gbromios

I wish that it did actually break the web so I didn't have to see this same dumbass article every two weeks

"revenge fork" lol this is an excellent term for describing this sort of thing

the irony of pontificating on UI with a bunch of random mouse pointers jiggling all over the article I'm trying to read...

I am personally a rabid descriptivist, but I still find myself somehow sympathetic to this editor's cause. Much like "literally", losing the "official" meaning of "comprise" would leave us (i.e. English speakers) without a word which uniquely captures that meaning.

People will use words however however they will, and that's their absolute right. And without pretending that the aforementioned unique quality should (or even could) justify enforcing one meaning over the other in the English language at large, I think that it's fine to have different standards for different contexts, and that Wikipedia is a context whose need for precision and clarity justifies some pedantry.

If this guy's willing to put in the legwork, more power to him.

what a bizarre reading...

I deeply, un-ironically respect their ethos and their hideous, distracting color scheme

this is great, but what sticks out to me is how quickly this seems to have been rolled out. Unless I'm misreading something, this went from first public draft [1] to full support [2] in less than two years?

Maybe I just haven't been paying attention to the rate new CSS features, but from my perspective this totally just dropped out of the sky. Here's hoping we can continue this pace.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/2020/WD-css-sizing-4-20200526 [2] https://caniuse.com/?search=aspect-ratio

I really want to avoid invoking any cliches to the effect of "youth is wasted on the young" here, but even though that's an unfair generalization, there's still a grain of truth to the sentiment: there are certain aspects of life which truly cannot be understood except by irrevocable passage of time. I hate to say it, but many of the insights that might help you navigate your current situation are of that nature, so it's possibly that they could be misunderstood, but I'll try nonetheless.

One thing (among many) I didn't (couldn't) appreciate when I was your age, Is just how much of my life was still ahead of me. The notion that your path will be set in stone based solely on how you spend the next five years is silly, but it's an easy assumption to make, since it's what you're currently focused on, and (if your upbringing was anything like mine) there are probably lots of people insisting that this is a life-or-death situation.

Secondly (and I'm not sure whether this will come as a comfort or not), your dreams might change. What if you push through your current program and end up hating the field? Or get into a PhD in the US and hate it here? What if you become a medical researcher and find you hate that? Or decide to become a physician and hate it (while still harboring a love of machine learning)? And what if you suddenly decide that you'd like to pursue something altogether different than CS or medicine?

I'm not saying that because the outcome is unpredictable you should just choose a direction blindly. Rather, you shouldn't stress too much about whether your path will line up with your current passions. Ultimately, your interests may change in ways that you can't anticipate, but you're young, and (per paragraph 2) you'll have lots of time to change your mind in the future.

If this advice seems unhelpful, I understand (per paragraph 1), since none of it addresses what you should actually do. But, whether you realize it or not, this isn't actually a question about what you should do, it's a question about what you value in life. For what its worth, none of the imagined outcomes (ML PhD, Med School, SE) seem like a terrible fate to me, so you should just follow your heart.

Fuck yeah, I love svgs. I'm not a designer so this isn't really for me, but the potential here is huge. Nice work.

Damn, that is beautiful, but feels too condensed for a terminal/text editor. Maybe I'll give it a try anyway...

Are you suggesting that ff traffic would be substantially higher if I were to account for users that were obfuscating their user agent header?

What a deeply ignorant perspective. Too infuriating to ignore. Firefox users constitute <1% of my traffic. If you had any context for how widely browsers diverged on webrtc features (especially video), you'd realize that ff support could easily add months and months to dev time. I'm sure it hasn't escaped your notice that apple makes no mention of safari in their announcement.

my webrtc-based video conference app doesn't currently support ff and never will unless compatibility with chrome's implementation comes around. My manager would have me committed if I tried to pull that shit, and I'm already notorious for refusing to do things on principle. Suggesting that we don't support firefox because I'm lazy? No, vendors force us to choose, and if the alternative is NO video? Here on earth, where we're trying to cultivate a competitive advantage and survive as a business venture, that's an incredibly easy choice.

edit: other commenters have made the point much more elegantly than I but I leave my words here as a testament to how infuriated I am at this condescending suggestion.

I think becomes difficult to argue and render this question invalid if we fail to quantify a problem.

It is difficult. It's probably the central difficulty of UIs on the web. However what I said is still true: The quantification inherently rests on users' perception of their experience. This is more a question of psychology than of computer science.

What percentage of your users feel that the app is too slow or confusing? What percentage would you be okay with? If you're selling some kind of enterprise software whose users will not be the buyers but rather the buyers' employees, who cares if it takes 30 seconds to load every page and another 30 seconds to find the widget you need once it's loaded?

The definition of "too bloated" is a function of both how users feel and also how much value you get from reducing it, and the measurement of "bloated-ness" (as well as many other parameters of UX) can't happen without getting feedback from users, which means there's a pretty strict limit to how much we can understand just from discussing theory.

And just to further complicate things: If I'm making a richly featured web app (something like Slack for example) I have a predefined set of features that will need to be implemented using javascript. Obviously there are many parameters that determine how well these are designed and implemented and optimized, all of which will affect how the users perceive the app as a whole. However, what about users (say, some plurality of HN readers) who intrinsically value websites which function without javascript, and will always consider those that don't to be bloated; What use is it to quantify that if it's always going to run up against my stated goal of building a chat app in the browser?

As with most things UI, it's subjective and difficult to quantify, but in the context of a website, it could mean a few things.

If you, as a user, feel that the site is sluggish, unresponsive or difficult to use because it feels too crowded or has too many features, you might judge that site to feel bloated.

In a more technical sense, bloated might refer to very large (or poorly optimized) files, either javascript or static assets, required to run the thing, causing it to load slowly (i.e. at a speed that the user feels is "slowly").

So maybe a good summary might be: "does too much stuff and/or poorly optimized/coded"

Again, not exactly a tight definition, but UIs are inherently characterized by the perception of their users.

I have no idea. Like I said, I was only a casual observer of the rally against systemd. I get the feeling that the opposition was more about ethos than any irrefutable technical argument.

I get the impression that OP seems to just be abandoning systemd to build another... systemd. So it seems like not-invented-here syndrome.

well, he does say:

There may be a bit of NIH syndrome leading to this decision; that’s ok, I can live with that;

I don't really know about any of the drama surrounding systemd

I have only been a passive observer of said drama, it boils down to A) init was a stable, widely used, and well understood system that didn't need an update B) systemd takes on far too much responsibility, contrary to the unix philosophy.

personally, I have experienced only minor annoyance when having to re-learn familiar commands, though there seems to be a init compatibility layer that has made it pretty transparent to me. It'd probably have been more annoying if I were still an admin.

prototype chicken nugget

for some reason, this phrase resonates deeply with me.

If BotW is the only game that ever comes out for the Switch, I'd still be satisfied with the purchase.

If by "the political motives of YouTube" you mean "the brand identities of their advertisers", then yes. If Old Spice or whoever doesn't want their deodorant sold by alt-right vloggers, there's no way for YouTube to make money from their videos. Capitalism at work, I suppose.

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.

I've never seen this article before, and I love how the author managed to leave me delighted in the same way, feeling much smarter than I actually am, especially about theoretical physics.

Not that it would have spared him from fizzbuzz on the interview these days..

I'd hope an interviewer would view an applicant's fizzbuzz as a pleasant surprise if it came with a bit of casual mathematical proof.

Dreamweaver 2.0