News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

rancur

Re:CS183C Session 8: Eric Schmidt on Monday October 19, 2015 @08:28PM (#10416741)
> not slander if it's true

but that's trade secret!

no seriously, I wonder if that's been tried.

I love skipping straight to comments.
Re:Background Data and Battery Usage of Facebook’s iOS App on Wednesday October 14, 2015 @04:11PM (#10389095)
I use App Quarantine to open/lock it down when done.
this is why I think it's great to start with C. I worked in it for 3 years and found myself creating and utilizing abstractions. I looked back and realized I was writing Design Patterns myself. Much easier to understand bottom up.
which reminds me of episode 1--

eeseetah oida-- oo, bah...ooooo bah....

eeseetah oido! oo bah...oooobahh...

Re:How I Teach Gerrymandering on Monday October 12, 2015 @03:27PM (#10376512)
maybe we should just set up states. half blue, half red. each get to do what they want, and everyone blue or red moves to blue or red state. We come back in 50 years, and see what's up. The blue states are spending gobs on tuition and everyone is still stupid, and the red states, I don't know someone help. I'm colorblind
Re:A global movement to ban urban billboards on Monday October 12, 2015 @02:19AM (#10372827)
the bad ones are the super bright LED ones that, when suddenly changing to the next advertisement, make me think there's a cop behind me when it's humid [always] at night [half the time]
Re:A global movement to ban urban billboards on Monday October 12, 2015 @02:15AM (#10372813)
they actually can take, parts at least, of the sky from me...
Re:Why Do High-Frequency Traders Cancel So Many Orders? on Saturday October 10, 2015 @03:09AM (#10364781)
so a game that's more fair than real life. weird....
media requires algorithm which isn't supposed to be patentable but because software is sOoOo complex it got shoehorned into patentability. I think we just need to loosen up the ties a little
Re:GADTs Meet Their Match [pdf] on Saturday October 10, 2015 @02:19AM (#10364696)
nobody understands haskell, they just like to think they do ;)
move to atlanta. lots of jobs, high salary:cost of living ratio
surely management at fault here for undue pressure? NASA / Morton Thiokol
Re:Free Lossless Image Format on Monday October 05, 2015 @01:06AM (#10330057)
I guess trollers/jokesters aren't appreciated here...
Re:Why the US stores 700M barrels of oil underground on Friday October 02, 2015 @01:12PM (#10319820)
yes, those were the days when Russia could at least hope they would win a war with us
Re:Free Lossless Image Format on Friday October 02, 2015 @01:08PM (#10319788)
BMP is free isn't it????
Re:A Breast Cancer Surgeon Who Keeps Challenging the Status Quo on Tuesday September 29, 2015 @11:38AM (#10297065)
> a bit repetitive

choose, at random, a sample of paragraphs and chapters to read. a great way to apply data-driven analytics to your every-other-day life

Re:Apple’s approach to privacy on Tuesday September 29, 2015 @11:36AM (#10297049)
yes. you can trust that only people who should have your data can get it :/
Re:When Your Former Boss Sues You for Starting a Startup on Tuesday September 22, 2015 @06:31PM (#10262158)
> is caught on video killing kittens

?

Re:Why the US stores 700M barrels of oil underground on Tuesday September 22, 2015 @01:55PM (#10260324)
because we don't care that much about Russia. This isn't the 80's.

OPEC got greedy, that created room for shale, and Russia got hurt.

Re:Marijuana tax take nearly double expected in Colorado on Tuesday September 22, 2015 @01:42PM (#10260242)
interesting....
Re:Marijuana tax take nearly double expected in Colorado on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @11:23PM (#10231411)
> The schools continue to underpay teachers

they always build brand new multi million dollar schools with fantastic football fields

Re:SpaceX Has Nearly a Full Uber Funding in Contracts on Tuesday September 15, 2015 @06:26AM (#10219822)
well to get it as investment funding it sounds like they just need to emulate Uber's model. So a Spaxe-X app where you can book Space, Space-X, Space-XL, Space-Black, and Space-SUV trips to various solar destinations.
Re:Access Denied to Apple.com on Saturday September 12, 2015 @01:18AM (#10207330)
flawless use of negative space. this page is a real tour de force in efficiency
Re:Access Denied to Apple.com on Saturday September 12, 2015 @01:17AM (#10207328)
Their phones aren't the only thing limited to 1GB RAM
Re:Destroying Apple’s Legacy on Saturday September 12, 2015 @01:12AM (#10207315)
do you have any favorite videos that demo the best features?
can unit tests be written for every use case that's known to work with the old method, and then used on every new replacement? People wouldn't even get to submit design changes like this unless it passes all known use cases.
Re:Destroying Apple’s Legacy on Friday September 11, 2015 @04:47PM (#10206086)
what about Holo theme? The action overflow on the top left, and row'd list of features and options was clean, intuitive, consistent, and was by no means confusing.
Re:Destroying Apple’s Legacy on Friday September 11, 2015 @04:37PM (#10206041)
I call Google's the Messy Desk Layout because it forgoes the function, order, and organization offered in a digital system to emulate the messiness of the real world. Stacked cards, the paper-layers-sliding-motion as you scroll down an app's page in the Play Store on your Android, and especially shoving all your Chrome tabs (my friend [...has problems, ok, but still...] regularly rolls with >50 chrome tabs open on his phone) into the Recents switcher (and poor guy isn't smart enough to figure out how to disable that feature in Chrome)...

anyways, my opinion is that tacit knowledge trumps nearly any level of design you can come up with. Users never look at the label or the picture of what they're interacting with, they remember it's spacial location in relation to the screen borders. For that reason, a good design should be chosen, and iteratively modified-- occasionally, but things should roughly always be in the same spot as before. This business of rewriting the entire presentation layer every year (Youtube app for example) is very mentally taxing and I have given up trying to learn how to use the new one. I suppose I'll figure it out eventually, but I can more productively spend my energy learning a new language. It is, literally, too hard for me to relearn everything to care about figuring out whatever the hell their UX engineers most recently pulled out of their ass.

The thing that really, really angers me is I used to have a keen perception of how a fluid, clean, efficient UI behaved, but as I've been forced to interact with poor designs I've lost that talent.

It's not just google, other products aren't designed as well as they were when I was younger, either. About half of my suggestions for usability improvements in google apps ('Send Feedback') have been implemented after I suggested them, and several within 2-4 weeks. This makes me cry at night. I had no idea what I had, and lost...

So anyways I basically don't update any apps anymore (they're always removing features or moving them anyways, why would I update if this one works fine?), and if I do and find the new interface too confusing I just track down an older APK online and make a mental note to never update that until I have the time and energy to learn the new layout.

bonus mentally-stimulating material: Windows XP's Explorer (likely back from the NT->2k days, and probably entirely thanks to IBM's role in NT development) had a great feature. You changed cursor focus in Windows Explorer with F6--but there were so many panes, so you would hold down F6 till you hit the one you want. Inevitably you were using List View, your hands were on the keyboard, and you were ready to start typing the name of the folder you wanted. The problem? There were so many panes that you'd always miss what you wanted due to the keyboard repeat rate. IBM's (or some other hero at MS) solution? Focus goes to main folder List View pane, to Link bar (ctrl+F6) above the folder List View, and then back to the List View pane. But why? ...because whoever made that decision knew that you were always going to miss it the first time, so they placed it twice so that you'd always hit it...genius...

As far as I can tell, these people don't exist anymore.

Re:Informative YouTube channels on Friday September 11, 2015 @04:19PM (#10205944)
I found Film Riot's humor to be sufficiently disjointed that it was destructive to my orderly-thinking habits. I also didn't like the lead presenter's personality. He has everything, except a compatible (to me) reason to live.

So I protect myself from it, and chose more organized, humane content.

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