Bizarre that this is the top comment on this thread right now. I agree they've done some damage, but you seem to have dismissed their justifications without any explanation. Do you really believe we should trust random tabloids just because "trust is a beautiful thing"?
I was already plenty aware of fake news and p-hacking, but this article still proved useful to me by demonstrating exactly how far you can go with it and which sources to not trust.
I can offer you a thousand examples of "How far can fake news travel". Pizzagate, anti-vax, moon conspiracies ...
"_Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it_" (Jonathan Swift, 1710)
Not only don't I want anyone to add to a pile of mistruths, I want purveyors of misinformation to face social and financial disincentives.
> Do you really believe we should trust random tabloids
Of course not. "Tabloid" === trashy journalism, so no, no trust. Those of us who believe in being good and not misleading people should join efforts to make sure that misinformation does not get out of hand; at the very least we should not be manufacturing trash of our own to prove to others how badly it can go.
I really like the idea of making the main input a saveable textarea that can hold multiple words rather than just one. Reminds me of Numi and Soulver, which do this for calculators (I never went back to a traditional calculator app after discovering them). I wonder if there's other apps that could be made more powerful by replacing the single-input with a textarea.
There's a few comments here saying something akin to "No, design trends are totally random, some hotshots decide they want to be different and then everyone else mindlessly follows". I got similar feedback when I wrote in an earlier HN comment my take on why flat design is popular now. I actually empathize with the sentiment because it reminds me of how I used to feel about wine tasters. To me, all wine tastes equivalently like poison. So when people express their complex, nuanced wine preferences, it's easy for me to feel like they're pulling something out of their butts, just saying what they think they're supposed to say.
If my taste in everything was similar to my taste in wine, I would probably still believe this. But I've realized that when it comes to UI/UX design, I am one of the pretentious wine tasters. And I don't feel like I'm making stuff up or mindlessly following trends. The trends genuinely make sense to me; I think they'd happen in the same order in a parallel universe. Design is an optimization problem, and sometimes new technologies or patterns of human behavior change the optimal path for a wide spectrum of products, leading to trends, or what this author calls "vibe shifts".
Of course there are mindless trend followers, just as there are people who parrot opinions on wine they didn't really form themselves. They may be the majority. But they don't disprove the existence of something real.
> when people express their complex, nuanced wine preferences, it's easy for me to feel like they're pulling something out of their butts … but they don’t disprove the existence of something real.
Yes! Most such preferences in my experience have been people pulling something out of their butts, whether it’s wine or web design. But then there are rare cases where it’s real. When I go to expensive restaurant that serve different flights of wine depending on the chosen food course, I like to sample the “wrong” wine in order to validate they claims they make. Often it makes little difference, but two restaurants in my life stand out in my mind as having wine pairings that were truly good, and when I sampled wines outside the pairing it was obvious that it didn’t work. I buy that amazing wines and amazing pairings exist, and also believe that people who actually know what they’re talking about are few and far between, so I can’t easily trust what someone says.
I think this is easily disproven by looking at other areas of functional design besides computer UIs. Architecture is a good example - it's obvious there that while there are some things that are optimizations, a large part of the churn in architecture is style. You might claim the modern trend of having lots of large windows to emphasize natural light is an example of an optimization, but that is only "modern" because the materials and processes to affordably make big pieces of double pane glass are modern. Otherwise, the brutalist monstrosities of the last 30 years are completely a stylistic choice. Ironically flat icons and brutalist architecture share a lot in common.
I think you defended my point for me with the glass panes example. Price is definitely a part of the optimization formula. In fact I think most trends in architecture are much easier to explain than in UI because they’re so clearly enabled by technology.
I don’t know much about brutalism, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a dominant trend. I feel most expensive new buildings are pretty and efficient in ways that weren’t feasible before. But when there’s a mainstream, there are rebels.
An interesting thought experiment is what buildings would look like if resources and labor were infinite—if we could essentially 3D print buildings. Whatever designs come out of that may be what we trend towards.
The architecture is a big reason people take vacations in cities like Prague or Barcelona. It makes people feel good. Mainstream modern architecture is boxy (because of the next point), "efficient" (measured in cost to produce, mostly) and not even remotely built to last. It has no character, and doesn't consider the emotional value of living in a unique space.
Whether it be healthcare, housing, or education, the government always responds to rising costs by subsidizing demand rather than helping increase supply or fix incentive structures. Really frustrating but almost inevitable because subsidizing demand is the one "solution" that sounds good to almost everyone involved. The suppliers make more money, some consumers benefit short-term, few understand that this just drives prices up further. Anyone have ideas on ways this cycle could end?
(I realize this article isn't what it seems, but I'm still taking the opportunity to discuss this issue)
This is spam-tier content. Almost nothing specific to scaling data intensive applications. You could rename the article to “how to catch the squirrel in your backyard” and it’d be just as relevant.
I wonder if the upvotes were purchased or coordinated. If actual readers upvoted this, I would love to know why.
I would call it linkedin tier content. Makes non-technical people feel like they've learned something new. Like their chair just slid an extra inch towards the dev team.
As for the front page, it only takes a couple (<10) upvotes early on for something to be shoved in front of a critical mass of people.
The term "10x engineer" always leads to incongruous conversation. Everyone has a different impression of what a 10x engineer is, depending on who they've met and how much they enjoy coding. There's those who think 10x = not team player, and there's those who've met an engineer who's both extremely productive and likable. There's those who think 10x = no life inevitable burnout, and those who realize there are people who genuinely enjoy programming more than "normal" hobbies, along with people who are unusually productive but otherwise normal.
This author believes that "10x programmers care about the code. Everything else is secondary." That seems even more arbitrary than other definitions.
I say we let the term become a joke meme and nothing more.
Agreed that reading with readily-available translations is the most important method of learning, but with technology we can do better than the interlinear texts this article describes, which seems to just be foreign texts where each word has an English translation on top. I see several limitations of this approach:
- The English is hard to not see, so it's too easy to accidentally cheat and avoid practicing active recall.
- Word-for-word translations aren't effective when your current language and target language are sufficiently different.
If you're willing to read on a screen, we can instead have only the foreign text visible by default, but have translations (both word-for-word and sentence-for-sentence) readily available on click or hover. Du Chinese (no relation, just a fan) does this really well for Chinese, and I'm sure there's equivalent tools for other languages.
Still, any American-born Chinese knows that being able to understand a language doesn't mean you can speak it yourself. Du Chinese is great for reading/listening practice but I couldn't find any counterpart for writing/speaking practice. So I'm working on my own counterpart that works sort of like Du Chinese but in reverse:
- Start by showing you English sentences, of progressively increasing complexity
- Click a sentence to reveal its Chinese translation
- Hover over any word of the translation to get the word's definition and etymology
- Along with the translation, a full grammar explanation
I haven't released this side project yet but I've been using it myself, and I feel like this combined with reading practice is close to optimal learning efficiency.
I'd add that writing on a computer is also not writing, for some languages. E.g. with Japanese IMEs, writing is an exercise of knowing how a word is pronounced and being able to visually distinguish homophones. Having not practiced writing on paper in a while, I can barely write anything in Japanese while I can type just fine (or swipe, on a smartphone).
Similarly listening and speaking are different things. I can read or hear a lot of words that wouldn't cross my mind when I speak.
This doesn't ring true to me; most people at the gyms I've been to don't talk to anyone. I think most people actually want the equipment, mainly the squat rack, bench press, and treadmills. I personally love bodyweight exercises but I still feel I'm missing something without heavyweight squats and deadlifts.
I'm sure you've already considered it, but move north were there are seasons and no pine trees :-/ The rain in Seattle tends to wash the pollen out of the air, too.
For me its grass. Even walking in grass with shorts on is a no-no.
Luckily none of them are that severe, but it’s just so many things… I got allergy shots for a few years in my teens which helped a lot, so it isn’t normally that much of a problem, but I’m also a bit asthmatic so exercise outdoors is a big trigger.
Sorry about that. I'd never jog if I had to do it indoors on a treadmill. Tried it a couple times, blech. Outdoors is so much better. Like I often stop to chat with a neighbor. Just today I found out one on my route had a hidden 57 Chevy, so I had to give him a ride in my Dodge :-)
I think this is a great presentation. I've found that learning to write has largely a process of unlearning everything I was taught in secondary school. In school we were conditioned to excrete as much bullshit as we could in a fixed amount of time. Everything we learned--new vocabulary, literary techniques--we were told was for sounding more sophisticated, which we unknowingly interpreted as verbose. I even remember a loved English teacher saying "the purpose of the first sentence in a short answer is make yourself sound smarter than you are. You shouldn't answer the question until at least the second sentence." And for some reason, every argument needed 3 supporting reasons, even though in real life there's almost always just one dominant reason.
Turns out actual good writing has precisely the opposite spirit. It's about compressing ideas into their simplest forms. New words are invented to make us more concise, not less. I wish I had realized this many years ago, before writing my essays for college admission.
Another thing done at all levels of schooling is to ignore the needed process of revision. A paper is written and then graded, but if revision was a focus the student would learn a great lesson: great ideas and writing take re-writing
Now that I think about it, an incredibly valuable exercise would be to give students a longwinded, vague, rambling essay and make them rewrite it to be as clear and concise as possible. This even works within the time-constrained test environment.
Branch highlighting is on the top of our to do list, should be able to get it out soon!