Making Software • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Software

#101

Post by kobenni » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 5:27 AM UTC

berelig wrote: post #61

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #56

This reminds me aesthetically of The Way Things Work [1] which was one of my favorite books as a kid. Having a similar wordly reference as an adult has been a goal for a while. [1] https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/the-way-things-work-newly-revise...

I've been looking around for a book like this that has scientific/engineering topics presented in a bite-sized fashion so a teenager (or even adults) can discover which ones pique their interests and are worth a deeper dive. Would this book work or is it a bit too simple? Does anyone have another book to recommend?

For mathematics, there are the Princeton Companion to Mathematics and the Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics.

Re: Making Software

#102

Post by sfn42 » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 6:20 AM UTC

internetter wrote: post #91

sfn42 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you know the term gaussian (blur) it's trivial to do a Google search

Google does not return the best content.

It usually returns good enough content for me

Re: Making Software

#103

Post by pflanze » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 9:35 AM UTC

I think the hard drive platter moves in the wrong direction--it pushes the head into the platter instead of away from it if it gets too close.

Re: Making Software

#104

Post by mindtarrif » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 4:05 PM UTC

Guess we are judging this book by the cover

Re: Making Software

#105

Post by lenkite » Fri, Apr 18, 2025, 5:30 PM UTC

wavemode wrote: post #32

dsego wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Justified text is bad on the web. Is there any reason why justified is okay printed but not on the web.

Beause in print you would typically use your publishing software to adjust various things, like where hypenated word breaks should happen. This is much trickier in digital media, and usually just isn't done, resulting in ugly word spacing.

I believe this will be fixed by this year - you have smart hyphenation going to come natively in CSS. It was always possible using the JS hyphenator lib.