Crazy how you probably wouldn't get a slice of cheesecake factory cheesecake on the side of your Macdonald's meal; but never think twice about a medium soda that has the same amount of added sugar
Reminds me of that one post that goes "Whenever I see those comparisons of sugar between donuts and soda it just seems to me that donuts are healthier than I thought"
>> I'm surprised more hackers don't seek out quality espresso instead of these weird XTREME energy drinks.
I think you answered it though, lots of (younger) people do not like the taste of coffee, so you get the caffeine and the delivery mechanism is sweet & sugary.
Here's a free idea for anyone out there: Caffeinated Ketchup. It already turns up every flavor component to 11 so why not make it heavily caffeinated too!
> a large Starbucks caffinated milkshake (and that's what they are -- addictive milkshakes)
I got the impression (from some online browsing) that Starbucks has started offering coffeeless frozen drinks.
But I also got the impression that their drinks are more "crushed ice mixed with syrup" than "ice cream mixed with milk". How much milk/cream are you getting in one of these milkshakes?
thats because the "ier" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting. getting fat from all that sugar is the least of your concerns. it also ages you rapidly and makes you more likely to have ongoing systemic inflammation. I'm back in the states for the last two weeks and the difference between people here and when I was aboard is jarring.
Please don't let the comments deter you from giving the site a try! Ok navigation is finicky on mobile but this isn't a blog post, it's quirky, I find the humor funny and the subject matter deserves some artistic liberty on the presentation side
Sorry—I feel bad about moving this one because you were on the downhill (good!) side of the contrarian dynamic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45542904), but the subthread mostly reverted to the uphill (bad!) side, in keeping with this sequence of sadness:
1. objections
2. objection to the objections (<-- you were here)
3. objections to the objection to the objections
...so it veered further off topic. (and yes I suppose my comment here is a 4-th order objection)
I ask genuinely: what is the value -- in what way does it "fit" so well?
"Custom navigation" means I as a reader need to split my focus between learning how this thing works, and consuming the information presented, which is presumably the goal of this page. I can't say for sure because the instant my screen started scrolling the opposite axis I smashed the back button.
Pick a lane: this kind of stuff is fine as a "design" showpiece, but if the goal of a page is to convey information, why introduce distractions over sticking with familiar patterns?
> I can't say for sure because the instant my screen started scrolling the opposite axis I smashed the back button.
> I ask genuinely: what is the value -- in what way does it "fit" so well?
This is a you problem. Its self-evident to anyone willing to explore their world in an incredibly low-stakes manner, and its pretty much pointless to describe or debate the merits to someone able but unwilling to experience it themselves.
"This is a you problem" is quite a nothingburger of a statement. Every single problem every single person has is personal. Hence why I asked a good faith question -- to try and understand someone else's perspective. You should try it some time.
We're all talking about our preferences here. Do you mean to come off so aggressive and dismissive?
I firmly disagree the discussion is meritless; I'm autistic, and it's much more taxing for me to navigate the page in a completely non-standard way. Avoiding overstimulation is not "low stakes" for me.
Surely I'm not the only one who feels this way, and surely there's someone who could commiserate or at least willing to have a dialogue or otherwise value my experience. If you don't value it -- well that's a "you" problem.
Snapchat is the ultimate example of how intuitive UX doesn't matter as much as we get carried away thinking. Of course it matters. But not as religiously as we think.
in other words, it's not that deep. The site is fun and you can figure it out.
Sorry to say I've never used snapchat, so I'm not able to understand your comparison.
Sure, I am perfectly capable of figuring out the site. But I won't trouble myself with it. My loss it seems!
And lastly, the person I was replying to claimed the design "fit the content so well" or something to that effect, which communicates a certain depth, contrary to your claim. I was genuinely trying to understand what I'm missing out on.
Fair points. in rereading the comments, I think "fits the content so well is in relation to the comment that comment replied to: the content being quirky and comical. So the navigation being non-standard is on brand.
and this is different from your point which maybe is "how does this help me understand fonts better?" which is fair.
Thanks for the added context. I obviously missed the nuance because I ragequit the page, so your perspective does help answer my question.
I can understand the perspective that something whimsical might appeal to a certain group and even enhance the experience; in fact I usually enjoy non-standard game designs, and in general I really appreciate subversion in most media I consume. I think however when it comes to educational or info-dense resources, I prefer the UX to be minimally distracting.
> I ask genuinely: what is the value -- in what way does it "fit" so well?
So, the key here is simply the horizontal layout: roman-alphabet letters naturally sit as "siblings" on a horizontal line, and — at least on desktops/laptops [which is pre-assumed here, since the site is just broken on mobile] — people's screens will almost always be much wider than they are tall.
Giving the type examples (a bad "A" glyph, vs a different bad "A" glyph, vs a good "A" glyph) all baseline-aligned on a horizontal line — packed together just closely enough to see multiple of them at a time (to visually contrast them) while also having room for notes in between — allows the eye of an English (or other LTR alphabetic-language) reader to intuitively pick up the same point that's being made explicitly in the notes, implicitly, just by looking at the successive examples next to each-other.
This wouldn't work with a vertical layout. Not just because on desktop there wouldn't be enough room (multiple example glyphs and their notes wouldn't fit together within the viewport), but more fundamentally because said English reader's eye isn't trained to compare things that are juxtaposed vertically nearly as well as it is trained to compare things that are juxtaposed horizontally. (Heck, part of that is inate in our biology: people with regular binocular vision can cross their eyes to superimpose things that are juxtaposed horizontally!)
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The arbitrary viewport navigation on vertical scroll, is a technique commonly employed by a modern "web experience designer" when what they want to show you is some kind of animated presentation, but one that is so information-dense that there is no "correct speed" for that presentation to automatically play at. Instead, they put the control of the animation into your hands, having you manually scrub through it, by giving the document a large height, and having your Y scroll offset translate to the animation's timeline position.
In other words: this webpage could have (and with a lazier team, would have) been a video presentation. But instead, they went to the extra effort to give you a "video" that plays as you scroll it in a way that feels intuitively similar to scrolling through a webpage; where that interaction "affords" scrolling in fits and starts, to give yourself time to read the content. And where, when you're not scrolling, it is just a webpage, where you can highlight and copy the text, click citation links, hover over things, etc.
---
And sure, in this case, all the "animation" is doing here is moving you horizontally when you scroll vertically, and fading things in and out a bit. And you could accomplish that without hijacking the semantics of scrolling, by just making the page very, very wide.
But even today, it's still a bad idea, accessibility-wise, to ship a "very very wide webpage", because even in 2025, the OEM mice that come with Windows desktop PCs still don't give you any way to scroll horizontally. Which means that any "wide webpage that you are actually expected to navigate by scrolling horizontally" would effectively lock out the average office worker from consuming the content on their work computer (unless they realize that the browser gives them a horizontal scrollbar — which is unlikely, due to the non-discoverability of modern scrollbars.)
(And this first-order effect creates a second-order chicken-and-egg problem: nobody ships very wide webpages [or any other kind of UX views, other than maybe spreadsheets]; so few people even realize it's possible to scroll horizontally, even when they have a mouse or touch surface capable of emitting horizontal-scroll gestures. [Or they know that it does something, but only seemingly bad things — pulling at the edge of the view rather than actually scrolling — so they train themselves out of ever giving any diagonality to their scroll gestures and never intentionally try it.] ...and so we all avoid shipping wide webpages, because it would confuse those people.)
In other words, "hijacking the semantics of scrolling" in this way is an accessibility aid: both for the desktop users with one-scroll-axis mice, and for the people who just plain don't realize they can or should ever scroll/swipe horizontally.
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Though, I should note that even on this page, which is nearly a perfect case for "just let the user scroll horizontally", there's still the potential for users "getting lost" in a contentless void if you remove the "guardrails" imposed by the single-axis timeline-scrolling mechanism.
There's a bit of this page where you scroll vertically "normally" before and after the scroll-offset animation-timeline sync happens. If the page was literally translated into a wide canvas, there'd still be a bit at the top and bottom that'd just be empty on the right. A user could wind up scrolling down, then right, then up (or more likely, up-right or down-right, which new touchpad-users often do by accident)... and wind up in a blank nothing space.
There's no settled solution for this "getting lost in the empty-space parts of a large canvas" problem on the current web.
That's not to say that it couldn't be solved. Video games have had "camera-lock bounding boxes" for forever. Browsers could allow you to specify a "valid scroll boundary" [probably as a CSS shape, ala clip-path] for a given scrollable container, where the viewport of that container would "run into a wall" if any part of it would collide/intersect/exit the inner boundary of the shape. Then the "wide part" of the document would have a "low ceiling" and "high floor" compared to the beginning and end of the document. (Also, to replicate the current experience, the footer would exist only on the far right of the canvas; and the with-header zone on the far-left would probably also have a "high floor", while the with-footer zone on the far-right would have a "low ceiling.")
But there's no real demand for this kind of fine-grained viewport control... because of the second-order chicken-and-egg problem. Even though it'd be hella neat and many designers [who almost all have two-axis-scroll-capable devices] would love to play with it.
I use NoScript on desktop and was confronted with a complete jumble of words overlaying each other, each individual piece apparently word salad. I can't even understand what the intended purpose of the page is. My best guess is that it's trying to demonstrate a font... ?
I used to have a small burner, and would throw a lot of (cold) dry pasta into not so much boiling water. The water would just stop boiling from being cooled down from the pasta, and take 5-6 minutes to come to a boil again. Perhaps something similar?
Can't speak for all italian regions as there are many differences; but this "spooning some sauce over naked pasta" right on the plate always struck me as positively un-italian. I would always expect the pasta and sauce to be mixed in the kitchen, and the pasta to be completely coated in sauce when the plate reached my table. Maybe it's something italian-american ?
It might be a potato culture thing as it was historically common when pasta showed up on shelves in Sweden that the older generation just went with the instructions separately, cooking pre-peeled potatoes loses so much of it's flavor so if boiled, it's done so separately, getting a new ingredient you probably do it as you've always done.
Great read, putting into some beautiful prose undigested feelings that have been stewing in my stomach for a while. Maybe I should find a cabinet that's worth painting the back of to me
There’s a reason a ton of software engineers (let’s be real that’s 2000 pounds so I only need to find ten or twelve) do woodworking on the side.
If you take it diligently and treat it as fun, you can make amazing pieces in only ten times the time it would take a factory - but you do it your way with your attention to detail.
And you can make the back out of good wood and paint it, too. Nobody will ever know; it’s your secret between you and God.
And if you do hand-tool woodworking it's cheap. More time consuming, but also harder to screw up.
I prefer metalworking, but the equipment is larger & more expensive. And you still need a workbench for a bunch of the finishing steps (hand filing, polishing, engraving, etc.) so some basic woodworking is very handy for making said workbench.
I used gitlab.com CI a lot but then at some point all the restrictions started and now it is not worth it trying to figure out how much quota is enough, especially for small personal projects. I don't remember the last time I wrote a git lab CI yaml file.
I understand the sentiment but I can't bring myself to think valve is to blame or should be doing more. Getting a case of "Yes officer, I have an NO2 bottle in my trunk, but what it is plugged to is not actually the air intake for my car but something entirely unrelated, if you just take 2 hours to dig around and take it apart you'll also realize this"
Thats such a bad example. Ofc you can carry NO2 bottles plugged into something, if its not air intake of your car, and investigation should happen finding you not guilty.
When you're accused of breaking the law, your accuser must prove you have broken the law. If they cannot, there are actions you can take to recoup your damages.
Valve can ban you for any or no reason with no means of recourse or refund.
I think this perspective explain the issue well: you pretty much cannot unit test this (unless you consider the whole function a unit). It becomes very unclear what each lambda expression is about, the deeper you get.
I don't understand how the points you qualify as "copium" aren't valid?
People have owned and enjoyed classic cars for exactly these kinds of reasons. Not everything is about datasheet numbers and performance.
