question if I even want to take it for a spin.

</comment><comment> aps-sids Is this different from Google Web Designer?

<comment><USER27> \- Google Web Designer is a desktop application and you can't run it on linux.

\- Google Web Designer is free to use, this costs money structurally.

\- This offers integrated hosting, Google Web Designer does not. So, for creative types, its easier to share a design and deploy it. (although it seems export is available)

\- Google Web Designer seems focused on (fixed-size) ads (for mobile), where this is focused on creating responsive animated websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Dreamweaver 2.0

</comment><comment><USER29> Scroll animation works well on windows phone 8. Seems like you didn't count it as `touch device` :)

</comment><comment><USER30> Inline all the styles!

</comment><comment><USER31> Instead of paying somebody once to do this stuff with skrollr, you instead rent your own website from this company for the rest of your life? Good business plan for the rentier.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, that's not accurate. Webflow sites can be exported at a click of a button, and you own all the code. You can host anywhere you want, make any custom changes, etc.

<comment><USER32> Only the higher Webflow plans have export. The cheapest plan doesn't let you export.

<comment><USER33> So what's wrong with that? These guys have built a piece of software which you personally may or may not find useful. We are all in the practice of paying for software and services we find useful.

As someone who has many years of experience coding animations by hand in css and a little js, sometimes a tool would be more useful. Its too easy to get lost in the minutiae of the code and lose sight of the visual impact you're going for.

For some people, a tool like this is entirely worth the cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Man are people that oppose to learning a little bit of coding?

I guess in my mind if you are that against coding maybe you should consider just sticking with design or biz development, etc? Not being mean but seriously, stick to what you are good at, right?

<comment><USER21> Totally get your point, and we could have a fun philosophical discussion around whether or not people SHOULD want to learn how to code.

However, it's pretty clear that most of the people in the world who want to create/share content on the web are NOT interested in learning how to code at all, right? I mean, that's a big part of the reason why blogging platforms, and many other user-generated content sites are so huge (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. etc.).

Yeah, people could just stick with what they know if they don't want to code -- but then there would still be huge barriers between having an idea that you want to create and get out there, and actually having the ability to make it real.

For example, this Webflow Interactions site was entirely created by someone who isn't a coder (I know, I work with him). How long would it have taken him to learn all of the code he would have needed to know to create it all from scratch? Or how much would he have needed to pay a developer to build it for him? And how long would that back and forth taken to get it all right?

For a lot of people, those types barriers are insurmountable (they don't have the time/skill to learn themselves, or the money to pay someone else). So should their ideas just not ever have the chance to see the light of day?

If everyone who ever had a great idea could code it themselves that would be awesome. I just don't think it's feasible -- and tools like Webflow can bring a lot more people a lot closer.

<comment><USER34> Nah man, you are contributing to the problem. Less training wheels, the world is a better place without them.

Drink your kool aid all you want, coding will never be replaced by a solution like this. It will simply allow someone to get closer to what they want before they grow frustrated by unforeseen limitations they will eventually run into; then they need to hire a real coder to fix everything, and likely replace it all, costing them more money and worse lost time.

<comment><USER35> "Nah man, you are contributing to the problem. Less training wheels, the world is a better place without them."

Tell that to all the Wordpress based projects out there or Dev Frameworks.

Some users just need an outlet to express fairly static data in engaging ways and don't need the overhead of learning a CRUD/REST stack in their way.

There will always be a need for experts who know who computer science actually works but harder things will continue to be further simplified.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Loon balloon crashes near Yakima - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.seattletimes.com/brierdudley/2014/05/30/google-loon-balloon-crashes-near-yakima/ <comment><AUTHOR> In the 90s, I would sometimes trip over ethernet cables that had been strung between server racks, across an aisle.

Will this be the decade where I get to experience being struck by falling routers and switches, far from any data center?

(EDIT: Simply remarking on novelty of problem and upward growth of network. No criticism of any firm implied or intended.)

<comment><USER2> I took down an AS/400 server once by tripping over two Type 1 token ring cables[1] that had been plugged together in the middle of a walkway. No-one ever owned up to that setup.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_hermaphroditic_connect...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_hermaphroditic_connector.JPG)

<comment><USER3> Given that it was token ring that might have isolated the AS/400 but the MAU would have healed the ring and everything would have been fine.

<comment><USER2> Oh god, I'd blocked from my mind the pain of ring dropping. We had MAUs for the servers, but for some reason ran the rest of the office on CAT-5 TR gear from Madge without any MAUs. Just took someone to unplug and that section of the office would lose network connectivity.

<comment><USER3> :-)

I used to work for Madge. Why were you running without MAUs?

<comment><USER2> Possibly the more important question is 'Why were you running a token ring network in 1999?'! I have no idea why our network was structured like that, this was my first job in the industry and I was a lowly PC tech at the time. If I had to guess, the word that springs to mind is 'legacy'.

<comment><USER4> _> 'Possibly the more important question is 'Why were you running a token ring network in 1999?'!'_

I've worked on a token ring network as recently as 2006. Thankfully, part of the project was migrating off of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The word 'crashes' could easily be substituted with 'drifted into'.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dropping at 2000 feet per minute is not quite free fall, but it's a long way from a drifting dandelion seed. I wonder if the balloon payload left a crater.

<comment><USER6> I've launched a handful of latex weather balloons to near-space. They all descend on a parachute and have a target impact velocity of ~2000 feet per minute. None have made so much as a dent in the earth so far.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe you. :)

I have no experience with balloons at all, but even a plowed field feels like a sidewalk to me when _I_ run into it at the same speed under canopy. I leave a sizable mark, and I have seen friends break femurs, pelvises, etc at the end of a similar descent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I grew up outside of Yakima. Northern/Eastern Washington State has some very desolate places, maybe that area will be the actual user testing ground too.

</comment><comment><USER8> There is something almost poetic in this. The perils of accidental infrastructural intercourse.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What do the Loon components look like up close? Here's a gallery showing the solar panels, avionics bay with covers open, and some staffers.

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gallery/2013/jun/16/go...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gallery/2013/jun/16/google- project-loon-wi-fi-balloons-pictures)

</comment><comment><USER9> I would still go for cables on the ground ... or underground.

<comment><USER10> There are definitely advantages to being completely wireless, building permits being one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like that the article referred to it as a trial balloon.

</comment><comment><USER12> Time for Bale Breaker Field 41 :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Guess that's a hazzard of balloons all over the place. Hope one does not take out a jet.

<comment><USER14> Balloons are launched all the time, Google's balloons are no different than the many many weather balloons, etc everyday. Their regulations are pretty easy [1] to find and follow. Basically, you call them, let them know when and where it's going up, when and where it's going down, and they'll put out a notice that pilots look at letting them know that there's a balloon out there they should look out for. If it gets loose, you call them again, say where you think it's going, etc, and they'll update the notifications accordingly. Stuff like this has been handled for a very long time.

[1] [http://www.chem.hawaii.edu/uham/part101.html](http://www.chem.hawaii.edu/uham/part101.html)

<comment><USER15> Indeed they are launched all the time. But, we are talking about the case that the practice becomes popular and the skies become a dense minefield.

<comment><USER16> That's an interesting back of the envelope question to work out. Something with volume occupied by all aircraft aloft at any given moment, volume of all balloons at any given moment, the total volume of the shell in which commercial air traffic takes place.

I think we can safely forget about the chances of spyplanes hitting balloons, the volume of space versus the number of spyplanes would make that a non- issue, even if there were a lot more balloons.

So 35000 feet (11 km give or take) would be a reasonable upper limit. Let's assume the worst and start from 0, you have a shell above the earths surface up to 11 km above it, which has an approximate volume of: 510.1 million km x 11 = 5610 million cubic kilometers.

That's a lot of space. Every cubic kilometer is 10^9 cubic meters, so 5.6x10^18 cubic meters.

I don't know how many aircraft are typically aloft, but let's say it's 20,000 craft and they're all of the very largest variety (say A380, or Boeing dreamliner). They're approximately 60 meters long, and 6 meter in diameter, so that's 1700 cubic meters, let's double that to include the wing volume, so 3400 cubic meters.

We have 20,000 of them, they're all aloft at the same time, so all the planes take up approximately 68,000,000 cubic meters.

Now for the balloons, they're 10 meters in diameter, worst case they are 50 meters high or so (instrument package dangling below the balloon, assuming a cylinder with a radius of 5 meters and a height of 50), so about 4000 cubic meters. ('assume a spherical cow of uniform density').

So how big is the chance that _one_ balloon intersects in all of space with the volume of _all_ the aircraft given that both have all of the atmosphere to play cat and mouse in?

68,000,000 / (5.6x10^18) = 0.000000000012 (the chance that any given cubic meter is part of the space occupied by an aircraft) multiplied by 4000 (the number of cubic meters in a balloon) is about 0.000000048. So that's pretty small but non-zero, multiply by the number of balloons aloft at any given time, but keep in mind that most of the factors here were taken very pessimistic (as in, favouring the collision). The calculation also totally ignores the relative speeds of the two types of vehicles, ascent speed of balloons, the time factor, ability to manoeuvre and so on.

See also:

[http://weatherjackwilliams.com/answers-weather-balloons- and-...](http://weatherjackwilliams.com/answers-weather-balloons-and- airplanes/)

edit: extensively edited after avoid3d spotted a crucial error in the math, I had dropped 6 orders of magnitude.

<comment><USER17> The problem is that jetliners don't have all that space you calculated to play around in. They actually have a few well defined corridors and altitudes in which they can operate - the straight lines drawn from one VOR (effectively equivalent to a major airport) to another at 1,000 foot intervals.

Detours are costly due to time and coordination (air traffic control, other aircraft), and reacting to seeing a balloon and moving the aircraft isn't that easy when you're traveling at 300+ MPH in an aircraft which turns like a cargo ship. And that's assuming you can even see the balloon in time to react in the first place.

And that's just the commercial jetliners. Private jets go higher and faster (about 50,000' and 700mph), while GA aircraft fill the skys below 14,000'.

Granted, this still leaves a lot of room in between these major aircraft corridors, but if a balloon should ever intersect with one of them, it's going to cause havoc, even if there's never an actual balloon/aircraft incident.

<comment><USER18> > They actually have a few well defined corridors and altitudes in which they > can operate - the straight lines drawn from one VOR (effectively equivalent > to a major airport) to another at 1,000 foot intervals.

Until NextGen (ADS, etc) finishes its rollout and everyone flies direct instead of on Victor airways and VOR to VOR.

<comment><USER17> True, but even then there will still result in "air highways" from airport to airport.

<comment><USER18> I would agree with this. Still, the number of "air highways" would increase drastically.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


ASK HN: How many books do you read per month? And what kind? - <AUTHOR>

Would be great to know...thank you for sharing with us. <comment><USER2> Why don't you change this to ask everyone? That would be more interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for changing the title Paul. Please add a comment of yours as well - it would be awesome!

<comment><USER3> "yc4ever", someday you are going to look back and feel embarrassed about this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not pg or even pg passing as a commoner, but I read 4 to 6 science fiction books per month, 1 or 2 technical books more if I'm starting a new gig, usually not cover to cover, and 0 to 1 general interest science book. Thank whomever for the general humanities requirement in college. I can converse with a little knowledge about Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton.

<comment><USER5> I don't believe you, you're obviously Paul. It's not like anyone else visits these forums.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Usually 3-4 books a month. I try to read 2 kinds of books at a time: 1 business-ish book and 1 fiction. I read the business book during the day and it helps me keep learning and I read the fiction book at night before bed or any time I want to decompress. Going to the library is a nice daytime diversion too.

</comment><comment><USER7> 2 or 3, mostly history, non fiction and technichal. Back in the day, with no internet available and more spare time, 10 to 15 books monthly. Also I used to read mostly fiction. I dont miss reading more paper books, the internet provides on demand knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER8> I mostly read business type books (even though I am a hacker/techie). I try to read about 1 or two a month.

</comment><comment><USER9> for me it would have to be books per year: maybe two or three. i know it's kind of a cliche, but the internet killed my need for them.</comment>


Demo: Pure CSS GUI icons, no images (experimental). - <AUTHOR> http://nicolasgallagher.com/pure-css-gui-icons/demo/ <comment><USER2> Now, I realize this is a demo, but aside from that, I really don't think things like this should be used in a final product.

Why? CSS wasn't made for this. We have SVG for graphics like this. This is a demo, yes, and it's great to demonstrate the capabilities of CSS for making small graphics, but in practicality, I don't see the point. The key problem is graceful degrading- there simply is none here.

Regardless, I love seeing things like this, and he's done a good job. Good work.

<comment><USER3> I completely agree that it isn't something to be used as a replacement for sprites or SVG. I tried to make it clear that it's nothing more than a technical exercise that I hoped to learn from. Hopefully others will pay attention to that fact and avoid plaguing the web with 'css icons' when there are better (and easier to use) tools for the job.

<comment><USER4> You're right, people will just continue to plague the blogosphere with posts about how they laboriously drew yet another piece of vector art in 'pure' CSS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone else getting sick of seeing "you should follow me on Twitter" everywhere?

<comment><USER6> Dustin Curtis may have a lot to answer for.

<http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html>

<comment><USER7> Yes, _everyone_ uses this formula now. It's annoying.

<comment><USER8> "People should stop asking me to follow them now."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For monochrome icons, using font-face seems like a better idea than CSS. You get a ton of icons in one cacheable packet and can easily change the color, drop-shadow, opacity, etc using standard css.

[http://somerandomdude.com/articles/design-technology/font- em...](http://somerandomdude.com/articles/design-technology/font-embedding- icons/)

</comment><comment><USER10> The ideal solution (neither SVG or CSS) should be to use appropriate Unicode characters, of which there are very useful ones added in Unicode 6.0. The very first icon, "search", can be done with U+1F50D LEFT-POINTING MAGNIFYING GLASS. Of course most users will not have appropriate fonts installed for comprehensive Unicode 6.0 coverage, so you should deploy a custom font using @font-face that suits your site. For example, the search box on my personal website uses LEFT-POINTING MAGNIFYING GLASS and a custom font I made that defines a simple magnifying glass much like the one in this demo.

<comment> mike-cardwell That sounds like a miss-use of fonts to me. Why isn't the ideal solution a GIF?

<comment><USER11> Have you heard of the font "Symbol"?

<comment><USER10> Do you mean Symbola, a Unicode 6.0 font? And yes, but it has elaborate characters that only look good at 40px+. I wanted a much more simplistic style, so I made my own U+1F50D.

Edit: Oh, you meant some unsemantic font.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ugh, too clever for my taste. I would hate to edit icons that are a mish-mash of CSS backgrounds, rotated boxes, and border-radius'ed edges, and to boot, based entirely on pseudo-elements. (Current web dev tools like Web Inspector in Chrome/Safari, etc. aren't well built for examining pseudo-elements.) This CSS uses ~3-4 pseudo-elements per icon. It's clever for doing that to preserve the markup and avoiding JS, but it's hard to understand. Maybe it would help to comment the CSS so designers can see that "this is the handle of the trash can, this is the left side of the heart," etc., since :after and :before are hacked far beyond having any semantic meaning.

<comment><USER3> As pseudo-elements, :before and :after don't have any real semantic meaning. But yes, it is a complete abuse of pseudo-elements that isn't immediately understandable. There are some more practical and simple pseudo-element hacks too - [http://nicolasgallagher.com/multiple-backgrounds-and- borders...](http://nicolasgallagher.com/multiple-backgrounds-and-borders-with- css2/)

<comment><USER12> Eh, some pseudo-elements have semantic meaning. My best example of this would be :link, which distinguishes between hyperlinks and bare anchors. I would typically associate :before with styling that happens visually before an element, and :after the opposite, but they have been both used here to provide for an icon before the element.

<comment><USER3> :link is a pseudo-class, not a pseudo-element

<comment><USER12> I stand corrected!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We use a pretty nifty technique that isn't CSS for rendering icons on the blip.tv HTML5 player. Depending on the context, we use a <canvas> tag to display either the vectorized or rasterized version of the icon. For the player itself, not a single image request is required for the thing to draw. And we don't run into the nasty anti-aliasing stuff you see with small icons and <canvas>.

<comment><USER14> Can you explain this a little more?

Do you load the rasterized image using a base64 url, or do you store specific drawing instructions in JavaScript (lineTo, moveTo, etc)? For the vectorized icon, do you load SVG inside canvas, or just display SVG directly?

Also, how do you fall back for older browsers that do not support Canvas or SVG?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What are the pros/cons of using CSS instead of images?

<comment><USER16> Performance -- even if the CSS is the same size as the image, a single CSS file can return all the icons with a single HTTP request, vs having to make separate requests for each image.

Even with CSS Sprites, there are two requests - one for the CSS, another for the sprite image file.

<comment><USER17> Unless you use data: URIs and base64-encode the images, which can result in a smaller CSS file than "pure" CSS while still eliminating extra HTTP requests. That depends on the complexity of the image and of the gradient set (or what have you) that would be needed to replace it. Optimization is always situational.

<comment><USER18> Oh great, I once felt the need of it, but did not it actually existed. I feel though that pure CSS solution would be better, since modifying the colors etc would be easier with pure CSS.

<comment><USER19> You can use image sprites and still control the colors using CSS! [http://www.digital- web.com/articles/web_standards_creativity...](http://www.digital- web.com/articles/web_standards_creativity_png/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow, a really nice experiment. I'm surprised you created so many.

</comment><comment><USER21> Reminds me of: <http://somerandomdude.com/projects/iconic/>, a set of icons done in @fontface.

<comment><USER22> I also like the Pictos icon set, it has a set done in @font-face (in addition to standard PNG/vector sets).

<http://pictos.drewwilson.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> That's cool. If you're a Raphael js fan, this is even cooler - <http://raphaeljs.com/icons/>

</comment><comment><USER24> It's interesting to see these icons and actually recognize what sites already use them. For example, I believe OKCupid uses several of these icons in their GUI such as the report flag, edit, views, etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> Here are mine: <http://lucianmarin.com/peculiar/>

</comment><comment><USER26> Great! This is a fun visual test for verifying browser's CSS transform functions.

</comment><comment><USER27> Nice! However, "Help" and "Warning" need another iteration ...

</comment><comment><USER28> This has no practical use. This is geeky. I love it!</comment>