Obviously wikipedia.org. Nothing better has been invented in 20-some years. I honestly feel relief when I research some topic and it has Wikipedia page on it, so I don't need to dig through some sh**y blogposts
Edit: I mean: it's one of the very few websites that actually provides sources of information. It's insane it's that rare these days. And most important facts are just placed in visible and easy to spot place, no need to dig through author's life story, thanks for subscribers etc. before getting to the point.
This is more of a testament to HTTP/HTML though. It's a universal format for storing and retrieving information.
OpenStreetMap is, along with every other geo data project, limited by the common coordinate systems we have for storing and retrieving geospatial data -- and these are almost always planetary, not universal.
I will agree, with an additional caveat that I particularly like the Simple English Wikipedia quite a lot (simple.wikipedia.org) if I need a quick understanding of a topic.
I also applaud their user-respecting design choices. E.g. if your browser sets the DNT (do not track) header, they won't show a cookie consent banner and just assume you selected "reject all"
My sites don’t present a cookie banner to anyone, and don’t check for the DNT header. We simply don’t spy on our users. Any cookies we set are session and other “essential” cookies.
We do that for all sites we (a nonprofit / education / science / arts web agency) build. Seems like such a no-brainer to me - if someone has expressed a preference like that, you're only going to annoy them with a cookie popup, which they're most likely going to reject.
Geizhals is an amazing website. If you send them corrections or suggestions they will always respond.
My only criticism of geizhals is that you can't see items that aren't for sale anyonger unless you search for their names directly. For example you can't use geizhals to get a list of 5k monitors models sold in the last years (most of them are no longer on sale).
Yes i've discussed it with them, they are unwilling to offer this service at the moment. I reckon the database is their crown jewel and they don't want to make it too easy to dump it.
I agree. In the past I've looked for potential upgrades of my outdated hardware and seen that they still list them on their website, but only if you already know the specific part numbers or model numbers of the hardware you're looking for.
Something like a "discovery" view would be nice where you could specify your requirements beforehand and then look for e.g. compatible parts that could be interesting.
geizhals.eu is in fact not in english (I never visited it before and it shows in German by default). I can't immediately find a language selector. I don't have german in my preferred languages browser setting.
Just a guess: maybe it is designed to serve English only to specific English-speaking regions such as the UK and USA, and defaults to German otherwise.
It reminds me of the GSMArena's Phone Finder (https://www.gsmarena.com/search.php3?) which also allows specifying very narrow search criteria. But it is specific to phones and tablets only.
Shopping.com (or shopper.com?) used to be like this 15-20 years ago.. then some company bought it and turned it into utter crap. Although looking at it again after a couple years, it does seem to offer a very basic version of price comparison with some basic filters, though with a very limited selection of sellers. About Us takes me to eBay which may explain why it's showing mostly eBay results.
https://www.mcmaster.com/ is fast. I've never been to Georgia, I don't live in the US, I don't even need hardware. But I still enjoy just clicking on random links and seeing a swift response.
What I like about it is that it's a no-BS e-commerce store, get in and get out.
I've seen people shopping for hardware on reddit say that the navigation is clunky and confusing, and IIRC they said the products are price-gouged?
I'd be curious to know what other users here with an eye for design think of it, and if they know of similar websites, as I've been working on a hardware e-commerce store (mainly for my own use) that uses a lot of the same principles of no-BS shopping, I'm supposed to present it to my mentor next week
Also, a lot of the speed is pretty standard with most frameworks, they did a good job of blending in the slow loading bits into something that feels fast. Overall It's a great website and I'm sure it makes lots of sales
Mech engineer here. We truly buy everything we can for our company from here. If you order by 6pm and select ground shipping, it comes the next day by 11am, and we’re in Boston where the closest warehouses are NJ and Chicago.
Also they have the best return policy. If you don’t like it, send it back and they will reimburse you without asking a single question.
Lastly, part of the no-BS aspect is that no brands are given most of the time. You need test leads for a bench top multimeter? They offer whatever length or specs you want, and any of the ones you choose will be high quality and most likely made in the US (in my example, all their test leads are Pomona brand). The ability not to have to sift through Amazon reviews or decide whether a premium brand is worth it is easily worth the extra cost.
> Also they have the best return policy. If you don’t like it, send it back and they will reimburse you without asking a single question.
Sometimes I forget how good we have it in Europe. In the EU we have a pretty close to universal [0] 14 day no questions asked return period for all online purchases. You occasionally get a crappy retailer who tries to push back but one link to this document stops that pretty quickly.
> I've seen people shopping for hardware on reddit say that the navigation is clunky and confusing, and IIRC they said the products are price-gouged?
I think these people are used to shopping from Amazon and Home Depot. They can get their bolts and random specialty items and it comes cheap. When you’re talking about a quality, precision piece of hardware, one where you know the manufacture and have reliable dimensions (and probably even a CAD model) it comes at a price. And if you’re working On something that matters, especially if this is your business, you’re willing to pay for that.
Yup, you see the same thing in industrial automation, even Automation Direct[1] which is on the cheap end is going to be 5-10x what HD/consumer options are. That said you know what you're getting and also that you'll be able to get support/replacement parts on short notice(I had one of their flow sensors go bad on me and they RMA'd + shipped with absolutely zero hassle).
I love the UI. You know what's clunky? Amazon. Amazon's UI is awful and their search is the worst (it's just about useless and I think that's by design.) It looks pretty though and I doubt you'll hear people on Reddit complaining about it.
As a ME, I used to manage a lab in a large corporation. McMasterCarr is ingrained in the US engineering culture. Every lab has a 5 inch thick yellow catalog.
Also Thorlabs. Everytime I'd open their shipment, it'd include Lab Snacks™. I wrote about it here [1]. Both are awesome companies to deal with.
We buy a ton from there. The price is a little high but not enough to matter unless its a significant part of your expenses. They save me money on balance by being fast and convenient.
Is it just me, or did they custom/hand-draw all the illustrations for the hardware being sold?
And man, the UI is brilliant. Straight and to the point - just enough complexity to handle what they're selling, without the clunkiness of Amazon's UI.
Pretty amazing company. They're a big Ruby on Rails shop. At least they were back in 2016. FYI, I was offered a position there but didn't take it up due to long commute.
I don't know if they still have it but they used to have a giant catalog that was the same thing in paper form. Super thin paper thousands of pages of just random stuff.
McMaster is really cool, but not for the quick response time of their website (its actually not very fast)... the wide variety of parts available is why I like them.
They appear to be using the Backbone.js/Marionette framework, which is super hardcore but also dates when this site was probably developed (I can't remember the last time I saw Backbone in the wild!)
In the spirit of clarification / correction (vs pedantry), SPA is a client-side web architecture pattern, whereas Next.js is a web framework best known for its support for rendering outside the browser (SSR and SSG).
Thanks. Terminology aside, what I referred to was exactly Next.js's pre-rendering (SSR & SSG) and prefetching. I feel like without them it'll be harder to achieve OP's interactivity with just React/Vue.
React / Vue is also irrelevant here however. It all depends how your actual prod code is built in the end. (For example you can use React with Next.js and still do all the SSR SSG stuff) In this case you're writing React for your server side rendered pages as opposed to the 'traditional' pattern of an SPA where everything happens in the client.
Might also be using the native Context Index API.[0] That's usually used to allow sites to be downloaded and browsed offline. I think that's how SVGOMG does it too
> Mechanical watches are not as accurate as digital ones. They require maintenance and are more fragile. Despite all these drawbacks, these devices show a true mastery of engineering. With creative use of miniature gears, levers, and springs, a mechanical watch rises from its dormant components to become truly alive.
And to an extent, I can agree that figuring out and building such a tiny mechanic is truly genius. But so is figuring out the digital electronics devices, even if they seem much less sexy.
What we should really be thankful for are those geniuses who figured out all those technologies and put their powers in the hand of the mere mortals.
I don't need to be able to understand the inners of the computer, but can still make use of its power to the benefit of others.
So this is clearly amazing, but on the topic of page design for my future reference, can any frontend people tell me whether there is an effective way to avoid the 'i want to scroll but interacted with the graphic' effect?
I’ve mentioned a couple of times on here before: I downgraded my data plan during Covid, and haven’t bothered to increase it yet. Oh my plan, it goes to 100kbps once I run out of data. Once that happens I mostly just read hackernews comments. It works perfectly. Google search also works ok, google maps works with patience, and virtually nothing else will even load.
I spent a few months with extremely slow (single digit KB/s) internet. As you say HN is basically the only usable site. Even HN loaded very slowly though, so I would read it through w3m (text mode web browser) over Mosh (more efficient than SSH).
-- Worth mentioning that many sites will be difficult or unusable in a text mode browser, so I recommend Browsh which renders them (in Firefox?) and then converts the image to colorful, pixelated terminal art—it supports mouse and everything! (The word "recommend" is a bit strong here, but if your internet is bad enough and you need to get something done, it may be the only way to do it.)
I had to actually plan my media downloads ahead—I'd collect a list of podcasts / lectures to download and then fetch them all when I had access to decent wifi. Eventually I made an elaborate series of bash scripts with a php frontend to extract audio from youtube lectures and convert it to Opus, to save money on my fast but expensive mobile data.
I even set up my own internet radio station, an Opus proxy for Lofi Beats to Relax and Study... as they say, necessity is the mother of invention... or at least the mother of reading a bunch of icecast manpages... Wouldn't want to repeat the experience, but it was very educational!
Right now I'm on a metered connection (5GB/day), so I set my Steam download speed low enough to spread a 12GB download over 3 days... brings me back to the old days hahah.
Unlike the old days, though, you have to actively not download data, as opposed to not actively download data. For example, make sure synching to the cloud is off (moving a folder, especially if you’re not always connected can easily be an accidental replias of 10GB), making sure an OS update won’t be downloaded (easy on windows but not easy on MacOS except in the case of iPhone tethering), and be careful about browsing (Reddit or news sites can easily use hundreds of MB in a few minutes).
Little Snitch (Mac) can be very helpful in these situations. When I'm on the road and using my limited phone data for internet, I turn on the 'limited' profile where Little Snitch doesn't allow most internet traffic (with some exceptions).
Try browsh in mosh like others have mentioned, but also Opera Mini. Download Microemulator from https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads..., and use curl or wget (not a browser) to download http://m.opera.com/mini.jad . Next run microemulator, set the device to "resizable", and open the mini.jad file (the menu item is "Load MIDlet from file" or something similar) you downloaded. Opera Mini works pretty well on bad connections, though every so often it shows an interstitial ad for an Opera site. Also, don't use it for logging in to things, it proxies all pages through its servers so it would be able to see your passwords. The Android version is bad, don't use it.
https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ The world's biggest collection of classic text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era IBM PCs and compatibles
Lets you listen to the full audio of three Apollo missions. Not only the official mix, but also behind the scenes stuff, like flight dynamics officer, computer supervisor, etc.
Not only is it interesting to hear what engineers on a mission sounded like in that somewhat early NASA environment, but it's also a pleasant background track.
The coolest website I've seen lately is http://howacarworks.com. It's a video course in which an experienced mechanic breaks down a car into all its constituent parts then puts everything back together piece by piece, explaining in detail how everything works and fits together.
I knew nothing about mechanics before starting this series and I'm very impressed by how informative and professionally made the content is. Well worth the price tag (currently discounted as it's still in prerelease, but lots of videos have already been published.)
(Note: I have no affiliation with the creator of this course and have nothing to gain by promoting him; I'm just a happy customer.)
No, I'm not trolling. This is one of the coolest websites I've ever seen, despite it being a personal blog and having no fancy animations.
ps: the coolest "site", not the coolest content of the site. While it is very good too in this case.
The Cutting Room Floor - Research on unused and cut video game content. Definitely one of my all time favorite sites to spend spare time on.
https://tcrf.net
100% agree! Unseen64 unearths some seriously cool stuff. I think an even equal pairing to unseen64, and in the same vein TCRF, is https://hiddenpalace.org/
What Unseen64 and HiddenPalace find and preserve is seriously invaluable in this area of interest.
Usually living in the tropics or at least near a coast, this website is invaluable to me to have an idea of what the weather is looking like. Local coverage is kind of lackluster in comparasion.
This is frankly amazing. Something I've thought about a lot as I've traveled and crossed various continental divides, but never even considered actually trying to map.
One of my engineering professors still has a Web 1.0 site, "best viewed in Netscape Communicator 4.0 or higher at 16 or 24-bit color". It's actively updated, but hasn't fundamentally changed since the late 90s - some pages still have the Netscape Composer generator tags in them. (For further frame of reference: I last had a reason to go to it over ten years ago now, but still bring it up as a talking piece.
It’s a solar powered, self hosted version of Low Tech Magazine. The articles are always interesting, but there’s also a ton of good information about efficient website design as well [0].
Since about 1998, whenever I need a rickroll-style URL placeholder for whatever reason, I use zombocom.
This is my favorite website ever, because, quite simply, you can do anything at Zombocom.
For those who don't get it, in the late 90's there was a distinct sense that internet websites might just solve all of the world's problems, and we just hadn't imagined yet how it was going to happen, and most people hadn't really been online yet.
Looking back I think the optimism for the internet in the 90s and early 2000s wasn't nearly as inaccurate as everyone says it was. There was certainly a lot of nonsense but I think most of what people thought would happen did end up happening, it just took decades instead of a few years.
It is true, if you know where to look. Twitter has many interesting creators I follow, both in tech and in other fields. Instagram similarly has many good photographers and artists I follow in many different styles as well.
>For those who don't get it, in the late 90's there was a distinct sense that internet websites might just solve all of the world's problems, and we just hadn't imagined yet how it was going to happen, and most people hadn't really been online yet.
wasn't it more of a parody of those long and elaborate flash intros that websites used to have?
Definitely, but it also addressed something I'm trying to tease-out here.
For people who had never really used computers, and had not been online, the buzz about how the Information Superhighway was going to change everyone's life was enigmatic at best.
This led to all manner of fantasy, and a yearning to make the connection and discover what was going to happen - to be a part of it, to converge - with, or without, a good technical understanding. There's something of this irony in Zombocom.
There's a great 80's Neue Deuetsche Welle song by Paso Doble with which I am practically obsessed, which captures some of the very weird fantastical dream-con-fusion of human and machine, love and logic, flesh and silicon. For the non-tech artists, it was (is?) a rich place to play:
* The Perseus Project: searchable Classical texts in the original language or in translation. Etymological and philological study tool from the gods.This thing has looked this way since at least 2003. Show me a more awesome website, I dare you: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collections
* Nietzsche Source. Searchable, digitized collection of the complete works, as well as scans of original manuscripts, etc! http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB
* WebSDR - control a short-wave receiver located at the amateur radio club ETGD at the University of Twente, complete with chatbox: http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/
If the Moon Were Only One Pixel [1] is my go-to data visualization to share with people who haven't thought about the scale of the solar system that much.
Wholesome, fascinating insight into the inner thoughts of some people, and shows us how tenuous the human connections we make on the internet can feel sometimes.. how lonely some of us can be.
This is what I got when I first clicked through it. There are some very interesting motivational messages in there, as well as some very sad ones, many people grieving or pining for a lost love.
This was a great idea. I expect it'll be alive for a long time yet. Some messages on there I really wish I could respond to, but I do realize that would ruin it.
thiswebsitewillselfdestruct is honestly one of the only places on the internet that allows anonymous writing that has a majority wholesome and meaningful content.
You don't go to that website looking for internet updoots, you go to that website because you have something to say, but no one to say it to.
Something about the phrase "ramblings of a pathologically eclectic generalist" smacks of egotism to me, I dunno why but it just seems a turn-off. It feels like saying "I'm just deeply interesting, I can't help it, it's just who I am."
I hear it the opposite. Like an admission that they failed to focus on anything in particular and than their reviews may be pretty useless for that reason.
His best books section is quite interesting, because he's read about 1.6k books and there's only a couple on there, suggesting those are probably some high quality reads.
Arngren is amazing. When I was UX lead at a big e-commerce retailer I spent a lot of time looking at that site.
You might also enjoy Yvette’s Bridal Formal. It’s the good, old, weird, outsider art web that you just don’t get now. Didn’t really get it then either but this is something special.
Really not sure how to describe it but I love the layout of this. It fully reminds of me old print mail-order catalogues which always had all sorts of zany products. Although here, things for sale all seem quite practical to the right person :)
Search for your favorite bands using the bar at the top right corner. Find the associated playlist on Spotify via "The Sound Of X" where X is the genre name.
If you have (or would like to have) diverse musical tastes this is the best way to do it!
It’s super fast with their jump to reference/declaration. Still curious what’s actually driving it. Looks like some sort of lightweight git/VCS browsing app. Does anyone here know more about it?
Without a doubt, one of my favorite sites to go reading through. I find every article fascinating, and love that it's still got that retro look and hasn't changed in years.
-- it's super old - like - old old internet - it used to be called Global Network Of Dreams (much better name if you ask me) - I discovered it - I think over 15 years ago? - and still use it today --
> The definition of cool is, of course, at your discretion.
OK I'll bite... There's a very cool five letters dot com which exists since forever (I just checked on the Internet Wayback Machine and it has a copy of the site in 1998!). I'll say what it is but I'd rather not link it directly as I wouldn't want HN to kill it (and its owner deciding to pull the plug, you never know you know).
It's basically called "lost.com" (but in another language) and there are just two lines of text saying:
Lost on the Internet? Don't worry, we're going to help you
* <--- You are here
I don't know who created it but that's my definition of cool!
She's sold the business to her employees now and is on a sabbatical travelling around the world in a Unimog based RV. You can follow her progress on Facebook.
A long time ago, I attempted to reverse-engineer the protocol of a game because I wanted to host a dedicated server on a Linux box, but the developers only provided a (bug-infested) Windows version. That's how I found this treasure trove of game-related PoCs and reverse-engineering knowledge.
I had a roommate who would binge watch that guy's videos in his room and when he came out I'd make jokes like hey how's Elmer Fudd doing? Roomate didn't like that (honestly I just thought they were more of his goofy ufo vids at the time) but he does have a pretty damn good channel regardless of rhotacism. I also like Anton Petrov on YouTube whose angle is more about recent developments in astrophysics: https://m.youtube.com/user/whatdamath
I know it's a shameless plug, but if you are searching for cool websites I got you covered: spent 2 years building https://Cloudhiker.net, a StumbleUpon alternative.
This is lovely. It captures the exact feel of Stumbleupon used to for me, with a great selection of websites. I hope this becomes the norm for people and does not get monetized.
I submitted a site as a joke and now I feel bad because there are a lots of interesting sites submitted.
So let me contribute with 2 other sites, maybe not the "coolest" but I think they will be of interest to some fraction of the people here (for those who dont know them)
- http://www.astronautix.com/ A labor of love of just 1 person, almost of 80000 pages! on humanity space programs,you can spend hours and hours reading about obscure soviet prototypes, NASA suits, the Chinese space probes, etc
- https://www.centauri-dreams.org/ A very active (and long) blog about interstellar travel. Despite the fact the subject is now more fiction than science the articles discussed and reviewed are about actual science done by actual scientists (many good guest posts too)
One of the most complete sources of baseball stats including game logs. Yes much of the data is from other sources (MLB, Retrosheet.org, etc) but they really ties things together nicely and I can spend hours on the site.
This website has a list and schedule of active and historical numbers stations, with links to listen in live. If you're fascinated with numbers stations, this is a must: https://priyom.org/
This was more of a demo page, the original website is long down unfortunately.. Back in the day I'd get excited every time I'd load it! This site is all about esthetic and nothing about the content. I'd say many people decided to become web designers just because of this particular work.
Oh yeah, 2A forever. Found them in 1999-2000 (when I was 12 or 13 and first learning to code and such) and it was positively mind-blowing. v2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHbQmqmmIFk) and v3 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWkNkQoQY_8) made me rethink everything, and I promptly switched focus to learning webdev over coding desktop apps. Those Flash days were fun, between 2A, Balthaser, DerBauer, etc. But yeah, 2A made me completely rethink media and interaction.
Go figure, I work on interactive web stuff and film stuff geared towards the web. I can still hear the first piece of music that would play in the background of 2A v2 in my head 20+ years later, and still occasionally listen to Eric's trance mixes on Soundcloud.
I don't remember the name, but there was a VERY cool futuristically-looking (like Unreal II UI) flash-based site that contained HQ wallpapers (before HD displays became a thing). I still regret not saving it! :_( Yeah, I love flash and think it was a golden era and possible better future killed by Adobe.
So, how about https://www.99rooms.com/ ? Great art.
I also liked joke sites like getyourasstomars.com or typicalmacintoshuser.com :D
It's a personal website, but is full of amazing visualizations, educational content, and it basically has a demo scene demo to music on the front page, all hand coded in WebGL. It's just cool, in a delightful, personal, artistic way, and I love it.
If posting the Internet Archive is cheating, how about https://libraryofbabel.info/ --technically containing not only everything ever written on the internet as a whole, but also everything that ever will be...
Anyone remember hell.com from the late 90s. I'm not sure I really understood what it was, some kind of email provider I think, but it has a really mysterious and exclusive feel, it seemed cool.
I just checked it and now it's some religious thing
Fun fact: Whenever I want to remember the name of this project, I just look for it on the front page of https://hn.algolia.com thanks to one of the most upvoted HN posts of all time, "Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195
The coolest sites are the ones that use the least personal data. Pollhub.xyz is the coolest in that sense. It's the funnest site on the internet. Endless polls and caption contests plus anonymous chat.
Fast and convenient, everything is one click away. Easy selection of the amount of news you're ready to absorb. Shows where you left off. Default colors are great with already followed links clearly visible. Default order is chronological contrary to https://news.ycombinator.com.
Edit: I mean: it's one of the very few websites that actually provides sources of information. It's insane it's that rare these days. And most important facts are just placed in visible and easy to spot place, no need to dig through author's life story, thanks for subscribers etc. before getting to the point.