7 ms·

This may not be the most valuable comment, but my goodness, the quality of this writeup and it's interactive descriptions of complex mechanical components AND t

This may not be the most valuable comment, but my goodness, the quality of this writeup and it's interactive descriptions of complex mechanical components AND their interactions is radically impressive. The treatment of complex topics in deeply visual and partially interactive ways, for me at least, is a remarkably helpful way to learn.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tomtheelder 4y ago
I almost couldn't believe the quality of this while reading it. Not just animations, but simulations? That perfectly illustrate the concept being discussed? Incredible. Not to mention the incredibly clear and articulate prose.
surement 4y ago
The author calling this a "blog post" really undersold it!
causi 4y ago
True multimedia is a lost art. We had it back in the 90s when software came on discs and it was a high-density, polished product that combined text, audio, video, and interactive elements on the same page. The internet taking over turned everything back into text, and then as bandwidth grew the only thing we thought to use it on was higher and higher bitrate video. When I was a kid I thought the future was going to be fully-integrated data. Like I would be able to pause a movie and click on anything I was seeing to get more information. Click an actor, get his bio and interviews about the movie and bloopers. Click a vehicle and get its model. Click a special effect and see how it was done or an animal and learn about that animal. Imagine watching Lord of the Rings and being able to instantly read the original lore of any object, location, or character just by clicking/tapping it. Hell, even the smallest things can radically change your experience. Imagine if Wikipedia articles had appropriate background music. I guess there's just no market.
- ghostbrainalpha 4y ago
  There is absolutely a market for your LOTR example. I think a kickstarter made LOTR or Harry Potter Interactive applications like you are purposing could charge $1,000 maybe. And I 100% align with your 90's prediction. What we gained going from Encarta to Wikipedia was amazing, but we shouldn't forget that we lost some things too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po3yW-wdLr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po3yW-wdLr0
  - gman83 4y ago
    Couldn't the Wikimedia Foundation raise some money to produce these kinds of videos? I wonder why they don't.
    - skyfaller 4y ago
      I think one problem is that it's difficult to make videos easy for anyone to edit, the way a wiki text page is. - The skills to edit video are more difficult to acquire, in part because - The hardware and software requirements can be expensive, and are not universally available - Once you've made a video, not everyone has the bandwidth to view it in high quality (certainly the first step to editing it) Wikimedia could hire people to make videos, but they could also hire people to write articles, and (generally?) don't because that's not how they roll. A Wikipedia-like platform for video would be fascinating, and worth pursuing, but a significant technological and social challenge.
      - zozbot234 4y ago
        You can already put instructional videos on Wikiversity. You're right that the editing workflow for raw video is a challenge, but I expect that support for editable animations, interactive simulation, etc. will also be added at some point. It requires some infrastructure for editing securely sandboxed code in-wiki, which is in the works anyway for the upcoming project Wikifunctions.
      - mgdlbp 4y ago
        There's Wikimedia Commons! It even (somewhat) addresses this particular issue by having a system for requesting specialized media-related edits—video editing, photo retouching, SVG editing, mapmaking, etc. For the unaware, Commons, a repository of media files, is but one of many Wikimedia "projects" (including Wikipedia). It's mostly used for images, but also hosts video, audio (including MIDI), 3D models (only STLs), and PDFs.Aside: considering what the Foundation seems to like doing, I'm surprised they don't do more to promote the "other" projects, especially to Wikipedia contributors—Wikipedia editors (even split by language) vastly outnumber those of the other projects, including Commons and Wikidata, which are multilingual. Commons' request system connects those who recognize needed edits but cannot make them with those who check the requests pages and are able to. There's the Graphics Lab[0] for edits to existing uploads, and File requests[1] for new uploads that are needed. Judging by the archives, they seem quite underutilized, though that might only be a sign of how few Commons contributors there are. Probably also has to do with the offloading of requests to local pages in many languages of Wikipedia.[2] [0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Graphic_Lab https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Graphic_Lab [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:File_requests https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:File_requests [2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5324355 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5324355 There's an interesting variation in the nature of barriers to being able to edit. Hardware and bandwidth cost money, but skills cost only time and software can be free. I'd say the Graphics Lab does decently in "teaching how to fish" through tutorials and lists of FOSS software. This contrasts with file requests, where there's no equivalent, because the most common reason that someone can't take a photo of something is that there physically aren't any instances of it nearby. This kind of barrier to contribution really isn't specific to media; analogously, not everyone has access to the same resources for researching edits to Wikipedia. Wikimedia's also trying to address that: everyone with >10 monthly edits in any project has free access to the databases participating in The Wikipedia Library.[3] Most are relatively specialized, however (IIRC, JSTOR is the most generally useful of the lot). [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library
remarkEon 4y ago
1000%. Sent this to my dad, and can't wait to talk this weekend. When I was a kid we would tinker around with watches in the basement but, alas, I had different interests and never really got around to truly understanding these mechanisms. I don't really know web development beyond setting up basic pages, but how the CAD was integrated into this is wonderful and I'd love to see more posts going through things like human joints or ICE, or maybe weapons ... other things where we kind of intuitively grasp how they work, but don't know the details. This entire blog seems to do a lot of that. So cool.
- positivejam 4y ago
  He has one on the ICE actually, though I don't have the link handy.
  - mbrubeck 4y ago
    https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/ https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/
    - remarkEon 4y ago
      Wonderful! Showed this to my wife who, bless her, hates stuff like this and she’s captivated.
pontus 4y ago
I came here to write the exact same thing. Amazing content.
justusthane 4y ago
His post on how GPS works is equally excellent[1] (as are, I'm sure, the rest of his posts). [1]: https://ciechanow.ski/gps/ https://ciechanow.ski/gps/
bambax 4y ago
Came here to say the same thing. This incredibly well done, well written, well executed, well... everything. How does one find, not only the talent, but the patience to do such incredible work... Mind boggling.
sixothree 4y ago
Does anyone know the tooling used to create these?
- phailhaus 4y ago
  According to his Twitter, he just uses bare canvas and WebGL. [1] What a legend. You can inspect the page and read the source js, it is unminified. [1] https://twitter.com/BCiechanowski/status/1484013009219375105?s=20&t=8bN1SiOFjoWM3v1hB9Uehg https://twitter.com/BCiechanowski/status/1484013009219375105...
  - amelius 4y ago
    Very impressive. The only thing that would make it better is a physics engine that would allow the user to play with gears etc.
    - ManuelKiessling 4y ago
      You mean like https://ciechanow.ski/gears/ https://ciechanow.ski/gears/ ?
stephbu 4y ago
Came here to write the same - that was amazing...
alimov 4y ago
I think that the person(s) that created the interactive visuals would find this to be a helpful comment. Radically impressive is a fitting description. I don’t think I’ve ever seen and interacted with anything like it, although I imagine people working with CAD software get to see and mess around with this kind of stuff pretty frequently.
unfocused 4y ago
Agreed! This is top quality writing AND interactive illustrations.
soheil 4y ago
To be 100% honest I found it very intimidating to even begin reading it. It's such a time sink (no pun intended) and a huge wall of text (with figures and interactivity nonetheless).
- duderific 4y ago
  I usually get about half way through his posts, see how much is left and just give up. Nonetheless I get a lot out of them.
  - cardinalfang 4y ago
    The end was the best bit. I have seen good explanations of the escapement and timing gears before, but not of the crown adjuster mechanisms.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Dont give up. Pause between sections and come back tomorrow. Put a reminder on your calendar.
pcurve 4y ago
This might be the single best work of art on the Web I've seen since 1995. Nothing else even comes close.
fuddle 4y ago
I wonder how long it took him to put together this blog post?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hamburglar 4y ago
And in true HN style we react to such objectively awesome content by having a slapfight over whether the author wrote the code in the “right” way.
qorrect 4y ago
My first thoughts were "This is what the internet was invented for". So impressive.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tomtheelder 4y ago

I almost couldn't believe the quality of this while reading it. Not just animations, but simulations? That perfectly illustrate the concept being discussed? Incredible. Not to mention the incredibly clear and articulate prose.

surement 4y ago

The author calling this a "blog post" really undersold it!

causi 4y ago

True multimedia is a lost art. We had it back in the 90s when software came on discs and it was a high-density, polished product that combined text, audio, video, and interactive elements on the same page. The internet taking over turned everything back into text, and then as bandwidth grew the only thing we thought to use it on was higher and higher bitrate video. When I was a kid I thought the future was going to be fully-integrated data. Like I would be able to pause a movie and click on anything I was seeing to get more information. Click an actor, get his bio and interviews about the movie and bloopers. Click a vehicle and get its model. Click a special effect and see how it was done or an animal and learn about that animal. Imagine watching Lord of the Rings and being able to instantly read the original lore of any object, location, or character just by clicking/tapping it. Hell, even the smallest things can radically change your experience. Imagine if Wikipedia articles had appropriate background music. I guess there's just no market.

ghostbrainalpha 4y ago
There is absolutely a market for your LOTR example. I think a kickstarter made LOTR or Harry Potter Interactive applications like you are purposing could charge $1,000 maybe. And I 100% align with your 90's prediction. What we gained going from Encarta to Wikipedia was amazing, but we shouldn't forget that we lost some things too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po3yW-wdLr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po3yW-wdLr0
- gman83 4y ago
  Couldn't the Wikimedia Foundation raise some money to produce these kinds of videos? I wonder why they don't.
  - skyfaller 4y ago
    I think one problem is that it's difficult to make videos easy for anyone to edit, the way a wiki text page is. - The skills to edit video are more difficult to acquire, in part because - The hardware and software requirements can be expensive, and are not universally available - Once you've made a video, not everyone has the bandwidth to view it in high quality (certainly the first step to editing it) Wikimedia could hire people to make videos, but they could also hire people to write articles, and (generally?) don't because that's not how they roll. A Wikipedia-like platform for video would be fascinating, and worth pursuing, but a significant technological and social challenge.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      You can already put instructional videos on Wikiversity. You're right that the editing workflow for raw video is a challenge, but I expect that support for editable animations, interactive simulation, etc. will also be added at some point. It requires some infrastructure for editing securely sandboxed code in-wiki, which is in the works anyway for the upcoming project Wikifunctions.
    - mgdlbp 4y ago
      There's Wikimedia Commons! It even (somewhat) addresses this particular issue by having a system for requesting specialized media-related edits—video editing, photo retouching, SVG editing, mapmaking, etc. For the unaware, Commons, a repository of media files, is but one of many Wikimedia "projects" (including Wikipedia). It's mostly used for images, but also hosts video, audio (including MIDI), 3D models (only STLs), and PDFs.Aside: considering what the Foundation seems to like doing, I'm surprised they don't do more to promote the "other" projects, especially to Wikipedia contributors—Wikipedia editors (even split by language) vastly outnumber those of the other projects, including Commons and Wikidata, which are multilingual. Commons' request system connects those who recognize needed edits but cannot make them with those who check the requests pages and are able to. There's the Graphics Lab[0] for edits to existing uploads, and File requests[1] for new uploads that are needed. Judging by the archives, they seem quite underutilized, though that might only be a sign of how few Commons contributors there are. Probably also has to do with the offloading of requests to local pages in many languages of Wikipedia.[2] [0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Graphic_Lab https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Graphic_Lab [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:File_requests https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:File_requests [2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5324355 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5324355 There's an interesting variation in the nature of barriers to being able to edit. Hardware and bandwidth cost money, but skills cost only time and software can be free. I'd say the Graphics Lab does decently in "teaching how to fish" through tutorials and lists of FOSS software. This contrasts with file requests, where there's no equivalent, because the most common reason that someone can't take a photo of something is that there physically aren't any instances of it nearby. This kind of barrier to contribution really isn't specific to media; analogously, not everyone has access to the same resources for researching edits to Wikipedia. Wikimedia's also trying to address that: everyone with >10 monthly edits in any project has free access to the databases participating in The Wikipedia Library.[3] Most are relatively specialized, however (IIRC, JSTOR is the most generally useful of the lot). [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library

remarkEon 4y ago

1000%. Sent this to my dad, and can't wait to talk this weekend. When I was a kid we would tinker around with watches in the basement but, alas, I had different interests and never really got around to truly understanding these mechanisms. I don't really know web development beyond setting up basic pages, but how the CAD was integrated into this is wonderful and I'd love to see more posts going through things like human joints or ICE, or maybe weapons ... other things where we kind of intuitively grasp how they work, but don't know the details. This entire blog seems to do a lot of that. So cool.

positivejam 4y ago
He has one on the ICE actually, though I don't have the link handy.
- mbrubeck 4y ago
  https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/ https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/
  - remarkEon 4y ago
    Wonderful! Showed this to my wife who, bless her, hates stuff like this and she’s captivated.

pontus 4y ago

I came here to write the exact same thing. Amazing content.

justusthane 4y ago

His post on how GPS works is equally excellent[1] (as are, I'm sure, the rest of his posts). [1]: https://ciechanow.ski/gps/ https://ciechanow.ski/gps/

bambax 4y ago

Came here to say the same thing. This incredibly well done, well written, well executed, well... everything. How does one find, not only the talent, but the patience to do such incredible work... Mind boggling.

sixothree 4y ago

Does anyone know the tooling used to create these?

phailhaus 4y ago
According to his Twitter, he just uses bare canvas and WebGL. [1] What a legend. You can inspect the page and read the source js, it is unminified. [1] https://twitter.com/BCiechanowski/status/1484013009219375105?s=20&t=8bN1SiOFjoWM3v1hB9Uehg https://twitter.com/BCiechanowski/status/1484013009219375105...
- amelius 4y ago
  Very impressive. The only thing that would make it better is a physics engine that would allow the user to play with gears etc.
  - ManuelKiessling 4y ago
    You mean like https://ciechanow.ski/gears/ https://ciechanow.ski/gears/ ?

stephbu 4y ago

Came here to write the same - that was amazing...

alimov 4y ago

I think that the person(s) that created the interactive visuals would find this to be a helpful comment. Radically impressive is a fitting description. I don’t think I’ve ever seen and interacted with anything like it, although I imagine people working with CAD software get to see and mess around with this kind of stuff pretty frequently.

unfocused 4y ago

Agreed! This is top quality writing AND interactive illustrations.

soheil 4y ago

To be 100% honest I found it very intimidating to even begin reading it. It's such a time sink (no pun intended) and a huge wall of text (with figures and interactivity nonetheless).

duderific 4y ago
I usually get about half way through his posts, see how much is left and just give up. Nonetheless I get a lot out of them.
- cardinalfang 4y ago
  The end was the best bit. I have seen good explanations of the escapement and timing gears before, but not of the crown adjuster mechanisms.
- lupire 4y ago
  Dont give up. Pause between sections and come back tomorrow. Put a reminder on your calendar.

pcurve 4y ago

This might be the single best work of art on the Web I've seen since 1995. Nothing else even comes close.

fuddle 4y ago

I wonder how long it took him to put together this blog post?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hamburglar 4y ago

And in true HN style we react to such objectively awesome content by having a slapfight over whether the author wrote the code in the “right” way.

qorrect 4y ago

My first thoughts were "This is what the internet was invented for". So impressive.