Pacabel

What you're saying about icons is true, but only if we're talking about desktop software that has major releases only every few years, or software that otherwise uses a very standardized and common set of icons.

That isn't what we see with most web apps these days, including the major ones. There's continual change, including the icons that are used, where they're positioned, and what happens when they're clicked on. If you discover what an icon means and does today, there's a very good chance it'll have changed by tomorrow, if it's even still around.

We're much better off losing a small amount of space, but getting an obvious and unambiguous description when text is used instead of icons.

I think he's talking within the context of software, you know.

Even within this context, icons have been used for a long time in things like toolbars. But historically they've been quite descriptive of what they do, and often times have been accompanied by a textual description if there's any uncertainty as to their meaning.

Like the earlier commenter wrote, however, we've seen the use of icons really taken to a stupid extreme as of late. This is especially true when it comes to websites and web apps. The icons are often rather abstract, to the point of causing confusion and harming usability.

Even desktop apps have succumbed to this. Look at Chrome's menu icon. In the last version I used, it was a stack of three horizontal lines. At a glance, it's not clear at all what it represents. It's only after clicking it, and seeing the menu that opens, that the connection is made.

Yes, I have heard that saying. It's a rather stupid one, because sometimes the tools are to blame, even when in the hands of the best expert there is.

Sometimes it is the tool that's to blame, you know.

Even the best master carpenter wouldn't be able to build something as simple as an end table if he were given a pickle to use as a hammer, and an onion to use as a saw.

If Persona was really of use to the Internet community at large, I think we would've seen it be rapidly adopted, regardless of how much "marketing" Mozilla engaged in.

While it might be nice to have from an ideological standpoint, in practice it just isn't of much value to enough people. This may not be pleasant to admit, but I do think that it's the reality.

Compare it to Firefox. Firefox proved to be a product that was useful to a lot of people, and it rapidly gained a comparatively large share of the market quite quickly.

Persona has been the opposite of that. Its adoption never took off, and there's nothing to suggest that it ever will. It just wouldn't make sense for Mozilla to waste more resources on a dead-end effort, especially when those resources could be put toward improving a product like Firefox, which is actually used by millions of people today.

I think that the "very successful launches of Firefox OS" claim is odd.

While justifying it with the "15 countries with 4 operators and 4 device manufacturers"-style claims may sound good, in practice we don't really see much serious adoption.

It isn't even really competing with Microsoft's or BlackBerry's offerings at this point, and even they are significantly far behind Android and iOS when it comes to market share.

If Firefox OS were actively competing against Android and iOS, I could see it being called a "success". But at this point it's, at best, the fifth-place player, and realistically it's further down the list than that. There isn't much to indicate that it'll get much uptake, either. So all in all, that's not really impressive, I'm afraid to say. It surely should not be described as "successful".

It isn't about Firefox needing to have its own distinct appearance, and it isn't about "ugliness". It's about usability, plain and simple.

Chrome-style UIs are quite dumbed down and non-standard. Now, this might actually work tolerably for average or casual web users, or those with very tiny screens. But for other users, especially those who expect a lot from their browser and push it hard, this approach is just plain ineffective.

Chrome's single menu, for instance, is a total mess. A traditional menu bar and menu hierarchy is a much saner way of organizing functionality. Best of all, there's a lot of similarity between applications, which in turn makes them all easier to use.

Firefox used to have a UI that offered a good balance between not wasting space, while still making important functionality quick and easy to use. As they've copied Chrome's UI more and more the past few years, Firefox has become decreasingly useful for a lot of users.

Having to remedy these deficiencies using more and more add-ons with each release is getting increasingly tedious. The worst part, however, is that all of the major browser vendors have fallen into this let's-imitate-Chrome trap, so it's not like there's a viable alternative to switch to.

What prevents a particular mark from being interpreted as some measure of validity, though? If such marking can represent ownership of another asset, could it not represent some other concept, too?

I've ordered pizza from several chains that use exactly the same process for their online orders, and have done so this way for years now.

No account is mandatory, although such functionality is offered if you want to save your preferred pizza toppings, your address, and so forth for greater convenience during future orders.

You can prepay, if you want, or just pay the delivery driver once the pizzas have been delivered.

I'm not really sure what needs to be "validated" here. This approach has been successfully used by many other organizations offering the exact same type of service.

Pointing out that pizza (or other food) delivery is a very well-established practice that's been carried out successfully all across the globe for a very long time isn't being "snarky".

He's merely stating the obvious facts that, for some reason, a lot of people here are totally overlooking when they think that this idea is somehow "innovative".

He clearly understands the concept. What isn't understandable is why it's here at HN, why it's within the top 10 front page submissions, and why some people claim to think this idea is innovative or special. It's really nothing more than pizza delivery.

I don't think he thinks it's a "dumb" idea, either. Clearly it's at least somewhat viable, given that pizza delivery is well and alive, with many establishments being around for many years, if not decades.

But that's really what it boils down to: this is just a very limited form of the well-established, long-running practice of pizza delivery. Pizza is, after all, just freshly-baked bread delivered to one's door, but with the benefit of various toppings.

It's really absurd to see you talking about "why it's only happening now" or that "nobody ever thought of it", especially when we've been ordering pizza and having it delivered to our door in well under an hour for many, many, many years now. This is an old idea, plain and simple.

Any moderately busy pizzeria will queue up a few delivery orders that end up being ready at around the same time, and will have one driver deliver them all within a single trip.

The trip may take marginally longer than if just one order were being delivered, but it ends up fulfilling five or six orders with one trip. The cost per order ends up being decreased to a reasonable level.

I'm not sure where you got the "I don't understand this" and the "This is dumb" interpretations from. It's pretty clear that neither of those are expressed in that comment. There's one coherent idea that is expressed, and it could perhaps be summed up as, "This idea is not particularly innovative or special in any way."

This is really no different from ordering pizza. I mean, the ingredients even overlap to some extent, although most pizza vendors will also offer drinks, sandwiches, chicken, and other dishes these days. And basically every pizza vendor will deliver to your door.

Many of the larger pizza chains have at least some presence over very large areas, so you can get the same predictable meal even when in distance cities or towns. And these days, most of these chains offer various ways of ordering, from in person to over the phone to websites to mobile apps.

Sure, it takes some skill to get such an operation up and running, but the idea itself isn't new by any means. And there really isn't anything special about it. It's just a very, very slight twist (perhaps even just a simplification) of a well-established type of business.

I'm sorry, this is absurd. You truly think that so many experienced database professionals and software developers speak out about the dangers of using it solely to be "cool"?

You really don't think it has anything to do with the numerous serious technical deficiencies it suffers from? (Read some of the other comments for this submission if you really do need more details about these problems.)

When it comes to databases, fooling around just isn't an option. If a given database technology has flaws, then those flaws need to be widely known. And this isn't done to be "cool". This is done because the safety and integrity of data are of the utmost importance when working with database systems, and it's absolutely critical to know about anything that may cause problems.

How do you propose that new algorithms become "widely used" if nobody should use them until they are "widely used"?

How is that an alternative that addresses the issues wildpeaks has raised, though? If anything, the invitation scheme over there just amplifies the sort of problems wildpeaks mentions.

I think what he's saying, though, is that to many people here the expression of "unpopular views" or any sort of criticism is always and directly synonymous with "trolling". This holds true for them even when what's said is completely valid, completely with merit, and expressed in a perfectly reasonable manner.

People do "get loud" about stuff that's inherently an improvement. C++11 is a good example of this. It generally does improve C++ in significant ways, and there are a lot of people who are willing to express this.

The fact that we overwhelmingly hear silence or anger toward Mozilla's UI changes is indicative of them not being very good at all.

I think that hardware factors like those are generally irrelevant when it comes to purely software issues, like we're discussing here. In this case, we're talking about an energy consumption penalty imposed solely at the software layer.

Aside from arguments about the screen perhaps not needing to be used as long when the software completes its operations faster, I think it's probably safe to say that such hardware-specific energy consumption due to the factors you mention would be constant in both the case of compiled applications and the case of interpreted applications.

I'm not convinced that it's purely an implementation issue. While maybe that's true in a theoretical sense, I don't think it holds true in practice.

There are various characteristics of programming languages that can make it much easier to implement them as interpreted languages rather than compiled languages, and vice versa.

Maybe any difficulties could be overcome given enough resources, but this usually isn't the case. I think this is why the efforts to make compilers for a language like Python have never really been that successful. And the same goes for the attempts to create interpreters for languages like C and C++.

Perhaps the most success has been with the various compilers that compile Java source or bytecode to native code. But even in that case, the end result usually isn't very good. It's usually somewhere in the undesirable middle, giving the worst of both compilation and interpretation.

Why is it surprising or notable that there are people who have different needs?

Sure, there are some people who make very minimal usage of a web browser. They can get by just fine with a dumbed down Chrome-style UI. They might even like that experience.

Not everybody falls into that camp, however. There are a lot of users who push web browsers much harder, and expect a different experience. They need a UI that exposes the functionality they need to constantly use.

Firefox used to be good at giving power users what they needed, while still being relatively lean, easy-to-use and useful for users who pushed it less intensively.

We've seen this change over the past few years, however, as they've stripped out useful UI functionality in their quest to imitate Chrome. Firefox is now a weaker, less-practical browser for many people. These people are burdened with trying to install numerous addons, just to restore Firefox to something reasonably close to its previous state of usability.

Firefox isn't alone, of course. Just look at the whole debacle that Opera has experienced with the new versions of their desktop browser. It's perhaps even worse in that case, given how they're building upon Blink and Chromium directly. The new versions of Opera are horrible compared to Opera 12 and earlier. It's just really unfortunate to see this happening to software products that were once pretty good.

They can, and many do or have done so in the past.

Let's not pretend that security incident post-mortems are anything new; they aren't. There's not really even anything special about this one.

I don't really see much point in applauding these guys for doing what's perhaps the minimum we should expect from them in this situation.

The arguments in favor of considering an interpreted language as a suitable alternative are not very convincing.

Slower execution is indicative of waste. When it comes to interpreted languages, even those that are very well implemented, any slowness is directly related to energy loss. This is very problematic when it comes to mobile devices, even modern ones, as this energy is generally coming from a rather limited source (the device's battery).

While this may not be a problem if one or two apps are written using a wasteful interpreted language, it can become a much bigger issue when the entire ecosystem is implemented in such a manner. It'd be irresponsible to unnecessarily reduce the battery life of the devices of thousands or even millions of people.

And while many mobile devices today probably are more powerful than desktops from a decade ago, I don't think it's correct to say that those desktops "ran interpreted apps just fine". They didn't. There's a reason why Java has a bad reputation for performance problems, even today: many desktop apps written in Java performed horribly on computers of that era. And Java was perhaps the best-performing of the interpreted or quasi-interpreted languages.

If anyone needs placating, it's those developers, managers and executives who pushed hard for the use of Node.js in business settings, not expecting a serious security incident like this one to happen.

For those who are especially serious about their careers, reputations, budgets and power, incidents like this involving the technologies they hyped and pushed through can be disastrous. Now they're seen as being very wrong about something very important, and this in turn makes them extremely angry.

They know that their competitors within the business will use this incident against them. Their next initiative will surely face comment like, "Why should we listen to you after the npm disaster?", and they will face a much harder battle if their decision involves any controversy or doubt at all.

I think he just wants them to not screw up the UI so badly in the first place that numerous addons and customization is needed to bring it back to a minimal level of usability.

Lots of people tell Mozilla that their recent UI changes are bad. Just read the comments of any blog post Mozilla makes about such changes. Mozilla never listens. Their current approach is always deemed the "correct" one, even if it's seen as totally wrong a mere 3 to 4 months later, and subsequently reworked in some significant way.

These recent moves to imitate Chrome to an even greater extent are not welcomed, even if Mozilla forces them on its remaining Firefox users. Many people use Firefox these days precisely because its UI still retains a few of the vestiges of the more more usable UIs of its pre-4.0 releases. Getting rid of these makes Firefox even less appealing.

Perhaps the only thing keeping people on Firefox is that the UIs of the other browsers have gotten far worse (like in the case of the new versions of Opera and IE), or were never very good to being with (like in the case of Chrome).

We have indeed seen a severe dumbing-down of all of the major desktop browsers over the past few years, as mobile devices have become more widely used. So I think that what you're saying is happening, and will continue to happen.

Desktop browser users should not have to suffer because mobile users choose to use platforms that are crippled in so many ways. Nor should desktop browser users have to install numerous extensions just to bring modern desktop browsers back to the level of usability we had a few years earlier. Yet with each new release of the major desktop browsers, we find ourselves in the position of reduced functionality, and the need for more and more extensions to restore the now-missing functionality.

Today's mobile devices, especially the higher-end ones, are quite powerful. They offer more processing power, memory and storage than laptops did just a few years ago, and desktops just a few years before that. So I don't think that "doing it on mobile" is really that powerful of an argument any longer.

To be fair, sometimes it is hard to tell when those in the Ruby/JavaScript/Web 2.0/NoSQL/"opinionated" crowd are being serious and when they're joking.

Some of the claims or statements they make in a serious manner are so far off-base that they appear to be jokes to those with more experience or higher standards.

The "JavaScript is like Scheme" claim is a good example of this. A lot of JavaScripters will openly express this idea in complete seriousness. Yet anyone who has actually used JavaScript and Scheme will know that this really isn't true at all. The true intent of the person making the outrageous claim is hard to discern. They might be serious, or they might be joking. Often, it's safest to assume that they're being serious, until they explicitly admit otherwise.

I really don't know what exactly it is, but there's something about the Ruby community that seems to draw in immaturity, and them amplify it.

This pervasive immaturity does tend to result in things going sour, and for some reason it always tends to happen in a very dramatic and public manner.