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Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

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Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#101

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

jbverschoor wrote: post #36
ryandrake wrote: post #7

Awesome. I remember much earlier in my career I was working on a 3D turn-by-turn navigation software, and one of my tasks was to draw the sky in the background. The more senior guy on the team said, just draw a blue rectangle during the day and a dark gray one at night and call it job done. Of course, I had to do it the hard way, so I looked up the relevant literature on sky rendering based on the environment, latitu…

Whipping down the innovator with the stupidity whip. Great management

I've been in the developer's shoes. I've also been in the manager's shoes.

It's not that simple. There's possibly better ways to deal with it, but for safety-critical stuff (like a navigation display in a vehicle), simple is much, much better. In many cases, there's actually laws and liability stuff involved.

I once spent six months, developing an "un-asked-for" WiFi control app for a digital camera, and had it nuked. It worked much better than the shipping app (which was enjoying a richly-deserved one-star rating in the app store).

The considerations had a lot to do with the corporate Process (note the capital "P"), which I sidelined. I thought I could do better, but the people with the hands on the brake, thought different. I didn't kiss the right rings. That's a very real consideration in any corporation.

As a manager, however, I did go to bat for employees that displayed initiative. In some cases, I was successful. In some cases, not so much.

Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#102

Post by dylan604 »

crazygringo wrote: post #82
ryandrake wrote: post #7

Awesome. I remember much earlier in my career I was working on a 3D turn-by-turn navigation software, and one of my tasks was to draw the sky in the background. The more senior guy on the team said, just draw a blue rectangle during the day and a dark gray one at night and call it job done. Of course, I had to do it the hard way, so I looked up the relevant literature on sky rendering based on the environment, latitu…

This is why specifications are important, and why design is important. The reality is that we have certain conventions that are immediately understandable, and that too much visual complexity results in confusion rather than clarity. If the sky is hazy white when I expect it to be blue, I'm confused as to whether it's the sky or if the map is still loading. It's adding cognitive complexity for no reason. Stars simila…

> This is why specifications are important, and why design is important.

Also the phrase "know your audience". No sense in casting pearls before the swine.

Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#103

Post by resonious »

dylan604 wrote: post #102
crazygringo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why specifications are important, and why design is important. The reality is that we have certain conventions that are immediately understandable, and that too much visual complexity results in confusion rather than clarity. If the sky is hazy white when I expect it to be blue, I'm confused as to whether it's the sky or if the map is still loading. It's adding cognitive complexity for no reason. Stars simila…

> This is why specifications are important, and why design is important. Also the phrase "know your audience". No sense in casting pearls before the swine.

Though sometimes the higher ups might not be the same as (or understand) the actual audience.

In this case the higher ups may have been confused due to, say, looking at the app while indoors (and from the perspective of "let's judge this developer's work"), while the actual users would see it in a vehicle alongside the real sky (and from the perspective of "let's see how easy this is to match up with reality").

Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#105

Post by dylan604 »

darknavi wrote: post #24
ryandrake wrote: post #7

Awesome. I remember much earlier in my career I was working on a 3D turn-by-turn navigation software, and one of my tasks was to draw the sky in the background. The more senior guy on the team said, just draw a blue rectangle during the day and a dark gray one at night and call it job done. Of course, I had to do it the hard way, so I looked up the relevant literature on sky rendering based on the environment, latitu…

A past coworker who worked on Cobalt[1] told me that they spent entirely too much time implementing stars in the sky of the game with some amount of real(ish) star system physics behind them. I can understand people removing polish things like that if there are usability concerns, but those small things add up to a lot in an end product and are a joy to find and explore. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_(video…

The last thing you want is to receive a message from Neil Degrasse Tyson about how wrong your sky was

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=neil+degrasse+tyson+gives+j...

Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#106

Post by dylan604 »

resonious wrote: post #103
dylan604 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why specifications are important, and why design is important. Also the phrase "know your audience". No sense in casting pearls before the swine.

Though sometimes the higher ups might not be the same as (or understand) the actual audience. In this case the higher ups may have been confused due to, say, looking at the app while indoors (and from the perspective of "let's judge this developer's work"), while the actual users would see it in a vehicle alongside the real sky (and from the perspective of "let's see how easy this is to match up with reality").

Ah, I see the confusion. You think the users are the dev's audience! /s

Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#107

Post by dylan604 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #71
ryandrake wrote: post #7

Awesome. I remember much earlier in my career I was working on a 3D turn-by-turn navigation software, and one of my tasks was to draw the sky in the background. The more senior guy on the team said, just draw a blue rectangle during the day and a dark gray one at night and call it job done. Of course, I had to do it the hard way, so I looked up the relevant literature on sky rendering based on the environment, latitu…

Yep, if you have to draw the Sun, you better draw it yellow. If you have to draw a cloudless day sky, you better draw it blue. That doesn't apply to every single instance of those, but if the sky isn't the focus of your application, a realistic one is just a distraction.

> Yep, if you have to draw the Sun, you better draw it yellow.

This one always gets me in how dirty the sky must have been "back in the day" in order for people to see a yellow sun. I've never looked into what gas would be needed to make the sun look yellow, but it must have been hell to breathe.

Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#108

Post by dylan604 »

urquhartfe wrote: post #98
dudus wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you are on about. Adding an HTTP header to a request is one of the easiest things to do.

I think you are the one who doesn't know what they are on about. First, the header must be added to the response, not the request. Second, in many environments (managed hosting etc.) there is not an easy way (or indeed a way at all) of adding headers to responses.

is that something that could have be done in the dot file for server override? what was it, .htaccess or something?

Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#109

Post by bravesoul2 »

ryandrake wrote: post #7

Awesome. I remember much earlier in my career I was working on a 3D turn-by-turn navigation software, and one of my tasks was to draw the sky in the background. The more senior guy on the team said, just draw a blue rectangle during the day and a dark gray one at night and call it job done. Of course, I had to do it the hard way, so I looked up the relevant literature on sky rendering based on the environment, latitu…

The thing here is programming the job can be much more dull than programming the hobby. Occasionally (twice a decade) there can be a collision where you get to do something really cool like that at work. The higher ups want a realistic sky because their market research said it'll boost an OKR by 10 basis points. And then you are in luck!

That said there are niches where jobs let you do cool stuff all the time. Hard to find. Probably why gaming jobs are notoriously underpaid and overworked.

Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#110

Post by throwanem »

dylan604 wrote: post #108
urquhartfe wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are the one who doesn't know what they are on about. First, the header must be added to the response, not the request. Second, in many environments (managed hosting etc.) there is not an easy way (or indeed a way at all) of adding headers to responses.

is that something that could have be done in the dot file for server override? what was it, .htaccess or something?

Sure, if you wanted to deal with configuring Apache. Or getting your hosting provider to do that. If you knew to ask, and didn't mind waiting, and your hosting provider knew how...and was willing to do it, a condition I forgot to add in my last comment here, but which applies equally there. (User-provided .htaccess files were the source of a number of relatively high-profile early CVEs, as I recall. Apache grew a number of options for trusting their content, and I want to say before very long you could not rely on anything working past simple HTTP-Basic credential management.)

Oldschool shared web hosting was a shockingly deprived environment by modern standards, which is why my Linode account turned old enough a few months ago to buy a drink in a bar: $20 a month in 2004 was amply worth gaining a degree of control over web server configuration which is broadly the default assumption now.

Since I was also administering some shared web hosting in my own right at the time - partially overlapping with my web design work targeting shared hosting, since some customers preferred to BYO - I don't blame admins for being difficult to work with; we all had good reason to be, with the afterthought security typically was everywhere in those days. But you begin perhaps to see why bypassing the whole rigamarole with a hint to the client was attractive.

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