The5thElephant

Joined 9 years ago

Karma
449
Submissions
134
Member since
Sep 28
Product designer and CSS developer building fun and useful tools like https://visible.page, https://animxyz.com, and https://yaherd.co
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
Figma on desktop is an Electron app I believe. Figma chose to build a custom webGL rendering engine for their design canvas, so the core issue is that technical decision early on (probably allowed for some better performance and multiplayer back then). Figma is stuck with wanting to control their rendering and allow for non-product stuff like Figjam or the new Draw tools, but it will inherently hold them back from providing a really good design/dev handoff and always will hold designers back because it doesn't use CSS web rendering.
Comment · 1 year ago
Exactly this. Thank you.

We need a Blender-like design tool specifically for product design. Using HTML/CSS for rendering so it covers most web needs and that usually more than encompasses native app-layout emulation. Open source, technical, and not expected to be picked up in a day or fully understood top-to-bottom by everyone.

The reason Figma is putting us into a design box is because it doesn't have all the CSS features that actually let you create incredible experiences.

Comment · 1 year ago
Because I can do way more meaningful design exploration and iteration if I am not constantly running into a tool's limitations. I work at a fast paced startup where my prototyping rapidly iterates into production and the vast majority of developers I have ever worked with don't really know CSS. If I want to implement something actually complex in layout it would be SO MUCH FASTER if I could show the devs how to do it in CSS correctly in the design tool. AND it would let me better test and explore how the complex layout interacts with real data and real users. Figma prototypes are terrible.

Figma is a great tool for 90% of basic and boring design. A lot of product design is not just basic and boring, and a lot of stuff I need simply cannot be reproduced in Figma. So yes I do just write the code directly, but that doesn't let me explore those complicated layouts and iterate on them visually the same way I could if it was HTML/CSS in a Figma-like design canvas.

Comment · 1 year ago
Sketch has the same issue with handoff. Sketch does not use CSS for rendering either.
Comment · 1 year ago
What about variables that don't use pixel units? Often values appear as hardcoded in dev-mode when they are actually meant to be a % unit or something else Figma doesn't support because Figma doesn't actually use CSS for rendering.

When my devs just copy whats in Figma dev-mode they get so much stuff wrong.

Comment · 1 year ago
I actually have the opposite problem with Figma. It is way too basic and simple, targeting every kind of design and the average designer skill level.

I work in complex SAAS product design. Basic things I can do in CSS I can't do in Figma. Things like a table? Yeah it is entirely faked and awful in Figma. Don't even get me started on anything more complicated than flex rows and columns.

Half the debate over designer/dev handoff in the industry right now is simply because of Figma's limitations and the refusal of designers and front-end devs alike to learn HTML and CSS.

We need a Blender-like tool for web and app product design. Highly capable and advanced, you aren't expected to know all of it, and it can do anything you want it to.

I need a tool that is more than just a fancy rectangle drawer.

Comment · 1 year ago
PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) would not have been possible without a completely unrelated discovery of a heat-resistant bacteria by a federally funded scientist years earlier. Is it possible that eventually a privately funded effort may have figured out that some bacteria can survive in temperatures beyond what was generally considered possible and connected that to replicating DNA? Yeah maybe, but it seems extremely less likely.

Your black and white way of looking at this is naive at face value. We need both federal and private funded research. Is there fraud in science? Yes. So your answer is throw it all out instead of rooting out the fraud? Somehow expect fraud not to exist in privately funded research? Your comments here are so myopically driven by a bias against something rather than what is the best outcome for scientific research.

Comment · 1 year ago
Peter Watts is fantastic. Very different tone from a lot of other scifi, with some very clever and dark ideas.
Comment · 1 year ago
Not doing basic research, and your research is entirely driven by short-term profit motives rather than long term benefit of humanity.
Comment · 1 year ago
Funny enough I also got diagnosed with gout once in my 20s. I have always had somewhat bad toes/bunions (probably partially genetic, and partially wearing only tight soccer shoes as a kid) and I went to a wedding wearing some new leather shoes that I hadn't broken in yet. The next day I woke up with a fever and horrific pain in the sides of my toes. Went to doctor and they did some tests and were also seemingly surprised at the results indicating gout. They asked me to come back in a week to double check, and by then my symptoms were gone and the tests no longer indicated gout.

Our bodies are such strange mechanisms.

Comment · 1 year ago
Why have I heard so many stories of doctors not wanting to diagnose something as Lyme disease?
Comment · 1 year ago
Honestly main reason is the UI and speed.

Cursor has consistently felt faster and easier to use with better inline auto-complete and faster large edits in chat than VSCode ever did. The way suggestions and chat is shown is just a bit easier to read and more elegantly presented.

These things make a big difference.

Comment · 1 year ago
Looking at the performance it's quite clearly much faster than equivalent effects done in traditional web browser rendering or in design tools.
Comment · 1 year ago
It's not so simple. Background panning on modern TVs can look very juttery/flickery with motion-smoothing completely off. OLEDs can turn on and off very quickly, and 24 frames a second really isn't that many, so you end up seeing each frame rather distinctly instead of the more smoothed out and less instant frame updates you got on older TVs.

I've found the lowest motion-smoothing setting makes watching stuff like this far more enjoyable while avoiding the awful soap-opera effect you get from higher settings.

It felt awful to admit to myself since I hated on motion-smoothing for so long, but I simply cannot not see the 24 frames in pretty much all scenes where the camera is panning and background has to move a lot.

Comment · 1 year ago
He is a serial liar, but we can also actually see the engineering progress which is remarkable regardless of his overinflated timelines.

His lying doesn't change the incredible work by those engineers and other employees of SpaceX.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton