gbromios

I'm not audiophile, but I was prepared to do the same, despite the discomfort and obviously-lower sound quality... but the mic isn't even sufficient for meetings in a public place (e.g. a diner at lunch time), whereas my laptop's builtin mic is. How can they expect us to use these things??

People will use words however however they will, and that's their absolute right. And without pretending that the aforementioned unique quality should (or even could) justify enforcing one meaning over the other in the English language at large, I think that it's fine to have different standards for different contexts, and that Wikipedia is a context whose need for precision and clarity justifies some pedantry.

If this guy's willing to put in the legwork, more power to him.

Maybe I just haven't been paying attention to the rate new CSS features, but from my perspective this totally just dropped out of the sky. Here's hoping we can continue this pace.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/2020/WD-css-sizing-4-20200526 [2] https://caniuse.com/?search=aspect-ratio

One thing (among many) I didn't (couldn't) appreciate when I was your age, Is just how much of my life was still ahead of me. The notion that your path will be set in stone based solely on how you spend the next five years is silly, but it's an easy assumption to make, since it's what you're currently focused on, and (if your upbringing was anything like mine) there are probably lots of people insisting that this is a life-or-death situation.

Secondly (and I'm not sure whether this will come as a comfort or not), your dreams might change. What if you push through your current program and end up hating the field? Or get into a PhD in the US and hate it here? What if you become a medical researcher and find you hate that? Or decide to become a physician and hate it (while still harboring a love of machine learning)? And what if you suddenly decide that you'd like to pursue something altogether different than CS or medicine?

I'm not saying that because the outcome is unpredictable you should just choose a direction blindly. Rather, you shouldn't stress too much about whether your path will line up with your current passions. Ultimately, your interests may change in ways that you can't anticipate, but you're young, and (per paragraph 2) you'll have lots of time to change your mind in the future.

If this advice seems unhelpful, I understand (per paragraph 1), since none of it addresses what you should actually do. But, whether you realize it or not, this isn't actually a question about what you should do, it's a question about what you value in life. For what its worth, none of the imagined outcomes (ML PhD, Med School, SE) seem like a terrible fate to me, so you should just follow your heart.

my webrtc-based video conference app doesn't currently support ff and never will unless compatibility with chrome's implementation comes around. My manager would have me committed if I tried to pull that shit, and I'm already notorious for refusing to do things on principle. Suggesting that we don't support firefox because I'm lazy? No, vendors force us to choose, and if the alternative is NO video? Here on earth, where we're trying to cultivate a competitive advantage and survive as a business venture, that's an incredibly easy choice.

edit: other commenters have made the point much more elegantly than I but I leave my words here as a testament to how infuriated I am at this condescending suggestion.

It is difficult. It's probably the central difficulty of UIs on the web. However what I said is still true: The quantification inherently rests on users' perception of their experience. This is more a question of psychology than of computer science.

What percentage of your users feel that the app is too slow or confusing? What percentage would you be okay with? If you're selling some kind of enterprise software whose users will not be the buyers but rather the buyers' employees, who cares if it takes 30 seconds to load every page and another 30 seconds to find the widget you need once it's loaded?

The definition of "too bloated" is a function of both how users feel and also how much value you get from reducing it, and the measurement of "bloated-ness" (as well as many other parameters of UX) can't happen without getting feedback from users, which means there's a pretty strict limit to how much we can understand just from discussing theory.

And just to further complicate things: If I'm making a richly featured web app (something like Slack for example) I have a predefined set of features that will need to be implemented using javascript. Obviously there are many parameters that determine how well these are designed and implemented and optimized, all of which will affect how the users perceive the app as a whole. However, what about users (say, some plurality of HN readers) who intrinsically value websites which function without javascript, and will always consider those that don't to be bloated; What use is it to quantify that if it's always going to run up against my stated goal of building a chat app in the browser?

If you, as a user, feel that the site is sluggish, unresponsive or difficult to use because it feels too crowded or has too many features, you might judge that site to feel bloated.

In a more technical sense, bloated might refer to very large (or poorly optimized) files, either javascript or static assets, required to run the thing, causing it to load slowly (i.e. at a speed that the user feels is "slowly").

So maybe a good summary might be: "does too much stuff and/or poorly optimized/coded"

Again, not exactly a tight definition, but UIs are inherently characterized by the perception of their users.

well, he does say:

>There may be a bit of NIH syndrome leading to this decision; that’s ok, I can live with that;

>I don't really know about any of the drama surrounding systemd

I have only been a passive observer of said drama, it boils down to A) init was a stable, widely used, and well understood system that didn't need an update B) systemd takes on far too much responsibility, contrary to the unix philosophy.

personally, I have experienced only minor annoyance when having to re-learn familiar commands, though there seems to be a init compatibility layer that has made it pretty transparent to me. It'd probably have been more annoying if I were still an admin.

for some reason, this phrase resonates deeply with me.

I've never seen this article before, and I love how the author managed to leave me delighted in the same way, feeling much smarter than I actually am, especially about theoretical physics.

I'd hope an interviewer would view an applicant's fizzbuzz as a pleasant surprise if it came with a bit of casual mathematical proof.