Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

seated.ro

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 396 posts

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#51

Post by zzzeek »

evnp wrote: post #27
zzzeek wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i am fascinated with that effect and turned off every CSS rule on the page I could find but did not identify how you make that effect

I love it too. Appears to be accomplished with this CSS, which you can tinker with by finding the :after element at the bottom of the tag in browser devtools: body::after { content: ""; position: fixed; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 1px, transparent 1px); background-size: 2px 2px; background-repeat: repeat; pointer-events: none; z-index: 9999; }

i figured that's what it was, but i didnt know how to find it in the browser tools but i missed the "after" part, so yeah it's in the "pseudo-elements". nice!

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#52

Post by heavyset_go »

SoftTalker wrote: post #23

I used to tinker with fonts, colors, etc but as I’ve gotten older I just accept the defaults in most things. You can waste any number of hours on that stuff and in the end it makes very little difference.

Fonts are like my dotfiles, I fucked with fonts.conf a decade+ ago and have just lived with that since then.

So I get to be very particular, but also not have to care about tweaking, I did all the work back when I had time for that.

I will argue that if you stare at a screen for hours a day, might as well make it pleasant with good hinting/anti-aliasing/features and a professional font instead of Dejavu Sans lol

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#53

Post by mediumdeviation »

jonplackett wrote: post #49
SoftTalker wrote: post #23

I used to tinker with fonts, colors, etc but as I’ve gotten older I just accept the defaults in most things. You can waste any number of hours on that stuff and in the end it makes very little difference.

I wish I could tinker with the font on this website. It flickers as it scrolls and does my head in!

It's the scanline effect, here's three lines of JS to disable it from the developer console

    s=document.createElement('style');
    s.textContent='body::after{display: none !important}';
    document.body.appendChild(s)

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#54

Post by jongjong »

I love tinkering but I'm very minimalist as far as tooling is concerned. I don't like to use too many tools. I only use tools to automate activities that I do frequently. I don't try to micromanage and automate every aspect of my existence. Some stuff is better left uncounted and unplanned.

A lot of other people who like tinkering seem to have a kind of obsession with using all the latest gadgets to solve the tiniest problems. IMO, there's a point when you're so into automation that you end up looking for problems to use your tools on. You end up introducing new problems into your life, just so you can solve them using your tool of choice. Your life becomes like a Rube Goldberg machine.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#55

Post by [deleted] »

jonplackett wrote: post #49
SoftTalker wrote: post #23

I used to tinker with fonts, colors, etc but as I’ve gotten older I just accept the defaults in most things. You can waste any number of hours on that stuff and in the end it makes very little difference.

I wish I could tinker with the font on this website. It flickers as it scrolls and does my head in!

[deleted]

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#56

Post by Syntonicles »

andy99 wrote: post #7

I’d like to tinker with that font, it burns my eyes to try and read the words styled like that, maybe that’s the intent?

It sent me back in time, very nostalgic. I even took a few minutes to sit and enjoy the moment and remember what it was like to explore the internet on a pixelated CRT in the 90s.

I suspect it's a generational gap.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#57

Post by Herring »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #47
Herring wrote: post #40

If you're going to make changes, make big changes. Learn to squat 100kg. Finish a triathlon. Learn intermediate Chinese. These are all impactful goals you can hit in a year, worth way more than colors and fonts.

Nobody who is raising children is able to do those things in a year.

Increasingly many aren't raising children either. I'm trying to move to a saner country.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#59

Post by KalMann »

As a person who doesn't do much tinkering the thing I dislike about this article is it doesn't really get across to me why the author likes tinkering so much or why I should either. Not saying that the article is bad but I was curious about the author's mindset and felt he didn't talk more about the appeal of tinkering.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#60

Post by andy99 »

Syntonicles wrote: post #56
andy99 wrote: post #7

I’d like to tinker with that font, it burns my eyes to try and read the words styled like that, maybe that’s the intent?

It sent me back in time, very nostalgic. I even took a few minutes to sit and enjoy the moment and remember what it was like to explore the internet on a pixelated CRT in the 90s. I suspect it's a generational gap.

I’m in my mid 40’s, and have been using computers since the mid ‘80s. What generation are you from?
Post reply on HN