This is an interesting concept, but I would rework the demos to show content that people might actually want to use. Transitions of text content describing a product or service, like bullet points that animate in sequentially comes to mind. Applying motion to text content is not something that is easy to get right, but simple and brief motions can be very effective. I would use something like content you might see in a well-made powerpoint presentation as a starting point.
Agree that it might sell better if we see the typical examples we'd normally see in say a vector driven 2D animation from various industries.
1. ProductSpec sent to Factory with multiple Products being created, packed, shipped, distribution centers, last-mile, receiving
2. Client -> API -> Edge -> Business layer -> DataSource dataflow.
3. Compliance training scenario videos. Security training. "Joe needs to share internal code. He uploads it to pastebin and emails the link to the team. What should Joe do instead?"
4. Education, can this work for illustrative problem solving? Deriving quadratic formula by completing squares?
This could also use a FF or Rewind timeline or some kind of time control like "Play from Line 24".
Yes, even reworking a classic "infra diagram" with connection between a web browser and a server, but showing it as an animation could be interesting, but those little stories add very little
The animations are just weird. Not just on an aesthetic level but the subject matter too. If they really feel the need to convey a short story then at least base it on a public domain fairytale instead of two guys literally fighting over a women.
…or better yet, have something that people might actually want to animate using this tool. Like a chart. It might be boring but you’re at least keeping consistent with what the target audience needs (or at least that’s my understanding of your target audience from the rest of the landing page)
Edit: if hnlmorg's reply is accurate then I take this back!
---
This is likely a cultural mismatch. I'd bet this demo was made by someone far away from the countries that most HN users are from.
From a few years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098): that's a hidden source of conflict, because people frequently misinterpret a conventional comment coming from a different region for an extreme comment coming from nearby.
Normally I’d be the first to argue for cultural diversity. However I don’t know of any culture that would consider masturbation an appropriate theme for a tech demo.
Even the articles on here that are very specifically about adult content (such as advertising on porn sites) have been more tasteful than some of the demos on this project.
So I can only conclude that this submission isn’t the result of cultural bias. Unless you consider “immaturity” a culture. But then you have to ask yourself if that’s a culture you want to promote in HN.
> masturbation an appropriate theme for a tech demo.
Oof, I didn't see any of that. I was reacting to the boy/girl stuff at the beginning, which is the sort of thing that is still conventional in some places. If I had seen the level of weirdness that you describe, I wouldn't have posted.
I've added an edit to my post above. Forgive the "if" - that's my hedge against having to watch the entire thing!
Dan, your HN comments are a collection of beautiful essays that is becoming a reference library for healthy discourse. I think it deserves a dedicated website.
I don't know, man - sexism is a pretty universal concept, and the author has lived/worked in the US, so its not like he's never watched one of those sexual harassment training videos...
This would be much more useful if it wasn't stickmen but animating components (which would allow to do "launch video" tier animations) on boxes, and websites. This would allow for people to create tiny components and not put videos. I feel like stickmen are a "nice to have".
The examples for the M5 exploit and the other stuff immediately make me think that the author is an idiot. I'm not calling you an idiot - I'm saying that if I were to read a technical article and the first thing I'm presented with is an absurdly stupid emoji-person animation that makes no sense and has no purpose and adds literally nothing, I would just immediately exit that website. This goes for all of the examples, and the fact that it's all so clearly written by LLMs isn't helping either.
Interesting, I do a bit of animation in XR for pedagogy. I can easily recognize patterns, e.g. stacking animations one after the other, classic parameters like duration, easing.
I'm wondering though if, compared to what I already know (e.g. https://aframe.io/docs/1.7.0/components/animation.html ) how this is better. Maybe a "renderer" there could be outputting AFrame animations instead (itself based on AnimeJS, quite popular).
It could be useful to discuss scenarii but storyboard is usually sufficient.
I'd be curious how newcomers take it up. I think for (JavaScript) the syntax is pretty straightforward but for others I'm not sure.
This is both awful and essentially the future, By that I mean its raw now as its in the beginning but this gave me flashbacks to the flash era of the web that had so much creativity across it.
Once you are able to add more assets in the place of emoji's this could really take off especially in the younger users. Instead of sending an emoji you'd instruct an LLM to create you one of these to send.
Creator could have chosen literally anything else to represent their product but instead went with an animation of boy emojis fighting over a girl emoji.
The topic of the demo is just ..odd: it's negative in its nature, difficult to understand (is there a message or a joke in there?), the animation isn't aesthetically pleasing either.
The fact that EVERYBODY here sees it but you, tells you that perhaps you should take a step back and try to understand... it might be YOU who don't get it at all...
Folks, we're now 5 levels deep on this thread and I still haven't heard it spelled out what's wrong.
I see "it's obvious" "cringey" and allcaps being used. Being able to vocalize specific problems and having the courage to clearly state it is a life skill.
Please be specific about the problem and why. Bonus points for replacement suggestions.
The boys-fight-for-girl is a very typical movie trope and this is a scene-based product. Maybe that's why they defaulted to it.
Well, here goes. The "story" told shows a woman as something men possess ("Backoff! She's mine!".) She even asks "do I get a say?" (hah, as if!) and is ignored, of course. If two men want to possess the same woman, they get into a physical fight, where the winner gets to own the woman. Oh, plot twist! She "decides" for the nice guy (lucky her, getting a man!)
Do you seriously think this is a story still worth telling? Is that how you view women? Is that how you view men?
But since you asked specifically about someone spelling it out letter by letter for you:
Women are not a prized possession, but individual humans, like men. You do not "take" them, you don't "fight over" them, you don't "own" or "win" or "loose" or "deserve" them - because they are not objects, but humans. They can also decide to pick neither of the two men if they so desire, and pursue a career in neuroscience.
Men who disagree over something do not, in fact, need to hit each other immediately, or throw rocks to their heads. They have the ability to talk and listen to reason. Because they aren't chimpanzees, but sapiens, a species with extraordinary capable brains.
Regurgitating this very trope, which works just as well with aforementioned chimpanzees instead of humans, proliferates the stereotypical depictions of women and men. Science is very clear about the fact that repeated exposure to an idea increases acceptance of this idea, so telling the tale of boys-fight-for-girl time and time again ensures its firmly planted in people's heads, influencing their view on other people negatively.
Women are exposed to severe violence all around the world, every day. If you don't believe this, I don't feel obligated to convince you with any particular slice from the mountain of freely available scientific material on the topic. Alternatively, for a fun little experiment, consider asking five female and five male relatives or friends each about the three worst things they can imagine happening to them on the way home at night. No spoilers, but the answers are going to be very different.
+1 This is a good if verbose response and the points and questions will be easy for the library author to address.
I'm going to take "you" here to mean the author instead of myself b/c I already found the example distasteful for reasons similar to yours.
> But since you asked specifically about someone spelling it out letter by letter for you:
You took time to do this and I appreciate it. I like to think you're teaching others how to respond clearer. I hope we can see this level of organized thought and direct challenge at the top level instead of reactionary slang and huffing.
I think you're discounting people's reaction of not liking it. That is communicative. Not everything has a well established model to communicate efficiently using words.
And being a trope is not enough of a defense; tropes can drift away from culture over time.
The demo is not egregious by itself, it's the choice of the demo for this circumstance. Why boy-hits-boy-with-rock-for-girl for an animation DSL?
Its the plague of western people thinking they have the moral high ground over other cultures and nations. In the place where I grew up this kind of scene would be considered normal. But you must be the one who dictates what is right and what is wrong, don't you?
Please do tell me which culture finds it acceptable to throw rocks at people because they happen to like the same woman.
Even ignoring the unnecessary language, sexist content, gender stereotyping, and so on and so forth, just the warrantless violent act in that story is enough for people to object to. And enough people have objected that there isn’t any good reason for the author to keep that animation included. Particularly when it doesn’t actually demonstrate this library in a way that literally any of demo couldn’t. So why even defend it?
> moral high ground over other cultures and nations.
I don't think I have that, really. But I have the high ground over people who objectify groups of other people, and if that is really central to your culture, then I am not accepting of it. Make of that what you will; you do not seem particularly open to criticism either.
>you do not seem particularly open to criticism either.
Right, and how would you know that? Just make sure you make your opponent look bad and you win the argument - this worked in school, not sure why try to do it here.
You can't know whether you have the moral high ground. That's always an assumption, and I am not making any assumptions about being morally superior to other nations or cultures. No more, no less.
> What is the objectification here exactly?
I have answered that extensively in another comment [0]; in short the scene depicted treats women as a prize for the stronger man. This seems pretty obvious to most people commenting on this thread.
> Right, and how would you know that?
Because you started off accusing me of thinking I have the moral high ground over other cultures and nations, and dictating what is right and what is wrong - without knowing anything about me either, on the basis of me pointing out how this animation is sexist.
You didn't pause to consider whether that might have some merit, but instead immediately went to a personal attack. It sure seemed to trigger a reaction in you, and it wasn't reflection.
I'm not defending it, I'm saying "cringy sexist bullshit" is just a modern liberal western take. It could have been something like "people might see it problematic", and I agree with that.
The fact that people in the tech-world don't realize that they are embodying deeply ingrained sexist / toxic behavior is the reason why women aren't more present, and why people like Musk or other sociopaths have been celebrated by this community, while the rest of the world hate them...
Yes. It’s astonishing how I see individuals with these enormous egos centered on their intellectual, technical achievements, who have such egregious blindspots surrounding their own unethical attitudes and behavior.
Sirs, please turn the apparatus upon itself. Question yourself as a part of a larger system. What is your function among members of your own species? How can you falsify your hypotheses on this subject? Please don’t be so incurious.
Mermaid diagrams are awesome, the usual pain points which I am trying to solve in https://mdview.io is to allow to fix broken diagrams visually: you hit Quick Fix and then given 3 fix propositions to choose from. Sounds complicated but it works in 80% of times
There have been too many ads for this site posted this month. 8 of your 10 recent comments are just site promotions, which is getting annoying.
By the way, I don't really see the value here. Most of this could be vibe-coded and reimplemented in a day or two. It’s just an integration of existing NPM libraries.
My goal is to build the only app you need for reading technical documentation. I am working on it daily for the past 5 months, and almost every day I have a new feature which I want to share with HN people and try it out
This is an interesting concept, but I would rework the demos to show content that people might actually want to use. Transitions of text content describing a product or service, like bullet points that animate in sequentially comes to mind. Applying motion to text content is not something that is easy to get right, but simple and brief motions can be very effective. I would use something like content you might see in a well-made powerpoint presentation as a starting point.
Agree that it might sell better if we see the typical examples we'd normally see in say a vector driven 2D animation from various industries.
1. ProductSpec sent to Factory with multiple Products being created, packed, shipped, distribution centers, last-mile, receiving
2. Client -> API -> Edge -> Business layer -> DataSource dataflow.
3. Compliance training scenario videos. Security training. "Joe needs to share internal code. He uploads it to pastebin and emails the link to the team. What should Joe do instead?"
4. Education, can this work for illustrative problem solving? Deriving quadratic formula by completing squares?
This could also use a FF or Rewind timeline or some kind of time control like "Play from Line 24".
Yes, even reworking a classic "infra diagram" with connection between a web browser and a server, but showing it as an animation could be interesting, but those little stories add very little
Oh, I like the features a lot but I don't like the aesthetics.
Maybe that's just the examples but the animations are not appealing to look at.
The animations are just weird. Not just on an aesthetic level but the subject matter too. If they really feel the need to convey a short story then at least base it on a public domain fairytale instead of two guys literally fighting over a women.
…or better yet, have something that people might actually want to animate using this tool. Like a chart. It might be boring but you’re at least keeping consistent with what the target audience needs (or at least that’s my understanding of your target audience from the rest of the landing page)
Hyperframes is a more mature tool in more than one way
> are not appealing to look at.
They word you are looking for is 'vibecoded'
This is just the weirdest subject choice for a demo
Edit: if hnlmorg's reply is accurate then I take this back!
---
This is likely a cultural mismatch. I'd bet this demo was made by someone far away from the countries that most HN users are from.
From a few years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098): that's a hidden source of conflict, because people frequently misinterpret a conventional comment coming from a different region for an extreme comment coming from nearby.
Normally I’d be the first to argue for cultural diversity. However I don’t know of any culture that would consider masturbation an appropriate theme for a tech demo.
Even the articles on here that are very specifically about adult content (such as advertising on porn sites) have been more tasteful than some of the demos on this project.
So I can only conclude that this submission isn’t the result of cultural bias. Unless you consider “immaturity” a culture. But then you have to ask yourself if that’s a culture you want to promote in HN.
> masturbation an appropriate theme for a tech demo.
Oof, I didn't see any of that. I was reacting to the boy/girl stuff at the beginning, which is the sort of thing that is still conventional in some places. If I had seen the level of weirdness that you describe, I wouldn't have posted.
I've added an edit to my post above. Forgive the "if" - that's my hedge against having to watch the entire thing!
Dan, your HN comments are a collection of beautiful essays that is becoming a reference library for healthy discourse. I think it deserves a dedicated website.
I'm glad that somebody reads them!
Oh, we do, closely ;-)
I don't know, man - sexism is a pretty universal concept, and the author has lived/worked in the US, so its not like he's never watched one of those sexual harassment training videos...
Absolutely deranged
This would be much more useful if it wasn't stickmen but animating components (which would allow to do "launch video" tier animations) on boxes, and websites. This would allow for people to create tiny components and not put videos. I feel like stickmen are a "nice to have".
The examples for the M5 exploit and the other stuff immediately make me think that the author is an idiot. I'm not calling you an idiot - I'm saying that if I were to read a technical article and the first thing I'm presented with is an absurdly stupid emoji-person animation that makes no sense and has no purpose and adds literally nothing, I would just immediately exit that website. This goes for all of the examples, and the fact that it's all so clearly written by LLMs isn't helping either.
Interesting, I do a bit of animation in XR for pedagogy. I can easily recognize patterns, e.g. stacking animations one after the other, classic parameters like duration, easing.
I'm wondering though if, compared to what I already know (e.g. https://aframe.io/docs/1.7.0/components/animation.html ) how this is better. Maybe a "renderer" there could be outputting AFrame animations instead (itself based on AnimeJS, quite popular).
It could be useful to discuss scenarii but storyboard is usually sufficient.
I'd be curious how newcomers take it up. I think for (JavaScript) the syntax is pretty straightforward but for others I'm not sure.
Cool project. Cringemaxxing demo, just like this comment.
How does this get on the front page of hacker news?
Hey at least it's not AI
Are going to pretend this wasn't vibecoded?
This is really cool. Can imagine vibe creating scenes quickly. If the animation was a bit smoother, I could see this being used all over.
cringe demo to bring attention is probably not a good way to go. that is how instagram became instagram. let's not do this to hn :)
How is this in the frontpage and with 77 points?!
This is both awful and essentially the future, By that I mean its raw now as its in the beginning but this gave me flashbacks to the flash era of the web that had so much creativity across it.
Once you are able to add more assets in the place of emoji's this could really take off especially in the younger users. Instead of sending an emoji you'd instruct an LLM to create you one of these to send.
Well done.
Macromedia Flash vibes.
Don’t stop.
Hey don't bring Flash into this
I recall MM Flash quite fondly. But what is the best-use case here? Where would this deploy?
it took me a while to understand what is ment with "Motion"
maybe "animations" would be a better term
reminds me of Story Machine on the C64
> No keyframes, no drag-and-drop.
No human developer… :-\
I suggest you change the demo.
1. Boys see girl 2. Boys fight over girl
Creator could have chosen literally anything else to represent their product but instead went with an animation of boy emojis fighting over a girl emoji.
Where I made up my mind is during “dance party” where the boys have faces and the girl has a dancing woman for a head.
Overall the idea is creative, but also not at all what I hoped. Was hoping for diagrams of actors in the systems sense.
If you thought that was bad, whatever you do, do NOT click the play button for the 5th step-by-step example: Expressions & Limbs.
I've never, EVER, in 18 years of being in this business, seen a software product demo of an emoji doing THAT before...
Wow. That sure is something.
Such a weird and creepy choice
yeah... AI doesnt seem to make us more creative
Ironically I don't think AI is this tone deaf.
You could've commented literally anything else instead of this but instead went with a zero-content apparent criticism of the web page.
> zero-content
Changing the default demo is a reasonable and actionable suggestion.
But not why.
The topic of the demo is just ..odd: it's negative in its nature, difficult to understand (is there a message or a joke in there?), the animation isn't aesthetically pleasing either.
You just need to be older than 12 to understand what is problematic about the demo. Just pointing it out was sufficient.
Reproducing cringy sexist bullshit is a choice deserving of criticism.
No-one's mentioned that anything's sexist, or how. You're filling in the blanks to create content where there wasn't any.
That's how conversation works. Things can be implied when it's obvious.
And if it's not, the onus is on you to ask why.
> That's how conversation works. Things can be implied when it's obvious.
That's how groupthink works.
> And if it's not, the onus is on you to ask why.
I have asked why. Note the lack of answers, but the surfeit of pearl-clutching replies.
Where's your argument, Braveheart? Why play coy? If people don't like this choice, where's your defense for it?
The demo is not egregious by itself, it's the choice of the demo for this circumstance. Why boy-hits-boy-with-rock-for-girl for an animation DSL?
The fact that EVERYBODY here sees it but you, tells you that perhaps you should take a step back and try to understand... it might be YOU who don't get it at all...
I think the poster gets it. As do I. And I do not believe either of us care all that much about the vocal minority.
Isn't that funny, considering you seem to be the vocal minority here?
Folks, we're now 5 levels deep on this thread and I still haven't heard it spelled out what's wrong.
I see "it's obvious" "cringey" and allcaps being used. Being able to vocalize specific problems and having the courage to clearly state it is a life skill.
Please be specific about the problem and why. Bonus points for replacement suggestions.
The boys-fight-for-girl is a very typical movie trope and this is a scene-based product. Maybe that's why they defaulted to it.
Well, here goes. The "story" told shows a woman as something men possess ("Backoff! She's mine!".) She even asks "do I get a say?" (hah, as if!) and is ignored, of course. If two men want to possess the same woman, they get into a physical fight, where the winner gets to own the woman. Oh, plot twist! She "decides" for the nice guy (lucky her, getting a man!)
Do you seriously think this is a story still worth telling? Is that how you view women? Is that how you view men?
But since you asked specifically about someone spelling it out letter by letter for you:
Women are not a prized possession, but individual humans, like men. You do not "take" them, you don't "fight over" them, you don't "own" or "win" or "loose" or "deserve" them - because they are not objects, but humans. They can also decide to pick neither of the two men if they so desire, and pursue a career in neuroscience.
Men who disagree over something do not, in fact, need to hit each other immediately, or throw rocks to their heads. They have the ability to talk and listen to reason. Because they aren't chimpanzees, but sapiens, a species with extraordinary capable brains.
Regurgitating this very trope, which works just as well with aforementioned chimpanzees instead of humans, proliferates the stereotypical depictions of women and men. Science is very clear about the fact that repeated exposure to an idea increases acceptance of this idea, so telling the tale of boys-fight-for-girl time and time again ensures its firmly planted in people's heads, influencing their view on other people negatively.
Women are exposed to severe violence all around the world, every day. If you don't believe this, I don't feel obligated to convince you with any particular slice from the mountain of freely available scientific material on the topic. Alternatively, for a fun little experiment, consider asking five female and five male relatives or friends each about the three worst things they can imagine happening to them on the way home at night. No spoilers, but the answers are going to be very different.
+1 This is a good if verbose response and the points and questions will be easy for the library author to address.
I'm going to take "you" here to mean the author instead of myself b/c I already found the example distasteful for reasons similar to yours.
> But since you asked specifically about someone spelling it out letter by letter for you:
You took time to do this and I appreciate it. I like to think you're teaching others how to respond clearer. I hope we can see this level of organized thought and direct challenge at the top level instead of reactionary slang and huffing.
I think you're discounting people's reaction of not liking it. That is communicative. Not everything has a well established model to communicate efficiently using words.
And being a trope is not enough of a defense; tropes can drift away from culture over time.
The demo is not egregious by itself, it's the choice of the demo for this circumstance. Why boy-hits-boy-with-rock-for-girl for an animation DSL?
If the choice is meaningless, why defend it?
And if the choice is meaningful, why this?
> If the choice is meaningless, why defend it?
> And if the choice is meaningful, why this?
Well said. So many of these painful "discussions" could be ended quickly if people would just honestly answer these :)
The behavior depicted is literally sexual competition.
Its the plague of western people thinking they have the moral high ground over other cultures and nations. In the place where I grew up this kind of scene would be considered normal. But you must be the one who dictates what is right and what is wrong, don't you?
Please do tell me which culture finds it acceptable to throw rocks at people because they happen to like the same woman.
Even ignoring the unnecessary language, sexist content, gender stereotyping, and so on and so forth, just the warrantless violent act in that story is enough for people to object to. And enough people have objected that there isn’t any good reason for the author to keep that animation included. Particularly when it doesn’t actually demonstrate this library in a way that literally any of demo couldn’t. So why even defend it?
> moral high ground over other cultures and nations.
I don't think I have that, really. But I have the high ground over people who objectify groups of other people, and if that is really central to your culture, then I am not accepting of it. Make of that what you will; you do not seem particularly open to criticism either.
>I don't think I have that, really
Thinking and doing is not the same.
>people who objectify groups of other people
What is the objectification here exactly?
>you do not seem particularly open to criticism either.
Right, and how would you know that? Just make sure you make your opponent look bad and you win the argument - this worked in school, not sure why try to do it here.
> Thinking and doing is not the same.
You can't know whether you have the moral high ground. That's always an assumption, and I am not making any assumptions about being morally superior to other nations or cultures. No more, no less.
> What is the objectification here exactly?
I have answered that extensively in another comment [0]; in short the scene depicted treats women as a prize for the stronger man. This seems pretty obvious to most people commenting on this thread.
> Right, and how would you know that?
Because you started off accusing me of thinking I have the moral high ground over other cultures and nations, and dictating what is right and what is wrong - without knowing anything about me either, on the basis of me pointing out how this animation is sexist.
You didn't pause to consider whether that might have some merit, but instead immediately went to a personal attack. It sure seemed to trigger a reaction in you, and it wasn't reflection.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48672915
Why are you passionately defending this? I doubt the author cares much, it's clearly an example that came about through vibe coding.
It's not core to the tech/product, people think it's off-putting, why not change it?
Hacker News loves to talk about being amazing business-people and "understanding the customer" but somehow that gets dropped for things like this.
I'm not defending it, I'm saying "cringy sexist bullshit" is just a modern liberal western take. It could have been something like "people might see it problematic", and I agree with that.
The fact that people in the tech-world don't realize that they are embodying deeply ingrained sexist / toxic behavior is the reason why women aren't more present, and why people like Musk or other sociopaths have been celebrated by this community, while the rest of the world hate them...
Yes. It’s astonishing how I see individuals with these enormous egos centered on their intellectual, technical achievements, who have such egregious blindspots surrounding their own unethical attitudes and behavior.
Sirs, please turn the apparatus upon itself. Question yourself as a part of a larger system. What is your function among members of your own species? How can you falsify your hypotheses on this subject? Please don’t be so incurious.
[dead]
Mermaid diagrams are awesome, the usual pain points which I am trying to solve in https://mdview.io is to allow to fix broken diagrams visually: you hit Quick Fix and then given 3 fix propositions to choose from. Sounds complicated but it works in 80% of times
There have been too many ads for this site posted this month. 8 of your 10 recent comments are just site promotions, which is getting annoying.
By the way, I don't really see the value here. Most of this could be vibe-coded and reimplemented in a day or two. It’s just an integration of existing NPM libraries.
My goal is to build the only app you need for reading technical documentation. I am working on it daily for the past 5 months, and almost every day I have a new feature which I want to share with HN people and try it out
Spam is not the way to win hearts and minds