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Awesome. I remember much earlier in my career I was working on a 3D turn-by-turn navigation software, and one of my tasks was to draw the sky in the background. The more senior guy on the team said, just draw a blue rectangle during the day and a dark gray one at night and call it job done. Of course, I had to do it the hard way, so I looked up the relevant literature on sky rendering based on the environment, latitude, longitude, time of day and so on, which at the time was Preetham[1] ("A Practical Analytic Model for Daylight"), and built a fully realistic sky model for the software. I even added prominent stars based on a hard-coded ephemeris table. It was quite fast, too.
Well, the higher ups of course hated it, they were confused as to why the horizon would get hazy, yellowish, and so on. "Our competitors' skies are blue!" They didn't like "Use your eyes and look outside" as an answer.
Eventually, I was told to scrap it and just draw a blue rectangle :(
All that to say, nice job on the site!
1: https://courses.cs.duke.edu/cps124/fall01/resources/p91-pree...
By crazygringo 2025-08-0920:053 reply This is why specifications are important, and why design is important.
The reality is that we have certain conventions that are immediately understandable, and that too much visual complexity results in confusion rather than clarity.
If the sky is hazy white when I expect it to be blue, I'm confused as to whether it's the sky or if the map is still loading. It's adding cognitive complexity for no reason. Stars similarly serve no functional purpose at night.
What you built sounds great for an actual planetary view like Google Earth. And it sounds fun to build. But it's an anti-feature for a navigation view. When you're navigating, simplicity and clarity are paramount. Not realism.
> This is why specifications are important, and why design is important.
Also the phrase "know your audience". No sense in casting pearls before the swine.
Though sometimes the higher ups might not be the same as (or understand) the actual audience.
In this case the higher ups may have been confused due to, say, looking at the app while indoors (and from the perspective of "let's judge this developer's work"), while the actual users would see it in a vehicle alongside the real sky (and from the perspective of "let's see how easy this is to match up with reality").
By Mentlo 2025-08-158:13 This is a valid hypothesis, and had this software been something you could update in the background, a valid experiment to run and see whether users like it.
But when it's embedded software on physical devices where the business will have to incur cost in order to ship and hit those users, I can absolutely see why management would do the same thing as what all of the competitors are doing.
Ah, I see the confusion. You think the users are the dev's audience! /s
Also, any fanciness you add in your product is something you need to then maintain. Even after the developer that built it leaves the company.
By carlosjobim 2025-08-1020:091 reply It takes thousands of years for the stars to have changed positions in a noticeable way, and my best guess is that the customers will not use their car GPS for so long that this will bother them.
By crazygringo 2025-08-1020:431 reply Very funny, but in case you're serious, it's not the stars changing...
...it's the software frameworks. A new screen size. A different color depth. A bug when the graphics library is upgraded for antialiasing. Etc.
By carlosjobim 2025-08-1021:291 reply That's not going to be an issue with devices already sold. And if developers of future devices can't handle it they should probably be fired from their job.
By crazygringo 2025-08-110:32 It's not a question of whether future developers can "handle" it. It's a question of whether the additional time required to maintain it is worth the cost. Maintenance isn't free. It takes time, and every little bit adds up.
Also, devices already sold often get updates, so it's not even just about future devices.
By johnfn 2025-08-0921:12 Oh come now. You are being no fun.
A past coworker who worked on Cobalt[1] told me that they spent entirely too much time implementing stars in the sky of the game with some amount of real(ish) star system physics behind them.
I can understand people removing polish things like that if there are usability concerns, but those small things add up to a lot in an end product and are a joy to find and explore.
The last thing you want is to receive a message from Neil Degrasse Tyson about how wrong your sky was
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=neil+degrasse+tyson+gives+j...
By edoceo 2025-08-102:02 And pointed out Jon Stewart's globe spinned backward
By pava0 2025-08-0919:58 Cobalt was a really interesting game, too bad it never got any fame
By jbverschoor 2025-08-0916:094 reply Whipping down the innovator with the stupidity whip. Great management
It sounds like the developer spent a lot of time implementing something that nobody wanted. Drawing the sky accurately may be cool, but it wasn't required in this case. It's also not innovation. It's been done before.
This is like if you were renovating your house and the drywall guy spends a huge amount of time building up round corners, but you just wanted regular square corners. Then on some drywall forum they're bitching about how "all clients are stupid" or something.
By alwa 2025-08-1018:32 And, from the sound of it, the developer confused truth with beauty. Sometimes we’d prefer to see the sky the way we wish it were rather than the way it is.
That’s an aesthetic call, not a “who can do the math” call.
“Good news, I accurately simulated the particulate load in the local atmosphere—so now you authentically can’t read the text on a given smoggy winter morning!”
(FWIW, grace for management decisions notwithstanding, I think what gp did is awesome, and would switch on full realism mode every time :)
By idiotsecant 2025-08-105:061 reply This is a wildly unprofessional attitude. Programmers are craft(wo)men. They employ their craft toward creating things people pay them to create.
We aren't painting sistine chapels, we are running the plumbing in the sistine chapels basement. The job doesn't exist to give you emotional fulfillment. A mason doesn't insist that a client who needs a warehouse must pay him to spend a week detailing corbelled brick cornices. He makes a CMU wall, in the cheapest and most efficient way that still gets the job done.
It's profoundly disrespectful when we build monuments to our own ego instead of just getting the work done and it speaks to a professional immaturity of the highest order. That was one of the hardest lessons I learned as a fresh engineer and I see so often others that are just learning it. Sometimes people never learn it.
By sgarland 2025-08-1012:20 > We aren't painting sistine chapels, we are running the plumbing in the sistine chapels basement.
Sure, but in plumbing - or any trade - there is a huge spectrum of quality of work. Tons of little details add up that confer the person’s skill level to anyone checking it out in the future.
> It's profoundly disrespectful when we build monuments to our own ego instead of just getting the work done and it speaks to a professional immaturity of the highest order.
When I insist that something must be done a certain way, it’s not for my ego, it’s because I know that a year from now, I will be called upon to fix it during an incident if I don’t do it right this time. I am so absolutely sick of hacky bandaids being thrown on the ever-increasing pile of tech debt. To me, it’s profoundly disrespectful when product tells engineering that yet again, they will not yield time to fix the backlog, and to ship New Feature X.
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-08-0922:181 reply I've been in the developer's shoes. I've also been in the manager's shoes.
It's not that simple. There's possibly better ways to deal with it, but for safety-critical stuff (like a navigation display in a vehicle), simple is much, much better. In many cases, there's actually laws and liability stuff involved.
I once spent six months, developing an "un-asked-for" WiFi control app for a digital camera, and had it nuked. It worked much better than the shipping app (which was enjoying a richly-deserved one-star rating in the app store).
The considerations had a lot to do with the corporate Process (note the capital "P"), which I sidelined. I thought I could do better, but the people with the hands on the brake, thought different. I didn't kiss the right rings. That's a very real consideration in any corporation.
As a manager, however, I did go to bat for employees that displayed initiative. In some cases, I was successful. In some cases, not so much.
By hobs 2025-08-1010:09 There's so much decision making in companies that comes down to some dingus in management decided that it would Be Bad On Purpose. Fighting that battle is something you can try a few times in your career if you want, but it usually leads to burnout or a resume generating event.
A foundational, core theme about making commercial software, that repeats over and over and I slowly got accustomed to is: companies really don't want these kinds of micro-innovations. 90% of companies are just looking at their competitors, making a checklist out of those products, and asking engineers to check the boxes and go home. They don't care about little details, about craftsmanship and polish, about lint warnings, about "oh, that's a nice touch," or even quality beyond "will the customer return the product?" They just want people to poop out software as fast as possible so everyone can get bonuses and drive around on their jetskis on Saturday.
If you're the kind of developer who likes to "sand and finish the back side of the cabinet," either you need to find a very rare, special company, or do it at home as a hobby.
By jbverschoor 2025-08-0919:441 reply But it's exactly the thing that makes software "delightful". It's also a huge boost to the developer's appreciation, motivation, productivity, care for the product.
But yeah, if you only care about checking the feature boxes.. Go ahead, make shit software with miserable people, but be sure to prepare to go out of business.
By philipallstar 2025-08-0921:041 reply The point is a real skybox is not great for satnav software. It's probably actually worse than a stylised mode, with a predictable colour background for anything that's going to sit on top of it.
By jbverschoor 2025-08-1019:161 reply That's exactly not the point. Where do you think innovation comes from?
It comes from tinkering.
By philipallstar 2025-08-1117:13 It comes from all sorts of different things. Massive capital investment into R&D processes also. Depends on the thing.
> They don't care about little details, about craftsmanship and polish, about lint warnings, about "oh, that's a nice touch," or even quality beyond "will the customer return the product?"
I worked at large companies, and there are reasons beyond that. I've been on the both sides of this fence.
Senior engineers feel the pain of supporting all these features. You created a new streaming API prototype that provides a gradual response, progressively displaying details of the 3D model? Great. But it's 15000 lines of dense code without a lot of explanation. Who is going to support it once you leave the company? Is it secure? How does it work with kiosk-type browsers? Can you write a formal proposal so we can start the review process?
Oh, I see that you're already leaving the company :(
And that's also why startups are often so much more successful initially. They just don't care about the long-term support and YOLO a lot of functionality.
By jbverschoor 2025-08-1019:18 Sure.. but all there prototypes don't have to be released. It's part of innovation. And maybe you'll even find a new product or a competitive edge.
By otikik 2025-08-0918:01 I understood that reference
By netsharc 2025-08-0914:40 Not even as an easter egg?
You could've sold it with telling them Vincent Van Gogh's paintings had the location of stars accurately, you were inspired by those paintings to reproduce the sky color accurately.
Ironically, I'm in the South of England wih clear blue sky, and the site thinks I have a much darker and beautiful reddish sunset. Im fairness, it's probably only out by an hour if that.
By thebruce87m 2025-08-1015:22 Maybe it is out by an hour due to BST.
By bravesoul2 2025-08-0922:42 The thing here is programming the job can be much more dull than programming the hobby. Occasionally (twice a decade) there can be a collision where you get to do something really cool like that at work. The higher ups want a realistic sky because their market research said it'll boost an OKR by 10 basis points. And then you are in luck!
That said there are niches where jobs let you do cool stuff all the time. Hard to find. Probably why gaming jobs are notoriously underpaid and overworked.
By Waterluvian 2025-08-0920:041 reply I’ve had similar issues at work where people really overdo something and it’s difficult. On one hand you never want to kill that joy and passion someone has. That’s a great characteristic. But projects have scopes and too often instructions like “just draw a blue rectangle” get ignored.
By ryandrake 2025-08-0920:44 Totally. It was a harsh but needed lesson on the realities of getting work done in a commercial environment.
By marcosdumay 2025-08-0919:261 reply Yep, if you have to draw the Sun, you better draw it yellow. If you have to draw a cloudless day sky, you better draw it blue.
That doesn't apply to every single instance of those, but if the sky isn't the focus of your application, a realistic one is just a distraction.
> Yep, if you have to draw the Sun, you better draw it yellow.
This one always gets me in how dirty the sky must have been "back in the day" in order for people to see a yellow sun. I've never looked into what gas would be needed to make the sun look yellow, but it must have been hell to breathe.
By card_zero 2025-08-1012:57 Nah, the ancient Egyptians, and other cultures, depicted the sun a lot, and never made it white. Red, quite often, gold, very frequently - warm colors. If you paint a white sun people say it's the moon.
By withinboredom 2025-08-108:27 The walls were black for a reason in big cities. All those chimneys and coal everywhere.
By nkrisc 2025-08-1018:34 That sounds really cool but I have to reluctantly agree with the senior: a cartoonish day/night sky is better than a half-implemented realistic one. I say “half-implemented” because it sounds as though yours didn’t account for local weather and cloud cover, which is reasonable but then incomplete. Even if you did, well, it’s turn-by-turn navigation. I expect the sky color to be selected for ideal contrast with the important UI elements to reduce the time spent looking at it while driving.
By teaearlgraycold 2025-08-0917:35 To be honest I don’t think anyone wants that kind of functionality - maybe in the satellite view but not in the vector map.
By j_bum 2025-08-0914:11 Fun (but not fun) story :)
By maddmann 2025-08-1013:40 Haha it sounds you applied the opposite of the YAGNI principle building this.
By GuardianCaveman 2025-08-1016:23 I identify so much with your sentiment and this type of overthinking overbuilding .
By pinoy420 2025-08-0917:22 [dead]
> the little-known meta http-equiv="Refresh" HTML tag
Oh, don't mind me, I'll just be over here in the corner laughing ruefully as my bones crumble to dust: back when I started, if you wanted a page to refresh on its own, this was the only way.
Beautiful work! A splendid example of formal minimalism at its best.
Of course, the "http-equiv" means that this tag is supposed to stand in for an equivalent HTTP header, so you could accomplish the same by sending a "Refresh: 60" header :)
Sure, if you wanted to deal with configuring Apache. Or getting your hosting provider to do that. If you knew to ask, and didn't mind waiting, and your hosting provider knew how...
Not sure what you are on about. Adding an HTTP header to a request is one of the easiest things to do.
By urquhartfe 2025-08-0921:463 reply I think you are the one who doesn't know what they are on about.
First, the header must be added to the response, not the request.
Second, in many environments (managed hosting etc.) there is not an easy way (or indeed a way at all) of adding headers to responses.
By KTibow 2025-08-0923:45 > Second, in many environments (managed hosting etc.) there is not an easy way (or indeed a way at all) of adding headers to responses.
It's getting better. Most serverless hosts (including Cloudflare, which this site uses) follow the (req: Request) => Response pattern, which by definition allows sending headers.
By bapak 2025-08-1010:17 What are you talking about. Any non-static hosting will let you specify headers with a plain php function. Any baseline shared hosting offers that kind of control and has done so for the past 20+ years.
is that something that could have be done in the dot file for server override? what was it, .htaccess or something?
Sure, if you wanted to deal with configuring Apache. Or getting your hosting provider to do that. If you knew to ask, and didn't mind waiting, and your hosting provider knew how...and was willing to do it, a condition I forgot to add in my last comment here, but which applies equally there. (User-provided .htaccess files were the source of a number of relatively high-profile early CVEs, as I recall. Apache grew a number of options for trusting their content, and I want to say before very long you could not rely on anything working past simple HTTP-Basic credential management.)
Oldschool shared web hosting was a shockingly deprived environment by modern standards, which is why my Linode account turned old enough a few months ago to buy a drink in a bar: $20 a month in 2004 was amply worth gaining a degree of control over web server configuration which is broadly the default assumption now.
Since I was also administering some shared web hosting in my own right at the time - partially overlapping with my web design work targeting shared hosting, since some customers preferred to BYO - I don't blame admins for being difficult to work with; we all had good reason to be, with the afterthought security typically was everywhere in those days. But you begin perhaps to see why bypassing the whole rigamarole with a hint to the client was attractive.
but that was the point of the dot file to allow vhosts to change the default server settings without needing access to the root config. maybe they weren't designed specifically for vhosts, but that was my main use of them.
Yes. If the main Apache config was set up to allow it to read a dotfile, and if configured not to ignore the options you wanted to use, that is what the dotfile did. That's why, if you wanted an option easily portable across hosting providers, you used the meta tag instead. Which is my point, and my only point, and not really up for debate by some pettifogging rando with nothing better to fill a Saturday night.
Wtf, seriously. I was just asking. Sorry if that resulted in me pissing in your cheerios. Just because a question was asked doesn’t mean it was challenging your knowledge. I was just asking to clarify based on personal experience. If you don’t have time for questions or feel personally slighted that someone would have the gall to question the written word of the almighty throwanem, then posting on the internet is probably something you stop doing
It isn't a question of "challenging [my] knowledge," it's a question of you acting like kind of a jerk. I realize you don't see yourself as the one starting an argument here, and I have observed your manners likewise lacking on many occasions on this website before. Your opinion of the matter is not well qualified. You're being an ass. Knock it off.
I realize you're probably not accustomed to being called on your lousy behavior. I doubt you will need to become so. But just for once, here we are. You don't bother to find out what you're talking about before you speak and then you want your hand held on points that were already clarified, had you but bothered to catch up. I don't tolerate that in candidates, I won't tolerate it in colleagues, and I see no very pressing reason to tolerate it here.
By radicalriddler 2025-08-115:312 reply You're like the caricature of what other social media platforms represent HN users to be.
By throwanem 2025-08-1116:00 Wait, I'm confused. Do you mean that I correspond with the caricature by which you're accustomed to see HN users represented, presumably not by themselves, on other social media platforms? Or do you mean instead that I correspond with a caricature of the caricatured representation that etc.? Your comment is ambiguous. Please clarify.
By throwanem 2025-08-1113:17 Not really, that's more like N-Gate (pbuh, rip) [1].
By astrange 2025-08-104:25 Ever tried doing it in nginx? You'll find `add_header` doesn't work at all the way you think it does.
And it doesn't allow overrides in dotfiles since that's not performant or secure.
By js2 2025-08-0921:51 There was also server[-side] push:
By skrebbel 2025-08-0916:59 I can’t wait till they hear about framesets
Thank you! And umm, not to make you feel ancient, but I think I wasn't even alive yet when `setTimeout(() => location.reload(), ...)` first became widely available.
Oh, don't worry about it at all, and I don't just mean in my own case. Every generation learns to age graciously or otherwise, partly through experience, and for me it's a regular source of joy to see you young 'uns independently rediscover things I long since quit bothering to remember.
By phatskat 2025-08-0917:00 Honestly it’s kind of cute, I had all but forgotten about http-equiv
Opened this up and sat there for a good 20 seconds waiting for something to happen... only to remember it's midnight here.
Maybe someone smarter than me could add stars to the night sky, so it's not just black.
I was just thinking about how to slice up a star map projection, and apply it as an overlay. I don’t do such things often enough to do it quickly, although I can imagine how it could be achieved. I’d imagine someone working in game dev probably could whip up a mechanism for applying coordinates to a star map fairly quickly, but realizing it in pure CSS would probably require exporting all the slices to a folder as SVG squares that are labeled with coordinates, and then using a bit of JS to stitch it all together in the rendered page.
By mpetroff 2025-08-0919:25 I wrote a simple web-based night sky viewer a while ago [1], which renders the 750 brightest stars from coordinates in a data file (along with the moon). It uses D3.js to do fully client-side SVG-based rendering for interactive use, but it could be simplified to render server side to an SVG file. I think the main complication is that by adding stars, a projection needs to be decided on, and you'd need to consider the aspect ratio of the browser window.
By socalgal2 2025-08-108:08 Suggestion for the author, I don't think there are any outdoor places where the sky is black. I don't know that gray would be any better. Stars? Some night clouds? or maybe even still a gradient?
https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=58e7983bf9f21fcd&udm=2...
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