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

sky.dlazaro.ca

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

#91

Post by ryandrake »

Waterluvian wrote: post #81
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…

I’ve had similar issues at work where people really overdo something and it’s difficult. On one hand you never want to kill that joy and passion someone has. That’s a great characteristic. But projects have scopes and too often instructions like “just draw a blue rectangle” get ignored.

Totally. It was a harsh but needed lesson on the realities of getting work done in a commercial environment.

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

#92

Post by philipallstar »

jbverschoor wrote: post #75
ryandrake wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A foundational, core theme about making commercial software, that repeats over and over and I slowly got accustomed to is: companies really don't want these kinds of micro-innovations. 90% of companies are just looking at their competitors, making a checklist out of those products, and asking engineers to check the boxes and go home. They don't care about little details, about craftsmanship and polish, about lint war…

But it's exactly the thing that makes software "delightful". It's also a huge boost to the developer's appreciation, motivation, productivity, care for the product. But yeah, if you only care about checking the feature boxes.. Go ahead, make shit software with miserable people, but be sure to prepare to go out of business.

The point is a real skybox is not great for satnav software. It's probably actually worse than a stylised mode, with a predictable colour background for anything that's going to sit on top of it.

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

#93

Post by johnfn »

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…

Oh come now. You are being no fun.

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

#95

Post by dudus »

throwanem wrote: post #51
mintplant wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, the "http-equiv" means that this tag is supposed to stand in for an equivalent HTTP header, so you could accomplish the same by sending a "Refresh: 60" header :)

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...

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

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

#98

Post by urquhartfe »

dudus wrote: post #95
throwanem wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

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

#99

Post by js2 »

mintplant wrote: post #46
throwanem wrote: post #3

> the little-known meta http-equiv="Refresh" HTML tag Oh, don't mind me, I'll just be over here in the corner laughing ruefully as my bones crumble to dust: back when I started, if you wanted a page to refresh on its own, this was the only way. Beautiful work! A splendid example of formal minimalism at its best.

Of course, the "http-equiv" means that this tag is supposed to stand in for an equivalent HTTP header, so you could accomplish the same by sending a "Refresh: 60" header :)

There was also server[-side] push:

https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/cgi/ch06_06.html

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

#100

Post by cyberax »

ryandrake wrote: post #58
jbverschoor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whipping down the innovator with the stupidity whip. Great management

A foundational, core theme about making commercial software, that repeats over and over and I slowly got accustomed to is: companies really don't want these kinds of micro-innovations. 90% of companies are just looking at their competitors, making a checklist out of those products, and asking engineers to check the boxes and go home. They don't care about little details, about craftsmanship and polish, about lint war…

> They don't care about little details, about craftsmanship and polish, about lint warnings, about "oh, that's a nice touch," or even quality beyond "will the customer return the product?"

I worked at large companies, and there are reasons beyond that. I've been on the both sides of this fence.

Senior engineers feel the pain of supporting all these features. You created a new streaming API prototype that provides a gradual response, progressively displaying details of the 3D model? Great. But it's 15000 lines of dense code without a lot of explanation. Who is going to support it once you leave the company? Is it secure? How does it work with kiosk-type browsers? Can you write a formal proposal so we can start the review process?

Oh, I see that you're already leaving the company :(

And that's also why startups are often so much more successful initially. They just don't care about the long-term support and YOLO a lot of functionality.

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