tenacious_tuna2 days ago
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...
rkuykendall-com2 days ago
A cool recent one for large-scale infrastructure is "Engineering in Plain Sight":
progbitsa day ago
I was disappointed in that one unfortunately.
Too much name dropping of random pieces without offering any insights why they are needed. You learn much more just skimming through a wiki article.
MisterTea2 days ago
Amazing book for sure. David Macaulay has a few other books, four of which were turned into educational animated PBS specials. My mother got us the box set from PBS years ago.
berelig2 days ago
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?
kobennia day ago
For mathematics, there are the Princeton Companion to Mathematics and the Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics.
tenacious_tuna2 days ago
it's been a couple decades since I've read it, but I'd buy it again as an adult. Like the peer comment says, "Engineering in Plain Sight" purports to be similar and I bought my dad a copy last christmas. Planning to spend some of my professionial development stipend on a copy this year.
kridsdale12 days ago
The Way Things Work is up to date. I loved it in the mid 90s and just bought a new copy for my kid this year. It has SSDs, OLEDs, Gravity Wave Detection, etc.
Acrobatic_Road2 days ago
I had the same thought. I don't remember if it was exactly this book, but I remember reading a book that explained all kinds of engineering concepts for my kid brain. And I remember the latter part of the book had some computer science content like how compression works.
vunderba2 days ago
If it had an abundance of woolly mammoths then it was likely this book. Highly recommended - covers everything from reactors to pin tumbler locks.
Apfel2 days ago
Stunningly beautiful landing page. I would never normally comment on the aesthetics of anything in the dev sphere but that completely blew me away. I'll preorder for sure.
I'd echo the other comment mentioning that a coffee-table version of this would be great.
dimal2 days ago
Agreed, it's aesthetically beautiful. It should be a coffee table book. But for the web, it has terrible usability. Really, really terrible in multiple ways. My comments will be harsh, but since the creator is obviously very skilled, he should know better.
Why multicolumn text? So it looks like an old printed manual? At first view, it's not clear where the first column ends. This is not something we see on the web (because there's no need for it), so it's not clear that the content flows from one column to the next. When the viewport is sized to two columns, I need to scroll down to finish the first column, then scroll back up to read where it continues on the second column.
Justified text is bad on the web. We're starting to get some better features to make it usable, but it's not widely supported, so right ragged text is always more readable.
There are numerous animations that never stop. This is highly distracting and makes it very difficult to read the text.
I'm sure there are more issues but the site is so unusable for me, I won't continue trying.
So, yeah. It's gorgeous design. I love it. But it's for the sake of aesthetics, not for the user's sake. It's completely unusable to me. Since this is the first installment, I hope the designer will keep the aesthetics but improve the usability in future installments.
dsego2 days ago
> Justified text is bad on the web.
Is there any reason why justified is okay printed but not on the web.
wavemode2 days ago
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.
lenkite14 hours ago
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.
bsoles2 days ago
> Justified text is bad on the web. ...so right ragged text is always more readable.
I disagree. I like justified text on the web as well as in print. To me, jagged right hand side of the text column is more disturbing than uneven spaces between words. So, you cannot universally declare that justified text is an accessibility issue.
layer82 days ago
Accessibility issue doesn’t imply universality. Ideally, this should be a user preference setting.
vunderba2 days ago
I'd like to see some sources on this. I've seen good and bad examples of justified text, and it's also highly dependent on the font as well.
Narishma2 days ago
> There are numerous animations that never stop. This is highly distracting and makes it very difficult to read the text.
And pegs the CPU and drains the battery.
oneovertena day ago
Those animations wont "peg" any relevant CPU, and they clearly had a purpose that was not about wasting cycles or battery.
Narishmaa day ago
They still end up doing that, regardless of the intention. It would be better if they only animated once, or just when you hover over them instead of constantly.
croemer2 days ago
On mobile there's far too much white space between sections, there are almost entire screens of nothing.
salomonk_mur2 days ago
Disagree on the animations. They are both beautiful and detailed, clearly illustrating the point.
Your other criticism I agree with.
dimal2 days ago
I agree that they are beautiful and detailed, clearly illustrating the point. I really, really love them. I'd love to have them on my wall.
That's not my problem. My problem is that they never stop animating. For me and many other people, when something is moving in our visual field, it is very, very difficult to read the text next to it.
Full disclosure: I'm autistic. I was wondering whether I should mention that. All the issues that I mentioned exclude me from using this resource. So maybe we could call these accessibility issues instead of usability issues. When I disclose that I'm autistic, it tends to evoke two types of responses:
1) Oh, sorry, we'll make it accessible. But they do it out of shame, which I don't like. I'd rather it's out of empathy.
2) You're too small of a segment to care about.
But I'm beginning to think that the only difference between usability and accessibility is the size of the population that's being excluded by the design. I chose to keep my autisticness separate to see how people responded when I presented this as a usability issue instead of an accessibility issue.
I'm only asking that designers have empathy for all possible users of their media. That's all. That's what good design is supposed to do.
NewsaHackOa day ago
There has to be a middle ground though. For instance, I am definitely the opposite; I would feel as the site would be less usable to me if it just ran once and I had to reload the page or spam click replay if I wanted to see the animation again. I'd imagine people who are slow readers or with dyslexia would feel the same, and would make similar aurguement that you are making that them auto playing the animation assuming everyone had same reading speed when the animation is in focus are not taking thier cohort in consideration due to the small size of the group. I am sure that there are some colorblindness condition that would find the colors of the site difficult to distinguish as well. I would be be more emphatic to your view point if this was a school/employment/healthcare/goverment document, but it isnt realistic to say a primarily artistic/design project has to cater to everyone's specific accessibility concerns.
eertamia day ago
I believe the middle ground is implementing `prefers-reduced-motion` alternatives for the looping animations.
Then it would still loop for you, but not negatively impact people who are using reduced motion settings in their browser/OS.
layer82 days ago
I’m not autistic and I agree that nonstop animations are distracting and detrimental.
dimal2 days ago
I hope you didn’t think I meant to imply that this is only bad for autistic people. I know that many other people have the same issues. But when I mention these problems to people that don’t have difficulty, sometimes they assume it’s just me and a tiny minority.
layer82 days ago
I just didn’t want people to interpret your comment as only autistic people being bothered by this.
bitwizea day ago
Probably got a lot of neurospicy folks here on Hackernews, so there's less of a stigma associated with it, and more people familiar with the kind of sensory issues you deal with.
I feel you. I can't have autocomplete on when I'm coding, partly because having video game stuff happening in my field of view while I'm trying to focus throws me off. I'd rather just remember the name.
neogodless2 days ago
Looked up the author's main site:
> Dan Hollick.
> Design, technically.
Blogs about using Figma to create things (like this).
georgewsinger2 days ago
The author should make a meta-entry about how he makes the (insanely beautiful) diagrams in the book (ideally walking through the process).
psadauskas2 days ago
In the FAQ:
07 How do you make the illustrations?
By hand, in Figma. There's no secret - it's as complicated as it looks.tonyhart7a day ago
using hand??? not after effect ?
god damn, that's some patient making animation right there
__loam2 days ago
Respect
behnamoha day ago
He has more content with figures on another platform: https://typefully.com/DanHollick
ivl2 days ago
The pair of animations on the page are beautifully done, not just technically but aesthetically as well. If the rest of the book is like that I'll be getting a copy.
vivzkestrel2 days ago
Commendable effort, i would also like to recommend some topics/chapters/lessons whatever you want to call it - How microprocessors and microcontrollers work - Types of storage => RAM / ssd/ hdd / flash drives and storage formats NTFS, FAT32 - OS stuff (theading, multiprocessing, coroutines, scheduling, paging, priority) - Some data structures stuff (trees, stacks, queues, graphs etc)
joshbaptiste2 days ago
CoreDumpped https://www.youtube.com/@CoreDumpped on YT is also a great animated reference or refresher on such topics..
vivzkestrela day ago
also would like to add a section about packets, network packets, tcp packets, udp packets, http packets. would be real nice to see what each packet is like in a very visually friendly way
felipemesquita2 days ago
The subtitle “A reference manual for people who design and build software” seems at odds with the description:
> This book won’t teach you how to actually make software […] It’s a manual that explains how the things you use everyday actually work. You don’t need to be technical to read this - there are a lot of pictures and diagrams to do the heavy lifting. You just need to be curious.
dijksterhuis2 days ago
A thing for a specific audience, not a thing with a specific purpose, is how i read the subtitle.
the subtitle doesnt say what the reference manual is a reference for. just that software people might like it.
jaapz2 days ago
Audience: people who design and build software
Subject: how the things used every day by people who design and build software work
Not the subject: how to design and build software
chromanoid2 days ago
yeah, I totally agree.
It's like there was a shift in goals after the author made the title. Maybe explaining the basics was so much fun, that the initial idea got lost... I also don't think knowing how a crt monitor works is instrumental for people who want to make software. The domain is cool, but it doesn't match the content. whatissoftware.com might be better.
when it is explained how pixel, gpu or llm work, I would at least expect some intro to Von-Neumann-Architecture.
meindnoch2 days ago
The table of contents seems to have a whole chapter on "AI and ML" before starting the next chapter with "What is a byte?". Funny.
0xEF2 days ago
I'm getting the impression that the book will not be organized in any real linear or iterative order, just sections that allow you to jump around and read what you want.
croemer2 days ago
I'm confused, I can't find the content anywhere. I clicked on the TOC items but that just underlined the words. Is this just an announcement?
falcor842 days ago
Yes, just an announcement. There's an FAQ at the bottom:
>When will it launch?
> I'm not entirely sure yet. I'd love to get it out before the European summer this year. It's a lot of work to illustrate everything so you might need to have some patience.
skadamat2 days ago
There seems to be some content previews here: https://typefully.com/DanHollick
XCSme2 days ago
Nice landing page, but I'm confused. The header is about software, but many diagrams are about hardware.
stronglikedan2 days ago
It'll come in handy for when I try to destroy a hard drive by getting the actuator arm to move back and forth at the drive's harmonic frequency.
robocata day ago
When your finger gets close to the [touch] screen it causes a disturbance in the *magnetic* field that the electrodes sense.
marcosdumaya day ago
Well, it's a disturbance on the AC properties... so both.
But yeah, we usually talk about capacitance as an "electrical-only" phenomenon. It's quite weird to se it referred as magnetic.
constantcryinga day ago
How do you cause a disturbance in an electric field without causing a disturbance in the magnetic field?
robocata day ago
To imply capacitive touch sensing uses magnetics is just so wrong - I can't imagine how someone trying to be technical could make such an egregious error.
A material can affect an electric field without affecting a magnetic field: electrically conductive (versus insulator that won't affect a field so much except via dielectric effects).
A material can affect a magnetic field without much affecting an electric field e.g. ferrites are non-conducting.
A finger changes the capacitance between two "plates" and that is what is detected.
Also the attached drawing shows diamonds but I've only ever seen flat wires myself (when looking closely at touch screens you can sometimes see the transparent sense wires). But I'm no specialist and I don't know how correct the drawing is.
constantcryinga day ago
Changes in the electric field of a capacitor cause changes in the magnetic field.
Electric and magnetic fields aren't Independent. Again, I asked about disturbances, Maxwells equations make it pretty obvious that changes in one cause changes in the other.
robocata day ago
Pedantically correct but rather irrelevant to the topic of capacitive touch sensors. Your point just isn't helpful.
kmoser2 days ago
The illustrations are definitely the secret sauce that makes this so engaging and informative. I'd also like to see links to where I can learn more about particular topics online. For example:
> Or maybe you’ve wondered why we call it a Gaussian blur?
Nowhere is Carl Friedrich Gauss mentioned, which is unfortunate. This should really link to the Wikipedia entry for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur.
sfn422 days ago
When you know the term gaussian (blur) it's trivial to do a Google search
internettera day ago
Google does not return the best content.
sfn42a day ago
It usually returns good enough content for me
kookamamie2 days ago
Looks like form-over-function to me. Cool looks, little content.
scubbo2 days ago
It's just an announcement page, for now.
clausz2 days ago
How old is this? Copyright at the bottom of the page says "1990".
gregschlom2 days ago
I think it's a cool little easter egg. Goes well with the technical illustration of a 3.5" floppy disk at the top and the pixelated font for the titles.
Also, maybe the author meant to say he started thinking about this book since 1990, too.
Either way the copyright year doesn't matter. You can put anything
junon2 days ago
It's definitely not from 1990.
rossanta day ago
Probably the author himself is from 1990.
pier252 days ago
How were the animations done?
From inspecting the DOM it's just animated SVGs but I'm guessing these were authored with some other tool.
Initially I thought these were made with Rive but AFAIK their engine runs on <canvas>.
oneovertena day ago
Just figma apparently, it's disclosed in the FAQ.
thallavajhulaa day ago
When you sign up for the mailing list, you get a response back with status: 200 | created.
chef's kiss Something so basic and yet, so aesthetically pleasing.
MatthiasWandel2 days ago
nice, but spotted several inaccuracies on the landing page. perhaps not the best reference.
zh32 days ago
Yes, very first item:-
> When your finger gets close to the screen it causes a disturbance in the magnetic field that the electrodes sense.
Sure should be capacitive?
WillAdams2 days ago
Which chapters are done?
I was very excited to go to (and link/reference) Chapter 2: Fonts and Vectors but it doesn't seem to be done yet?
The progress indicator shows that this is only just begun?
croemer2 days ago
No chapters are done - it's a bit weird that this fact is buried deep down in the FAQs. I would have expected the fact it's an announcement to be mentioned above the fold.
pflanzea day ago
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.
evanletz2 days ago
This is awesome. Reminds me of that book "How Things Work" that breaks down the everyday item into understandable pieces
skadamat2 days ago
Lovely website! I stumbled into this other account by the same author that showcases some of the work that might end up in this 'book':
mindtarrif15 hours ago
Guess we are judging this book by the cover
khaledh2 days ago
Very nice. The design reminds me of a website that I forgot to bookmark a long while ago, it was about explaining network protocols at the wire level, and it had some of the most amazing visuals that I ever saw. It's a shame that I forgot what it was, and googling doesn't help. If anyone knows what I'm talking about please share the link.
virogenesis2 days ago
Let us know if you find that site asking for my kid :)
promiseofbeans2 days ago
Looks like it might have been VisualLand.net, which isn't around anymore. Looking at the archive of the site (https://web.archive.org/web/20130811073141/http%3A//www.visu...), most of their animations / diagrams were Flash, so no longer run, and don't seem to work with archive.org's emulator either.
khaledh2 days ago
No, that's not it unfortunately. It was a single page with a style of diagrams that shows a high-level format of something, with arrows to a zoomed-in version that details the structure of the fields. I remember its colour scheme being dominated by light blue and green, IIRC.
gecko62 days ago
Could this be it? TLS 1.3 connection, with every field in the packets labelled: https://tls13.xargs.org
khaledh2 days ago
No, not that one either. The page was static and full of high quality images dissecting the format structures.
truetraveller2 days ago
Where the visuals interactive or static?
khaledh2 days ago
Static.
bombelaa day ago
On my old phone it was a smooth and stable experience. I really liked it.
cjr2 days ago
looks great, i'd definitely pay for a coffee table style version of a book like this!
VoltCraft2 days ago
copyright 1990? I doubt that. layout and finish are first rate on this.signed up for the mailing list - hoping it will be touched again in 1991
agos2 days ago
the design is really cool, but the two columns are really confusing on a screen that is not tall enough to fully contain them
mattbee2 days ago
Exceptional landing page, very exciting project.
dirtybirdnj2 days ago
I really like those illustrations I hope you keep going with this progress. Looks great and I think it could be a very engaging tool because of its visual appeal.
Don't let the haters get to you. Let him cook people.
ChrisMarshallNY2 days ago
Very cool resource!
cusha day ago
Gorgeous UI
ValveFan6969a day ago
I'm an Atheist, and I would like to know if AI models have the ability to detect sarcasm? Is there a way to make them understand that? Or maybe just give context in parentheses of something sarcastic I'm about to say? If I wanted to, can I just tell the AI that everything I am about to say is sarcastic? Maybe put quotation marks over the things I am about to say so that the AI comprehends the context?
If anyone has done this and made success, I'd really like to know how you did it and if there's any tricks to accomplishing that.
coolThingsFirst2 days ago
So.... none of the chapters are available?
xabush2 days ago
Amazing design! Just joined the mailing list
martin_henk2 days ago
Really rad!
frank200225 days ago
wow, excellent job here!
yapyap2 days ago
Honestly you had me at the graphics, really neat.
game_the0ry2 days ago
Same. That site is masterful example of just cool design.
scop2 days ago
I'm sensing an uncomfortable amount of human labor behind this. Even worse it appears to be labor done for the sake of the thing itself. shudder Terrible and makes me feel bad about myself. Back to the AI slop I go!
exe34a day ago
some people got all the discipline!
khana2 days ago
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