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rrrx3on Fabricator – modular website design system

Interesting. Looking around at the source now, it looks like it's not optimized to imply that sort of architectural thinking. That's a bummer. I'd love to have seen it take the React style approach of co-locating all the relevant parts to a module together.

rrrx3on Conceptual Debt Is Worse Than Technical Debt

Yes, precisely.

rrrx3on Conceptual Debt Is Worse Than Technical Debt

You have renamed "Design Debt," as outlined here back in 2004 by James Shore: http://www.jamesshore.com/Articles/Business/Software%20Profi...

Design Debt is not a new concept. It is a common cause of product failure. Taken from the link above:

"'Design debt' explains the problem. When a team is working under pressure, they take shortcuts that compromise design quality. It's like taking out a high-interest loan. The team gets a short-term boost in speed, but from that point forward, changes are more expensive: they're paying interest on the loan. The only way to stop paying interest is to pay back the loan's principle and fix the design shortcuts."

rrrx3on Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform

The decision to only support Philips products came most likely from the engineering division themselves. Marketing probably had a shit-fit because losing a marketable feature is a giant regression to your general user.

People in Marketing and Product tend to be way more in-tune with customers and don't make boneheaded decisions like this. Another easy tell: the company was shocked by the reaction of users. That meant the company wasn't aware of user impressions of the decision. That also meant Product/Marketing teams weren't involved in the decision.

When the "what does it cost us to test this compatibility" calculus comes out as more expensive than "what is the cost of the backlash to our company," you realize that Engineering divisions without enough resources are driving this type of decision, 99 times out of 100.

rrrx3on Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform

It's making sure that you're not liable for someone's house burning down because they bought the el cheapo bulb from knockoff brand C. This is standard protective legal boilerplate to protect philips in the unlikely event.

Also, want to point out that philips is not "extorting money" from other companies - they can choose to enter the "friends of" program to make the general consumer feel better, or choose not to, at their discretion.

The class of user that realizes any zigbee bulb will work with a hue hub is already technically proficient, and will more often than not be willing to take on any associated "risks."

rrrx3on The Dribbblisation of Design

That's fair. But that goes back to my original statement - you can't reasonably call yourself a "UXer" if you're not doing the whole bit.

rrrx3on The Dribbblisation of Design

My 2 cents, as a former visual designer, now senior UX designer - Dribbble is a place where lots of pretty baubles are on display, where flash is valued over process, and where it's very hard to get a sense of anything other than the showcased designer's visual acumen.

When I'm interviewing a designer, I don't take it as a positive or negative that they have a dribbble account. If they're interviewing for a position that is primarily visual design, I will peruse their stuff there just to get a sense of their style and capability, but not as a final deterministic factor on their hireability.

Dribbble was never really meant to be a place where people showcased their process, just a place where they could throw out a quick snippet to get reactions. Visual designers find that extremely helpful. If you're not versed in the ideas of typography, color theory, moodboarding, concepting, or any of the other methodologies and tools in a visual designer's wheelhouse, then looking from the outside in at Dribbble can make it seem like a world filled with trite, inefficient, fantastical non-reality.

You're not alone in this. Even I, as a former visual designer, have to tell myself that when I go clicking through Dribbble. It's not a place to showcase fully-polished, finished products - it's not a product marketing site. It's not a place to showcase the messy process of product design - it's not a portfolio site. It's a place where people can toss out ideas and get feedback on the micro-points of it. The colors, they typography, the alignment. Start to expect anything more and the model of the entire site falls apart.

For better or worse, Dribbble is not built to scale as a place for the critique of the entire design process. I think that's where this article gets it wrong. There are plenty of things to critique the site for - the lack of real meaningful engagement, for example, or the highly exclusive invite-only nature, for another - but fundamentally the OPs of this article are projecting thoughts and ideas about what they think/want Dribble to be vs what it actually is.

TL; DR: Dribbble is a place to showcase digital visual art and design artifacts, not a meaningful UX or UI portfolio catalogue.

rrrx3on The Dribbblisation of Design

If the UX people you've been working with haven't been doing post-implementation statistics and analytical measurement leading to refinement, then they are not UX people. They are visual or interaction designers playing at being UX people.

Unfortunately, the hard truth of it is that most "UX people" are in environments where the post-implementation cycle is ignored. For as many companies out there that claim to embrace the "UX process," I'd say that well over 80% of them don't actually embrace it beyond feature release.

rrrx3on Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

Sure. Except that the OP of this on Medium went on to detail a very different scenario, outlining behavior that mirrors exactly what I said. You assert that the companies you've worked for do it differently? Ok, that may be so. But you're also not the bellwether for the entire industry, no matter how you may characterize your 20 years of work. I've been in it half as long, and as a person of color I can tell you unequivocally that you have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to exposure, opportunity or lack thereof, or general desire to be involved in technology as a profession from that community.

rrrx3on Platter Crash on an IBM Death Star HD (2003)

Ahh, I remember this scandal. What's funny is that there were tons of people affected by this from what i recall, because these drives were initially billed as some of the best hardware money could buy.

rrrx3on Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

Exactly. There are numerous HBCUs that have very well structured CS programs. I'd be willing to put money on the fact that those graduates don't even get a second look. Valley people are too preoccupied with the optics of having a BIG SCHOOL NAME to actually care if an employee without the school name can do the job just as well or better.

rrrx3on Facebook listening to conversations through microphone?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...

I work in Ad tech. No one is capturing anyone's voices to serve them ads via their mobile devices. People are often segmented by location and proximity to interests, however. If someone nearby (a neighbor, perhaps) searched for pest control? Guess what, you're now in a likely segment of people looking for pest control. Boss searched for a canon printer at work? You're in that segment, too, until your interest score drops and you're removed from that audience segment. This is pretty universal - you can even see what Google's got you pegged for being interested in by going here: https://www.google.com/settings/ads

TL;DR: There are like-minded people in very close proximity to you, searching for the same things that you search for/mention/use/lust after, and you're getting lumped in with them.

rrrx3on Netflix Switch – dim lights, turn on the TV, order food, and silence your phone

This is really cool, thanks for sharing.

rrrx3on New API for directory picking and drag-and-drop

It's unfortunate, but this is typical behavior. I really wish it would stop, though.

rrrx3on 37 rental cars – 2 days – 185,000 miles earned

It's definitely both.

rrrx3on The Hamburger Menu Doesn't Work

Depends on the user group and the context you're designing for. Only so-called "novice users" struggle with right click. Intermediate to advanced users are well versed in it. The former user group is dwindling by the day.

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/feature-richness-and-user-en...

This also falls under the "myth of the stupid user." http://infodesign.com.au/usabilityresources/articles/themyth...

Be very careful about conflating the two issues. Usability studies have shown that users struggle with inappropriately labelled hamburger menus. Usability studies have also shown that users of intermediate to advanced skill do not struggle with right click. One is an issue regarding appropriate labelling and visual affordance, and the other is one of system and hardware affordances.

rrrx3on Show HN: Page progress with bookmarking

that seems like the right direction to take it - make the position as transparent to the user as possible.

rrrx3on Ask HN: Which JavaScript frameworks do you use?

"Why are there so many frameworks in the first place?" seems like a question for psychology paper more than a computer science one :)

rrrx3on Show HN: Page progress with bookmarking

Goodbye, back button. Goodbye, history.

rrrx3on Why Britain has ‘ghost trains’

These are the fascinating things that keep me coming back. Are there any ghost routes in the US that anyone knows of?

rrrx3on How Apple’s iCloud Drive deletes your files without warning

It's happened to me as well, with albums I purchased from iTunes. It may be anecdotal, but I've heard it enough to take it as fact.

rrrx3on Show HN: Free Company Logo API

I'm a designer, too, and there are those of us who believe that not only is design automation possible, it is likely, and we will be much the better as contributors and society for it.

Google's Mathias Duarte advocated as such at UXPA last year in his keynote.

Think about it this way - design trends are just manifestations of a particular temporal affinity towards one aesthetic or another. Machines can measure this and expound as well as react to it at a much faster scale than the human mind can.

Design isn't art. There are way too many designers out there who think it is. Art is art. Design is about solving problems. You can and totally should automate as much of that as possible.

rrrx3on Why nobody pays for Sublime?

I paid, and I use it daily, but I have noticed the drop-off in support lately.

rrrx3on Interoperable CSS

Always relevant. In life, and in code.

rrrx3on Interoperable CSS

Exactly. This comes from proper element definition and understanding pieces before they go onto the page to begin with. Planning out, using BEM, or OOCSS, or Atomic helps tremendously here.

rrrx3on Ask HN: Using a mac as the main development system or not

The road to hell is paved with good intentions - I'd personally get a 15" because of the flexibility it provides. Also because of the "envy" factor, which is nearly impossible to discount.

rrrx3on Ask HN: Using a mac as the main development system or not

If your current machine is sufficient for the non-iOS/OSX dev work you do, I don't see the value in putting money into it instead of a MBP. I would go for option B, however i'd get a 15" with as large an SSD as you can afford with 16GB of memory. Unfortunately what you get with these newer models is what you're stuck with, and I can tell you that anything less than 8GB on those machines can be a PITA, especially if you start running VMs.

rrrx3on Sand Hill Exchange Fined $20,000 by SEC

So, by fabricating entirely false financial pictures for companies,

> We created bots to trade against incoming orders. They were like my friends. I even named them! My favorite was the “Jesse Livermore” bot. Opportunistic to a fault.

> The bots would run every day and place orders against each other so the market looked like it was exhibiting lots of price movement and volume. For added credibility, we randomly generated trading histories for each company going all the way back to last year. So we had historical price and volume in addition to streaming quotes for chart data.

and by then letting people speculatively place their own money into the already unbalanced and illegal equation, you somehow managed to wipe your hands of any responsibility for their actions?

What in god's name are you smoking? You got off easy with a 20k fine. You belong in prison.

rrrx3on Sand Hill Exchange Fined $20,000 by SEC

Completely fabricating equities, along with their histories, activities, and level of market interest isn't fraudulent?

Oh, ok.

rrrx3on I Can’t Design in the Browser (2012)

This is from 2012. I'm not sure how relevant it is anymore. As tons of others have mentioned here, tools like Sketch help to bring designs closer to implementation. Also, "design in the browser" was never meant to mean "forgo all other parts of the design process and just start coding." Some people seemed to skip over that.