skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use an SD card (one way or another) almost daily. It would only take a small amount of reworking to make the "floppy disk" Save icon look like an SD card and still look enough like the original icon to not confuse people. The cloud is cool and all but many devices (even cloud enabled ones) make use of some sort of physical storage. Many devices do not have the capability (or even the need) to get data straight from the cloud (or at least can't if they aren't able to connect to cell/wifi).
Do you regret suggesting it? I mean, sure, there would have been some immediate pain involved in finding a new job but surely that was balanced out by not working in a inefficient toxic working environment.
Off the top of my comment above, I said:

"To people that already know some Python and want to write a web app, yes, but I don't think I ever saw a "Starting out learning Python? Then use virtualenv" advice."

People tackling Django and Heroku are not Python beginners. They have to at least know the basics first...

Even pip is not something for a first-time Python use to use. Before he gets to use third-party modules he has to learn the basics of the language, syntax etc. Have you seen any introductory Python book (Learning Python, etc) starting with the installation of third party stuff via Pip?
If you are building anything serious, I would avoid GAE! Since their price hike (5-10X) in November you'll be paying 5-10X for the same performance on AWS and even more if you get a good deal on your own dedicated servers.
>Same goes for the clipboard– hell if I know why MS would use that icon for paste, but in no other software that I can think of is that normal.

That's easy. When you copy something you place it onto the clipboard, when you past it you are pulling a copy off the clipboard.
Please remove the leading space from your quote.
I think it's also worthwhile to recognize that librarians have been trying to sound the alarm on this problem for at least a decade. In 2001, Kenneth Frazier, Director of Libraries at UW-Madison, wrote an article in D-Lib Magazine where he named such journal packages the "Big Deal" and urged library administrators not to buy them.

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/frazier/03frazier.html
This headline illustrates the importance of the hyphen.

The headline refers to "people icons" that are old. I went to see how many people icons there could even be. Turns out that what he really means is old-people icons.
>Maybe you're right and Paul Krugman is wrong

Indeed (btw. where is Chile on the chart? can't seem to find it).

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/05/04/paul-krug...
All browsers I've seen that allow you to override settings allow you to do it by family (sans, serif, fixed, etc)
Other things I still see regularly in my day to day life, know (young) people that use them or even use myself sometimes: address books, calendars, manila folders, phone handsets, magnifying glass, binoculars, envelopes, screwdrivers, carbon copies of stuff
The question is why Facebook forces you to use an E-mail address as a user ID. Now THAT's amateur hour.
There's a good article to be written on this subject, but this isn't it.

"folders": we can go back to "directories" if you'd like. It's still what I say most of the time.

"wrenches/screwdrivers/gears": This was the most baffling one. Who's never used a screwdriver? And he says it as if it's obvious.

"phone": 75% of the US still has a landline (as of a year ago anyway), so I find "you haven't used this in 20 years" to be a rather dumb statement too.

"tv antenna": Antennas have actually come back recently when broadcast stations switched to digital and HD feeds. This would have been a better criticism ten years ago, and makes him the one that sounds out of date.

When I saw the article title, I figured "floppy disk" = "save". And sure, that's somewhat valid. But as others have pointed out, it's idiomatic. It happens in language all the time: people still say that someone is given "free rein" even if nobody involved has ever ridden a horse.
Sidewalk pavement stones offer Bluetooth and wifi
Which is a good thing. There's no point in having a bunch of people do manually what can be done automatically with greater efficiency and at less cost. Keynesian economics does not apply to individual organizations.
Fun read. However, if the suggestion is that we force ourselves to constantly update iconography because the metaphors are outdated, I don't agree. Sailors still say "knots", but I bet young ones don't all know why. People say "breadboard" all of the time when building electronics.

Similarly, the very letters of our language evolved out of symbols that meant something to some humans long ago, just as words have an etymology.

People simply start to associate icon with action. Mail on my Mac is represented by a postage stamp. I never realized that until I just analyzed it. Good icons are subconscious like that.
Can you clarify your issue with Fireworks? By "palette" do you mean "canvas"? From my experience, there are no sub-pixels initially on the edges of boxes drawn in Fireworks. Sub-pixels will occur if you use the Scale tool (Q) to resize the box, however you may subsequently snap the box to full pixels using Cmd+K. Also, if you resize the box using the X/Y dimension inputs in the Properties inspector, the edges will remain at full pixels.
Another thanks! I was scratching my head for a while.
That may be the case, but it's quite possible you just didn't catch them. Most people really don't do a rigorous comparison and even if they do, it's so menial a task that the brain shuts down and things slip through the cracks.

I've dedicated the last 2.5 years of my life to auto-detecting differences between browsers and have tested thousands of sites across a variety of fields. I was kinda surprised at the number of rendering issues I've come across with Firefox and Chrome in various combinations of versions and OS. I've even seen some pretty substantial rendering differences between Win XP and Win 7 in Firefox.

Anyway, your experience could be totally different. I've just come across a lot devs that have adopted this hivemind mentality around Firefox & Chrome and as a result, they stop testing thoroughly with them. Without thorough testing you can't know if you have problems, so it's really hard to conclude anything because the key data are missing. There's a gap between perception and reality.
“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.	”
The Johari Window - quote from Donald Rumsfeld

This is the point of user acceptance tests - it doesn't matter if the code does 100% what it was designed to do. If the users can't make it work, it's no good.

Nice analysis from Codecademy.
There are dozens of rules someone could already have on the page that would break it, why make a special case for box-sizing?
Yep. It's a perfectly good word for the repository of copied items.

What's the point in inventing a new term for something, when this one makes sense and is widely understood?
>You don't have to Flowers for Algernon your own productivity

Are you thinking of Harrison Bergeron?
£2/hour more than a temp data-entry position isn't market compensation for an entry-level programming gig. Converting to US wages, temp workers often make $8-$12/hour -- the temp AGENCY may be making $20-$25 for that, but the worker only pulls in up to $24k/year.

If they'd doubled his salary to ~$48k/year (assuming he previously was earning ~$12/hour) then that starts to be a decent wage for an entry-level programmer. Consider this the bare minimum ethical offer, paying the developer based on minimal market value (instead of taking advantage of his naivete).

But if it was saving them from having to pay 10 temp workers (at $20/hour each, say) and they only paid him for the summer months to perfect the script and (presumably) train a replacement, then they were basically treating him as a consultant, which (reasonably) would have doubled his hourly rate again. Paying him for 3 months at $48/hour should have cost them about $30k, but he ended up saving the company ~$350k/year (assuming they still needed to retain a $50k/year "expert" data-entry/programmer type to use and maintain the script). Since they could see his script was valuable, the least they could have done would have been to pay him a reasonable consulting rate for a few month.

On the other hand, if they'd at least gone with a fair entry-level programmer salary I wouldn't be complaining -- paying someone half of what they're worth seems to be too common to name a company a scumbag over. But yes, the company is well into scumbag territory for taking advantage of someone by paying them 1/4 of the fair market value of their time.
No idea what you're getting at. Are monopolistic internet providers about to slam us all with 48 hour round trip times? Unless we let the FCC (which doesn't have a clue about what it's regulating, according to you) enforce net neutrality?
What the author misses is that with colour LCD displays you can do sub-pixel anti-aliasing with the 3 RGB sub-pixels, if you start from a vector, which is why HTML type looks better than Photoshop rendered type.
RubySource | DDD for Rails Developers. Part 3: Aggregates.RubySource
Yep, and you have supposed "leaders" like Apple that just give up and stop trying. Apple widely just throws up a button with a "gear" on it when they're too lazy to organize functions properly. And there's no telling what the gear button will do.

Even worse is the Easter-egg UIs that are becoming a widespread problem: There's no icon (or even control) at all until you accidentally roll the cursor over the area. WTF? Are users supposed to sweep across every pixel on the screen now, looking for hidden goodies?
Beyond Hello World
Brilliant explanation of Semiotics :)
The point of better merge tools shouldn't be to automate merging with 100% correctness, that's an impossible task. Instead, the point should be to have a high level of accuracy in doing safe merges and in alerting a human being to an unsafe merge that requires resolution.
Isn't this common sense? If you've ever tried to teach anyone anything, you've run into this.
I was indeed! Curses, my memory of middle school is failing me.
Asking the free software foundation their opinion on this is pretty much like asking the turkey if it's looking forward to Christmas. The idea of an API being copyright runs so contrary to their ideals.

That being said, I'd hate to think of the number of APIs which have been cloned without the explicit permission of the copyright owner.

I can't imagine how this wouldn't cause trouble for Wine. Possibly even VirtualBox, it re-implements the IBM PC API. Could any emulator fall victim to this? Isn't a processors instruction set just the API for the processor?
I think the wikipedia game specifically excludes words in parenthesis and italics. Following those rules you actually do get to Philosophy, and you also get to Philosophy from Indo-European Languages.

Though there are some other cycles that exist.
And he missed the "film" icon for movies. I think about this one when I see the stylized movie-chain trailers in theaters: What percentage of the audience even knows what that strip is supposed to be?
MAU doesn't seem like a good model to me; it's not very well connected to your costs or customers' usage so it creates weird incentives on both sides. And it makes it expensive for an existing product with a large userbase to try out a small simperium-based feature.

You guys are a hosting/infrastructure service, and it's probably for good reason that such services have historically charged based on usage. For you that could be something fairly raw like "GB transferred, GB stored" or something a little more abstract like "pushes" or "versions".
Thanks for your kind words. As somewhat of a novice myself, I found the lack of documented real-world use cases frustrating, so I'm super happy to see this kind of feedback! I hope this can help you down the road should you make a second attempt at Kalman filtering.
Icons are the hieroglyphs of the 21st century. I can promise you that in a few thousand years if a human came across a functioning computer from the 21st century they would be truly confused by the funny little pictures all over the place. They would (WILL) most likely study our icons and try to understand our language.
I vote for Game of Life. Here’re two implementations in CoffeeScript:

http://willbailey.name/conway/docs/conway.html

http://recursiveuniver.se ;-)
I purposefully chose to ignore subpixel antialiasing because it's complicated and you have little control over how it works. It's done at a layer further abstracted from the source file, so you can't accurately pixel-fit anything to a subpixel. It's also just another hack, using a smaller unit than a half-pixel, and, like most hacks, it has some serious negative side-effects.
I wrote a program to transfer reserved seats from a 2-night show in one theater to a three night show in a different one. (For example)
Yep. I'm pretty sure Blue and others sell mics designed to look exactly like those old chrome ones.
Yes, it itself is an invisible stumbling block for experienced teachers. So meta!
This is a nice take on the I/O Docs/API Explorer style (e.g. http://developer.mashery.com/iodocs). Those sample JSON responses could really stand to get some pretty printing though. Don't provide example responses if they're unreadable. The post even touches on this ("An API’s documentation is its human interface") so it would nice to see them made more human-readable.
> * It's possible to be a good programmer without knowing how linked lists work in excruciating detail - get over it.*

It looks like our definitions of "good" and "programmer" are somewhat different.
> If I were a member of management, and I found out that he was doing this, I would be furious.

And this is why you're not management. He hasn't shared it yet, why assume he would not ever? You could show some understanding and realize there are many reasons an employee might be uncomfortable showing a radically advantageous method immediately to management.
>Can you fail PCI compliance if you're able and do this?

There are many ways to achieve PCI compliance. Not having the data is simply the easiest.
Not to mention that the icon is for the reels in a cassette, not a reel-to-reel tape.
For us young ones:
How do sea navigators measure their ships speed? http://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae400.cfm
In my app I just have the same little image of a CPU for everything - much more logical
The obvious response to all his critiques is that they're all idiomatic. Apple didn't choose a handset icon because everyone is familiar with those old handsets, they chose it because everyone will know that the icon means "telephone." Sure, it's fun to go back one more "etymology generation," but it's not necessary.
Robotic harvesting without damaging the plant is a hell of a lot more difficult than robot cars for highways. For these kind of problems you need walkers and climbers that can deal with a very wide variety of terrain.

Will happen eventually, but if you automate all labour I don't see why you should expect the poor to work any more than the rich. Already many of the jobs available in the richer countries are only there to make up the numbers and provide the illusion of employment.
High-quality Open-access Peer-reviewed journal that takes less than a year to get review and published is already in place (e.g., http://www.josis.org/index.php/josis). As a matter of fact, the academic community loves it.
Facebook's App Center has a distinct advantage over alternatives: they have much more information on the users of their apps. Also, because ratings are based on real names, they'll have a much easier time preventing ratings spam.

Because of this, Facebook has the potential to develop a more accurate app recommendation engine and solve the problem of app discovery. If Facebook can make their platform more merit-based than the capricious Apple App Store, both users and developers will flock to them.

And this isn't even considering Facebook's social graph. Not only could Facebook recommend apps based on your demographics + interests, it could also recommend them to you based on how much you previously liked the games that some of your OTHER friends liked. Things like this could add a whole new dimension to app discovery - all completely exclusive to the Facebook platform.
This is the crucial annoyance with knobs in a lot of synthesisers (real and virtual). Another problem with them is that it's not obvious how you change the value. Do you drag to the angle you want? Do you drag vertically? Horizontally

Which then gets me thinking about direct vs indirect manipulation. Which then distracts me from eating my breakfast.
"phone" - The shape he's talking about is this one[1]. While the Wrench/Screwdriver etc. are in common use, the shape here is from the rotary phone, which is not in common use.

The page I linked was literally the first google image result for me, and that top cluster of images includes many recognizeable clip-art phones, all with the same rotary phone shape.

1. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/01/getting-the-intervi...
Great post. I would have kudo'd it were I not so annoyed with having been tricked by the kudo button's hover-for-irrevocable-action on another article in the past.
Even then, the Gmail UI sucks badly:

http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6034/6310566055_4a5f5d4a53_b.j...
This goes back a lot further than computer icons.

Road signs for railway crossings still show steam trains. Men/Women signs for toilets show women in skirts that nobody wears, on images that hardly resemble people at all.

My car has a snowflake for the AC button, even though snow doesn't come out of the vents when you switch it on.

Interestingly, signs that ban music players in certain areas now look like Gen 1 iPods, even though a modern iPod (or any other player) doesn't have a clickwheel.

The point is that, iconography is meant to be clear and concise. As long as everyone agrees on what something stands for, then it doesn't matter what that is. Generally, that thing refers to a classic image of a thing, because the original shape will always be associated with the modern version.
I love Reddit, (I did have to leave for health reasons), I hope I don't sound bitter!
Obama Says Same-Sex Marriage Should Be Legal
From the stackoverflow thread linked by rapidnsnail:

> I tried this on my 9 and 13 year old nephews. I asked what does this button mean? "Save" they both answered immediately. Then I asked what the image looks like? They had no idea - not even a suggestion (which is fair since they haven't ever seen a disk). So I guess the meaning has overriden the image itself in the icon so we're stuck with it.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1019573/save-icon-still-a...
Thanks Chuck, it seems transport is pretty decent in SF then - that's good news!

I really do appreciate your input, thanks again :)

jlt
I'd normally agree with you, but it might depend a bit on management's likely reaction. If he has reason to suspect it would be negative, he might be right to keep it secret. There do exist companies that would lay him off and keep his work. That would be monumentally stupid, but it happens.
I wouldn't say the employer is wrong (I don't think parent was saying that either), but that the choice was naive. The company saved the the wages of 10 temps and only paid the guy $2 more. He should have asked for more/something more long term.
This is good news to me but has nothing to do with HN in particular.
Yet another blog which, if visited without JS enabled, displays a rather disconcertingly unrelated page (ticket search).

Noscript -> seatgeek.com -> Temp

(For anyone else confused by the apparent topic/content discrepancy).

And for those interested in a more readable technical explanation, there's the Wikipedia article (linked from the seatgeek blog): https://duckduckgo.com/lite
Deepworld, a 2D cloud-based sandbox MMO, runs on Ruby EventMachine and MongoDB
Mozilla Firefox: Rolling Out HTTPS Google search
Show HN: Syntax Highlight for your github diffs
The only real issue I have with it is that it's no more about the clipboard than copy– they're both related but neither one is it. I think in this particular example it's not so obvious that anything is coming off the clipboard. I can see it's being taken off, but it's too subtle for a cursory glance especially if I'm not used to it. I suppose I don't really have a problem with the symbol, just the icon in particular.
I guess you're right. I usually dislike such topics, but I have kind of a soft spot for Apple (not as a company, but as what they supposedly stand for: simplicity, unification of hardware and software, trying to deliver an experience rather than a product) and find these stories interesting.

But you're right: HN is not the place for such discussions. I'll refrain from posting anything like this again.
It's not common sense, in my experience. Most programmers who have tried to teach code at all have done so to someone with extraordinary aptitude (i.e. like themselves).
Sure, but if you're not old enough to know what a floppy disk is, someone would first have to tell you that the floppy disk was the save icon. I think the op's point is that icons are no longer making the user experience intuitive, they are actually adding another step. Young people have to figure out what they represent first before they use them where the point of an icon is to eliminate that step.
I was a programmer and sysadmin at a company that had lots of people doing data entry.

One of the typists found out that the client did not check the data at all. (It was all just packaged and resold.) She just hit OK for every single OCR scan that she was supposed to correct/verify. She was doing ten times as much as anyone else and doubling her salary with her bonus.

When made aware, management went along with it. I think it bordered on fraud.

On the flip side, I automated most of my sysadmin (and a lot of other co-workers) work and freed half of my work week. What did they want me to do? Data entry...
Fuck the south. Why are they always lagging behind the rest of the world in everything?
You'd be surprised. I know several guys who pay regional sales manages 15% of net. No matter how much is sold, they get 15% every month. This encourages them to work hard and allows them to directly influence the income. And yes, if they sell 1 million bucks of goods and services, they get 15% of that.
I've had a couple dozen students working through many of the CodeCademy programs this semester as an experiment. And most of the Javascript lessons currently on the site are just barely above mediocre.
Yep. It'll run within a Webkit frame on Mobile.
I hope I'm not naively over-generalizing a complex process, but is 80% of what he doing just not anti-aliasing straight lines? If that is most of it, couldn't pixel-fitting be improved by just doing that?
Good point, we will absolutely fix this.

If you don't mind me asking, why are you visiting websites without JS?
Leap Motion Raises $12.75 Million To Advance HCI With New 3D Motion-Control Tech
It's easy to claim 99% of the country has multiple broadband options if you count satellite as a broadband option, since theoretically everyone CONUS can get it. I don't, because of the 2 second latency.
The point is that it's not a good thing for him for that scenario to unfold.
I'm not a fan of Bitbucket for various reasons, but your point is well-taken - I tweeted them just now myself:

>generally like the octicons, except (a) some are too detailed, and (b) the colored bkgrds are confusing. (still a fan!)

Then again, I'm pretty sure GitHubbers will be watching this thread. ;)