Hacker News Reader

smolgumballon Median product "lifespan" has fallen from ~4y down to ~1.5y

Anecdotally, I've found I'm far less interested in adopting new products and rethinking my workflows amidst a sea of half-baked and short-lived products / services.

Instead, I'm stripping back to basics, building small tools to solve specific problems, and find myself vastly preferring established software with a track record of keeping feature-bloat down and the problem-space focused.

smolgumballon To my students

Absolutely wild to see this take downvoted. While it's abundantly clear that Hacker News has long since become a mouthpiece for the AI investment machine, I really hadn't felt the loss of strong engineering ethos until recently.

smolgumballon Godot Arrives in the Epic Games Store

I wonder if they patch a base installation of some kind (think: a core project selector / launcher) and then individual projects contain a copy of the engine at time of creation?

smolgumballon Godot Arrives in the Epic Games Store

I truly cannot describe the amount of confusion that courses through me each time I open the Epic Launcher. I know that Epic decided to create it using the Unreal Engine UMG technology, but it truly shines as one of the most sluggish applications on my entire PC.

At this point, I would _gladly_ accept an Electron application in it's place. Just wild to me that UX teams at Epic seem happy to deliver this to users.

smolgumballon Godot Arrives in the Epic Games Store

Happy to see Godot continuing it's climb as a viable engine. What a journey it's been for the creators!

smolgumballon Framer's Magic Motion

Love this explainer.

One thing I noticed that often isn't caught due to platform differences is when "Hide types" is pressed, a scrollbar will appear on most browsers on Windows 10. This draws the eye so harshly that most - if not all - of the magic of the animation is ruined.

I wish that Windows 10 had an option to "hide scrollbars until necessary" like macOS does, but sadly this continues to be a bit of an edge case for FE work.

smolgumballon Netlify expands minutes, bandwidth, but charges some teams more

Huge bummer for us at work today. Agency setting, lots of devs coming and going, external collaborators. Equating "active users" with Git commit logs is hugely disingenuous and feels like a dirty cash grab from Netlify execs. VC funding strikes again, I suppose...

smolgumballon Brave and Firefox to intercept links that force-open in Microsoft Edge

I've started using Account Surfer on Windows to avoid this issue, as well as the general workflow issue of "I want to open any link I click in one of many browsers." The developer has also been very responsive to emails, bug reports and feature requests.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/account-surfer/9phvp9rjr7r...