HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

micheljansen

3,259 karma · joined May 9, 2010

Generalist UX designer and tinkerer. Currently based in the Hague.

http://micheljansen.org

submissionscomments
micheljansen··on Tesla Roadster
I guess that puts the final nail in the coffin of the 2019 Roadster that was announced but never arrived. Shame, because I loved how it looked. Some of its aesthetic lives on in the Highland Model 3 at least.
micheljansen··on Empty shelves likely at Nederlands Albert Heijn due to "Cyber incident"
That’s a separate incident (but probably not a coincidence)
micheljansen··on Intellectuals Are Fucking Idiots
Unfortunately it seems that many leading figures in the tech industry live by the absolute opposite of these. Just look at Elon Musk, Sam Altman, DHH... the list goes on.
micheljansen··on Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard
Temu Sans is very on the nose.
micheljansen··on Super ZSNES – GPU Powered SNES Emulator
Impressive, but oh man, the transition from the original ZSNES User Interface from my childhood to the UI of Super ZSNES was jarring to say the least. Nostalgia is powerful:

https://imgur.com/a/R63BKTe

micheljansen··on Mac Mini and Mac Studio Supply Shortages
This would be a clever time to introduce a "Mac Neo Mini" (e.g. a cheaper mac mini alternative with a mobile CPU like the A18 Pro in the MacBook Neo). Probably won't happen due to shortages of A18 CPUs but they would sell like hotcakes.
micheljansen··on "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"
If you don't know Ben Eater, check out his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/beneater

WARNING: nerd snipe material.

micheljansen··on Show HN: Awesome J2ME
Thanks for making me feel old! One of my first real jobs involved MIDP/J2ME development. I cannot say I loved the platform, but it somehow felt more magical back then to develop something and run it on a Nokia brick than (mobile) development of today.
micheljansen··on Shader Glass
The way I understand it, the shader overlay can only modify what is already being rendered below. It does not have access to the underlying application logic, 3D geometry or other internals of a game that you would need for this. You can increase the contrast etc of a game but you cannot see through walls or anything, so it probably won’t help you cheat.
micheljansen··on Shader Glass
That's so clever! Plenty of emulators and games don't have native support for these kinds of shaders so just put a filter over it.
micheljansen··on Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B
Ah yes, Bending Spoons. The company known for:

* Acquiring Evernote, laying off most of its staff and raising prices.

* Acquiring WeTransfer, announcing 75% layoffs and pissing off their most loyal users by changing their T&Cs to grant themselves license to use their content for AI training purposes.

* Acquiring Filmic and laying off all their staff.

* Acquiring Komoot and laying off most of its staff.

Now would be a good time to poach some Vimeo engineers.

micheljansen··on E-paper display reaches the realm of LCD screens
For mobile devices that matters, but plenty of use cases for stationary displays, including desktops.
micheljansen··on OpenMower – An open source lawn mower
"Let's be honest: The current generation of robotic lawn mowers sucks. Basically all of these bots drive in a random direction until they hit the border of the lawn, rotate for a randomized duration and repeat. I think we can do better!"

The funny thing is: this actually works incredibly well. Perimeter wires are a PITA to install, but once that's done, they are a very practical and flawless method for making sure the robot does not escape into the neighbour's yard or worse. The random movement is really effective too. What exactly can a smart robot do better?

Removing the need for perimeter wires would be great, as long as it works 100% flawlessly. Obstacle detection would also be nice, so I can avoid my mower chewing up the toys my kid sometimes leaves lying around (though it is a great motivation to clean up!)

micheljansen··on Show HN: Reviving a 20 year old OS X App
I came here to say the same thing! I used an ancient (DOS) version of it to get me through high school French, German, Latin and so on. Fond memories.
micheljansen··on Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
That’s by Jeffrey Zeldman
micheljansen··on A tricky Commodore PET repair: tracking down 6 1/2 bad chips
Thanks I will see if I can get my hands on an oscilloscope and look at the 12v and 5v rails.
micheljansen··on A tricky Commodore PET repair: tracking down 6 1/2 bad chips
Amazing that they were able to figure this out. I have a PET that also sometimes boots up into a garbled screen similar to the one pictured in the article. I am usually able to get past it with a few hard resets. I don’t have access to (or much knowledge of) logic analysers, but this almost makes it look doable to figure out the problem.
micheljansen··on Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]
I was doing mobile development on a home healthcare product during this period. The product was built around Nokia’s line of phones with NFC built in, so we had good ties with them and would always get prototypes of their next generation of NFC-capable device ahead of time to get the software ready ahead of launch.

Shortly after the launch of the iPhone, Nokia canned the prototype S60 model we were working on without announcing any alternative. I always imagined they scrapped the whole pipeline of successors they had planned. The iPhone was at least 2 generations ahead of the unreleased prototype. Ended up having to port the whole thing to a different device from Samsung.

micheljansen··on Starlink Direct to Cell
Awesome proposition, but good grief what a terrible website. It looks like some dodgy knockoff site and scrolling is broken. Not really inspiring confidence.
micheljansen··on Anger over sale of George Orwell archive
'Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.'
micheljansen··on A rare disorder makes people see monsters
Nightmares differ from night terrors though. To quote Wikipedia:

Night terrors are distinct from nightmares.[31] In fact, in nightmares there are almost never vocalization or agitation, and if there are any, they are less strong in comparison to night terrors.[31] In addition, nightmares appear ordinarily during REM sleep in contrast to night terrors, which occur in NREM sleep.[2] Finally, individuals with nightmares can wake up completely and easily and have clear and detailed memories of their dreams.[2][31]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_terror

For a good description of what they are like, read the "Signs and Symptoms" section of that article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_terror#Signs_and_symptom...).

micheljansen··on A rare disorder makes people see monsters
That may help for bad dreams, but not for night terrors (which are medically a different thing, where you are not consciously awake).
micheljansen··on A rare disorder makes people see monsters
My son has night terrors and if I were living in the Middle Ages, I would probably have called in a priest for an exorcism by now. I can absolutely imagine that in less enlightened times, where we did not have access to the internet, peer reviewed journals and MRI machines, people with night terrors were believed to be possessed by demons.
micheljansen··on The lie of music discovery algorithms
I don't have evidence for this, but my working theory is that there is too much money to be made in promoting certain artists / songs for music recommender systems to remain objective. If supermarkets auction off premium shelf space to the highest bidder, what's stopping Spotify, Tidal, Apple etc. from doing the same? Want to create a new pop star? Hand over the cash and we'll put it in millions of people's "Discover" playlist.
micheljansen··on Walmart Selling MacBook Air with M1 Chip for $649 Starting Today
We still have a ton of these in use for general office work and they are still more than fine. For light use these should be good plenty longer, but I would not pay full price for them anymore.
micheljansen··on Pipes: A spiritual successor to Yahoo Pipes
Shortcuts is indeed the (more than spiritual) successor to Automator. Scratch was pretty famous in interface design circles in the early 2000s (it was a pretty high profile MIT Media Lab project). I'm sure the Automator developers were aware of it, but it may also have been a case of both having a rich neighbour [1]. Agentsheets, for example, predates both by over 10 years [2]

[1] https://folklore.org/A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AgentSheets

micheljansen··on Pipes: A spiritual successor to Yahoo Pipes
Apple's Shortcuts seems heavily inspired by the visual programming language that Scratch uses: https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts-mac/intro-to-how-s...
micheljansen··on What's the difference between a motor and an engine? (2013)
Same in Dutch (a Germanic language).

Then again, we colloquially call both a motorcycle and its engine “motor”.

micheljansen··on The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder
DynaMike from that page deserves special mention for accidentally including some browser history with... you guess... https://tcrf.net/DynaMike
micheljansen··on The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife
Not mine, the article mentions subservience.
Page 1 of 22Next →