175 karma · joined March 14, 2012
https://ali-alkhatib.com
uber-drivers-are-comparing-fares-with-riders-to-check-their-pay-from-the-company/If it's the former, it's more than a little melodramatic to say they're locked in. The situation would be resolved when the hotel paid the ransom (which they'd done twice before). And they don't really even have to leave their things in the hotel room; guests could pack up their belongings and move to another hotel if they really feel like the situation won't be resolved in a timely manner. I assume European laws would guarantee customers a refund (or at least a prorated refund) in a case like this, wouldn't they?
If it's the latter, then what kind of hyper-secure system is this hotel using, and more importantly why?
I don't see any reason to go off spec given that they should be able to go up to 100W, but I may be wrong. Or Apple might come up with some hazy excuse for why the existing standard was no good. It'd be a real shame, though.
First, it's a good thing that we're converging on a standard. Standards mean not only that we can safely buy components from third parties (for instance, buying reputable, reliable USB Type C cables from places like Monoprice or whomever), but that we can borrow charging cables from others relatively easily. We've had a taste of that thanks to MagSafe's ubiquity, but a USB-based spec potentially broadens that.
Second, USB battery packs (admittedly a slightly niche product category, but one that's been growing rapidly in the past few years) could potentially be made to charge Macbook Pros now. There are some battery packs out there that support MagSafe today, but my sense from shopping around every few months is that the best option continues to be to buy a battery pack that has a standard electrical outlet, and carrying that big bulky MagSafe AC adapter with me. Transitioning to a USB spec (should) permanently open the door to portable battery packs, third party AC adapters, etc...
Third, USB power hubs (again a slightly niche product category, depending on whom you ask) can consolidate all of the AC adapter functions that devices need for charging. I'm already nearly there --- my tablet, battery pack, bike lights, phone, and watch all charge by USB (heck, I have a charger for my DSLR's batteries that uses Micro USB), and a single AC adapter for those devices is both tidier and easier to pack and travel with.
I agree that MagSafe's really nice and I'll be sad to see some of the benefits go, but particularly with MagSafe 2 they've overcorrected in my opinion by making the threshold strength necessary to break away too low, and it's caused me to seriously reconsider whether the frustration of all these inadvertent disconnections is worth the benefit. I see at least a few reasons to be glad that the next laptop I buy (maybe in a year, certainly in three) will probably be able to charge via the same (reasonably priced!) AC adapters and battery packs that I'll own for my peripherals, and that if I'm really up a creek it'll be more likely that I find someone with a compatible charging cable, since USB is (and will continue to be) pretty much ubiquitous.
I probably wouldn't give them this PDF, but I imagine I would give them a markdown file that illustrates many of these same reminders with examples and caveats.
It's confusing that the author specifically says that the startup works with Python and Django, because I agree that a Python developer shouldn't need a reminder that `python <file.py>` runs the python script (and in fact in that space I would have instead made a note about `python`/`python3`) but I want to try to take the value from this, rather than pile on with the crowd deriding it.
Koby's tweet shows what a breakup looks like, and it's tragic, but if you imagined someone retrospectively posting a screenshot of their heart rate readings from the day they met their current partner, we might see a similar pattern of elevated readings as well, wouldn't we? It seems like it would be just as plausible (to me, anyway).
I'm not saying that we should find better dimensions to measure (I think we'll always find ambiguous, confusing results absent context), but that whatever we measure should get qualitative context if we want it to really mean anything.
What's the copyright status on Space Invaders? I'm asking because of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10180209
I'd complain about the WSJ's practice of not properly referencing the study, but I'm afraid that's becoming about as played out as the complaints about paywalls.
It's also nice to be able to upgrade that desktop relatively easily, tap into a more performant computer when my laptop's not up to snuff (but the problem's not quite big enough to justify spinning up EC2 instances or using some university resources), and plug in/unplug essentially with an ethernet cable (to mitigate the latency issues of on-campus wifi) rather than deal with a mess of cables.
I actually have 3 monitors (2x4K and a 1080p display), so all of the MiniDP ports and the HDMI port would've gotten taken up, leaving me just with USB, which would've been somewhat frustrating (yes, a shortcoming of the laptop, but one I accept). This way I still have my HDMI port and a Thunderbolt port available (and I have ethernet, arguably somewhat faster than the available wifi, as a nice side effect).
It's not necessarily perfectly ideal - perfect might be something like monitors that connect wirelessly, certainly without a second machine running in the background - but having a pair of 4K monitors in portrait/vertical orientation is so pleasant that it totally overwhelms any lingering misgivings or doubts about whether it's worth it. I can put myself in Bandt's shoes where he says that he didn't really like having 2 or 3 monitors, but for me that awkwardness was only temporary.
I fully understand that 4chan is the bigger ticket item in this, but that only makes it more confusing to me that Nishimura would want 8chan, let alone offer money for it (I could understand if 8chan was a rider, like he had to take 8chan if he wanted 4chan, but they were owned by different people, so that seems unlikely).
I'd like to see some guessing as to how this is expected to affect 4chan (and 8chan)'s day-to-day/culture, but I'm skeptical of anyone's analysis/insight if it leaves out the black sheep 8chan in all this (as is the case in the NYT article here).
In one chapter he points out that studies such as the OECD's tend to find middling results (as this one seems to, although I see more explicitly negative conclusions, like that students do worse with technology in some circumstances) mainly because you're studying students from across all schools; look at the successful schools and see how technology affects them, and he seems to argue that you'll find those students make even greater leaps over the underprivileged students.
His bigger point is that technology's benefit is contextually determined by human factors, and that we need to understand the cultures in which we hope to use technology to benefit the members of that culture. Throwing tablets, laptops, or smartphones at everyone won't magically make the world a better place. It's a good read (so far, at least).
Also, I'm getting more and more annoyed seeing news outlets publishing summaries of third party studies without linking to anything. The BBC don't even link to the OECD's homepage, let alone the study they ostensibly published.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10152224
[1]: https://redd.it/3jd1bj (from Artemis2)
The timing might be a little confusing; my understanding is that the book was born out of her dissertation written before 2010, predating the article in the Atlantic, but this book was published after the Atlantic article came out (so it may be even more refined than the article, and certainly more in-depth).
It's longer (on the order of ~250 pages), but it's really great, and one of my favorite examples of Anthropology investigating and thinking about technology and the people that live and breathe it.
It's fairly well-documented[0], and the GitHub incident in particular has been discussed on HN at length[1]. I think I gave the exclusion that if you're talking about it in a context that's socially acceptable (e.g. critiquing the use of the word, or as you point out discussing it medically), then I imagine that's fine (but I don't know, and I'm not about to test GitHub on how readily they'd censor content in a gray area).
This point about whether a site is yours or not is a red herring. For the purposes of technicality, you could argue that you don't really own your online presence unless you own the servers and the service providing access (per example: Wikileaks used Amazon's S3 service until AWS dropped them[2]). For the purposes of this discussion, however, it suffices to say that you "own" your online presence if your front page (absent a personal site, your profile pages on social networking sites) is determined by you rather than potentially influenced by friends (e.g. tagging you in a photo at a party).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retard_(pejorative)
It's really mean-spirited to cherry pick embarrassing examples, so I'll email those to you privately and publicly suggest (to everyone with a site) a quick pass through of the static content (don't bother revising all the blog posts unless you have plenty of time; just be more careful with your writing in the future and do several pass-throughs).
The value in a personal website is that the content of the first search result is all yours (as in, rather than letting Facebook be the first result with all the embarrassing stuff your friends might tag you in, the first result will be entirely self-sourced). Arguably, that puts even more onus on you to be absolutely confident in the quality of that result, because people are expecting this to be your best foot forward.
I'd like to see a discussion over whether a personal website is a better investment of one's time (and money?) than a LinkedIn profile on balance (maybe for certain people). It may be controversial, but I imagine there are good points on both sides (more detailed insight about exposure from google analytics on someone's and better export affordances with personal sites; a real network and infrastructure on LinkedIn's side).
Admittedly, it's not clear whether GitHub would take down such a repository/site, but my hunch is that when it's deliberate and not casually thrown around, people wouldn't have as much footing to complain about a charged word. That being said, I'm not willing to test it, which says your point has merit just by virtue of a chilling effect.
Nevertheless, a sibling comment mentions using S3, which (I think) would be less likely to get taken down (although I've never heard of Amazon outright refusing to take down such content, so maybe the request simply hasn't happened yet).
In the former case, there's no attention placed on that summer, and people (probably rightly) assume that nothing interesting happened (it may come up in an interview why there's a gap there, but I'll get to what I think the parallel for that is). In the latter case, I'm being relatively uncooperative in the information-gathering process.
The connection to companies seems weak to me. When I go into a restaurant that neglects to post its food hygiene scores, I assume roughly the same as when I walk into a store and the cashier neglects to tell me if he has a criminal history. If I ask, and the restaurant tells me that it declines to answer, that seems more parallel to the question of declining to answer negative personal information. Similarly with the "decline to answer" case among people, I bet people would infer the worst of companies that "actively" declined to answer questions (versus those that neglected to bring it up).
These are interesting questions the researcher is asking, and it's particularly interesting to think about how we craft our identities online, but I think they need to reflect more on the parallels they draw before concluding that dynamics are different.
edit: I'm looking up the paper itself, because it occurs to me that a mainstream news outlet is pretty likely to misreport the study's design, results, discussion, etc... and it'd be unfair not to assume that the article writer (or I the reader) misunderstood something.
I'm tempted to agree, but I'm not sure whether this is entirely Apple's fault (some of it is, certainly), or whether this is partly the fault of developers (or maybe shifting the blame back to Apple, Apple's fault for not imposing even stricter interface guidelines). Some apps in iOS have this affordance where you can go back if you swipe from the left edge of the screen inward, but frustratingly some don't. Is this what Norman is talking about? It's not clear because he avoids giving specific case studies, which isn't his style (DOET is a veritable plethora of strong examples to illustrate his points), making me think he's saving them for his later critique.
Norman mentions research that users can't remember more than a small number of icons, and I'd like to know what research in particular he's referencing, but coming from a cultural anthro background and with some very superficial knowledge of semiotics, that seems inaccurate, or at least incomplete; maybe he's talking about people learning icons in a very constrained timeframe? People learn to identify countless icons throughout their lives and (within a given culture) you can reliably show people hundreds of iconic symbols and images that they would recognize immediately.
I agree with the general argument that Apple (and others) are overloading us with iconography that we need to internalize (iOS emoji in particular seems like too much too quickly, but maybe that's just me), but I think the answer to this is that it takes time for cultures to adopt icons into their lexicon.
I would argue that helping the user form a consistent and "accurate" mental model for how things work is the most important thing a designer can do. He points to this in some examples (swipe gestures in particular, which evidently are inconsistent between iPhone, iPad, Trackpad, and Magic Mouse), but he doesn't name the overarching point as such (or if he ties it all together, I missed it).
At the end, Norman previews that he and Bruce Tognazzini are writing a critique on "How Apple ruined design", giving me the sense that this post was about drumming up interest for that. If that's the case, mission accomplished.
Ignoring the minutiae of the rest of the post (and you can argue I'm really doing this quite intently), I think I agree with the principle. The name's not that important. If you're processing financial transactions you could be named PayPal, sure, but you could also be named Stripe or Square or BrainTree[0] or any of dozens of weird names that make no sense at face value (if these names are in fact deeply meaningful, I'd be curious to hear the stories... privately, or on Twitter, not necessarily here/now).
There are reasonable things to get stuck on - if you're committed to being a B2C product or service, and others are telling you your startup is more of a B2B idea, then you should wrestle with that. But you shouldn't be wrestling over the name for such a great deal of time. If Paul Graham tells you to change your name when you're pitching to him so you can get a .com, you probably shouldn't (he argues) protest all that much.
I don't think I hold his view as strongly as he does, but I'm neither a successful VC nor widely respected in Silicon Valley, so his argument about perception is admittedly a little self-fulfilling and it seems impossible to reject.
[0] the irony is not lost on me, now that I check, that BrainTree doesn't own braintree.com - although first glance suggests Square only has squareup.com, square.com redirects to it; I'd be interested to hear Graham's thoughts on that, and I think it would signal strongly whether I understood his argument correctly.
If your idea seems worthless, a squatter might figure this is the time to shed a worthless domain for a few hundred or thousand bucks. If you're at the helm of a runaway multi-million-dollar success, I imagine the squatter is going to try and squeeze you for significantly more.
I don't doubt it per se, I just want to pin down that notion. I find it shocking that they outlived Circuit City and Radio Shack, so I'm beginning to wonder if maybe they're actually profitable and we're just annoyed that their target market doesn't necessarily capture us anymore (the way it did in the 90s and to some extent the 00s in my case).
(note: a descendent comment asking about a Best Buy reference pointed out that I inadvertently said Fry's outlived Best Buy; I meant Circuit City and corrected it, but that may just add more confusion with the resulting conversation)