Vanta.js: Animated 3D backgrounds for websites
vantajs.com
vantajs.com
HN has become one of the worst places to have one's work demonstrated at.
The second wave of objections tends (ironically!) to get upvoted to the top of the thread. Whether that's because people's minds are open to the creativity in the OP or because they enjoy disses of other people (i.e. the rest of the community) even more than they enjoy disses of someone's work, we can leave as an exercise to the reader.
This impulse governs the internet but it isn't the greatest thing on a site that values intellectual curiosity [2], because it's essentially reflexive: people see something that activates a previously existing grievance (be it battery-draining websites, bad internet comments, or what have you), which generates irritation and therefore energy to produce a post, but the post is actually litigating the generic grievance rather than responding to anything interestingly new. To get the latter, one has to perceive the new information and digest it in a way that leads to a new response—that is, one must be reflective rather than reflexive [3]—and that is a much slower process. But we definitely want reflective comments here.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
---
Edit: I'd like to add a response specifically to this:
> HN has become one of the worst places to have one's work demonstrated at
... by pointing out that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29786132 is currently at #1 on the front page. It's very much a question of which examples you notice and how much weight you put on them.
The post the other day about the individual leaving the C++ community (something like "Wrapping Up 2021") was an absolute nightmare thread basically dismissing the author as mentally unsound without really addressing the content.
Every post about nuclear causes a massive fight without even addressing the contents.
Every post about COVID is a shitshow.
Anything having to do with programming languages devolves into a war.
Not every thread is like this of course but a lot of these harmless, cool submissions often get completely wrecked by nay-sayers and just generally unpleasant people anymore, it seems.
I'm not sure what the solution is but I've definitely been discouraged from coming around as much as I used to.
The way these perceptions tend to work is that we notice a few data points and then jump to a general conclusion. Remember the so-called primitive tribe that supposedly could only count "1, 2, 3, many"? It seems that's basically how all our minds work. The trouble is that a stochastic data feed like HN inevitably generates as many such sequences as you could ask for. It's really the mind that decides which sequence to pick out and deem representative. This leads to false feelings of generality (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
(Edit: for example, look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29781019 and how positive the top comments are at the moment. The stochastic feed generates lots of those datapoints too!)
What's worse, those feelings have consequences, since they lead to a "why bother" sense of no longer needing to take care of this place or do one's part of build up the culture. If it's all just a shitshow, why not just add more shit? everyone else is, right? Well, no—that's not true at all.
This is not to say that the problems you mention aren't real. They are, and it's important to work on them, and we spend a lot of time trying to persuade people to work on them. It's in everyone's interest to do that, so we can achieve at least part of what we all want here, which is to have an interesting internet forum that doesn't suck.
We should also all be cautious about seeing other people as the problem ("completely wrecked by nay-sayers and just generally unpleasant people anymore, it seems"). My experience is that if we look honestly at ourselves we find all the same things to be true there too, and that's a more productive place to work.
FWIW, I actually feel like it used to be much worse than it is today. At one point, it felt like it was practically a meme that the top post would be someone poo-pooing whatever was being discussed / shared. Maybe I've just become purposefully blind to the negativity or something, but I feel like I see a lot more interesting comments at the top these days.
It's not that those comments are necessarily bad—it's rather that those categories of comment reliably attract lots of upvotes for reasons other than intellectual curiosity. It's not in HN's interest to have them at the top of a thread, because their tendency to attract upvotes creates a feedback loop that the system can't break itself out of. They just sit there, accruing ever more mass and choking out more interesting conversation.
The solution is to have moderation (and to some extent software) carry out a countervailing function. That's basically what moderation is for, anyhow—to jig the system out of its default failure modes.
I was just writing about this here, btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29788303
(Someone observant might ask why we didn't do that to this very subthread, i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29781971, which is still at the top of the page. The answer is that the rest of the thread wasn't that great in this case. Had there been lots of curious conversation going on elsewhere on the page, we'd have downweighted the generic/meta subthread. It's still helpful to let those run sometimes, though, as a kind of valve for community self-reflection—we just want that to happen in places where it isn't choking out something better.)
Delaying comments from new users would be of dubious benefit to the community (many of the worst comments on HN are not as a rule coming from fresh new accounts, and that safeguard is easily gamed), and what we'd lose in exchange is pretty clear. It hasn't been adopted here for a reason, not just out of laziness.
I think because it could kill the thread, or demotivate the OP. People reflexively rejecting my contributions would demotivate me.
Definitely getting some 'can I copy your homework' vibes. But then again, if you use the original shader to educate yourself on how to render volumetric clouds... this is the kind of code you'll end up writing afterwards.
And pretty much everyone writing any shadercompo-style code ever ends up borrowing some techniques from iq :).
ngmi
Jokes aside, pretty much no client side javascript allows this restriction. Its a tale as old as view source.
My mantra is “do things worth suing over”. Prideful restrictive in line comments don't pass that bar for me.
That explanation might have made more sense a decade ago before these types of effects were ubiquitous on the web. Now, it's easier than ever for anyone to drag and drop one of these preset visual effects onto their webpage. There's nothing to it anymore, people have seen them, the shine has worn off: There's no longer anything 'special' about these special effects.
Worse (as another commenter posted about always seeing these effects on 'crypto coin' sites) these effects are often used on sites engaging in confidence tricks - relying on dazzling the viewer with visual effects to convince them that their fraudulent scheme is legitimate. I associate stuff like this [0] with 'scam'
[0] https://img.freepik.com/free-photo/gradient-dark-blue-futuri...
https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/three.js/r121/three.m... - 631.12kB https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/vanta@latest/dist/vanta.globe.m... - 15.20 kB
Few lines where?
That said, I love it, reminds me of the long gone http://www.dhteumeuleu.com/ projects. I would never, ever actually deploy it though, it's grindingly slow.
It's hard to judge from the linked page, since it's showing all the available effects. But I imagine if you're using just one that it adds up to something smaller than the typical huge "hero images" on a lot of pages.
I did also mention an unofficial builder where you can bundle just the parts of three.js you need in another comment.
Very cool tool!
Also, the simpler the operation, the higher the chance v8 optimises it pretty well.
https://www.accenture.com/us-en
That's with a few minutes of just searching various consulting type firms.
It can be a good way of turning your computer into a heater ;)
Side-note to waste of battery/compute: it was not for a general purpose web page, but for a tablet device that is always plugged in to act as a idle animation.
Anyhow, works fine with Chrome on Linux and on Android. And probably every other combo that's not Apple.
I really like the Waves preset.
Repeat after me:
It’s a website, not a power point presentation
It’s a website, not a power point presentation
It’s a website, not a power point presentation
It turned out that by make a website she meant create a power point presentation that she could upload to the internet.
And that’s supposed to be good version of this, so imagine all the copy cat knock offs.