Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheFloppyDiskMeansSaveAnd14OtherOldPeopleIconsThatDontMakeSenseAnymore.aspx <comment><USER4> The problem is that if we modernized most of our iconography, a heck of a lot of things won't be able to be represented simply with something distinctive enough. This is largely due to what I'll call the merging of things into the same form largely driven by computing. For example...

Icon for a phone - rectangular screen

Icon for a TV - rectangular screen

Icon for a tablet - rectangular screen

Icon for a camera - rectangular screen (with a little dot in the corner)

Icon for a video recorder - rectangular screen (with a little dot in the corner)

Its true that most icons refer and represent a visual form of something from a decade or more ago. But what do you replace them with that will be any better when a lot of these things have no distinctive visual form anymore?

<comment><USER5> Exactly, I suspect there is nothing we can replace it with. A TV with rabbit ears will always be a TV - perhaps a hundred years from now?

<comment><USER6> This "nothing we can replace it with" sounded wrong to me, so I spent a moment trying to quickly draw on my tablet some possible alternate metaphors for many of the things used in this article, and I came up with these:

<http://drostie.org/icons.png>

(Disclaimer: my ability to draw is very limited so this looks unintentionally minimalist, because my "boxes" are just squares.)

You could have some convention which says, say, "the present file is a sort of ball or rounded object, the filesystem is a box where we can put our balls, the clipboard is some sort of stack of stuff," and so forth. Phones could look more like mobiles do now, if you put them in a bit of perspective and gave them a keypad. Rather than using the page for a generic document, we have the ball for that purpose, so we use the page instead to indicate printing, since you're converting the ball into a piece of paper.

I think wrenches, magnifying glasses, and binoculars can stay as iconic things -- but since people now use magnifying glasses for "zoom" we should perhaps stabilize on binoculars for "search"/"find". (And come on, I'm not Sherlock Holmes. I'm not trying to find a _clue_ , I'm trying to find _last night's homework_.)

Email is much trickier; if we don't keep using envelopes, I don't know how we would iconify that.

<comment><USER7> I like the look of those, but I did laugh when I saw the cell phone with an antenna on the top.

<comment><USER6> I actually spent fifteen minutes or so going back and forth on that. My old cell phone had one, perhaps for style, yet my new phone doesn't. And I was thinking a lot about that bizarre V-shaped TV antenna, too. ^_^

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is awfully condescending towards people in their twenties and younger.

> Want to indicate Settings or Setup to a twenty something? Show them a tool > they've never used in their lives.

> If you don't know who Johnny Carson is, how could you know that this is a > old-style microphone?

> No one under 30 has seen a Polaroid in years but we keep using them for > icons.

We don't live in a cultural vacuum where everything that existed prior to our birth ceases to exist or be represented. We watch old movies, we watch old TV, we read old books and we see old photographs.

Some things go missing and some things stick around. The icons that stop having a useful meaning will either disappear or be transformed and some icons will come to be a somewhat abstract representation of what they do, even if they're based on things that existed in the past.

I don't understand people's obsession with telling everyone they should modernize their icons - if you think so, then you should do it. See how your users react.

<comment><USER9> I didn't like the post as much as I expected to.

The floppy disk as an icon for save is a legitimate complaint, in the sense that it is early technology that has been deprecated by later technology, and [almost] nobody will ever use one again.

That said, good luck finding a new icon. The difficulty is that the concept of "saving" only came about with computers, and unlike zooming or even grouping things together in folders, finding a real-life pictorial representation of saving is... difficult.

But the others... The last time I checked, bookmarks, calendars, envelopes, magnifying glasses, and screwdrivers all exist in the real world and are used regularly by a lot of people, and they aren't going to go away any time soon.

Also, it's not hard to find microphones today that look a lot like the one in the icon.

<comment><USER10> I'm glad we're using a floppy disk rather than the alternative (dead now) "piggy bank".

Imagine how confused most people are seeing a tiny pig in the tool bar. It's an effort to get from "little pig" to "piggy bank" to "save". And that's for people with english as a first language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's a good article to be written on this subject, but this isn't it.

"folders": we can go back to "directories" if you'd like. It's still what I say most of the time.

"wrenches/screwdrivers/gears": This was the most baffling one. Who's never used a screwdriver? And he says it as if it's obvious.

"phone": 75% of the US still has a landline (as of a year ago anyway), so I find "you haven't used this in 20 years" to be a rather dumb statement too.

"tv antenna": Antennas have actually come back recently when broadcast stations switched to digital and HD feeds. This would have been a better criticism ten years ago, and makes him the one that sounds out of date.

When I saw the article title, I figured "floppy disk" = "save". And sure, that's somewhat valid. But as others have pointed out, it's idiomatic. It happens in language all the time: people still say that someone is given "free rein" even if nobody involved has ever ridden a horse.

<comment><USER12> I agree, I was very surprised that he doesn't even mention the "hourglass". It's true that it's less and less frequent but I would argue that it's more common than the floppy disk.

<comment><USER13> I chuckled when I read your post, because at TripAdvisor we have one in every meeting room. And they actually get used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fun read. However, if the suggestion is that we force ourselves to constantly update iconography because the metaphors are outdated, I don't agree. Sailors still say "knots", but I bet young ones don't all know why. People say "breadboard" all of the time when building electronics.

Similarly, the very letters of our language evolved out of symbols that meant something to some humans long ago, just as words have an etymology.

People simply start to associate icon with action. Mail on my Mac is represented by a postage stamp. I never realized that until I just analyzed it. Good icons are subconscious like that.

<comment> jack-r-abbit For us young ones: How do sea navigators measure their ships speed? <http://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae400.cfm>

<comment><USER15> Another interesting word is 'log' which we use daily in a digital sense but it has a very physical nautical origin:

log: _"from log (n.1) which is so called because a wooden float at the end of a line was cast out to measure a ship's speed. General sense by 1913."_

Source: [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=log&allowed_in_...](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=log&allowed_in_frame=0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd love to go to schools and get kids in groups like <15years or <10 years and ask them to design icons for these things and see what they come up with. They have a lot less cultural history and technological history. might be interesting.

Or maybe they've learned all these icons and while not getting what they did mean, they understand what they mean now, like letters of a new alphabet. Like how many Asian script characters are descendants of more obvious pictograms of actions. They still have meaning even if they've evolved a bit and even changed.

<comment><USER17> From the stackoverflow thread linked by rapidnsnail:

> I tried this on my 9 and 13 year old nephews. I asked what does this button > mean? "Save" they both answered immediately. Then I asked what the image > looks like? They had no idea - not even a suggestion (which is fair since > they haven't ever seen a disk). So I guess the meaning has overriden the > image itself in the icon so we're stuck with it.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1019573/save-icon- still-a...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1019573/save-icon-still-a- floppy-disk)

<comment><USER18> Well that particular one we don't have to worry about. The expectation of having to explicitly 'save' an electronic file is (finally) on its way out.

<comment><USER19> Really? Than what do you call the action of making particular snapshots of file state?

<comment><USER5> A camera? (snapshot)

<comment><USER20> What's a camera? You mean the photo app on my smartphone?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The idea that people don't know what a cog or a wrench is seems like the author is taking this a step too far. I wouldn't call those things "shrouded in mystery".

Similarly there are still plenty of microphones that look like that, they're professional microphones, not "old fashioned" ones.

<comment><USER22> Plus, once a reference is established (like the floppy disk) it's idiotic to always replace it with the latest tech (we'd have zip drives in the nineties, usb drives in the '00s, the cloud today, etc etc..)

<comment><USER23> We might similarly go to another extreme and phase out the use of 'alpha' and 'beta', or just the ancient Greek alphabet altogether.

It's thousands of years old, thus despite our ability to record and learn from history, we should replace it with something more modern.

<comment><USER24> If you phased out "alpha" and "beta", you'd have to call the alphabet the aybee.

<comment><USER25> A lot of people DO call it the "Ay-bee-see"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This goes back a lot further than computer icons.

Road signs for railway crossings still show steam trains. Men/Women signs for toilets show women in skirts that nobody wears, on images that hardly resemble people at all.

My car has a snowflake for the AC button, even though snow doesn't come out of the vents when you switch it on.

Interestingly, signs that ban music players in certain areas now look like Gen 1 iPods, even though a modern iPod (or any other player) doesn't have a clickwheel.

The point is that, iconography is meant to be clear and concise. As long as everyone agrees on what something stands for, then it doesn't matter what that is. Generally, that thing refers to a classic image of a thing, because the original shape will always be associated with the modern version.

<comment><USER27> Indeed. This one used to mystify us on the UK driving test 25 years ago - <USER2> older than steam trains, and presumably anachronistic even when it was standardised: [http://wwwdelivery.superstock.com/WI/223/1848/PreviewComp/Su...](http://wwwdelivery.superstock.com/WI/223/1848/PreviewComp/SuperStock_1848-161827.jpg)

It's not a UK sign. Most Europeans will recognize it, but I doubt it travels well, and even where it has local currency, many peoples _grandparents_ won't remember these in real life.

<comment><USER26> I recognised that one as a horn, but I had no idea what the connection to post is, and still don't. Just took it for one of those weird corporate logos that meant something to someone at some point but doesn't anymore.

<comment><USER27> Here's the explanation:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_horn>

 _The post horn...used to signal the arrival or departure of a post rider or mail coach. It was used especially by postilions of the 18th and 19th centuries...The instrument is still used as the logo of national post services in many countries._

The logo I posted was for the German mail service, but you'll see variations of that image used to mean 'post' all over Europe, and in Australia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have a handset in my house.

Envelopes are still used for lots of things. I still get mail.

I use screwdrivers pretty often, and I have access to wrenches.

I recognize the old microphones from movies (and even if I didn't, they look similar to newer mics.)

I've also used a polaroid in the past 5 years.

I've also seen TV sets with "rabbit ears" in the past 5 years.

The others I'm at least familiar with. I'm 18.

<comment><USER29> Yep. I'm pretty sure Blue and others sell mics designed to look exactly like those old chrome ones.

<comment><USER30> Well many large diaphragm condenser mics look like that because that's what the footprint of that kind of microphone is! And Shure still faithfully makes the Super 55, your iconic "Elvis mic."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> That is not a floppy disk. It's a Save icon.

See the difference?

<comment><USER32> | <\- Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

<comment><USER5> Touché ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The difficult part about reading this thread was having to ask, after every point, "well, then what?"

Out computer verbs are based off of (admittedly, maybe outdated) similar verbs. Our electronic work mirrors our physical work solely because of the limitations of our language constructs. I have it on good authority that there is not a single language that has words that that specifically define what we do on a computer that would be better suited and more efficient than a physical-describing counterpart.

So, as mentioned earlier, the floppy metaphor: OK, I get it. But clipboards, bookmarks, Manila folders? How would you describe an object that lets you take information from one place to another in 32px? What physical object are you aware of that allows you to mark your place amidst a vast density of information? Don't even get me started on the folders.

It's coy to label them "old-people icons" -- it's clever, I dig it -- but if tomorrow we were to unveil a new set of nouns and verbs to describe computer objects, the reigning argument would be that they never made sense at all.

And have fun trying to explain to your grandfather/mother/nephew how to uses computer without having any real-world jargon to borrow from.

</comment><comment><USER34> This discourse goes beyond the anachronistic references indicated by these icons and calls into question our entire system of interface metaphors. At one point in time imagining the information stored on your computer as a system of "files" and "folders" was pivotal in transitioning a society from the physical world to the digital one. Now that the transition is largely complete and many people are coming of age who have never known a world without computers, its time to move beyond anachronistic metaphors. We must discover new means of interaction that take advantage of the unique features of the digital medium.

<comment><USER22> > _Now that the transition is largely complete and many people are coming of > age who have never known a world without computers, its time to move beyond > anachronistic metaphors._

They might have been metaphors once, now they are idioms.

The people who "have never known a world without computers" have also never known a world where there weren't filesystem folders and files.

<comment><USER35> iOS devices mostly does away with both concepts, and I hear they've sold a few.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What's really interesting is that a lot of these rudiments (save, open, copy, paste, print) simply do not require icons in modern software.

I can't remember the last time I saw a save icon in any of the software I use. Not because saving has gone away, but because it's so fundamental to document- based applications that it doesn't need a dedicated button to call it out, and having one just wastes space. Saving isn't special functionality requiring an icon - you either use File>Save, or Cmd/Ctrl-S, or even just close the document and follow the prompt to save.

Copy, paste, open, these things don't need to take up valuable interface space as if they're some novelty functionality that uses must carefully be introduced to. We don't need a new save icon, because we don't need a save icon at all.

</comment><comment><USER37> Great thought provoking article.

A general tone of "isn't this interesting" rather than "isn't this stupid", might reduce the negative reactions.

It never occurred to me before that the use of physical objects for software functionality may be transitory. Clearly these icons do work today (and their use is not stupid), but it's probably a matter of time that a new approach may be needed.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, that is a good point. I was aiming for "isn't this silly" but your point is well taken.

<comment><USER38> Clearly a thought provoking article none the less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> While I support the point behind this article, some of them are... not on point.

> Want to indicate Settings or Setup to a twenty something? Show them a tool > they've never used in their lives.

What have screwdrivers and wrenches been replaced with?

<comment><USER40> Who cares? A floppy disk nowadays is the thing that indicates "save", and that's it. You don't have to have seen a floppy disk to know that it's the save icon. If that were the case, company logos would be objects. A swoosh is Nike, and that's that.

<comment><USER41> Sure, but if you're not old enough to know what a floppy disk is, someone would first have to tell you that the floppy disk was the save icon. I think the op's point is that icons are no longer making the user experience intuitive, they are actually adding another step. Young people have to figure out what they represent first before they use them where the point of an icon is to eliminate that step.

<comment><USER40> Definitely, but I didn't know what a clipboard was before I started copying and pasting (text on the computer)... You probably learn which button is "Save" when learning what saving actually is, I don't know how intuitive the pictograms for these actions can be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I found it bizarre (and sad) that the author believes that a screwdriver and wrench are somehow only tools for old people, that 20-somethings would have never wielded one in their life?

</comment><comment><USER43> iconic -- executed according to a convention or tradition (reference.com)

Isn't the whole idea of updating traditions a little silly. They're traditions. We don't follow them because they make sense. We follow them because the people before us followed them.

100 years from now we'll still need a symbol to conceptualize saving something. The other ones might go away but we'll probably still need to save our work. I expect the floppy to still symbolize this. The users at the time will not understand what a floppy is. But unless there is good reason to upend convention why bother.

Just look at all the linguistic idioms we retain from yesteryear.

I don't have any axe to grind with icons. But tradition is nothing to sneeze at. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words.

<comment><USER44> Absolutely, icons are... iconic. The whole point is that we know what they mean, not they are a literal representation of the object or concept being designated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This blog post is fairly useless without proposals that do a better job of communicating these concepts. It almost seems that the author wants to do away with metaphors entirely? If we aren't going to use an address book as an icon for our list of contacts, then what on earth are we _going_ to use??

<comment><USER46> The contacts icon could resemble a person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> The article began with an introduction to what could have been a really great dialogue. Why do those who didn't experience the inspiration for icons still inherently understand them? Yet it dropped that in favor of the same schtick for each icon.

<comment><USER48> I think that the point, which the article may miss, is that we _don't_ inherently understand them. We have to be _taught_ to understand them—but we only have to be taught _once_ to use a given set of icons, so it's good to use the same ones other people use, even if they're meaningless.

(I'd draw an analogy to "Why do we inherently understand menu items written in English?" We don't _inherently_ understand them (witness non-English speakers); we just get to draw on our existing familiarity with English to make the understanding easier.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Around halfway through I jotted down a few thoughts. I like and appreciate people thinking about this sort of thing however, so I'm not saying any of this to offend.

> I don't see any reason that we couldn't be storing our files in abstract > squares rather than folders in the sky.

...because they're called folders, and we know how to use them? If I said, "Here, have a square," is your first instinct really to think oh! that must be for putting stuff in/on? Sure, you can abstract them to just a symbol but it's unnecessary. It's not like the system cares what you call it or how you choose to display it.

> The world's most advanced phones include an icon that looks like a phone > handset that you haven't touched in 20 years, unless you've used a pay phone > recently.

I have in fact, but that's not the point. Again, we know the shape. There aren't many things it could be besides a phone. You could show someone a glossy brick I guess, but what good would that do? The best alternative I can think of would be something like a speaker or microphone, but where's the argument that that would actually be better?

> At some time in the past the magnifying glass became the "search everywhere" > icon, but for some reason binoculars are for searching within a document.

I'm just now realizing that he must be thinking of a specific piece of software. I gathered he was on Windows, now I see he worked at MS. Is this Office? This one I agree with, but it sounds like a quirky error made by some engineer or perhaps phony UX consultant. Same goes for the clipboard– hell if I know why MS would use that icon for paste, but in no other software that I can think of is that normal.

> Envelopes

Same thing as folders. So our terminology expanded to cover abstract digital entities, but that doesn't make it a hinderance to our intuition. Folders, packages, envelopes... maybe they're too nostalgic for the bold futurist, but generally it's about as practical as you can get.

> Wrenches and Gears Who hasn't used a screwdriver? Or never seen a wrench? > Even the people who don't own one _probably_ know what it is. I'm > indifferent to the gears/tools thing. It still makes sense, but I'm open to > new ideas– preferably a little more clever than a circuitboard.

> Microphones For speech recognition, would an ear be better? I think most > people would get the microphone bit simply from watching cartoons, > talkshows, album covers etc... but I admit this will likely be more foreign > in the future, and is already disconnected from people in developing > countries without that much media exposure (although they apparently have an > iPhone/Pad/Pod).

> Photography It's kitsch. It still makes sense because the alternative to a > square with a border is a square without a border. But for all of us who > still use medium/large format cameras from time to time or for work, we can > simply pretend. Lenses are a-OK.

> Televisions Actually, for the large number of people who gave up cable for > hulu and netflix but still want to catch the news– yes! I do have rabbit > ears! Maybe it's a little too retro for most video icons, but again– it till > makes sense, it just may be better suited to apps that show live broadcasts.

> Carbon Copies and Blueprints Eh, so the term's (carbon copy) a bit outdated. > But then again, when was the last time I "pasted" a document together? Yeah, > Drawing I. As for blueprints... it makes sense for XCode right? And CAD. We > may not use blueprints so often anymore, but it's less ambiguous than > "construction documents," which might as well be "layouts". Which might as > well be squares with a shape on them. Etc...

Basically, this would be a far more interesting post if the author would go further into making actual suggestions. Some of it makes sense because it's intuitive, some of it makes sense because we're _used_ to it. If you want to correct the latter, you've got to show something what's better.

Edit: ouch, that's an ugly post. Not sure if I can format it in any way.

Also, I'm looking forward to seeing what people suggest in the discussion here. It's an interesting topic for sure (and I'm sure there will be plenty of people to disagree with me).

<comment><USER50> * ...because they're called folders, and we know how to use them?*

Historically they were called _directories_ , which I would love to see a return to from the wrong and infantilizing "folders".

<comment><USER51> _which I would love to see a return to from the wrong and infantilizing "folders"._

Probably too late. I work with nice guys, progammers in their late 20s, mid-30s, who have only ever known those as 'folders'.

By convention at work if it's on a unix-y OS it's a directory, if Windows it's a folder. It's just easier that way.

<comment><USER5> Good distinction. I hear Mac folks uses both, usually depending on where they started.

<comment><USER52> I use both myself, depending on whether I'm using the mouse or a terminal, i.e. I "open a folder" but "list a directory". I've heard others do the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> It seems to me that what we are doing is creating new _ideograms_ \- that their icon nature will soon enough be beside the point, because they will be something closer to letters, like 漢字.

</comment><comment><USER54> Icons are becoming dead metaphors, which is fine. We pick concrete concepts to represent abstract processes and eventually the concrete concept becomes obsolete. This is exactly what happens with language -- should we stop using the word "deadline" because we've forgotten what it used to mean before it became a metaphor for a due date?

<comment><USER55> I agree completely. Just because the original uses have stopped being so common doesn't mean the icons are bad now. In language terms, you could compare this to street names - very few people would know why the street they live on is named that way - its just useful that it has a name so people can find it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Back in my day we didn't care what the icons looked like. I had to use a mouse with hard to move wheel to scroll all the way across a 10 inch screen! And I liked it!

The entire internet was AOL! It took 30 minutes from the time you turned on the computer to the time you loaded your first website. That is when you got all your thinking done!

<comment><USER38> Oh yeah? I'm so old that my mouse was hairy and used to squeak and vomit when I squeezed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> There was a discussion on Reddit about this a few days ago: [http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/t4z2o/the_save_ic...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/t4z2o/the_save_icon_is_a_floppy_disk_and_everyone_still/)

As pointed out by Mike Kazarnowicz in the comments of Scott's post.

Coincidence or cherry-picking?

<comment><USER5> Coincidence. We had been tweeting about this a few days ago and many of the ideas were from my followers. Then my coworker Pete showed me his 2008 post on the topic [http://10rem.net/blog/2008/11/18/when-will-the-floppy- disk-d...](http://10rem.net/blog/2008/11/18/when-will-the-floppy-disk-die-as- a-save-icon) and later after I wrote it, the StackOverflow question [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1019573/save-icon- still-a...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1019573/save-icon-still-a- floppy-disk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> How could you possibly associate an object with an action without first intimately knowing the object's function?

And when did we all get rid of wrenches? I didn't get that memo.

</comment><comment><USER59> We started using horsepower to describe how much power an engine has and that has nothing to do with horses. And last I heard, many of us are still measuring things in feet.

Conventions hang on for generations because speaking a common language is more important than being up to date.

<comment><USER60> Well, horsepower has absolutely something to do with horses: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsepower> "Horsepower was originally defined to compare the output of steam engines with the power of draft horses in continuous operation."

<comment><USER59> Yes, of course. I meant horses have nothing to do with engines. Nobody today is going to compare the power of a car to what they know about horses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Clipboards are are everywhere: sexy business men and ladies in movies; gym coaches; bitchy stage managers; kids use them in school occasionally, etc.

</comment><comment><USER62> I thought that the article did a good job of explaining the problem of changes in the world making things change appearance or shape, but not some other causes of icons not making sense.

To me, icons indicating actions (save, print, etc) work well when they depict (wholly or partly) a physical object that is obviously used to enact that action. I assume that this is because our visual cortex is tuned to recognise physical objects that do actions, not visual representations of actions themselves. We see a depiction of a hammer and know that its for driving nails, but its hard to depict driving nails without depicting a hammer. You could presumably do it (i'm not a graphic designer) but you're making people work harder to understand your depiction.

The problem is that sometimes changes in the world result in the recognisable physical object no-longer being recognisable and/or physical.

This can happen we make an action abstract ("save to floppy" becomes "save to cloud storage"), virtualise an action ("pick up phone and talk" becomes "make skype call using laptop"), or merge a once-external object into a multi- function object ("save to floppy" becomes "save to internal disk"). (What others have I missed?)

I don't know what to do about this. You could use a logo or graphical device/convention to indicate actions (e.g. skype logo indicates make a voice call) but you're also increasing the cognitive load on the user of the interface and increasing visual clutter.

<comment><USER63> Since we are still going with file and folder, why not make the metaphor complete and go with a filing cabinet with an arrow either directed towards or away from an open drawer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Why do we even have a save icon function anymore anyway? Just to torture people who forgot to save their file? Google Docs doesn't have a save button because it is _saving all the time_. Why would you not want to save what you are doing? Why is _not saving_ the default? (Alan Cooper made this argument in About Face in 1995.)

Also, if you want to talk about outdated terminology, theres "disk" and "drive". These are being incorrectly applied to flash/solid state storage. They do apply to hard disk drives, and optical media.

<comment><USER65> > Why would you not want to save what you are doing?

Because the document is public, and you don't want work-in-progress to be shared until it is complete?

<comment><USER66> Don't publicly share the document until it's finished?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> We do the same thing with written language (no one knows or questions where e.g. "pull out all the stops" comes from but it doesn't matter), so why should our visual language be any different?

<comment><USER25> On the other hand, pipe-organs are not outdated, whereas floppy disks are (for most of us).

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I think some of those are pushing it quite a bit...

Printed books aren't going anywhere in the foreseeable future (and I'm pretty sure all young people know what they are, even if they're not really into reading); the (Exchange-connected VoIP) phone on my desk at the office still has a handset shaped exactly like the icon; and what kind of magical sci-fi world does the author live in where no mechanical device requires gears any more, or where wrenches aren't necessary for basic home repairs?

</comment><comment><USER69> In the 1800s, broadcasting meant standing in the field and throwing seeds in every direction.

We've been adapting old idioms to new uses since long before everything turned into a computer.

<comment><USER38> Nice. Learned something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> My TV has rabbit ears. I can watch NFL games in high definition with them for free.

<comment><USER38> This. I get a couple dozen channels over the air eight of which I watch from time to time. Still having a hard time recognizing rabbit ear icons though. One pole on mine is broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> They do make sense, they are and have been the standard for years, and even the new generation understands what they do, in almost every case.

</comment><comment><USER36> I was fascinated that Google chose the name "Google Drive" for their latest product. Without a hint of false naivety, my initial thought on hearing the name was that it was either:

a) Something to do with journey planning/directions, or b) Some new in-car technology

When I saw it was neither of those, I presumed the cloud storage service had been named in the same way razors are named, i.e. "puts you in the driving seat" sort of thing.

It was only several hours later did it occur to me that, OMG, they mean like a FLOPPY DISK DRIVE? Yikes.

"Drive" is not really a word I've heard used in relation to storage for years. Mainly because we only think about the distinction between disk and drive when the two can be parted, like a floppy disk drive. Put the disk in the drive. Most removable media is USB-based these days, so the term isn't used.

I guess in 1990s-era Windows NT networks you'd be told to save your work to "the M: drive" or such, but yeah, 1990s.

To me it's a moronic product name. "I'll save that to my Google Drive!" Sure thing, you do that Grandpa.

<comment><USER38> Actually, there were also hard disk drives. The drive was the motor attached to a spindle which would spin the disk whether the disk was floppy or hard. Your point still holds that spinning media are starting to be replaced by solid state devices. I agree that Google made a poor choice with the name. BTW the word drive goes back further than motors. It was and still is the term to cause sheep and draught animals to move where you wanted them to go. Still not great for Google's product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> That's not something limited to computers or technology. Many entities are represented with an icon of the _first_ or _first popular_ iteration of am item. A train has smoke, lights are bulbs, authors use feather pens etc.

One could argue that it's actually faster to parse words than icons sometimes (don't know what traffic sign planners would think about that)

</comment><comment><USER73> The reason we still use these old icons is because every single icon requires people to think about and learn what it represents. The only icons that don't require the user to think are ones they see all the time. If you've never seen an icon before you can only really guess what it means, the shorter the time it takes to guess, the better the icon is. It's for this reason that I don't like icon-only user interfaces, they require too much thinking and guessing from the user.

Take a look at these ones that show up when you select text in Android ICS: [http://asset3.cbsistatic.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/10/18/ICS_co...](http://asset3.cbsistatic.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/10/18/ICS_copypaste.png)

What on earth do they mean? I've been using ICS since January and I still don't know what they do except for the cut one. Because there's no way for them to show tooltips on hovering the only way to learn is to press it and try and work out what it just did.

<comment><USER74> Well, the first one has multiple identical squares, so it seems to me intuitive that it means 'copy'. For exclusion (and resemblance to the folder+sheet on, e.g. MS Office) the last one has to be 'paste'.

Oh, I never used ICS, so it's not because I tried them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> This is, essentially, how language itself has always worked. Common sense labels are applied to things, and they make them things their own and outlive the original reference.

A tin (can) is still a tin despite the fact it has nothing to do with the element today, a light bulb has no bulb any more. The floppy=save isn't going anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER76> I'm not sure that I agree with the "Photography" examples. Even for people who haven't seen actual Polaroid cameras, the icon is clearly some sort of camera. The author finishes his argument with a quote from a recent pop song, which probably means that Polaroid pictures aren't an extremely obscure reference. Also, I bet that Instagram's early adopters know exactly what Polaroid cameras are, and the reference isn't lost on them. I'd also be willing to bet that there's at least some overlap with early adopters and people who are aware of the Impossible Project. Those people would at least make the connection between analog photography and the filters that Instagram provides.

That being said, Polaroid-inspired icons are probably not ideal for every use.

<comment> excuse-me Even more bizarre is the road sign for speed cameras - it shows a camera that nobody has seen for a century

[http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcToxHFPJthCpR32ukk5h...](http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcToxHFPJthCpR32ukk5h9juENVVeXOmzTUfsI7a473Sp9PBLH7q)

<comment><USER77> If they've never watched a period film or TV program ...

<comment> excuse-me Yes that's why I have a papyrus plant as the icon for my word processor

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> So that's where radio buttons comes from!

And yes my TV has rabbit ears, only they are the wifi antennas on my router :)

<comment><USER79> I also did not know the origin of the term radio buttons, though I DO recall that our old cars as a kid did have those type of buttons on them.

<comment><USER42> I looked into replacing the old AM radio in my ancient dodge with a modern one, but eventually decided I simply liked the look & feel of that pushbutton thingie, and anything more modern just looked wrong in that car.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Reminds me of a Bucky Fuller rant about the "incorrect" words we still use every day even though we know more now than when they came into use.

His best example is "world wide", which he put forward should really be "world around" since we all now know that the earth is a globe and not flat.

<comment><USER38> Wow! This really should be known more widely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Great premise, no so great execution. Other that the floppy icon, which I do agree with, the others are either not icons (radio buttons are just circles -- radio buttons just happen to be what they're called) or show use items that are still in very common usage.

</comment><comment><USER82> The clone action in VirtualBox is represented by a sheep (<http://twitpic.com/767oui>). Took me a while to connect it with Dolly the sheep, but now it's both distinct and funny.

</comment><comment><USER83> Interesting. I'm 46. I've used reel-to-reel tapes because they were the normal thing to use at the time. But it has never once occurred to me that the voicemail icon represents a reel-to-reel tape.

Now I'm trying to figure out if I'm stupid or not.

<comment><USER84> That recording tape symbol was also used on VCRs and stereo equipment, so it was already an "old person icon" long before it evolved into the standard phone icon for voicemail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> Icons are visual words, and like words, they have a history (etymology) which is often long forgotten. But even with their history lost, they become familiar as identifiers of a concept, and so we keep them for that reason.

</comment><comment><USER86> Makes me wonder how old the author is.

Reminds me of an anecdote I read about an elementary school that had a rotary phone for the kids to use well after digital phones were the norm. The kids had to be taught how to use it. One child ultimately concluded it was not too different from a digital phone though it was real slow.

Reminds me of my standard flippant remark to my sons when they were growing up: "When I was a child and had a pet dinosaur and rotary phone." To my young sons, both dinosaurs and rotary phones were "prehistoric" -- I.e. existed before their time. For me, only dinosaurs were actually prehistoric.

<comment><USER5> I'm 39. The post was written in brief lunchtime fit of get of my lawn. :)

<comment><USER86> I will be 47 in June ...and I have a condition with a life expectancy in the thirties. In human years, that makes me the equivalent of about an 85 year old. So get off my lawn already, you young whippersnapper!!

(More sinecerely: Thanks for responding.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The irony is that there's a concurrent and opposite reaction to the non- traditional new icons used on Github.

The simple reason the save icon still looks like a floppy disk is because everyone expects it to look like that.

</comment><comment><USER87> I believe this post to be the definitive authority on the subject of dead icons ... ;-)

[http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/3117/save-icon-is- the-...](http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/3117/save-icon-is-the-floppy- disk-icon-dead)

seriously - there's some good points made here, including:

"The floppy disk icon is an idiom, not a metaphor. It doesn't matter that we're no longer writing files on 1.44MB 3.5" disks. It doesn't matter that many users don't even know what a floppy disk is. What matters is that users associate the icon with saving." -- Patrick McElhaney

</comment><comment><USER88> That's exactly the way culture gets built, there are always traces left from past generations - not only in icons, more so in the software and technology they assist. These traces, sources forgotten, slowly turn into obscure quotes, then become alive with their own new meaning, and act as channels for the transfer of knowledge from one generation to another.

And a little OT remark about the so called "dead tree format" - it helps hide the fact that e-books might actually be more harmful to the planet than "dead tree" ones (think carbon imprint).

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit I use an SD card (one way or another) almost daily. It would only take a small amount of reworking to make the "floppy disk" Save icon look like an SD card and still look enough like the original icon to not confuse people. The cloud is cool and all but many devices (even cloud enabled ones) make use of some sort of physical storage. Many devices do not have the capability (or even the need) to get data straight from the cloud (or at least can't if they aren't able to connect to cell/wifi).

<comment><USER89> > It would only take a small amount of reworking to make the "floppy disk" > Save icon look like an SD card and still look enough like the original icon > to not confuse people.

What would be the point, though? Surely the floppy disk icon has more meaning now as "save" than as the original metaphor of "save to floppy disk." Besides, SD cards are outdated now - I think the only thing of mine which uses it is my camera, and I never actually remove the card. I would guess that more people would recognize the floppy disk than the sd card.

<comment> jack-r-abbit no point. just offering a suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> I thought Hanselman's tweet made the point far better than the entire article because the article very quickly became quite the stretch trying to find examples: overlooking the fact that many, many people are still using dead- tree calendars, folders, and clipboards. As well as binoculars and magnifying glasses.

The really interesting point - that there are more and more icons that truly are becoming "icons" in a more metaphorical sense of the word - was already made quite poignantly by the tweet.

</comment><comment><USER91> This article would have been interesting if included actual suggestions for replacement icons.

Being anachronistic isn't inherently a flaw. However, if our attachment to anachronism is preventing us from using more intuitive icons, then our bias toward anachronism is something we should examine critically.

So, the real question is: are there more intuitive visual representations available for common computer actions? What does an e-mail address book look like?

</comment><comment><USER92> Icons don't have to make sense if people can learn them. I think people are being way to hung up on things being too skeuomorphic.

Remember that A didn't start as an A, it started as a sign for ox. That's right, our writing system had skeuomorphic origins.

Someone growing up today might not know what a handset it, but I'm pretty sure they recognize the handset icon. This is true for a lot of stuff in our culture (think of non-textual road signs).

</comment><comment><USER93> It's not just icons. Phrases are the same.

I'll bet many people here have never heard a broken record, but still have heard the phrase "sounds like a broken record."

<comment><USER94> I think the phrase "broken record" is used more when referring to someone repeating themselves over and over again.

<comment><USER44> What do they call it if it is a sportsperson repeatedly regaling stories of their "fastest of all time athletic performance".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> He missed the point of the Instagram logo. The whole purpose of Instagram is to make retro-styled photos, so a retro camera icon makes total sense.

</comment><comment><USER96> wow, I never knew that "radio button" meant that - I sort of imagined that they were checkboxes that had walkie talkies with eachother?

</comment><comment><USER97> One which is not on here, and is my favorite, is the icon to start a PowerPoint presentation: portable projector screen. Sure, they still exist, but most people these days have never had to actually carry and/or set one up. Well, maybe I take that back... If you are using PowerPoint, perhaps you are old enough to remember using one... :-)

</comment><comment><USER98> Google is a good example of what happens when you modernize icons - no one knows what the hell is going on.

The old icons are fine.

</comment><comment><USER99> It doesn't matter what the icons look like as long as they are different enough from each other to be recognizable.

Someone who hasn't used a computer before isn't going to know that a floppy disk icon means save, even if they have seen a one before and know what it is used for. For all they know it's means open a file.

</comment><comment><USER42> I always wondered what was wrong with English. You know, using 'print' instead of a 'what-does-that-box-of-kleenex-mean' icon?

And for non-English speakers, is it really harder to learn what 'print' means than consulting a cheat sheet for what the icons mean?

<comment><USER29> Are you saying you don't recognize a printer when you see it?

<comment><USER42> Printers come in all sorts of shapes, and I've seen quite a few different printer icons. The first one I saw looked like a box of kleenex, and did so to several of my coworkers at the time.

For most of the gui programs I use, I have to hover the mouse over the icon till the tooltip comes up so I know what it does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Oh man, not another one of these "durr, icons are based on technologies that don't apply anymore!" articles. Tell you what, you invent "better" more "modern" icons that everyone can recognize and then maybe I'll be willing to read your blogarrhea.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why do I have to still log-in to Facebook? Why can't I run Windows games on my iPad? Why can't I just talk to my computer like Star Trek?

Programmers know why, but users don't. Same goes for icons: designers know what they're doing & why...

<comment><USER29> The question is why Facebook forces you to use an E-mail address as a user ID. Now THAT's amateur hour.

<comment><USER30> You can log in with your URL.

<comment><USER29> Assuming you've defined one, and a URL is not an appropriate user ID either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> Actually, my TV _has_ rabbit ears again -- only they're for DVB-T now.

</comment><comment><USER102> This gave me something to think about.

When icons fail to be understood, they can fail hard. I spent a lot of time frustrated with the new gmail design until I changed the icons to text.

<comment><USER29> Even then, the Gmail UI sucks badly:

[http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6034/6310566055_4a5f5d4a53_b.j...](http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6034/6310566055_4a5f5d4a53_b.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> The floppy disk icon has always frustrated me. Though I still haven't seen a great replacement. Would love to see this list with more thoughtful options to use instead.

<comment><USER104> It's because "saving" is an activity that exists only to appease computer architecture choices. It's not a natural thing to do at all.

A more humanistic approach would be to save versioned history of everything you do and then "save" by marking points in time as versions you would like to share with other people or systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> Conversely, how about redesigning them for something older...

</comment><comment><USER40> I love how there's a spool of camera film in the photo for the "voice mail" icon. Sounds like someone's too young for those flat cameras!

<comment><USER106> That would be to illustrate the phrase _"but it always looks like a container of 110 Film."_.

<comment><USER40> Ah, I missed that, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> Envelopes are a very common item for anyone who runs a business. The vast majority of correspondence with Uncle Sam is done via USPS.

</comment><comment><USER108> I wonder if the Egyptians had the same problem.

</comment><comment><USER109> Not that the floppy disk being used as a Save icon was actually floppy, of course.

<comment><USER44> They had flexible cardboard cases once and were 8 inches across, so they were floppy originally as opposed to removable disc packs which had rigid platters. They were still called floppy discs when they stared appearing in smaller rigid plastic cases because the old ones were still commonplace and it reminded people they were the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> That pointy gear icon on iOS drives me crazy. Gear teeth don't look like that!

</comment><comment><USER111> Really interesting, but a correction should be noted: CC is for courtesy copy, not carbon copy

<comment><USER44> Citation required, my understanding is that CC predates emails and would designate those to whom carbon copies were to be sent.

<comment><USER112> It definitely predates emails. I'm 44 and I've always heard "carbon copy", never "courtesy copy".

<http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=cc> <http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/carbon-copy.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment> excuse-me In my app I just have the same little image of a CPU for everything - <USER3> more logical

</comment><comment><USER29> This headline illustrates the importance of the hyphen.

The headline refers to "people icons" that are old. I went to see how many people icons there could even be. Turns out that what he really means is old- people icons.

</comment><comment><USER113> Is this from the future? We still save to disks... sure the media has changed, but we're doing the same task.

After reviewing the author, filed under: Comedy!

<comment><USER114> Well... Some people have been saving stuff to flash memory (even calling them SDD's is an anachronism)</comment></comment>


Adobe's first three Photoshop CS5 apps for iPad - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/#!5790662/these-are-the-first-three-adobe-photoshop-touch-apps

<comment><USER2> In light of the "mid-cycle" 5.5 update it's a pleasant surprise to see this one's a freebie. I've dreamed about this kind of thing pretty much since I first used the iPad.

Also eagerly awaiting some kind of update to Premiere that uses a touch device as a control surface for scrubbing through time, etc. Single-purpose hardware exists, of course, but it's expensive[r than a tablet I already own] and, just as annoyingly, takes up desk space!</comment>


Use labels to break ifs in JavaScript  - <AUTHOR> http://rthor.is/javascript/quick-tip-labeled-ifs/

<comment><USER2> This is not unique to JavaScript. You can do this in many languages, including Java. In fact, the JDK source is littered with usages of this "pattern", but with loops instead of if statements. It is frequently used as a technique to capture a terminal event in an inner loop that requires termination of the entire nested looping construct; in other words, the label is applied to the outer loop but the break statement occurs somewhere in an inner loop.

99.9% of the time, when I'm writing nested loops and I find myself needing the ability to kill the outer loop from within the inner loop, this is a flag that I need to refactor or re-evaluate my design, not start using labels and breaks.

<comment><USER3> To the contrary, labels and breaks are the better design because they are far clearer than testing for termination in each outer loop. Get more than two loops deep and your problem suddenly becomes unmanageable without labels and breaks.

However, if there are other actions like logging or reporting that are occurring it may be better to not use them. Here's some Ada:

      Outer: loop
        Inner: loop
          Handle_Head: declare
            Head : Human_Head;
          begin
            Acquire_Head (Head); -- Entry will block until head is acquired.
            exit Inner when Head = No_Head;
            exit Outer when Head.Exploded;
            Log ("Head unexploded.");
          exception
            when Brain_Error =>
              Log ("Brain deficiency detected.");
          end Handle_Head;
        end loop Inner;
        Log ("Head exploded.");
      end loop Outer;

<comment><USER2> I'd argue that if you're more than 2 loops deep then you should, as I stated before, seriously evaluate your design decisions.

And, should you do so and end up in the same place, you may have stumbled upon that 0.1% of the time that I left wiggle room for in my first claim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm having a hard time finding a reason to use this, I've always understood named breaks and named gotos as antipatterns, and MDN recommends you not use them as much as possible (if nothing else because they're uncommon). [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Statements/label)

The irregularity of these functions are not lost on the author, who improperly claims the following code is equivalent:

myTest: if ( condition ) {

        // some code...

        if ( anotherCondition ) break myTest;

        // more code if anotherCondition is falsy...

}

if ( condition ) {

        // some code...

}

if ( !anotherCondition ) {

        // more code if anotherCondition is falsy...

}

While the second comment will run for the same value of "anotherCondition," in the first, "condition" also must be true, and the second does not evaluate "condition" to run the comment.

<comment><USER5> EDIT: That this JS feature lets the developer break an outer scope from an inner scope is pretty awesome. I should ponder whether I can conjure this in C...

====

I'm with you. Now, take the case of a function that can return "early" \- because it hit a condition that prevented it doing its job, or because it finished early on in its code. I've recently been requiring such functionality in places that have accumulated resources which should be released or otherwise tidied before returning. My fellow co-workers have been using goto, and at the label freeing the resources. My solution is to use 'while' and break (you could certainly use 'for' instead):

      struct some_object *o = some_object_create(); // maybe you alloc here, and set properties
      OtherType *result = NULL;

      while(true) {
        if (cond_based_on_args) {
          result = OtherTypeCreate(...);
        }
        if (!result) break;
        if (OtherTypeGetValue(result) != kCorrectValue) {
            OtherTypeFree(result);
            result = NULL;
            break;
        }

        /* Other work to do with 'result' */

        break; // never let it run again
      }

      some_object_free(o);

      return r;

This code is a bit contrived, but I think it illustrates the idea.

<comment><USER6> I would use Promises to handle the situation of "returning early." Essentially, you create recursive function, and execute it in a setInterval (don't forget to bind the scope if you're doing class references!). Manage state outside the scope of the function and create a deferred object outside the scope as well. When it's done, resolve the promise and kill the .

Elsewhere, use the resident "when" function to capture the resolved state. This helps create a very secular structure of code where each method is purposeful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would probably only use labels for breaking out of nested loops, for example: [https://gist.github.com/badsyntax/5317545](https://gist.github.com/badsyntax/5317545)

<comment><USER8> I've been programming in JS since early 2000 and I've only ever used it to break out of nested loops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've had the experience of using labels exactly 1 time so far, in this code: [https://gist.github.com/RSully/5262735](https://gist.github.com/RSully/5262735)

</comment><comment><USER10> Dijkstra is turning over in his grave.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised. I've always thought of labels as something to be used with goto. What is the purpose of labels in javascript, since it does not implement goto ?

Do you have any idea if it was intended to be used as you describe ?

<comment><USER12> The best I can come up with is this:

        ANIMAL: if (isAnimal) {
            DOG: if (isDog) {
                POODLE: if (isPoodle) {
                    if (color == green) {
                        break POODLE; // we don't want green poodles
                    }

                    if (age > 10) {
                        break DOG; // we don't want old dogs
                    }

                    if (weight > 20) {
                        break ANIMAL; // we don't want heavy animals
                    }

                    // more poodle conditions
                }

                // more dog conditions
            }

            // more animal conditions
        }

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The last two snippets of code are not equivalent.

The second if in the second piece of code should be:

        if (condition && !anotherCondition) {

<comment><AUTHOR> It has been updated! Thanks for the heads up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting, but I'd probably need 10 seconds more to understand code that uses this than code that doesn't use it. I'm wondering if there is a real benefit to this.

</comment><comment><USER14> I knew this trick from C++. And while it's a fun example, I believe it ruins the natural flow of your code. So please don't.</comment>


Uber fires driver for social media comments - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ChrisJOrtiz/status/522863105630416897 <comment><USER2> Stating stats is hateful? Well Uber, guess I don't need to support you financially.

<comment><AUTHOR> More and more people I know are switching away from Uber. I just can't support them anymore in good conscience.

<comment><USER3> I've switched to lyft and it's nearly as good (but not quite as good). I'm able to get rides quickly in the south bay and the experience is as pleasant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And he was just tweeting a Pando story. Lyft is always my first choice, but they don't always have the supply that Uber does. Shame.</comment>


Obsession Times Voice - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2009/03/obsession_times_voice/

<comment><USER2> I love this Walt Disney quote from the post: "We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies." That is exactly what separates great content providers (the top 1%) from hacks (the other 99%). HN commenters often dismiss John Gruber as the uber-reflexive Apple fanboy he is, but posts like this suggest there are deeper waters.

<comment><USER3> There are deeper waters, but I tired of wading through the muck. Anything of his ( like this ) that is interesting enough to me to read, usually comes to me through here anyway. Except when he posts about the Rat Pack. Or baseball.....darn it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> IMO this is the best quote from the article, and pretty much gets to the heart of it:

The entire quote-unquote "pro blogging" industry ... is predicated on the notion that blogging is a meaningful verb. It is not. The verb is writing. The format and medium are new, but the craft is ancient.

\---

In other words, as I read it: create content which is meaningful to you and engages your passions, then publish it.

</comment><comment><USER5> (2009). Best talk I've ever heard.</comment>


Coffee linked with lower depression - <AUTHOR> http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0927/breaking13.html

<comment><USER2> > He stressed that the study does not prove that coffee lowers depression risk > - only that it might be protective against depression in some way.

Sounds like the journalist got confused. The study probably shows that there is a correlation, but the causal chain has not been established. It's possible that some other factor increases coffee use and decreases tendency to depression.</comment>


Show HN: 360° and VR Video Streaming in HTML5 Tutorial, Build a Netflix For VR - <AUTHOR> http://www.dash-player.com/blog/2016/01/vr-360-video-next-big-thing/ <comment><USER2> Does this work on an iPhone? I was playing around with in-browser 360 degree video a while back and was infuriated to find that absolutely everything I required - WebGL, a Three.JS library, <video> tags, were present - but iPhone Safari will only ever play videos fullscreen through tap to play, so it's impossible to play a video through WebGL.

I really, really wish Apple would drop this restriction. Aside from anything else, the original intention (bandwidth savings) is totally ruined by the fact that everyone is encoding videos as (much larger) animated GIFs to get around the restriction. How about letting videos autoplay, but silently, and have "tap for sound"? Either that or disable autoplaying of GIFs, because the current situation doesn't really make sense.

<comment><USER3> Android Chrome as well requires user input (usually a tap) to play videos. So a less drastic change would for iOS to do the same, not just let videos autoplay.

Also, if you want to use the web audio API to control the volume of videos like this, there's a known issue that prevents you from doing that on Android Chrome if you source the audio from a <video>.

<comment><USER4> It's also worth noting that this is a direction I see mobile browsers heading in, not a restriction that may disappear at one point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I alone in getting aggravated by people considering 360 video VR? If you want proper VR you need stereo display of 360 video. I feel like the lack of stereoscopic video being called VR is poisoning the well for layman.

<comment><USER2> It is possible to do stereo display of 360 video in the browser - you just need Google Cardboard or similar to allow users to view it.

<comment><USER6> How? I've never seen a stereo 360 video before. How do you avoid the camera recording itself?

<comment><USER7> You use a bunch of cameras, calculate a depthmap, and use the spherical video and the depthmap to apply parallax, like this [0, 1] but spherical. It's a kind of faked stereo video.

Google Jump is one such camera jig that use 16 cameras [2].

[0] [http://depthy.me/](http://depthy.me/) [1] [http://www.scalari.net/2008/04/22/generating-stereoscopic- im...](http://www.scalari.net/2008/04/22/generating-stereoscopic-images-with- parallax-occlusion-mapping/) [2] [https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/jump/](https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/jump/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Please check vrapp.co/whitehouse to tesr our vr video in the browser solution. For ios choose add to homescreen

</comment><comment><USER9> Slightly OT, but I have been looking for a live streaming / transcoded solution.

IE, webcam in, and streaming video out that _doesn 't_ use FMS/Flash/etc. Is it possible in HTML5 yet? Dash seems promising - but is there a totally OSS solution available ?

<comment> w-ll In the web, I'm using

Video.js [https://github.com/videojs/video.js](https://github.com/videojs/video.js) with HLS.js [https://github.com/dailymotion/hls.js](https://github.com/dailymotion/hls.js)

for a streaming video project. Works great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> /r/oculus and especially /r/VRFilm would also be interested in this :)

<comment><AUTHOR> cool! I'll post it there as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> demo: [http://www.dash-player.com/demo/adaptive-vr-360-video- html5-...](http://www.dash-player.com/demo/adaptive-vr-360-video-html5-demo/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We would be curious on your feedback on this, so please be brutally honest ;-)

<comment><USER12> This is really cool, but still lacks IOS-support, right?

I was developing the app for differentperspectiv.es, and quickly realized that the easiest way for me to get 360-degree video support on multi platforms was to build an Unity app and project movies on sphere-shaped textures.

This project seems cool, but would love to see the HTML5 player being open- sourced.

<comment><USER13> iOS is garbage for anything VR right now. iOS' version of Webkit is the Internet Explorer 5 of our times.

<comment><USER14> Fun fact, IE 2 included support for VRML, the virtual reality modeling language, back in 1996.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very cool... interesting to see Hacker news picking up stories on VR with increasing frequency... Here's to hoping VR is the next boom! Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER16> How is this any different than 360 videos on YouTube?

<comment><AUTHOR> With this you can host your own 360° videos, and don't need YouTube. This is in particular interesting if you want to monetize by your own, e.g., through ads or subscription. It's basically the infrastructure you need to build Netflix-like services.

<comment><USER17> I'm pretty sure you can't host it yourself. If you want to use their framework, I'm pretty sure you have to host it through them. At least, I can't find a download link anywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, you can download the video assets after encoding + download the player for self-hosting</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GitHub is a fish bowl - <AUTHOR> http://wynnnetherland.com/journal/github-is-a-fish-bowl

<comment><USER2> Are there any really good Python or Ruby projects on github that have consistently atomic commits and a TDD style of coding? I would be cool to narrate a project like it was a sports event.

<comment><USER3> Most could be narrated with "Oh, now he's gone and done it, he's committed a patch that totally breaks the regression tests and introduces a major incompatibility bug. Yeah, this is going to be trouble down the road if he bundles up this and releases it as a...oh no. Are you seeing that? It's up, it's being downloaded already, and it's only a matter of time until the issues start coming in. Ted? What's your take?"

<comment><USER2> "It looks like he's heady towards the deadly Factory Factory Factory if he isn't careful, Ted."

"Oh yeah, it's either that or proxy objects all the way down"

"Oh whats this?! He's pulling out an FSM, what a good move"

"I like the way this is headed, let's see if the tests pass"

"Ohhhhhhh, noooo, the parallel processing tests all broke; that's why they call it a Finite State Machine, not a Whole Bunch of States Machine, Frank."

"How is he going to fix this one up?"

"Queues?"

"Yeah, probably Queues."

"Oh no rookie mistake, he's using the built in Queues, not the multiprocessing Queues, this is going to cause some nasty bugs"

<comment><USER3> "Looks like the referee has to jump in here. We've got a memory allocation error. That reference was freed twice and now, yeah, that's his third yellow card so he's going to have to hit the bench and sit this one out."

"Ouch! That's got to sting. At least it's not like last game when number 49 got into a heated argument after he got a red card for forgetting to escape SQL."

<comment><USER4> So, seriously now. Can we do this? It seems like a lot of fun!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would really like to see case studies be a result of GitHub. There is so much data available to us thanks to Git, that it wouldn't take that much besides some commentary here or there to have a GitHub repository be a very powerful teaching tool.

A good programmer's "DVD Commentary" would teach me a lot, I think.

</comment><comment><USER6> _After all, if we were only interested in deconstructing finished products, there would be no Food Network._

Not quite. The food network is mostly about recipes that have already been created and tested. The equivalent would be putting up the git commits after the project is ready.

</comment><comment><USER7> Am I the only one who almost always starts projects as private repos and only puts them public once they're at a reasonable alpha or beta stage?

When I'm still regularly trashing all my code and starting over, it doesn't do anyone any good to follow the repo.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's a nice thing about bitbucket: private repos. Release when you want to.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have been very happy with github. I've been using it for the last few months and it's worked pretty well. Specially for hg-heads like me. :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> It's really intimidating for new coders to have their work publicly available. The programmer community are very harsh critics and I know I don't want someone to come looking through my code and call it shit. I know it's not very likely but it's still a fear however irrational.

There are times when you hope someone will find your project useful but know (or probably feel) that everyone else is better than you so you end up qualifying your work with some "it's not finished" or "I know this is crap but.." statement.

It's weird because we have this fear (I keep saying we and I'm not sure if this is a universal sentiment but it definitely applies to me) of harsh criticism but we're also proud of our work and hope its good enough for people to find useful. I guess the solution is to keep your public repos but be careful how you promote them outside of GitHub and "good" programmers also need to be just a bit nicer with the tone of their criticism. It takes guts to show off your work I think.

<comment><USER11> The ideal solution is to be less talk, more action. You can fork a repo in Github and submit a pull request when you're ready. Instead of typing out a long complaint, clone the repo and try and fix it if you can. Then push it back, and you've solved the problem for everyone once it's done.

Realistically, though, I think you should avoid putting your code in the public domain until you're ready for the criticism or the feedback. Working in the open right from the start and expecting people to stay hush until you personally announce it is a stupid idea if you're concerned about people spreading the word too soon. You're not going to be able to issue an embargo on your work until a set time.

In this respect, why would you even push your code to a public Github repo in the first place if you objectively knew it wasn't ready for public consumption?

<comment><USER12> Github offers some pretty good version control stuff that git alone doesn't. There are alternatives (bitbucket offers private repos with similar functionality), but if you like the functionality of github and don't want to pay to keep your project private, then it's really your only option. Fortunately there's so much on github it's probably quite unlikely that anyone's even going to look at your code unless you're already known for doing another project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There should be like a "close" option in github once you create a repository, a project that anyone can fork but can't follow and it means that the project is not ready for prime time.

<comment><USER14> A technical solution to a social problem.

(The problem isn't that people follow or fork WIP repos; it's that you care whether they do or not.)</comment></comment>


Bicycle Helmets and the law: a perfect teaching case for epidemiology - <AUTHOR> http://www.badscience.net/2013/12/bicycle-helmets-and-the-law-a-perfect-teaching-case-for-epidemiology/ <comment><USER2> I think it's really important to understand the impact cycle helmets have. They negatively impact the number of people cycling. They enforce the perception that cycling is dangerous. Finally, as the study showed, they are designed to only be involved in an accident between you and the road. Not another vehicle. They bring a false sense of security.

If cycle helmets were made compulsory in the UK, it is calculated that an extra 253 people per year would die from obesity related diseases ( [http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1231.html](http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1231.html) ) . Ironically cycle helmets kill.

What is interesting about this is the identification of two groups of cyclists. The 'speed' group who currently wear helmets (and usually have lycra) and then the slow group (the rest of society) who just want to go from A to B. Helmet laws specifically have a negative impact on the slow group. This is the group of people that we need to encourage.

As mentioned in the BMJ article ( [http://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.f3817?ijkey=I5vHBog6FhaaL...](http://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.f3817?ijkey=I5vHBog6FhaaLzX&keytype=ref) ) : "For others, this is an explicitly political matter, where an emphasis on helmets reflects a seductively individualistic approach to risk management (or even "victim blaming") while the real gains lie elsewhere. It is certainly true that in many countries, such as Denmark and the Netherlands, cyclists have low injury rates, even though rates of cycling are high and almost no cyclists wear helmets. This seems to be achieved through interventions such as good infrastructure; stronger legislation to protect cyclists; and a culture of cycling as a popular, routine, non-sporty, non-risky behaviour."

This stuff is important. The UK justice system is permeated with the belief that if you were not wearing a helmet then you were, in some way, partially responsible. It's got so bad that insurance payouts are being affected by this.

Note I personally don't wear a cycle helmet except in winter when I want to have a bigger light to see the trail ahead of me as I commute to work. However if I go out on a club ride then I wear one. I'm pushing the speed of the bike and it could slip out from under me. I do not wear it with the belief it would save me if I had a collision with a car.

<comment><USER3> Personally, every single bicycle commuter I have known has been involved in an accident, often multiple. The consequences are much worse than an auto accident. If I didn't wear a helmet, I might not have the courage to ride at all--even if they help only in some scenarios. I often see the risks of bicycling and not wearing a helmet downplayed, but to me this rings of agenda and not reality on the road. For example, it seems like all arguments against helmeted cycling also apply to helmeted motorcycling. Should we encourage motorcyclists not to wear helmets?

<comment><USER4> >If I didn't wear a helmet, I might not have the courage to ride at all...etc.

So wear a helmet, there is no law whatsoever prohibiting you to wear one.

Me, I am a datum point for the argument that helmets stop you from cycling. I used to ride a bike everywhere before the compulsory helmet laws were introduced. After, cycling became so much less convenient, you had to make sure that you brought your helmet, that you kept it secure, and I plain do not like the way bicycle helmets feel on your head.

I hate the compulsory helmet laws, and I want them gone.

<comment><USER5> > I plain do not like the way bicycle helmets feel on your head.

> I hate the compulsory helmet laws, and I want them gone.

This is the heart of the bike helmet debate, not the "evidence". I put that word in quotes because epidemiology is being abused by people who just don't like wearing helmets.

<comment><USER6> _...epidemiology is being abused by people who just don 't like wearing helmets._

You're going to have to be more specific in your critique if you want to be taken seriously. What in TFA amounted to an "abuse" of epidemiology?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been commuting by bike ( [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgvjnOJwWTU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgvjnOJwWTU) ) for about 20 years now and I feel that every motor vehicle occupant should be wearing a helmet.

The case is quite clear: Most people who die in cars have not had their heads protected by a helmet at the time of the fatal collision. While they might very well be dead regardless, so might the occasional cyclist that got run over by a lorry while not wearing her helmet, so this doesn't really enter the argument.

When helmets are mandatory for car occupants, I shall laugh at their faces and ask them if they feel any safer crossing the railroad tracks. I'm also certain my ill manners will improve road safety by a measurable margin.

And, of course, I wear a helmet most of the time.

</comment><comment><USER8> Our family does without a car and I take my daughter to school or pick her up in my cargo e-bike. Neither my wife or I wear helmets as speeds are slow around here and there are plenty of other family bikers. I think my daughter is safer when I'm not wearing a helmet, as I can see and hear better and most importantly it's easier to make eye contact with drivers when you don't have a helmet on.

<comment><USER9> What kind of helmet impairs vision and hearing? I haven't heard this before so I'm curious.

<comment><USER8> Would you be able to take in all the sites and sounds around you on a nature hike, say you are going birdwatching or something, just as well with a foam hat on? If you can see your helmet at all then that's part of your peripheral vision you are sacrificing. And if you can't see your helmet it's probably not gonna do much in a car crash anyway... I prefer not to get hit and one way to do it is ride in a part of the world that respects people on bikes. When I lived in Mountain View I wore a helmet... but I also didn't bike much.

<comment><USER10> >And if you can't see your helmet

Properly worn bike helmets are invisible to the person wearing it (except for the head visor extension if you use one, and that's above you so doesn't really get in the way).

>it's probably not gonna do much in a car crash anyway

Bike helmets aren't designed to protect you from a crash with a car, so yes, it's probably not going to do much, even if it was in your peripheral vision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bike helmets are mandatory Australia wide and it is enforced. I have no idea if the net effects are positive or negative but the behaviour is so normalised now people rarely question it.

I don't think it represents a disincentive to people exercising or kids riding to school. It might have when introduced but I suspect other lifestyle changes have more impact. When I was a kid I had to ride a couple of km just to see a computer. I had two television stations and my only electronic game was pong so riding my bike was the only way to stay sane.

Where it is a problem is you don't carry a helmet around with you so you can't just hop on a mates bike or hire a bike without putting someone else's helmet on which isn't attractive. I have considered hiring a bike when interstate but the helmet thing has always put me off.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'll take responsibility for my life and you busybody do gooders can fuck off.

Let's make helmets mandatory after we outlaw being a fat fuck and eating like shit.

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately my insurance pays for folks with your attitude. So yes its my business. Unless you want to sign a waiver for bicycle-related injuries? No?

<comment><USER7> However, it pays substantially less for such folks as it does for the folks such folks are angry about.

Bicycle related injuries are not what any insurance company is worried about, while obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and motor vehicle related injuries actually really are the issues that keep raising the cost of your insurance - you just don't see it that way, because you don't want to take responsibility for the costs your lifestyle imposes on the society.

I'm dreadfully sorry if this has come out as addressed to an individual - speaking epidemiologically, this is absolutely about all of us, collectively. I would never recommend anyone to not wear a helmet, but I would rather see their choice of transport be the bicycle as often as possible, and mandatory wearing of helmet will not help that.

<comment><USER13> Sorry I got lost in all the prepositions and articles. To be clear, I happen to be a bicyle-rider, who likes to take week-long 500 mile vacations on a variety of human-powered cycles. No obesity here, nor cardiovascular issues. So I'm definitely paying for others' problems of whatever kind.

<comment><USER6> Your quest for personal perfection, young grasshopper, will not be complete until you accept that others have different preferences, which are just as valid for them as your lycra-clad Lanciness is for you.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. But I have a hard time believing their priorities include dying young, in a grotesquely deformed body. I think they are plain lazy.

<comment><USER6> Again with the judgment! While it may be for you, for _most_ people cycling is not an extreme activity. At least, not to the same extent as climbing a ladder or eating a hot dog (two "safe" activities that are actually more dangerous than cycling).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am truly baffled at the number of people here against bicycle helmets--have you never had to interact with someone who has suffered brain damage?

I'd wear _two_ damned helmets if it ever saved me being in that position.

<comment><USER7> I find it hard to believe anyone here is against bicycle helmets.

I can only see people who think helmets should not be mandatory, because the data shows this will reduce the number of people using their bicycles for casual transport, which in turn increases their risk for a wide range of health problems and simultaneously makes cycling more dangerous for everyone else, because fewer cyclists on the road means fewer drivers will take enough care to notice them and give them their space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cost-benefit analysis and the role of government in personal safety laws is very interesting. One of the best TED talks is Steven Levitt on children's car seats. They do not seem to more beneficial than seat belts passed infancy. These are very much related, as BC has increased the age at which children need to be confined to a car seat to 9.

Steven Levitt: Surprising stats about child carseats [http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_on_child_carseats.htm...](http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_on_child_carseats.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> IMO the most important aspect of this whole debate is money. Lots of money is made from manufacturing and selling bicycle helmets. That's why the bicycle- naive general population only knows about helmets when asked about bicycle safety.

Given that skills training, traffic engineering and other key components of real (i.e., statistically defensible) bicycle safety are not profitable how would you go about fixing this dysfunctional aspect of our automobile-centric cultures?

</comment><comment><USER17> The government knows what's best for you. Stop being so individualistic.</comment>


Steve Huffman, the new CEO of Reddit on AMA - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cxedn/i_am_steve_huffman_the_new_ceo_of_reddit_ama/?utm_content=buffer52fb3&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

<comment><AUTHOR> >No. I know she was well-loved by many moderators, and I'm very sorry at how everything played out. It could have been handled much better. However, she was let go for specific reasons, which I obviously will not share, and we will stand by that decision.

Pretty honest, rather than beating around the bush.</comment>


Tell HN: Lawrence Lessig is doing an AMA tomorrow on Reddit at 2pm - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Wrong day I'm afraid; [http://reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1o8hul/i_am_lawrence_lessi...](http://reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1o8hul/i_am_lawrence_lessig_activist_and_law_prof_at/)</comment>


6 Ways Remote Workers Can Prove They're Working - <AUTHOR> http://www.hrworld.com/features/6-ways-remote-prove-working-051308/

<comment><USER2> The 6 ways are all just restatements of: "communicate with people back in the office."</comment>


100 more of those BITFIELDs - <AUTHOR> http://antirez.com/news/103 <comment><USER2> With the #N syntax, Redis is getting dangerously close to having C-struct- typed fields (i.e. product types with a known bit-level encoding.)

I could imagine a STRUCT LOAD command (like SCRIPT LOAD) to push a struct definition to the server; and then STRUCT GETFIELD and STRUCT SETFIELD commands to manipulate the structs. The GETFIELD and SETFIELD commands would just boil down to the same BITFIELD command after dereferencing. (Heck, Redis could probably cheaply tag the fields with their struct definition, and then you could GET/SETBYFIELD would be _polymorphic_.)

...thinking about this more, this is possible _now_ , isn't it? The struct- definition loader command, and the dereferencing commands, can all just be Lua functions passed to EVAL. The struct definitions could be loaded into a sorted set; the dereferencing commands would read from that set and then translate your query into a call to this BITFIELD command to do the work.

Anyone care to implement this silliness? :)

<comment><USER3> Not that silly and perfectly doable with the current support for Lua scripts...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Check out Concise [0] or Roaring Bitmaps [1] before rolling your own compressed bitset scheme. Wish I had known about these sooner.

(I realize now this is offtopic, as this is bit fields not bit sets; nevermind, but still it's interesting!)

[0] [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1004.0403.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1004.0403.pdf)

[1] [http://roaringbitmap.org/](http://roaringbitmap.org/)

<comment><USER5> +1 for Roaring Bitmaps. We are starting to use it in multiple products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm quite excited for bitfields in Redis. We are going to need to implement some bloom filter-based data structures for one of our products in the near future. Previously the best way to do this was to either keep a hash map or a binary k/v, both of which have substantial drawbacks (such as the need for locking). These bitfields, however, are a perfectly-timed ideal solution to the problem.

<comment><USER7> You can implement bloom filters in redis >2.6 with SETBIT And GETBIT. But I'm guessing this is not your case exactly? I'm curious what exactly you're trying to model.

<comment><USER6> We want to count the number of users, including guests, who are currently viewing a resource. To count guests, we plan to count unique IPs, so each IP should be counted at most once even if it connects to several different servers as a result of load balancing.

The approach we're moving towards is an augmented bloom filter where each "bit" is actually an unsigned integer counting the number of items hashed to the position, allowing us to add and remove IPs to the filter as users come and go (just rehashing and "subtracting" the IP when it leaves). This lets us ensure that IPs are not counted more than once. SETBIT and GETBIT would work with a normal filter, but they can't increment multiple bits, so we'd end up needing to lock.

<comment><USER8> I wonder if you could use Redis hyperloglogs for this... You count IP ins in an HLL, COUNT IP out, and subtract.

<comment><USER7> sounds to me like it's more suitable for HLL than for blooms actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> i love using 64 bit unsigned ints in mysql for 64 boolean columns. I do:

alter table foo add column bar bigint(20) unsigned default 18446744073709551615

and that gets you 64 111111111111111111111111111111 etc.

<comment><USER10> That sounds pretty painful to query, though. If the first bit position represented if the user had confirmed their email address, wouldn't a SELECT for confirmed users look something like SELECT * FROM users WHERE (mydata & b'0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001')?

<comment><USER11> No, you can just compare against an integer: SELECT * FROM users WHERE mysql & 1

<comment><USER12> This sounds like it'd be a full table scan to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 53 bits.. they're returning a bitfield as a double float at some layer?

Or am I misreading the implication and they can do signed 64 bits but not unsigned?

</comment><comment><USER14> Would like to see speed vs storage benchmarks. Bit twiddling must be a bit slow, no?

<comment><USER15> The only slow operations these days are L3 cache misses and transcendental function calls, around 100 cycles each. Optimize for that, not a 1 CPU clock cycle "bit twiddle."</comment></comment>


Unreal Engine 4.11 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-4-11-released <comment><AUTHOR> HN's dupe check failed. The later post [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410811](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410811) has more comments right now. Please go there for Unreal Engine 4.11 discussions.</comment>


Infographic: Who earns and spends more money, iOS or Android users? - Beat-O https://toshl.com/financial-infographics Infographic comparing average spending and earnings of iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Symbian^3 Toshl users. Sample geographical views of the data as well. <comment><AUTHOR> So, in the EU and US the average amount spent is above the average amount earned. I'd be more interested in more data on that than what OS was on their phones.

<comment><USER2> That's the first thing that struck me too. What magic is present in Toshl's ecosystem that allows people to spend more than they earn?

Stay away from this financial assistance software written by people who can't do math.

<comment><USER3> Credit cards? Large purchases like homes and cars?

I don't think the same people are simply accruing more and more debt. So maybe this shows that more people are entering debt every year?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What will make the market collapse? - <AUTHOR> The market keeps going up it's almost impossible to see what would make it collapse beside a complete distrust in the US or Chinese economy.<p>What could make it collapse? <comment><USER2> It depends on how real you feel the current values are. Or rather, on how real everyone else feels the current values are.

If everyone thinks that the values are fake (not solidly based on company fundamentals), then everyone is trying to make as much money as they can while the market goes up. But they're all ready to run for the exits at the slightest thing. In this scenario, what will make the market collapse? Anything. Any little event that makes some people sell, which makes the price dip, which makes more people sell, which makes the price dip further...

If everyone thinks that the values are solid, then the market could go up for a long time. It will go up for long enough, and reliably enough, that people will borrow money to buy stocks (especially at these interest rates). That borrowed money will make stocks rise, so more people will see the stocks as a source of sure profits, and will buy more stocks with more borrowed money. This is the start of a real bubble. (I can't comment on whether the market is currently in this state - does anyone know of a measure of how much borrowed money is in the market?) This goes on until the banks aren't willing to lend any more money to buy stocks with, and _then_ the first little thing causes everyone to run for the exits. Except in this situation, they run even _faster_ , because as the market goes down, they can lose even more than they invested. So the market crashes very hard and very fast, and a lot of people lose money, and even some of the banks lose money, which can cause real problems for the larger economy.</comment>


Ask HN: Struggling to find static site developers in Spain - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to get a corporate website redesigned, the only caveat is that I don't want the developers to use WordPress. I would instead prefer that a static site generator like Jekyll or Hugo is used.
This seems to be a big sticking point, as after a few quotes and a couple of one to one meetings, the response I am getting is:
"We are a WordPress shop. It is the only and best solution. Using a different technology would be a one-off, meaning more cost to you as we would never use it again for another client."
Given previous experience using freelancers that (generally) aren't around to support the site on an ongoing basis, my company would rather use an agency to do the job. Is there an agency or similar that can deliver a project like this? <comment><USER2> Well, if you are looking for a developer, you can outsource it from any other country like India</comment>


Solving State Explosion with Petri-Nets and Vector Clocks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bitwrap/bitwrap-io/blob/master/whitepaper.md <comment><USER3> > The Problem: [https://barrgroup.com/Embedded-Systems/How-To/State- > Machines...](https://barrgroup.com/Embedded-Systems/How-To/State-Machines- > Event-Driven-Systems)

The article linked spends a lot of time looking at an event-based calculator in VBScript that evidently has a lot of bugs. This is used as a justification for doing what they do (whatever that is? I don't really get it).

My problem with this is the calculator program is very poorly written. One could probably get rid of most of the bugs by using a "single source of truth" state object that includes all state data necessary for all events to act correctly.

The calculator program is buggy because the programmer is apparently not thinking holistically, and is patching bugs as they are found by adding another little state variable here and there. The result is just what you'd expect.

But this is largely a solved problem. The React folks developed Flux[0] to get away from these kinds of situations.

I guess my point is I can't be bothered to go study what a bitwrap is all about given the problem it solves is moot when using good design techniques.

But if someone can explain the problem better, I'm all ears.

[0] [https://facebook.github.io/flux/](https://facebook.github.io/flux/)

<comment><AUTHOR> > But if someone can explain the problem better, I'm all ears.

Assuming you mean it...

Here's a youtube video about the benefits and attributes of event-sourcing. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JKjvY4etTY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JKjvY4etTY)

Though the demo project is presented in the browser, I'm trying to demonstrate that I can model the game of Tic-Tac-Toe using a much _smaller_ and _comprehensible_ (I hope) graph.

Additionally - because these are mathematical graphs I'm speaking of - <USER2> means the 'program' that the graph represents - can be expressed as _pure math_ ( which is nifty to say the least )

A classic DFA would have to represent all the permutations of the board like so: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Tic- tac-...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Tic-tac-toe-full- game-tree-x-rational.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Ah, seeing the tic-tac-toe graph and comparing to yours gives a much better idea what you're trying to do. Interesting! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/5yktdo/tictactoe_s...](https://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/5yktdo/tictactoe_state_machine_petrinet/) <\- Related post focusing only on the TicTacToe State machine.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Cool! I'm doing DFAs with my fifth graders right now and I'm definitely showing them this." :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Never heard of petri-nets before, but familiar with ES. Do you have some good references as an intro to petri-nets?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm afraid I've learned about them mostly by tinkering - the tool I use is: [https://github.com/sarahtattersall/PIPE](https://github.com/sarahtattersall/PIPE)

I believe "Dining Philosophers" is the usual problem used to introduce the need and concept of Petri-Nets - googled for some examples I found:

[http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15671-f97/www/le...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15671-f97/www/lectures/18-PetriNets2/ppframe.htm)

Also here's the link to the PNML source used for tic-tac-toe: [https://github.com/bitwrap/bitwrap- io/blob/master/bitwrap_io...](https://github.com/bitwrap/bitwrap- io/blob/master/bitwrap_io/pnml/octothorpe.xml)</comment></comment>