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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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!
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.
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...
A cool recent one for large-scale infrastructure is "Engineering in Plain Sight":
https://practical.engineering/book
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.
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.
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?
For mathematics, there are the Princeton Companion to Mathematics and the Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics.
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.
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.
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.
If it had an abundance of woolly mammoths then it was likely this book. Highly recommended - covers everything from reactors to pin tumbler locks.
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.
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.
> Justified text is bad on the web.
Is there any reason why justified is okay printed but not on the web.
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.
> 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.
Accessibility issue doesn’t imply universality. Ideally, this should be a user preference setting.
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.
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.
> 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.
Those animations wont "peg" any relevant CPU, and they clearly had a purpose that was not about wasting cycles or battery.
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.
Disagree on the animations. They are both beautiful and detailed, clearly illustrating the point.
Your other criticism I agree with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not autistic and I agree that nonstop animations are distracting and detrimental.
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.
I just didn’t want people to interpret your comment as only autistic people being bothered by this.
On mobile there's far too much white space between sections, there are almost entire screens of nothing.
Looked up the author's main site:
https://alcohollick.com/
> Dan Hollick.
> Design, technically.
Blogs about using Figma to create things (like this).
The author should make a meta-entry about how he makes the (insanely beautiful) diagrams in the book (ideally walking through the process).
In the FAQ:
using hand??? not after effect ?
god damn, that's some patient making animation right there
Respect
He has more content with figures on another platform: https://typefully.com/DanHollick
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.
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)
CoreDumpped https://www.youtube.com/@CoreDumpped on YT is also a great animated reference or refresher on such topics..
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
There seems to be some content previews here: https://typefully.com/DanHollick
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.
Let us know if you find that site asking for my kid :)
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.
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.
Could this be it? TLS 1.3 connection, with every field in the packets labelled: https://tls13.xargs.org
No, not that one either. The page was static and full of high quality images dissecting the format structures.
Where the visuals interactive or static?
Static.
Nice landing page, but I'm confused. The header is about software, but many diagrams are about hardware.
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.
Looks like form-over-function to me. Cool looks, little content.
It's just an announcement page, for now.
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.
How do you cause a disturbance in an electric field without causing a disturbance in the magnetic field?
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.
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.
Pedantically correct but rather irrelevant to the topic of capacitive touch sensors. Your point just isn't helpful.
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.
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.
When you know the term gaussian (blur) it's trivial to do a Google search
Google does not return the best content.
It usually returns good enough content for me
How old is this? Copyright at the bottom of the page says "1990".
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
It's definitely not from 1990.
Probably the author himself is from 1990.
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>.
Just figma apparently, it's disclosed in the FAQ.
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?
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.
nice, but spotted several inaccuracies on the landing page. perhaps not the best reference.
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?
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.
This is awesome. Reminds me of that book "How Things Work" that breaks down the everyday item into understandable pieces
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':
https://typefully.com/DanHollick
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.
Guess we are judging this book by the cover
looks great, i'd definitely pay for a coffee table style version of a book like this!
On my old phone it was a smooth and stable experience. I really liked it.
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
Exceptional landing page, very exciting project.
the design is really cool, but the two columns are really confusing on a screen that is not tall enough to fully contain them
So.... none of the chapters are available?
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!
some people got all the discipline!
Very cool resource!
Honestly you had me at the graphics, really neat.
Same. That site is masterful example of just cool design.
Amazing design! Just joined the mailing list
Gorgeous UI
Really rad!
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.
wow, excellent job here!
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