skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yup, agenda view is great for a full day.
Settings in Chrome turns off the tab integration.
On the lock screen you can slide up from anywhere on the screen (which then takes me to the slide code screen).
The rest of the stuff - I guess some personal preference comes into it? But I'm thoroughly enjoying 5.0. Made a few tweaks to the default settings and it's great. Feels soooo much faster.
What are there, 1B Android users? I'm sure Google would like that to be 7B.

I'd wager the complaints of the sort of people who frequent lobste.rs or HN are not representative of the majority of current users and almost certainly not of the next 6B potential users.

Overall, it's everything Google said they would do with material [1].

It's fine to dislike these things, I don't necessarily like them myself, but claiming they're simply wrong or "for no reason" is somewhere between angry and lazy.

Just a glance at the new vs old keyboard or gmail shows a direction - moving / duplicating interactions toward the bottom right (logical as screens get bigger), breaking out punctuation into discrete keys (presumably logical given the way most people actually type).

The overall restyling is adding consistency between apps and particularly between mobile and the desktop.

Animations are really valuable anytime someone doesn't come to the table with a complete mental model of how something fits together already. Basically, they're not for you Mr. Programmer.

1: http://www.google.com/design/
So now we wait for somebody to come up with a way to fake ratings on Shazam (eg, by using a botnet) and watch a mediocre artist become a sensation? :)
It's also become incredibly difficult to scroll properly in the new calendar. I constantly find myself scrolling horizontally when I want to scroll vertically, or vice-versa; it is maddening.
Much Ado About Hamburger Icons
There are startups with 5-50 employees that have no revenue. I think the $1 million covers "established business", and 250 PCs covers "really well funded startup".
5 Things to Consider with User Experience
But other things don't require 2X
How Firebird transactions work
Show HN: WavHead, a democratic DJ
Most people aren't software developers (or similar types), their browsing habits aren't grounded in their continually-honed digital search and retrieval skills.

They like pretty pictures. They don't mind being distracted as much (all those news websites we find god-awful, with tons of display ads and flashing colors - do you assume those businesses don't know what they're doing?). They don't always visit a website with a singular intent to extract the relevant data as quickly as possible and move on.

There is so much UI/UX-related ranting on HN from the power user perspective; a lot of people just can't believe how amazingly stupid these companies are, how they haven't done any research or testing, how some exec just wanted to fuck with the design for the hell of it. The reality is, they just aren't optimizing for you, especially if advertising is their main source of revenue.

I do think it's important for them to make the power users happy enough, because they are the influencers and early-adopters that the others will follow, but they're going to have a hard time putting some nerd rage before the piles of cash flowing in.

(This post wasn't specifically aimed at you, I do agree with much of your argument, but we have to keep in mind that we aren't the only user class, we're actually a relatively small one.)
"Golf balls (2)"
Well think about it, now that you have to air gap it to keep it secure it's probably even more productive than before - no time wasted on HN for example!
Thank you, I needed that. Since I got a new job recently, and switched from PHP to C# .NET, and therefore have to use VisualStudio, I feel totally dumbed down, as I have barely any idea what is happening most of the time.

And I started to blame myself for this. So this piece really speaks to me, and confirms me that it might not be my fault here.
Agreed. Some more venting...

Calendar is now rubbish, month view is gone, schedule view is too limited and there's way to much whitespace and 'fat' place cards. Got multiple Google accounts? You can't remove the 'events' calendar. And 'Events' is ostensibly the first calendar in your actual online Google Calendar which you might have named 'Home' but in the app is steadfastly refuses to be called anything but 'events'.

This = install aCalendar[1] and Simple Calendar Widget [2]

Gmail app is now rubbish. HORRIBLE account switching. Do they even use their own app? I don't want a profile pic so I don't know which account is which of the 5 I need to use, so I just pick pot luck or swipe through them all? Then there is that annoying hover button. 'WRITE SOMETHING' it screams out at you, 'Surely that's why you're here isn't it? You couldn't possibly just want to scroll through your inbox without accidentally tapping me!!!'

This = install K9 mail.[3]

YouTube - Enter menu drawer, close it, press 'back' > still takes me back to the home screen. Take a leaf out of Feedly's book and open the frickin' menu drawer!

Chrome - Thankfully you can stop the annoying tab merge pretty easily.

Notifications - now to get to settings I have to do three actions, two pull downs and hit a teeny tiny little button, or you know, waste a space on the home screen.

Phone dialer - I actually like it. It's way faster to get to you contacts and has a much better layout than before. Still got that annoying floating button - 'DIAL SOME NUMBERS ASSHOLE!!!'

Default keyboard - why is removing the key separators a good idea? Is there some data to back that up? To me it looks like a cluttered mess. Thankfully switching back to the old style is just a setting away, but it would be great if there was a more sane default.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.withouthat...

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.anod.calen...

[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9&hl...
This is my first major open source project, so any comments or criticism are very welcome!
Can you? Oh, thank god! Actually, now doing that, that reminds me of another two WTFs?

The new menu system is bizarre. You get loads of random animations of grey appearing for no apparent reason. Put your finger on something to scroll, "grey flash!!!!". Err? What did I do? Oh, nothing...

And, this could be just not getting used to it yet, but I am completely flabbergasted at just how crap the new scroll limit indicator looks. It changes shape depending where your finger is pulling from, why? I keep thinking something's gone wrong because this uneven blob suddenly appears on the top of your screen.
They can definitely be both! But the function of a UI is not to be "gorgeous" -- it's to be usable.

A UI that's entirely functional without being flashy or visually attractive still accomplishes its mission (e.g. space shuttle control panels). A UI that's beautiful to look at but can't be understood is of little value.
Whether or not they owned the car previously or not, they are still investing that capital into the business. If they're driving full time with Uber they'll have to replace that car in a couple of years or so, instead of the ~15 years or so of life you can expect out of a modern car.
> This is dis-engenuous. One of the guests invited a tabloid reporter, did not appear to disclose the terms of the invitation to this person, and the result is predictable.

People need to realise that journalists will report everything. They will report as much as they possibly can. Unless you have a written agreement with a specific journalist that covers what is or isn't allowed to be printed you must assume that they will print everything.

The meeting was not private.

You keep saying things like "ethically challenged". That's wrong -- this is standard journalistic ethics.
How about the next Bill Gates? Microsoft was bootstrapped.
Founded X uncovers local startup scenes
He's always been low tier, but his jump in popularity was caused by m2k
Also, all languages (C++, C#, Basic) in one IDE. The Express versions have one language each.
You'll see signs like "importation of firewood prohibited" or "clean off your fucking boat" but yeah, California's the only one that stops you.
I'm pretty pleased with lollipop. Some of your complaints may be down to personal choice, but not all. For example, the triangle animation changes from pointing left when the action would be 'back', to down when the action is 'down', as in hiding the keyboard.

Some other thoughts:
- Getting to settings is no different from before when I had to swipe down and then tap a button to see the settings button. Now it's two swipes instead.
- Try schedule view in calendar for the overview you're looking for.
- The double tap on notifications to open them I like because it means I won't accidentally open one.

Things I've said 'oh, cool!' to:
- Guest accounts
- Brightness slider in the swipe down
- Priority/None interruption settings for the ringer. I used to use Shush! but this works nicely and with more configuration options, albeit less granular timing.
- Lock rotation in the swipe down settings
- Flashlight in the swipe down settings

Just another data point.
Thanks. As I said this is older than the hills :) but still holds up IMHO.

Hierarchy of controls is exactly one of those things that are very hard to do because you have to find the balance between easy to use and powerful.

I.e. the more powerful you want you tool to be the more controls you need and thus the complexity rises.
RebelMouse Integration Extended to Follr Professional
I am sure plenty of people go to Heroku from AWS and vice-versa of course. But don't underestimate the amount of work it is to switch either, you already have a working, running solution today. You maybe better off taking a week or so of time and just automating your AWS infrastructure using either OpsWorks or Ansible etc. Then deploy something like the ELK stack for the monitoring and logging to make that easier and be done with it. I am not saying any of this is trivial, but once you do it you will not have changes every day. My bet is it would take you a week or more to move, and it would probably take a week or so to automate most of your "issues" today. But at least with AWS today you know how your app is performing and acting etc.

If I was in your position, I'd probably try to automate the pain points first, then move as a last resort. Unless there are other reasons for wanting to move. But either way, just don't underestimate the work to move.
> I see your point, but what does it mean? It means returning an Option<Option<T>>. I think I'd rather lift the value out automatically

Lifting the value out automatically loses much of the value of having option types. A large part of the value of Option types is that they preserve information that gets lost when using Nullable types for a similar purpose because you can nest them -- that is, the fact that Option<Option<T>> is a thing you can use where Nullable<Nullable<T>> isn't is a big part of the point of using an option type. Extracting the value is done explicitly.
Whenever I try to get motivated to work on VR, CAVE and similar projects I reread "Ready Player One" and secretly that's the world I'm building towards :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One
Node Bug Me
Share your startup for free
We are giving an opportunity for startups to share their website for absolutely free (the offer will end soon) please go to enythings.com and share your company for free exposure.
Excellent point, completely forgot the invaluable F-Droid.
As I understand it, reCAPTCHA now relies heavily on metadata to determine if someone is a bot. Probably stuff like their IP address, browser information, geographic location, internet speed. Then it predicts how likely they are to be a spam bot and sends them a much harder CAPTCHA if so. And they change the interface to throw off bots.

The average person who just wants to automate filling out your website form is still blocked, so it's not useless.

There is some recent research that suggests you can make images which are very hard for neural networks to identify, but still easy for humans.

Here is an example: http://i.imgur.com/K6AQRkV.png The digits on the right are just slightly changed to be harder for NNs to recognize.

For comparison, this is the amount of random noise needed to have the same effect as their method: http://i.imgur.com/Asnf2L8.png
I have a spare phone so I decided to throw lollipop on it. Wow, I couldn't believe how much I hated it, and I'm not one of those never-upgrade-it-because-I-don't-like-change folks.

On 4.4.4, I've been hating the new calendar. Christ I hate the colors in agenda mode. They make it almost impossible for me to "see" the text without extreme concentration.

The first time I became familiar with the constant-change-is-bad meme is with Quicken. They would force you to upgrade every 3 years (or so, I may have the number wrong), and for a while I upgraded every year. Nothing changed from year to year except everything was in a different place and they added more bugs. I finally moved to Moneydance a couple of years ago and have been in financial software heaven ever since. One of their selling points was "we don't change shit around for no reason!"
One problem with low framerate in AR is things come "unglued" when you move your head.

(There are some workarounds: low-persistence, asynchronous timewarp)
Uber to launch low cost cab service exclusively for India
Yet it gets the job done in a successful way. At least it's a common core for almost all of nuclear and particle physics.

Also PyROOT (http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/pyroot) or the newer rootpy (http://www.rootpy.org/) really help.
Some valid points, but GitHub's UI evolution has been phenomenal over the last two years.
I just made my browser window smaller in agreement with your comment.
What does 1/3 divided by 1/6 mean?
Is it OK to leave objects on the Moon?
Your second paragraph explains it. As long as companies are sufficiently non-creepy in their privacy invasion (or at least APPEAR to be such), then the only people who will care are cypherpunks and privacy nerds, who don't form a large part of the market. The "masses" usually go for the latest shiny toy.
Control flow in SQL
I guess the trouble is with the paraphrase. I tried a lot of "sentences" and failed. I tried a more compact serie of numbers and letters and it worked. (same story with 3 of my friends). firefox on linux.
You can actually reskin the keyboard back to the old look.

Click the unlock button, swipe up on your phone, not left or right, pull down on your phone twice, click the settings button, ignore the randomly flashing menu items as you scroll down, find "language and input", click "Google Keyboard" (not "Current Keyboard"), click "Appearance and Layouts", click "Theme", click "Holo White".
They also completely removed the Gallery app and you are now forced to use Google Images. Unfortunately if you disabled the Google Plus app Google Images won't even turn on leaving you with no way to look at your own local pictures.
We have a huge underutilization issue in tech right now. The strategy seems to be to throw programmers and designers at the wall until they make something that sticks, but a lot of bad decisions come out of that strategy and it's not immediately apparent that they're bad decisions until users complain.

And it apparently leads to shallow changes. While I am ok with the new design in OS X, there are a lot real problems that I would rather like to see addressed, such as: providing a better filesystem than HFS+, fixing the annoying 'sandbox apps set quarantine attribute' bug [1], making Mail work with GMail, make iWork on par with the old versions again, etc.

[1] https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/issues/162
Well, the new calendar app is ridiculously bad. You can't get back the old "normal" calender view, lots of screen space is wasted in every window and the 1-month overview now is totally useless without any indicators.

Compared to that, the new Gmail and Maps apps are almost good...
You can tap on the month to get a monthly view.
The only Google services I use on my Android phone are Maps and the Play store. Occasionally Drive and Docs because of a customer that uses them. I search in the browser. No sync. It works perfectly fine. But that's how I use Google on my desktop too. If you are used to more integration you won't survive that :-)
I don't understand all the vitriol.

Lollipop arrived on my Nexus 5 last week, and I couldn't be happier. Battery life is significantly longer, and the new UI ... ugh, this sounds almost cloying ... the new UI makes me happy, it gives me joy.

It's beautiful, it's intuitive, it's functional, it's natural. What more could you want?

I've never owned an iPhone, but this joyful experience must be a tiny bit like what iPhone owners feel. To bring this experience to the unwashed masses of Android users is a very good thing.
I love these kinds of things, and I consider this one of the best things about the internet.

I've spent entire days exploring weird subreddits, their social rules, and the way some of them interact with each other. And from the 'pc master race' phenomenon to the enmity between reddit, 4chan, imgur and 9gag, from a forum filled with nothing but elaborate (and often well-researched and well-written) alternate histories to the troubling 'men's rights' movement, from the ecosystem of Minecraft to the parallels between cults and the more fanatical bitcoin 'groups': I can observe all of these things effortlessly without leaving my house.

How amazing (and sometimes terrifying) is that?
>the triangle animation changes from pointing left when the action would be 'back', to down when the action is 'down', as in hiding the keyboard.

I have a 4.4 device and a 4.0.something device and this happens in both (except is not a triangle)
you forgot to say stand on one leg.
Step 1 : Have a great UI.
Step 2 : Slowly and subtly break that UI.
Step 3 : Announce and hype up that you will have a great UI in the next version.
Repeat.
That looks interesting. Thanks!
Where I work has 5x complimentary MSDN Premium licenses care of whatever partnership level we have with MS.

So if they lost us to the community edition they'd lose $0. (And probably end up saving money, since no Azure developer credits.)
Started switching to alternatives after Gmail redesign fiasco. Last nail in the coffin was Google maps 'redesign'. I loved both these products but have now moved on. Luckily for us Here maps is alive and kicking and it's so much better than GMaps! Why are people still stuck with Google Maps, I don't know. Here has everything and more. Real offline navigation! And they have an Android app too!
Mendix Aims to Address 'App Delivery Chasm' for Application Development
That keyboard looks somewhat alright at first, and you can sort of see where the buttons are for the most part, but the comma and full stop really makes me uncertain about where the borders between the keys are, and that's not a good thing for a touch UI - it's uncertain enough for people with fat fingers. Is it too much to ask for to have some lines separating the keys? On the other hand, someone will certainly propose that the spacebar should really be completely blank...

Wasn't one of the most important UI guidelines for a long time "things that behave like buttons should look like buttons"? The term "mystery meat navigation" was invented to describe the effects of not following this; it's even more difficult with a touchscreen as you cannot "hover" over UI elements to discover if they're clickable.
The site selling a for-pay online video course in coding according to a certain IDE-free style unsurprisingly warns me that using an IDE is bad. Okay.
Steve Jobs Movie Dead at Sony
I really hate that we use so many analogies when teaching programming.

A programming language is not an instrument. Its a language that lies somewhere between logic, math, and actual spoken language.

When I was learning guitar, it wasn't filled with analogies like "A guitar is like a broom, you've got to learn to sweep across the strings consistently". They just said, learning guitar is hard, practice and you will get better.

Don't dumb it down for people learning, just say straight out. "Using an IDE will hide the low level things like compilation that you will need to know to be a good programmer".
I don't think users should have to tick the "behave in a less broken way" box.
It's not likely to happen in the US either, but sometimes unlikely things happen. That shooting instructor died because he was stupid. If he were smarter, he would have known not to give a kid a gun that even adults have difficulty shooting. And a single article of someone doing something stupid does not a picture of an entire culture paint. And US does not have a monopoly on stupidity, or shootings.
I strongly disagree.

We haven't seen a MOBA go without patches long enough to test if your theory is correct. Defense of the Ancients ended up at version 6.85 before develop ceased. League gets biweekly patches. DotA2 get monthly patches.

The time scale we are talking about is 5-10 years of fixed metagame development. Which in nearly all games where this happened (primarily fighters and board games) we do continue to see metagame development as long as the game is played competitively.

To assume one subgenre is excluded form this ignores the present data, and makes an assumption that the game is incredibly shallow.
> It's been proven that they are helpful for users

Proven how? With first-time users? Phones are things where I want to pull it out of my pocket, do the thing I want to do, and have it take the absolute minimal amount of time. I don't think this is a techie thing. Even non-techies are willing to take a little more time to learn an interface if it means they can spend a few seconds less to send a message. That said, if I have a device that can send a message quickly, I don't want to pull it out of my pocket and find out I have to re-learn how to do it. I don't care if the interface is better - I want a 5-year interface, not a 5-month interface.

When you make statements like "helpful for users" you can't stop at a simple focus group. You have to think about how added complexity hurts the reliability and speed of the device.

It seems standard that phones older than 1 year are getting slower and slower. I've had the same Android phone for about 22 months, and it's been getting unusably slow (mostly, Google Apps (Gmail, Maps, Hangouts) take between 10-15 seconds to open on a white screen.) I'm willing to believe the hardware has degraded over the time I've had the phone. But primarily, I think software has been pushed out that was designed for flagship phones released in the past 8 months without looking at the performance impact.

This is not the kind of innovation we need.
Staya Nadella might be accelerating things, but Microsoft has been moving through this direction before Staya's arrival (ASP.NET MVC was open sourced in April 2009), actually I see Staya Nadella taking reins as another step Microsoft took to be more open.
Facebook Shuttle Bus Drivers Vote to Unionize
This is fantastic!

A valuable resource preserved for future generations. It's frank and intimate. I'll others comment on how you could improve the production values. I just wanted to say that I appreciated this a great deal.
K9 Mail is the traditional answer to this problem. Google never put very much effort into the Android Mail App because they wanted to push you into using GMail. That said, Email still works fine in KitKat - why did you have to switch to the GMail App?
I agree with you, but it seems the train has already left the station.

I don't use my tablet all that much, but I don't find myself questioning how something is done (that stuff didn't really change), or why things look different (I don't really care). It's just... different, nothing else.
Maybe I should have stayed at MAKO a little longer for that payout... derp.
Man! Move on. Start using Here maps. I don't know why people are stuck with GMpas when far more superior alternative is available. They have a new android app as well!