Live data from Hacker News

Vanta.js: Animated 3D backgrounds for websites

vantajs.com

41–50 of 107 posts

Re: Vanta.js: Animated 3D backgrounds for websites

#41

This looks great, but it requires all of ThreeJS, even for the backgrounds that are really just some shaders. You don't really need a complete 3D library to just render 2 triangles that fill the entire screen and apply a shader to them.

if you have a direct fiber internet connection to your house page size doesn't even matter.

I hope you're not a web developer. That's a very bad attitude.

Re: Vanta.js: Animated 3D backgrounds for websites

#43

This is nice stuff - I just wish it wasn't "for website backgrounds"...?! Can these just be screensavers? Please?

Lively[1] does this with desktop wallpapers if that helps and is FOSS. Additional shaders can be found on shadertoy[2] and others. It can be a good way of turning your computer into a heater ;) [1] https://rocksdanister.github.io/lively/ [2] https://www.shadertoy.com/

That's really nice. Mac OS needs to get some shadertoy desktops asap. I can't even get a toaster to fly anymore :(

Re: Vanta.js: Animated 3D backgrounds for websites

#47

This looks great, but it requires all of ThreeJS, even for the backgrounds that are really just some shaders. You don't really need a complete 3D library to just render 2 triangles that fill the entire screen and apply a shader to them.

if you have a direct fiber internet connection to your house page size doesn't even matter.

And what if I'm on mobile with a spotty connection where I average < 1 mbps?

Re: Vanta.js: Animated 3D backgrounds for websites

#48
The attitude in this thread is the exact opposite of constructive. It is a great library that the person is giving you for free. Yes it can be improved, yes it you should not use it everywhere, but can you at least appreciate the execution and the fact that there is a real person behind it who can read the entitled diarrhea y'all "hur dur the internet should be just html and usenet" ppl are spewing?

HN has become one of the worst places to have one's work demonstrated at.

Re: Vanta.js: Animated 3D backgrounds for websites

#50
post #48

The attitude in this thread is the exact opposite of constructive. It is a great library that the person is giving you for free. Yes it can be improved, yes it you should not use it everywhere, but can you at least appreciate the execution and the fact that there is a real person behind it who can read the entitled diarrhea y'all "hur dur the internet should be just html and usenet" ppl are spewing? HN has become one…

This looks like a case of the contrarian dynamic [1]. Dismissive comments tend to appear first, not because they represent the community, but because they're the fastest to write. Often there's a wave of such comments objecting to the OP, followed by a second wave objecting to the objections with some variation of "I can't believe how negative the comments here are". The irony is that they're driven by the same impulse—to make objections—they're just objecting to different things.

The second wave of objections tends (ironically!) to get upvoted to the top of the thread. Whether that's because people's minds are open to the creativity in the OP or because they enjoy disses of other people (i.e. the rest of the community) even more than they enjoy disses of someone's work, we can leave as an exercise to the reader.

This impulse governs the internet but it isn't the greatest thing on a site that values intellectual curiosity [2], because it's essentially reflexive: people see something that activates a previously existing grievance (be it battery-draining websites, bad internet comments, or what have you), which generates irritation and therefore energy to produce a post, but the post is actually litigating the generic grievance rather than responding to anything interestingly new. To get the latter, one has to perceive the new information and digest it in a way that leads to a new response—that is, one must be reflective rather than reflexive [3]—and that is a much slower process. But we definitely want reflective comments here.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

---

Edit: I'd like to add a response specifically to this:

> HN has become one of the worst places to have one's work demonstrated at

... by pointing out that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29786132 is currently at #1 on the front page. It's very much a question of which examples you notice and how much weight you put on them.

Post reply on HN