Internal Combustion Engine • Hacker News Board

Re: Internal Combustion Engine

#311

Post by csbartus » Sat, May 01, 2021, 6:46 AM UTC

This post has 1199 points and 290 comments, a 4:1 ratio.

This always rings me an alarm: Hey, this is something extraordinary even Hacker News can't deal with it (via the usual way, like on posts with an inverse points/comments ratio, indicating hate and flame inside).

Right, this guy is a genius.

Together with Amelia Wattenberger they represent a new wave in storytelling: Meaningful content and meaningful interactions.

The previous wave was proven to be a bubble. Embraced, supported and pushed by mainstream media (NYTimes, Bloomberg, Spotify) the formula for the first wave was not successful: Meaningless (average) content + Meaningless (flashy, art-pour-art, attention-seeking, etc) interaction.

Re: Internal Combustion Engine

#312

Post by vishnugupta » Sat, May 01, 2021, 6:49 AM UTC

umvi wrote: post #271

qwertox wrote: post #164

One of those web pages which deserves an award. Some place in some kind of Internet Hall of Fame, an historical archive which shows the only best highlights of what websites were actually capable of presenting. Milestones of web development. This page summarizes pretty good what web technology is capable of, when in the hands of a real professional. --- Ok, I just realized this is from Bartosz Ciechanowski, and this…

I'm assuming he used something like SolidWorks to CAD up the parts, but then it looks like he custom made all the animation stepping widgets and camera rotation logic and various shaders for the different effects in pure JS[0]? Surely he didn't write this JS by hand (i.e. it was generated from blender3d or solidworks files or something?). I would like an article on how he made the interactive animations in the articl…

> Surely he didn't write this JS by hand

It seems parts of it are auto-generated like all those co-ordinates. But then some parts appear as if they are hand-coded.

I also noticed that other program texts are getting assigned to variables (example "line_vert_src"). Could someone please describe what's going on?

That explosion animation is absolutely mind-blowing. Goes to show what can be achieved if someone focuses their attention to a topic to understand it in depth and explain it at the same depth.

Re: Internal Combustion Engine

#313

Post by publicola1990 » Sat, May 01, 2021, 7:01 AM UTC

What tool is being used for the interactive animations? They are really impressive.

Re: Internal Combustion Engine

#314

Post by foepys » Sat, May 01, 2021, 7:05 AM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #283

worewood wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> makes me a little ashamed to use the word "engineer" in my title of "software engineer". There is no real comparison of the quality of the result. I think that's because the barrier to entry is too low and anybody is being called a "software engineer" these days. But think about a system which makes proper use of synchronization primitives, like an OS kernel or a robotic control, or a CPU design like the other guy…

> Those things can be as complex as an ICU engine. From a complexity perspective an ICU isn’t nearly as complex as even something as simple is a script scraping a webpages for links and queuing them up for further crawling. I’m not sure if “complex” is the word you are going for but even the TCP state machine has significantly more complexity than an ICU and that’s just a fragment of what it takes to transmit some da…

I don't think you can compare both. It's abstractions all the way down, for both. Modern ICE are made from metals compounds that were unknown a few years ago and are the reason they are efficient. Just as you can send bytes over a wire without TCP, you can build an ICE from pure iron. But both then have just very low fault tolerances and break rather quickly.

Re: Internal Combustion Engine

#315

Post by arendtio » Sat, May 01, 2021, 7:06 AM UTC

I like the detailed explanations and animations. It reminds me of another page, which doesn't look as polished, but has a few additional designs:

http://animatedengines.com

Re: Internal Combustion Engine

#316

Post by shivenigma » Sat, May 01, 2021, 7:08 AM UTC

This is such a great article man. Love for the effort you put into this article.

I seriously wish I had teachers and schools like this. I used to imagine the four strokes when I was in school but it is very hard to relate all the moving parts and how everything connects together in that age where I've never used a motorcycle or a car.

Thanks for writing this.

Re: Internal Combustion Engine

#317

Post by BlueTemplar » Sat, May 01, 2021, 7:16 AM UTC

exhaze wrote: post #301

BlueTemplar wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and to think that some people are incredulous when I say that I need animation support in my electronic documents ! This is even better, I will bookmark it as an example.

Saw a startup recently building something like “PowerPoint for animated documents” - https://www.unscene.app/ Crazy that no one’s made this before

Really cool, but : - For the love of God, why a web app ?!? - We pretty much already have what I'm asking for in the form of MHTML, I just need Firefox support !

Re: Internal Combustion Engine

#318

Post by fractalb » Sat, May 01, 2021, 7:38 AM UTC

What an excellent illustrative write-up. I don't even know what a four-stroke engine is all these years! Thanks to the author, I do know now :)

Re: Internal Combustion Engine

#319

Post by obiwanpallav1 » Sat, May 01, 2021, 7:51 AM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #29

The quality of the explanations, and progression of complexity, reminded me of an old video that explains how a car's differential (rear end) works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI Skip to 3:30 for the explanatory part.

This video is a gift.

Re: Internal Combustion Engine

#320

Post by themeiguoren » Sat, May 01, 2021, 7:54 AM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #283

worewood wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> makes me a little ashamed to use the word "engineer" in my title of "software engineer". There is no real comparison of the quality of the result. I think that's because the barrier to entry is too low and anybody is being called a "software engineer" these days. But think about a system which makes proper use of synchronization primitives, like an OS kernel or a robotic control, or a CPU design like the other guy…

> Those things can be as complex as an ICU engine. From a complexity perspective an ICU isn’t nearly as complex as even something as simple is a script scraping a webpages for links and queuing them up for further crawling. I’m not sure if “complex” is the word you are going for but even the TCP state machine has significantly more complexity than an ICU and that’s just a fragment of what it takes to transmit some da…

Well that’s just because we understand internal combustion engines well enough that we can abstract away a lot of the details. Software engineering is nice because by design it is at a level of abstraction that we can grok it. We’re basically manipulating structural concepts of pure thought. But never forget that reality has a surprising amount of detail. When we interact with the physical world, we rely on abstractions at our peril.

http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...