Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces - <AUTHOR> https://brandur.org/interfaces <comment><USER4> I had sort of an "aha" moment reading a non-technical co-workers conversation on Slack the other day. Someone built a Slackbot to show the menu for whatever food truck is outside our building that day, and people could use it just by typing "/foodtruck". They were blown away and loved it. Rather than opening a browser and navigating some disparate menu pages, they could simply fire off a command in their "console".

I realized that people love Slack because it has introduced them to the CLI paradigm of computing for the first time. CLI is _so_ much more efficient and powerful if users can somehow be incentivized to put in the time and effort to become productive, which Slack has focused on a lot. As inefficient and silly as it may seem to us developers, Slack with it's endless command based integrations has succeed wildly at that where nothing else has so far.

<comment><USER5> Most successful interactions with Siri/Alexa/Cortana/GoogleNow also fall under the same paradigm. They have some finite number of templates/recipes that they can respond to, and just enough "NLP" to attempt a fuzzy matching between what you ask for, and the triggers to the recipes.

The key point is that communication is fundamentally serial, in both voice and basic text consoles, whereas GUIs allow parallel communication streams (and hence "exploration") organized spatially.

I find it ironic how the same people consider GUIs a more newbie friendly interaction paradigm than the terminal/console, and then say the same for voice interfaces over GUIs.

<comment><USER6> Maybe because, the cli mode means, you need to remember the commands?

In GUI mode, though inefficient, you know exactly where to access help and a few basic params (like dropdown menu on top, usually save under file, cut and copy under edit) that smoothens the learning curve. They have some solid ground from which to start exploring.

Whereas under console mode, there is no unifying paradigm. So each tool has a different way of doing the same thing. There is a lot of inertia at the start. Like what command is it for help 'h' or 'h?' or 'help' or 'H' ? What command is it for quit 'q' or 'quit' or 'ctrl+d' or 'ctrl+c' or 'bye' ?

For example, in gmail, I expected archive to be 'a' and delete to be 'd' or atleast "DEL". Very basic operations and basic expectations. Turns out, archive is '#' and delete is some char I can't remember now (I think '{' and '}' to indicate whether to go to the previous mail or the next mail. A 'd' to go to next mail and a 'D' to go to previous email would have been a lot more intuitive). Of course, you can customize the key bindings, but then you got to go do it across all your accounts.

While people may be quite happy to be able to wield so much power within the slack environment, they are very quickly going to lose their enthusiasm with the introduction of each new console tool, unless what they have learned in the slack environment translates into easier learning curve in the next console env.

Basically for users to be able to adopt the console mode, there is should be some sort of standardization.

<comment><USER7> Just so no one accidentally deletes an email on Gmail, 'e' is archive and '#' is delete.

<comment><USER8> Also ctrl+enter is send email (immediately) which is very annoying after working in google sheets for a while where ctrl+enter is newline...

<comment><USER9> The most annoying for me is "j" in outlook. It means "move down" in Gmail and dozens of other apps - in outlook it means "mark as junk".

<comment><USER10> TBH, outlook hotkeys generally are a mess like that - not even when compared with their "competitors", but also when compared with Windows itself. I can't even tell how many times I wanted to search for text in a long email only to find that "Ctrl+F" forwards the open email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The animations serve a valuable purpose, though, especially for new users. They show what's happening. Lots of old UIs (like those running in VT100 emulators) had instant wipes from one view to another, but made it impossible to tell what had happened, or why. Even when I wish animation was faster (like with Spaces, sometimes), I rarely wish it didn't exist at all.

I often have people watching me, and with animations they say "you're working fast!", while in environments with no animation (like Emacs), it's just "I have no idea what you did". I want computers to seem efficient, not unapproachably magic.

What if animations started at a slightly slower speed, and gradually increased in speed the more you used them?

We shouldn't need to pick one animation speed for all users, but we also shouldn't make expert users tweak it manually. And I definitely want to see full animations for new applications that I'm not familiar with yet, but not those in old applications which I've seen 1000 times.

<comment><USER12> I agree. I've long thought that animation could potentially make it much clearer what's going on in Vim.

Like if the user types 'das' to delete the current sentence, and it quickly highlights the text to be deleted, and then shows it shrinking away, as the text that was following it moves in to take its place. (Obviously, you'd want the animation to happen pretty quickly).

Such animation could make it clearer what the command is doing, and this could also make it easier to tell if you'd accidentally typed a command that didn't do quite what you wanted.

<comment><USER13> You might like kakoune, a vim-like editor which focuses on interactivity: [https://github.com/mawww/kakoune](https://github.com/mawww/kakoune) It flips around a few of vim's operations (like for example, to delete a word, you do 'wd' and not 'dw'). This allows it to highlight the text before performing an operation, which makes what you're doing much clearer.

<comment><USER14> I love Kakoune. Vim muscle memory and not being able to work out how to have per-language settings (for indenting) were the only thinsg that stopped me from switching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wrote a comment under a different post just a few days ago. My comment got _way_ out of hand and wasn't as articulate as I had hoped. But the salient point I made with it is simple and applies equally well to this article.

UI is hard.

User interfaces seems really simple. Every programmer I know has looked at a UI and thought to themselves "I can code that in an hour!" and then ended up spending weeks, sometimes _months_ building the UI.

I believe UI is a big, unsolved problem in modern computer science. Just as hard as any other unsolved problem in our field. Right up there with general artificial intelligence and P=?NP. I'm not even joking.

We will eventually solve the problem of UI. But there are a thousand and one articles posted every day either A) complaining about existing UI or B) telling everyone the solution (without providing real, concrete new libraries, frameworks, code, etc). No one wants to admit that this stuff is just plain hard and we shouldn't beat ourselves up over the fact that we haven't solved it yet.

In other words, it's easy to complain. It's easy to display hubris. It's hard to put forth real, practical solutions. Or at least be humble and admit that we _don't_ have the solution.

<comment><USER16> Will we ever solve UI? UI is the meeting place of tech and user, and in a sense it is THE problem for humanity right now. UI informs how we tend to use the internet, and for example we are currently involved with UIs that tend towards consumption (e.g. discovery mechanisms, feeds, etc). To solve UI would imply a certain optimal way to live our lives, if that exists. I agree with you that UI is unsolved and extremely complex, but I don't think it something to be solved as much as it is the political heart of technology.

<comment><USER17> There's an inherent dichotomy in UI in that the most "efficient" interfaces generally have the steepest learning curve. You can be really efficient in a terminal or VIM. But figuring those out take a lot of work.

When we design interfaces we try to make them have a short learning curve but expose greater ability as you use them but it's still hard.

<comment><USER18> Completely agree, but we can also figure out how to make it easier. Take a look at [http://kakoune.org/why-kakoune/why- kakoune.html#_improving_o...](http://kakoune.org/why-kakoune/why- kakoune.html#_improving_on_the_editing_model) (this is the section that introduces the flip on vim's command structure, but is otherwise a great article to read top to bottom).

There are a lot of ways vim is right or not right, but this lowers the barrier to entry in a profound way. We can keep advancing like this, and stacking those advancements on each other until vim isn't hard. Maybe? What do you think?

I think one of the big ways vim is hard is what Kakoune attempts to fix - visualizing selection. Adding a "layer" to working in vim, we had `u` and `^r` to figure things out - doing something and knowing we could go back. Now with Kakoune we have movement before action. This adds another way the program can converse with the user.

Disclaimer: I don't use Kakoune, but I dig what it's doing and I want to try it out. I think it is a fantastic critique of vim.

<comment><USER19> I'm not trying to say Kakoune's exploration is without value, but Vim very much does have "movement before action" mode. It's the visual mode, entered by the "v" key. It's the main feature vim has over vi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's interesting to me that nobody has yet mentioned the Bloomberg terminal, which is basically what the author is describing. It seems Bloomberg "got this" a while back, and dug their heels on for their keyboard-driven terminal- like UI whilst all other shops were going w32, Excel plugins, Web, etc. It's not sexy by any means, looks like it's from the 80s in a mainframe, but it works well for a lot of people.

Images, check. Fonts, check. Command-driven, check. Lightning fast, check.

Moving traders and other front-office staff away from BBG terminals is next to impossible due to the drop in efficiency and familiarity.

Pretty much every "function" (more similar to what devs might call an "app") can be launched via a command typed into their command bar. And it's incredibly well indexed and fast to search. Everything from reading news, checking messages, seeing a quote for AUDUSD (then subsequently purchasing). No mouse required.

Edit: typos

<comment><USER21> This is super cool! Are there any OSS like Bloomberg Terminal?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think this article points out some very valid problems (I relate a lot with Slack's loading, OSX spaces taking too long to switch between, etc), but the conclusions may be a little misguided. To address specific examples first:

1\. Slack is slow to start, and, as others have pointed out, uses animations to remind the user that it's working and not just frozen. The fix here is to improve the application's performance, but there will never be 0 network lag.

2\. Animations are good here so that you remain spatially aware of a "space" relative to other spaces. I agree that the animations are too long, and I myself have shortened their duration.

My biggest disagreement is with this quote:

"We should stop babying our users and try to raise beginners and the less technical to the bar of modern day power users rather than produce software that's designed for the lowest common denominator."

I think the best software is intuitive to use for novices, yet leaves room for people to improve. I'm learning how to use OSX's Logic right now, and I've been really happy with the amount of guidance it gives me. There are options to expose advanced controls, and there are a fleet of really convenient shortcuts, but I have no problem getting around.

<comment><USER23> I think another example of this would be using something like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Switching between tools _can_ be accomplished by clicking an icon, a drop down, or some other GUI element. However, once you get to a certain level of skill, it becomes faster to just use the keyboard shortcuts.

For a novice, it's more forgiving. But for the expert, it's possible to be very efficient.

It's also possible to go too far the other way too. Not to date myself too much, but an old example of too much "expert" levels was back in the DOS days with Word Perfect. Keyboard shortcuts were the only way to do things (like formatting). So you either learned the magic codes (with three extra/meta operations per code) or you kept a cheat sheet on the keyboard itself. That was a learning curve to get to 'power-user' status.

<comment><USER24> I still use cheat sheets, but I design my own into wallpapers that fit my desktop perfectly, than have them rotating randomly every hour. Keeps my refreshed on shortcuts in my popularly used programs, and adding a new one to the rotation is a great way to learn all the shortcuts for a new program.

It's not like I ever leave my desktop visible for a pretty wallpaper to matter. My nice ones are on my lock screen.

<comment><USER25> Would you mind sharing some?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So to sum up, Terminals Are So Responsive & Fast Users Always Feel It [1]. Animations are bad because they take too long but add no value [2], and terminals render non-english characters super well [3].

I've been researching for a bit, and actually research on how to make a "good" and "accessible" terminal interface is pretty thin on the ground. You can find a lot of opinions but very few with any data backing them.

[1]: They're not. [https://danluu.com/term-latency/](https://danluu.com/term- latency/)

[2]: They do add value in helping direct user attention. [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/animation- usability/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/animation-usability/)

[3]: Right-to-left is still poorly supported by shells, and the installation and support process for custom glyphs in terminals is often extremely complicated.

<comment><USER27> I think your criticism misses the mark.

[1] You're answering an article that starts with a 45-second video of Slack opening (surely the worst offender among modern apps) with something about latencies measured in thousandths of a second.

[2] As Nielsen is focused on web apps and applications, this advice is less applicable to UI provided by the OS that you interact with all day in presumably familiar ways. Note that generally "directing user attention" isn't necessary in a shell: output always comes at the bottom. However, be sure to read the "Frequency: Don't Get in the User's Way" heading that includes almost verbatim the OP's points against animations that slow the user down.

[3] Yes, internationalization is still hard. At least for Terminal.app, this is basically a solved problem, but of course it's possible for terminal apps (ncurses etc) to need custom support. The situation with web tech is about the same, these things are solved for you if you stick with the basic technologies, but if you get fancy you may need more explicit support.

<comment><USER28> > 45-second video of Slack opening (surely the worst offender among modern > apps

I hate to defend Slack as it's far from snappy, but comparing it to a console app seems hardly fair.

I wonder how much of it's slowness is due to network requests? I could make the argument that git is slow because when I clone a large repository it takes a while.

<comment><USER29> This goes to the article's point about caching; a chat app -- of all programs -- should cache conversations for a fast boot up. Sure, _updating_ the conversations -- the "cloning" stage -- may take some time, but why should you have to wait for the network requests to complete before seeing your past conversations?

The git equivalent would be if you had to wait for git to do a fetch/pull every time you ran "ls" on a git-controlled folder. It would be insane, and no one would use git (or any other version control).

<comment><USER26> Don't get me wrong, Electron has a lot of issues. I think Slack should switch toolkits. But I don't see how we argue that a famously poorly implemented app is somehow indicative of the entire space of GUI apps and that a space equally fraught with UX issues is somehow obviously better.

Especally when we have excellent examples like VS Code, which is cheerfully giving neovim and emacs a run for their money and displacing longtime contenders like sublime, because it's genuinely quite good and plenty fast enough for most folks.

<comment><USER30> Slack's problems have zero to do with Electron.

<comment><USER26> I think maybe it's security problems have something to do with Electron.

However, I agree Slack's got a lot of issues that are just bad implementation choices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I highly disagree that the animations are superfluous for the vast majority of users. Yes, they _can_ be superfluous, but that's not by their nature of existing.

History shows us that consumers value good UX, of which animation is a key component. The iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, but it was the fist one to take UX as seriously as the hardware.

As for the examples:

\- Slack: Yes, it takes forever to load and I hate that, the real problem is performance, not the animation. Would it be better if no animation happened and didn't inform the user about about what's going on? Keep in mind that the animation also serves to inform the user that it hasn't "frozen", so a still interstitial would be a regression.

\- Spaces: The animation tells the user what is going on! Having the entire screen change instantly would be confusing for the vast majority of users.

I do value choice though, so perhaps there should be a setting for power users to disable/minimize them.

<comment><USER29> > Spaces: The animation tells the user what is going on! Having the entire > screen change instantly would be confusing for the vast majority of users.

That's an interesting point, and it makes me wonder if there's a level of nuance to be found here. For example, animations are acceptable iff they do not extend the time required to perceive the requested action.

In other words, it's already going to take me some fraction of a second to perceive any change; animations within that fraction of a second are perfectly fine. Anything that extends the change past that fraction of a second, however, is eating into my productivity (or at least, so the author would claim).

<comment><USER32> When i upgraded my phone gro a nexus 5 to an S7 i was initially confused that my new (3 years newer, higher end) phone seemed sluggish compared to my old one.

It turned out that I'd enabled an option to double animation on the old phone. Enabling the same option on the new phone made everything as fast as expected.

That said, I really appteciate the (faster) animations. I wouldn't want to do a without them at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The single point that I disagree on:

> "Let's dig into it by looking at the aspirational interface concept from a > great movie: Minority Report. (…) I think we can all agree that the > interface of this prospective future is incredible and desirable"

I guess, this single scene of a movie has distracted interface development like no other vision. However, it's just a terrible interface: Working over prolonged stretches of time, gesturing with stretched out arms, would be simply impossible, you had to memorize a complex alphabet of gestures, which made the command set of Wordstar shrink in comparison, not to speak of the visual clutter and the (perceptual) bandwith required. – Please, let's stop speaking about Minority Report in this context. (It's a nice visual effect in a movie, but nothing to aspire to in terms of real life – just as is true for most movie FX scenes.)

<comment><USER33> P.S.: If you're looking for inspiration by a movie, have a look at the status screens and their update process in 2001 – A Space Odyssey, which were grossly overlooked for other effects in this movie and didn't have much of a real life impact. (I guess, for the era they came from, the clarity and economy, these are just in line with the article.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Relevant: [https://ilikeinterfaces.com/](https://ilikeinterfaces.com/)

<comment><USER33> Interestingly, while the site (which is great BTW – thanks for the link!) features all kind of minor UIs in 2001, the major status screens, which can bee seen in various places and scenes, are not covered in any way. (Again!)

<comment><USER34> Even more relevant - the Sci-Fi Interfaces blog, which analyzes various science-fictional interfaces in movies from an actual UI/UX standpoint.

[https://scifiinterfaces.com/category/ghost-in-the- shell-1995...](https://scifiinterfaces.com/category/ghost-in-the-shell-1995/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I recently got gifted an old Commodore PET. It boots straight into BASIC, so anything you type can be a command or a program, but what's even cooler is the way the console (they call it "monitor") works. If you press "up", rather than scrolling through past commands one by one like in Bash, DOS etc. the cursor simply goes up the screen. You can modify anything you see and hit return to commit. This can be a previous command, a line of code or even the contents of the system's memory (!).

It's a really interesting form of direct manipulation that I have only ever seen matched by "document" style interfaces like Matlab, R etc.

If anyone is interested, I'll do a write up later with some videos or something.

<comment><USER36> IIRC all Commodore machines did this. The C64 did. That's how you edited a program: you LIST'ed it, and then scrolled up and changed the lines on the screen. When you hit ENTER the new line overwrote the original one.

The C64 did not have any way to directly show or edit system memory, though. That's cool.

<comment><USER35> The C64 was indeed one of the only Commodore machines that did not ship with a Machine Language Monitor. You could however install one: [https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Machine_Code_Monitor](https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Machine_Code_Monitor)

<comment><USER36> Sure. I even wrote my own, as an exercise in learning 6510 assembly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Yes! I am so glad somebody called out the UI animations! The one in 1Password bugs me every time, I don't use Spaces because it takes too long for the animations to play out. There are more examples.

Every time a programmer adds an animation, a settings option should also be added to "disable animations". Advanced users will love you for it!

<comment><USER38> I'm confused. By Spaces animation, are we talking about the horizontal sliding transition?

On my machine (High Sierra) the transition time between Spaces is dependent on the finger gesture swipe velocity. I'm not really sure I would even call this an animation- the Spaces x-offset is being adjusted as I move my fingers along the track pad in the same way as scrolling up/down in a browser behaves. There's literally no waiting for the "animation" to complete; when I lift my fingers I'm either in one space or the other.

<comment><USER37> Compared to i3wm on Linux, it takes ages. I can could probably switch workspaces three or more times (using the keyboard) during the time that a single Spaces animation takes to complete.

Also, I am on High Sierra too, and there is at least a half-second lag between when the gesture ends and when the animation is complete. Taken together with the time it takes to initiate the gesture, I'd say we're around 0.75s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> A related sort of idea, which has been posted to HN before but never gotten a huge amount of attention is the Arcan project [1].

Basically an interesting implementation of a display server and desktop environment being worked on by a lone dev as far as I know. Really impressive stuff, and in the author's own words: _it is keyboard dominant, building a better and more efficient CLI than the flaccid terminal emulators of yore_

[1] [https://arcan-fe.com/](https://arcan-fe.com/)

<comment><USER40> lone dev here, and thanks for noticing - so this is where the traffic came from :-)

The lack of attention (and releases, not representative of the half a million lines of C code and about 100k of Lua it entail) is mostly by design - to a large extent, I prefer obscurity to the point that productivity dips and lethargy sets in around release bursts, it opens up old mental war wounds from academia (also - getting a ph.d wasn't worth it).

The posts etc. so far is much in the terms of documentation, not dissemination or politics. Coming soon: "Arcan vs. Xorg - far beyond feature parity" and "The Divergent Desktop"; that will show how these things fit together. The latter expands _a lot_ on some of the ideas in this article.

<comment><USER39> I think it's a fantastic project! Seems like a lot of what I want in a desktop. Looking forward to the new posts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> <Slow clap>

I'm switching away from macOS to Linux with the i3 window manager for precisely this reason. But all of his criticisms of terminals are spot on: no multimedia, no support for anything other than monospaced fonts, etc. Lord, somebody give me a terminal program that produces laid-out text and can show inline video.

<comment><USER41> If you use mlterm (and supposedly xterm with the right compile flags) you can have inline pixelmaps via DEC -regis- sixel escapes.

<comment><USER42> Actually i think REGIS is for vector graphics, SIXEL (six pixels pr character) is the pixel graphics.

I seem to recall that at least one terminal browser can pull some tricks to insert images into the window in X as well.

<comment><USER41> Oops, you're right.

The browser you're thinking of is w3m.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think this stems from a problem of companies hiring visual designers over interaction designers. They are two completely different skill sets and yet when a UX & Interaction Designer applies for a job they are required to submit visual designs as well. I have a colleague going through this process right now. They are in the final stages of the interview process and are rejected because they can't put together a visually perfect design.

The world needs more User Experience designers and yet it seems like no one is hiring them (even if they say they are).

<comment><USER44> Yep, that's been a huge problem for me too. I've put lots of time into thinking deeply about interaction design issues, and implementing solutions to them (mostly in the context of developing new kinds of programming tools). I've studied a good bit of psychology, and learned some from my dad who worked in HCI for > 30 years.

However, whenever I try describing to folks the kind of design where I have some ability and accomplishments, they seem unable to disentangle the problems I'm talking about from visual design. I've even regularly ended up falling into rolls at work where I'm consulted on interaction design issues—but no one knows the name for this or anything, just that when a problem comes up about, "how can we make this easy for people to do?" I tend to have useful ideas. But I won't be hired for it initially, and there won't be anything once I leave the job or work with new people there which says that's something I contributed.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > We need a reboot. We need toolkits that produce interfaces that are fast, > consistent, bug free, and composable by default

I would add to this list "programmable" so that automation is possible without being too disconnected from the GUI. Imagine clicking on an element in the page and being able to see (and use) the API behind it. This is one of the premises behind our project (shameless plug alert: [https://membrane.io](https://membrane.io))

"Bug free" though...

</comment><comment><USER45> "UIs that are pretty and friendly are nice to have, but the true values of a good interface should be speed and efficiency to make their users as productive as possible."

Nonononononono! Both. I want both. The biggest problem with terminal interfaces is that very little of the functionality is obvious from the outset.

<comment> amiga-workbench Ease of use and utility/efficiency seem to exist on the opposite ends of a continuum.

The more common "easy to use" software is designed to be up-front and intuitive but because of its nature it is hobbled from a maximum utility/efficiency standpoint. The interface usually relies on interaction modes that are severely limited in bandwidth (poking things with a pointer).

And the stuff on the other end is designed to be as useful and efficient as possible, but because of this its functions aren't immediately obvious and it requires the user to actually read the manual instead of fumbling their way around the interface. Once you actually put the time and effort in and learn the program you will be working far faster with this than the friendlier software.

There is one piece of software that comes to mind which seems to exist in a happy medium, the nano text editor can be extremely powerful once you learn the hotkeys but it meets you half way and gives you a heads up of all the main functions without you asking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I absolutely agree that aesthetics shouldn't come at the expense of efficiency, but I don't think it's practical to expect every user to be a power user. There are some products and programs, like the Adobe Suite and a bunch of terminal programs, that are marketed for and should be designed with power users in mind. But I'd say the majority of programs we use every day aren't designed with professionals in mind - they're designed for a standard computer user. And having something that "just works" rather than something that is tailored for a power user is absolutely valuable to the billions of people out there that aren't going to be power users.

Slack, like I'm thinking a lot of applications, falls in a middle ground where lots of users are power users, but many use it just a couple times a day, or less. It should be fast for those users, but those users shouldn't have to climb a steep learning curve to get value out of the product. An ideal interface would be easy for a newcomer and powerful for an experienced user, but that's a difficult challenge for a designer, and tradeoffs need to be made.

<comment><USER47> Yes, I agree here and you would not be losing much with the added effort. power users are already more likely to dig into most software/s and tweak settings so it is a win-win

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Animation is unnecessary in most cases. Minimal animation can be added where the UI would otherwise be unclear, but other than that it's visual spam.

Animation should be like a very thin layer of icing on a cake, but we're getting fed cakes with 4 inches of icing on the top. There is often little aesthetic restraint.

Designers should be asking, "how can I remove as much animation as possible?" It spammy and also an accessibility issue[1][2][3], especially when the animation is designed to mimic physical motion (parallax, Material Design, etc.).

To try and make computing bearable, I switched to i3wm and turned off all CSS animation in my browsers with Stylus. It's still too much.

I also have a suspicion that animation is causing cognitive damage to users by regularly breaking attention.

[1] [http://simplyaccessible.com/article/animations/](http://simplyaccessible.com/article/animations/)

[2] [http://accessibility.psu.edu/animations/](http://accessibility.psu.edu/animations/)

[3] [https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/04/designing- accessibi...](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/04/designing- accessibility-inclusion/#lens-animation-effects)

<comment><USER49> I wouldn't say animations are unneecessary. There are cases where they do add something positive. For example I see this open/close animation of yakuake [1] up to a hundred times per day since years and I still like it.

I think the key to good animations is that they use the right timing. They are best when you barely even see them. They should transport a notion, but as soon as you see it clearly, you have to wait for your computer to finish rendering and that sucks.

[1]: Terminal emulator which comes down from the top of the screen [https://www.kde.org/applications/system/yakuake/](https://www.kde.org/applications/system/yakuake/)

<comment><USER50> I used to use Yakuake heavily. Loved it. It made me much more productive.

Then I realized what was the reason behind it. And it's not the animation.

Yakuake has a specific shortcut that your muscle memory can remember. Making Yakuake super accessible. It's like my brain has now O(1) to access my konsole.

So I removed Yakuake and saved a specific shortcut for Konsole.

It's much better. Because there's no annoying notification and the window is full screen.

I applied this pattern to all my apps and I'm far more productive than I've ever been in any environment:

F1 opens up browser

F2 opens up pdf viewer

F3 opens up text editor...

(You can apply a shortcut to any application/window using Kwin -> Special Application Settings -> Arrangement & Access

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> There are _very_ few web apps where users need - or want - to do any kind of intelligent, complex text editing.

Most web apps are virtual paper forms with pre-filled menu options and - usually - a bread crumb trail so users can change their choices and/or their minds.

Animations are largely irrelevant to the user experience. The best way to speed up this kind of web app is to iterate over and over to find the sticking points empirically, and then nuke them from orbit.

That means minimising the number of menus, making sure they have useful defaults, and spending extra time on problematic elements like date and time selectors.

The user should type as little as possible and click as little as possible to get the job done. Beyond that, "productivity" does not apply as a concept. Users do not need composability or grep-like text manipulation options.

It's also handy if a page looks good, because this makes an impression on many users and is one factor that can persuade them to come back.

So no - I do not think there's anything of value in the OP, except perhaps as another example of "Developers want to turn everything into a emacs and a build system, because that makes them happy, even though it's 100% inappropriate for non-developers."

<comment><USER52> I disagree on several aspects.

I do agree that "most web apps are virtual paper forms with pre-filled menu options (...)", but that doesn't mean they don't need productivity improvement. First of all, many people use those "forms" for work, not just casual browsing. It's one thing when you're putting up some old book you found on eBay, it's another when you have to manage hundreds of such auctions each day. Suddenly, the difference between old and new web design trends is measured in 10x increase of time spent on task.

I know because I sometimes help my SO do her work tasks faster, and usually get 10x-100x speedup with clever application of web scraping, regular expressions and batch processing in command line.

Another thing - people don't "fill in forms" in isolation. Each webapp being a productivity-hostile silo causes pain whenever a task involves more than one of them. Often, users do in fact need "composability or grep-like text manipulation options", they just don't get them, so they suffer (or delegate to a friendly programmer, who can _force_ a webpage to have some semblance of interoperability, whether its authors want it or not).

> _So no - I do not think there 's anything of value in the OP, except perhaps > as another example of "Developers want to turn everything into a emacs and a > build system, because that makes them happy, even though it's 100% > inappropriate for non-developers."_

It's not that - though I do believe that Emacs presents a much better UI paradigm than the one accepted in the mainstream (due to flexibility, interoperability and consistency). It's just that present day software - <USER2> apps in particular - are _ridiculously_ hostile to productivity. The perfect solution is not doing everything from CLI, but it's also not shiny, animated web UIs exposing as little functionality as possible while still being able to sell the product.

Someone upthread mentioned the concept of threshold and ceiling. Emacs and CLI tools are high-threshold, high-ceiling. Webapps and mobile apps are low- threshold, low-ceiling. Perfection would be low-threshold, high-ceiling - <USER3> is, something accessible to beginners, but designed so that they can level up and become power users, if they need/want to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Last year's discussion when it was posted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13733777](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13733777)

</comment><comment><USER54> Agree with author that desktop UIs could be quite a bit better, and web tech gives devs enough rope to hang themselves with, which most do. Rest of the article sort of reads like a general annoyance with a grab bag of various apps and UIs tho.

The most revealing part of the article is that the author states current UI philosophy is making things legible and intuitive, but that UIs should be about speed and efficiency. These aren't really either/or, good UI/UX should explore the frontiers of both, and pitting them against each other feels off.

I think speed/efficiency are proxies for something deeper that the author is really getting at - many apps focus on approachability so much that they become superficial when they should be powerful. There are, however, approachable apps that are powerful. For example, Airtable is quite intuitive and approachable, but ultimately its a tool that helps users manage complexity, not avoid it. This class of tools is what we need more of, and I think the author is looking to fixing frameworks when deep down the problem is actually having better apps (e.g. this feels like category error).

Also, the author is asking for a reboot, but has failed to look at the most important UI reboot in the last decade - iOS UIkit. A junior dev can make a passable app just by following iOS Human Interface Guidelines that is accessible, responsive, intuitive, etc.

Personally, I like terminals for their show your work ledger aspect and the 'I know exactly what I want' factor, but just about everything else they're terrible at UI-wise. And in improving them, I'm not seeing anything in this piece that makes me think the same mistakes won't be repeated over again.

</comment><comment><USER55> Visidata seems like an example of the kind of UI this author thinks would be better. [http://visidata.org/](http://visidata.org/)

A former coworker used this as his project while on sabbatical at the recurse center.

It is mostly GPL v3, except for MIT license on the core UI.

From the Visidata GitHub page: The innermost core file, vdtui.py, is a single- file stand-alone library that provides a solid framework for building text user interface apps. It is distributed under the MIT free software license, and freely available for inclusion in other projects.

</comment><comment><USER56> You can only have success in building interfaces if you first understand who your users are, and what problem you're solving for them.

The author compares the benefits of flashy, spread-out interfaces and CLI. The truth is that both have incredible value in the right contexts. The tricky part is making an interface that is easy to pick up, but powerful enough for power users.

If you deeply understand your users you can build adaptive user interfaces[0]. LayerVault experimented[1] with the idea of progressive reduction—stripping down UI elements as the user becomes more familiar so they can work more efficiently.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_user_interface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_user_interface)

[1][http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/42361566927/progressive- re...](http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/42361566927/progressive-reduction)

</comment><comment><USER57> Everything the author describes lacking in the end exists in emacs. Come on in, the water is fine.

<comment><USER58> Are there Emacs-based terminal UI libraries?

Looking at how insanely fast competent line staff are with terminal interfaces like in retail POS settings, I sometimes wonder if Emacs would be fast enough to keep up with them. If so, instead of using a browser as the base UI framework, would a terminal-screened Emacs (that is, in console mode or perhaps inside xterm, and not the graphical Emacsen) with an appropriate text UI library be feasible?

It can't possibly be worth the effort unless the text UI in the code is the only presentation layer, I'd imagine. But if you have to go down that route, it might be faster and easier than rolling your own termcap-based text UI, especially with all the elisp goodness within. The only extensive text UI I knew of was Vermont Views' product, which has since disappeared off the Net and was closed source anyways. There are some open source libraries, but none with nearly the power that came with that closed source offering, and all still quite low level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I think it's probably easier to make a web app or desktop app as fast/bare/responsive/etc as an old terminal app, than it is to add good rendering of mixed fonts images etc into terminals.

So what he's arguing for is simpler, faster traditional non-terminal apps. Because those are good.

</comment><comment><USER60> 'Software on the web today takes too long to load, depends too heavily on synchronous calls to slow networks, overemphasizes visual gimmickry, and lacks the refinement that allows mastery by more experienced users to gain huge leverage for productivity's sake.'

This nicely describes the road Intuit has gone down with QuickBooks Online. Slow user interface, and lack of productivity. I wish Intuit would take half the money they spend on Marketing and use it to develop their Desktop offerings of QuickBooks.

</comment><comment><USER61> > I think we can all agree that the interface of this prospective future is > incredible and desirable, but if we drill into it, what's its most amazing > aspect?

This had to make me laugh a little bit. Jaron Lanier actually designed this UI to intentionally be unusable and bad, because the film was described to him at the time as a Dystopian film, so he designed a computer interface to be equally dystopian. Yet, the effects look so cool, that people actually thought it was a good idea

</comment><comment><USER62> That "Composability" bullet point rang so true for me just now. There are command line tasks for which I can just be 10x productive. And it usually comes down to the simple portability of stream IO.

Cloud functions may create a set of standard libraries or tasks that can be ported to any interface. You can get a sense here from this snapshot from a recent Google Cloud Next talk:

[https://imgur.com/a/RghGkQE](https://imgur.com/a/RghGkQE)

Many of the libraries are multimedia related. But its easy to see how the set can also include Cloud ML functions for pre-trained scene recognition.

Another welcome development is an anecdotal renaissance in IRC. Slack and Discord are killing it due to the ease with which new users can come onboard. But the communities forming around mission critical infrastructure, chaos engineering and SRE seem to rely on the old tried and true minimal ircd configurations from last generation.

There is no reason for web application entropy to make sites unusable. Modern browsers have high performance timers, request animation frame, gpu acceleration, background workers, and of course access to low level instructions via web assembly. It comes down to investing in the web again.

</comment><comment><USER63> One of my favorite application interaction was an old as400 thing from the 80s at the tax office. I was in college and still a bit into async js + css (in theory). That app had usual terminal screens, but the ergonomics were holistic, no brainer keyboard usage, no latency whatsoever, and the software was helpful. It was such a bliss. Software was never in the way, the only time it bugged you was to actually notify you of important issues (absurd data) and to provide either correct automatic fixes or a few clear suggestions. I realized how much context/paradigm is worth. It was obvious the efforts were spent on logic and not tech for the sake of it. Ironically it was the first wave of web2.0 business fad, so we were introduced to the new reincarnation of the tax UI in html/css and it was subpar in speed and ergonomics, and was of no help.

</comment><comment><USER64> I don't think the 'terminal' model of UI gets enough attention. I don't know why that is, perhaps it is a feeling that it is the "old" way to do things and so not a source of good ideas.

Xerox's XDE had a very nice terminal. It could use proportional fonts and you still had precisely formatted text for code. It was not as fast as a VT100 or an xterm which relied on monospaced fonts. But that was the root of the issue.

Terminals conflate "formatting" and "content" in the worst way possible, there is content that "is" formatting (whitespace). This closely mimicked how typewriters did it but they did it that way not because it was "best" but because it was "possible" given the mechanics of building lines of type without a bunch of lead letters.

It is insidious how that in band content/formatting mixing of ASCII and then later ISO-Latin-x drove compromises in editor and text manipulation tool design. But here we are.

I wrote a pretty printer for come code once that pulled apart the format from the content and it would print out source code with a nice proportional font (I think a2ps(1) could do this too at some point) and I admit that the code "looks wrong" in that form but I also have to admit that it only looks wrong because I'm not used to seeing it in that form. It is harder to read when things like parenthesis fade into the text because they are so much thinner, but this is again the design vs eyeball sorts of trade-off.

When I read this bit what I heard was "Gee, it would be really awesome if some designer could capture the flow of terminals with a modern set of capabilities." But that XDE terminal? Dave Curbow, who was with Xerox Business Systems, once tracked down how many function calls had to be made before the glyph ever hit the screen and it was a _lot_. It made it hard to run efficiently on the hardware of the time (great when you can code new microcode, less useful on CPUs without that capability).

</comment><comment><USER49> > We should build networked applications that cache content and make network > fetches asynchronously to remote APIs so that humans aren't waiting for data > to come back over the wire while they're working.

I built something like that a year ago and thought that I wouldn't have to bother the user with the sync state. I was wrong. Due to the nature of the mobile connections it happens quite often that for short periods multiple devices aren't synced. Yes I could certainly improve the logic to let this happen less often but in the end the user requires some indication about the sync state (e.g. last successful sync).

So when you build something similar don't hide everything from the user just give him as much freedom as possible to allow him to keep working while the sync happens in the background.

</comment><comment><USER65> I think animations that you don't notice as animations are the most useful. Take scrolling and scroll locking an element to fixed when a threshhold is reached. A slide down of a section opening, a zooming of an image, a swipe left... these are useful gestures that are not noticed but rather feel as though they should be part of the experience naturally. Focus on useful animations that add to the experience but we are not going to the stark days of command lines ever again although as a programmer I love them and can't stand probing for settings deep in UIs or navigating nested trees via clicking. We are not normal though.

</comment><comment><USER66> Happy KDE Plasma user here(with KDEPIM/KMail too), on 10y old AthlonII desktop with 5y old GPU. All GUI animations are configured to my taste, inobtrusive and smooth, on 4K monitor.

</comment><comment><USER67> On macOS, SysPrefs > Accessibility > Display > Reduce motion will disable some of the unnecessary animations.

I don't know if third party apps can read this setting and also comply.

</comment><comment><USER68> The sorry state of UIs is more of a marketing thing than a computer science failure. There is a trade-off between gloss and performance. Gloss is the easier sell. Let a little of the web doodaddery in, and users will not let up until you bring the rest of it. At that point, we just took the long trip back to Electron.

Also, learning from terminals to make better UIs--especially if the big selling points are speed and composability--is developer Stockholm syndrome. The speed is only there because the user-facing I/O is very limited, and rich media is out-of-the-picture. The composability is only there because we have 40+ years of command flags to format and reparse every single _ad-hoc_ format into something the next command can understand. Interfaces like Jupyter and Mathematica did a decent job integrating rich media. Symbolics Genera--and probably a few other language-machines--had a better story on composability (by having a common structured data format).

Amen to " _We should stop babying our users_ " though. Engelbart called that one from the outset--with something to the effect that if we're going to be using these things all our productive lives, most learning curves are going to be worth it--as long as the feature isn't garbage.

</comment><comment><USER69> One way to think about interface power is in terms of thresholds and ceilings. CLIs are powerful with a somewhat high threshold and high ceiling. In the attempt to lower the threshold, most UIs and OSes significantly lower the ceiling too.

I don't recall who originally described it this way. One of Logo's motivations was to have an experimentation environment for kids with low threshold and no ceiling. Perhaps Seymour Papert.

</comment><comment><USER70> > Composability: I'm far from a zealot singing the praises of the Unix > philosophy, but most terminal apps produce output that I can process in some > way to get into another program.

Composability _within_ the conceptual framework of the terminal itself (e.g., using a pipe).

But suppose I want to shuttle text back and forth across the terminal/GUI domain.

Do I even have a reliable way to select and copy text that extends past the viewport of a terminal? Even the method of copying a selection isn't cross- platform in terminals (e.g., among terminals running in Linux/OSX/Windows).

Compare that to the holy trinity of <ctrl_or_cmd-a>, <ctrl_or_cmd-c> and <ctrl_or_cmd-v> in any viewport of any web browser.

Plus, you can't even depend on a particular feature being available to a terminal of a single platform. Take the example of middle-click selection pasting from the terminal. Can I depend on distros to _never_ bother me by removing that feature? If so, what is the standard that governs the requirement for this feature?

<comment><USER52> > _Composability within the conceptual framework of the terminal itself (e.g., > using a pipe)._

Personally, I think that operating systems (and browsers) failed in enforcing such a framework, or at least _strongly suggesting it_.

Compare with Emacs, which is a prime example of how interoperable software could be, if it adhered to a common paradigm more. There's a reason people run tasklists, e-mail, IRC, shell, time tracking, invoicing and others straight from it. It's not because they're crazy. It's because the overarching UX principles enable greater productivity and integration than it's possible elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> If you're interested in good UI design read Jef Raskin, "Humane Interface"[1].

You should also study the Oberon OS. You would have to read up[2] on it to use it[3], but it's a high point of UI elegance that has never been equaled since. (Specifically the base system plus the "Gadgets" UI extensions.)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface)

[2] [http://www.projectoberon.com/](http://www.projectoberon.com/)

[3] Live in-browser Oberon system from original source code, via JS emulator for the underlying RISC CPU: [https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/](https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/)

\</comment><comment>

edit:

And if you want to read a book that fell through a wormhole from thirty years in the future read: "Computers as Theatre" by Brenda Laurel.

</comment><comment><USER72> The first thing I do when I get a new Android phone, or update the OS, is disable all animations. As a consequence, my Nexus 5X is in some respects more responsive than many flagship phones today. Sometimes animation can feel nice, but after using a piece of software more than a few times, I'm much more interested in responsiveness.

</comment><comment><USER73> As with debugging, it's important to choose your battles. How often do you start up slack? Is that 45sec once per day or even per hour, or is it per minute? Obviously it's not a frequent occurrence. So that delay, regardless of your computing power, is not an issue.

A case where it does matter is with a good mobile phone camera. It must launch and be able to capture an image within one or two (or at least within 5) seconds.

But back to the Electron topic... Would you rather a tool exists and isn't perfect, or it does not exist at all? Ok, or maybe it exists but costs $99 per user?

I love clean, performant, low latency interfaces. I live in a terminal. But I also understand the value of developer time. Whether tools and frameworks actually make devs more efficient can sometimes be unclear, but often they allow things to be made that otherwise wouldn't be made due to budget (time cost) constraints.

<comment><USER74> > Would you rather a tool exists and isn't perfect, or it does not exist at > all? Ok, or maybe it exists but costs $99 per user?

I understand this argument for niche tools. I'm eternally grateful for things like Insomnia (a GraphQL client), NoSQLBooster (MongoDB GUI), etc, all written in Electron. I understand that asking for things like that in native is a recipe for them to not happen, or for them to be Mac-only, or for them to cost $100/year.

Slack is not in this category. It is produced by a corporation valued at three billion dollars. It is a product that is completely, totally, and wholly solved. They produce very little that is novel. I expect that experience to be all twenty shades of pixel perfect, because they have no excuses.

Let's look at Telegram. Great app. But they wondered if there were ways it could be improved, so they released, simultaneously, Telegram X on the app store [1]. A rewrite, using the same backend and APIs. It's even better. With Slack's resources, they could have done this twenty times over.

[1] [https://telegram.org/blog/telegram-x](https://telegram.org/blog/telegram-x)

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Hi. UX designer here who reads Hacker News as a way of keeping tabs on what geeks are up to :-)

I think the article is generally correct when it concludes that we're on the wrong path. But I'd just like to assure the "engineering community" that the "design community" is fully aware of this and has been since about 2003 (mainly due to the effects of Flash at time - remember the loading screens?).

Part of the problem stems from the fact that UI design has swung into a bit of a dark age at the moment in terms of usability. Most designers are "visual designers" who don't know much about the history or practice of interaction design as developed by Norman, Raskin, Tognazzini, Nielsen, Cooper and others. With so few interaction designers around it's not surprising that UIs are designed to just look good rather than also work well. Some of the main issues are summarised here: [https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving- desi...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-design-a-bad- name)

I'd also point out that this means engineers are probably just as confused about the difference between visual design and interaction design, since there are so few people to look to who are practising the latter. So articles like the one at brandur.org will be written as though they are broaching new issues on the topic. In fact, discussions around the advantages of CLUIs are pretty old and nothing in the article is particularly new in that regard.

The only thing I'd say after that is a minor point: he says native phone apps are faster and more responsive than web ones. Is that true? The apps I have on my phone mostly use webviews or network API calls for large parts of their UX which is by definition practically the same speed as the web, no? At least, I can't tell any difference between using, say, Amazon's native app to search for and buy something compared to if I go to Amazon with my phone's browser.

</comment><comment><USER76> >>> These powerful devices should be propelling our workflows forward with us gangly humans left barely able to keep up, and yet, almost without exception we wait for our computers instead of the other way around. We're conditioned ourselves to think that waiting 30+ seconds for an app to load, or interrupting our workflow to watch a half second animations a thousand times a day, are perfectly normal.

In addition, the GUI has conditioned us to think that in order to make a computer do work for us, we have to perform precise manual labor to guide it through a lengthy series of tiny discrete steps. "I have seen the computer, and he is us." In addition to making those steps quicker, we should also be thinking about how to eliminate them altogether by having the computer understand natural language.

<comment><USER77> This extends to how people think about teaching others about computers. I would get so frustrated with E-mails that consisted of about 9 "steps" to walk through when using a WEB site, instead of posting a direct link to the final target!

The progress animations are out of control too. Every time I see one, I imagine the engineering hours it took to animate and wondered if they could have just spent hours optimizing the code instead. The _weirdest_ thing about a lot of progress indicators is that developers don't even get the point: your indicator has to be _in sync_ with the activity! It has to give meaningful updates, it can't just be a background animation that looks alive even when the server has died and isn't coming back.

<comment><USER76> Indeed, I've seen installation instructions that come with hardware accessories or software, where it's page after page with pictures of dialogs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.

And they don't apply to your version of the OS.

The instructions for installing the same thing on Linux is just a series of commands that you copy and paste into your console.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> I remember finding TermKit a while back and thinking it had some interesting concepts. Looks like it hasn't been touched in a while though. [http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/](http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/)

</comment><comment><USER79> > compose able by default

You're looking for click

[http://click.pocoo.org/5/](http://click.pocoo.org/5/)

It's the best framework across any programming language that I have found for building command line user interfaces.

I instantly know how to use an application made using click because it prevents you from making non-obvious GMO interfaces.

Even as a developer, I love using it. I often create CLIs for common chores in my projects using click. The applications always come out perfect, with little to no effort.

I wish there was something like this for GUI.

This makes me want to make a GUI framework like click, where you don't deal with the bare components, but "compose" your UI by just providing data

</comment><comment><USER80> One thing I found out the lazy way is that for single purpose UI as part of some overall process (Point of sale, Order picking and what not) TUI really works because the set of actions is constrained by what Fx key you can press and what barcode you can read. For convention front office (cash/voucher/pre- order converted into event ticket) I ended up with UI that mimicks IBM's ISPF built on top of Python's urwid. Previous versions were straight readline (which worked well for the happy path) and GUI thing which confused the operators.

</comment><comment><USER81> I agree with the article in that designers can be too focused on the shiny and non-functional aspects of interfaces.

Personally I would treat _design_ as being purely about function and anything superficial is about _aesthetics_.

But I think the author is throwing the baby out with the bathwater by wanting to restrict all animations. Fast, subtle animations, especially in the form of transitions between states/screens are extremely important for keeping the user informed about where they are in the context of the system.

<comment><USER82> I also think animations are not what's making slack take so long to load.

I don't think it would load any faster without the animations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> To the point of animations looking cool the first time and then quickly getting old, Ubuntu actually has a good solution for at least the window minimizing/restoring animation. The first time you minimize a window on a fresh install, the animation plays somewhat slowly. Each time the animation plays after that, it plays slightly faster, until it becomes almost but not quite instant, so you can still see where the window went, but it doesn't waste your time now that you know what to expect.

</comment><comment><USER84> I wonder if the 1Password animation only seems egregious to me because I'm not the crowd that it'll add value to. I understand on some level what 1Password does when I enter in my password. If I were to get my parents to use 1Password however, the visual effect of the vault unlocking could help them understand what 1Password does.

I think we may be too quick to judge these things within our own context rather than in the broad range of users which these user systems were designed for.

</comment><comment><USER85> I totally agree with this article and if the author is reading this comment, please do one about touch based interfaces. I am sick and tired of touch interfaces in Cars, home appliances and laptop screens. I want a billion knobs and switches. About the only place they make sense is an hand held phone.

Every designer needs to read this article. I am just so angry at what is being taught in graphic design schools and the sheer incompetence that graduates from UX/UI courses.

</comment><comment><USER86> The other important factor the author neglects to mention is the _keyboard_ \-- ctrl-tab is so great because you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard or your eyes from the screen. The place the machine _is_ waiting for the user is when he or she is screwing around with the mouse and then returning their hands to the keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER87> If "terminals" was improved to support fonts, images, videos, etc it would basically become a _web browser_.

</comment><comment><USER44> Reading this reminded me of my parents sitting on their patio, complaining about the neighbor's air-conditioning unit. I wouldn't even notice the sound it was making until they said something—but for for them, being so tuned into it and having it already on their mind as 'a problem,' it was a prevalent part of their experience.

There are two regularly occurring situations times where I'm delayed by the slowness of interfaces:

1\. At work, waiting for our web app to reload after I've made some changes to the source. This is actually a problem and eats up a significant amount of time and makes me lose focus.

2\. I'll occasionally come across a slowly loading webpage. And I stress 'occasional' here—it's maybe once every couple of days when I open an article on HN or something and it's some site with a tons of ads and stuff. It's a non-issue—easily less than 5 minutes per week.

Aside from those delays, I basically never find myself waiting for whatever software interface I'm interacting with, and that's on a 2014 macbook pro.

</comment><comment><USER88> I was once annoyed with the slowness of Lynx, the terminal web browser. Poking around in the source code, I noticed that it literally called sleep() several times while loading a page. I removed every sleep call in the code and suddenly Lynx was a lot faster. Try it!

</comment><comment><USER89> My only disappointment working with terminal comes from SQL queries (mostly mysql & postgres). The queries results always come scrambled and absolutely unreadable. Anybody ever heard about 'responsive design' for sql results?

<comment><USER90> The results likely have lines wider than the screen. Configure your CLI access app to display table results using the "less" pager, then configure your environment variables to include the "-S" option to less. The long lines will be clipped at the screen edge (instead of wrapping) and you can scroll around horizontally and vertically (look into the less man page for how to move around inside of less).

edit: typo

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> I think you can get pretty close by investing a lot of time into configuring your perfect linux desktop, but hardly anyone is willing to do that as OSX or even Windows is good enough for most people.

</comment><comment><USER92> I couldn't find a date on this article, but the author clearly isn't using the latest (rebased) version of 1pass which still has the animation, but it's very smooth and quick.

</comment><comment><USER93> I don't accept that HTML is the reason why Slack is slow.

Can anyone explain, in concrete terms, what resource does Slack require a lot of, which is fast to produce on iOS but slow to produce in HTML?

</comment><comment><USER94> I get the idea, and I agree in general. However, I've always struggled with DE's like i3 because they were so barren with visual information up front. I respect the power they present, but I appreciate a nice balance. Animations, more than anything, just need to be paced appropriately. They help a lot in easing a user into a flow within an app. Slack for me does this perfectly. It doesn't feel kludgy, slow, nor does it feel like everything pops up in your face loud and obnoxiously. The interface and animations helped me feel like I was getting down a flow, and when I learned the hot keys and patterns, it felt like playing an instrument well.

</comment><comment><USER95> I like this article. In the future everyone will be "a developer", and apps that are developer centric will go mainstream - at least that's my prediction.

</comment><comment><USER96> These rants always seem to miss something important.

Not everyone thinks like you (seasoned terminal users) do. There are different kinds of intelligence. The only way to get good with a terminal is to RTFM and _play_ with it, until you're used to it and have constructed a mental model of its internal "types", their logic and composability.

Software developers are as a group highly predispositioned to construct mental models of this sort, and to learn by reading the docs. Most people aren't. Many more people are very good at building a _spatial_ model of something, and remembering how to do things by _where they are_. Animations, different screens, various OSX ui components, etc, tabs, all do this. For discovering features and learning to do new things, rather than read the manual, you explore of the environment presented to you. While working, instead of writing intermediate state to buffers somewhere (like the pushd stack) you _put_ it somewhere, and when you want to find it again you go look where you put it.

I'm personally better at this than at the software way of thinking and generally find that if things move too fast I just get stuck and have to wait for my brain to catch up. This is probably a fault but it's not going to change overnight. I'm also bad at reading manuals, or at least, I don't like to put the time in to read the manual for everything I do, and am very annoyed when an interface exposes its internal model and complexity non-uniformly, ie to do something that I can _think_ about quite simply I have to absorb and model a lot more of how it works than it feels like should be necessary. (That sentence was about git, also a favorite of these advocates. But also bash, and honestly most CLI tools.)

<comment><USER97> > Not everyone thinks like you (seasoned terminal users) do. There are > different kinds of intelligence. The only way to get good with a terminal is > to RTFM and _play_ with it, until you're used to it and have constructed a > mental model of its internal "types", their logic and composability.

Yes, and here's the point I would like to stress that is completely lacking to make the idea of user friendly terminals work:

 __GUI:s are more user friendly than Terminals because of discoverability and limiting affordances. __

User friendly Terminals might just be possible if you allow users to explore what is possible with clever search and query completion. It should be able to recognize what entities you are likely typing about and suggest commands that use them. Let 's call it "Semantic terminal"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> [https://github.com/ocornut/imgui](https://github.com/ocornut/imgui)

</comment><comment><USER99> Seeing that 20 second start-up time [of the Slack OS X desktop app] in the video on the site was kind of painful :/.

</comment><comment><USER55> Jef Raskin's book "The Humane Interface" is basically the book-length version of this article.

</comment><comment><USER100> I had thought the author meant airport terminals, and was waiting for an insight to come that never did.

</comment><comment><USER101> agreed - at the end. But a terminal isn't faster per se. It is fast if you are a rapid typer and have all the knowledge to point exactly that command with that param in the right terminal and the right context. Otherwise, it is just a blank piece of paper. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER102> Isn't one of the most successful companies ever built on that principle? (Google.)

</comment><comment><USER103> Ironic that the author uses up 2/3 of valuable screen space for the title of the article when a much smaller size would have sufficed. It took me extra time to scroll down to the main content. This just goes to show that aesthetics have more value than perhaps the author is conscious of.

<comment><AUTHOR> An article, something you use once, is different from an application, which you use continuously for long periods of time

<comment><USER103> Following that logic would mean that the more time we spend interacting with the medium the less important aesthetics/gestalt is, and that the medium should instead be focused solely on function. I think one thing the low level tech focused individual can sometimes overlook is that it is humans interacting with these interfaces, and humans are varied, and as such interfaces need to incorporate many different methods of engaging the user.

<comment><AUTHOR> Aesthetics are always welcome as long as they don't compromise usability. What I've noticed is that the more you look at something, the more normal it tends to look, regardless of whether initially you thought it was beautiful or ugly. Not sure why it happens but aesthetics stop being as important as time passes.

<comment><USER103> I agree. I just think we shouldn't be too quick to write off things that seem frivolous or maybe slow down the power user. For example a fade animation may seem like it's wasting time, but used properly it creates a visually pleasing transition, while at the same time possibly allowing for work to be done in the background while the UI would be otherwise unresponsive. However, I have also seen this abused as well. I think it's best that we continue to call it into question like this article does, but also try and stay balanced and not ignore some of the other considerations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> This is why I am loving Alfred, and recommend it to everyone I can.

</comment><comment><USER105> What is the terminal running in the 5th movie? (ThemWare)

</comment><comment><USER106> I stopped reading when he claimed Minority Report was a great movie, the forecast UI was "incredible and desirable" and confused the technology in the movie with the book on which is was based.

</comment><comment><USER107> I like animations. The blinking cursor for instance.

<comment><USER103> That's a great point of how animations communicate an idea to the user

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> please, god no. i've watched so many "terminal gurus" painfully hold left or right keys to jump to editing text (I use vi mode, but it still sucks). i've watched them fumble with !! to do something they think is efficient, but really slows them down. i've watched them write unreadable buggy awk scripts over the course of hours that end up not getting the job done. terminals are a classic example of fundamentally bad design.

<comment><USER109> Could this be because people who are in the process of learning things like that are more apt to use them and show them off?

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> One of the failures of modern GUI design is exemplified by the calculator app on the iphone. It looks exactly like the old stand-alone desktop calculators. What could be wrong with that?

Have you ever used a calculator, and wondered if you'd punched in the operands correctly? I have. And so I do the calculation again.

With a scrolling terminal, you can see (and check) the operands on the previous line(s).

<comment><USER111> It's for macOS instead of iOS, but numi is a great scratchpad calcualtor. [https://numi.io/](https://numi.io/)

Never tried it, but Soulver looks like a good solution for iphone: [https://acqualia.com/soulver/](https://acqualia.com/soulver/)

and CalcNote on Android - just installed this and its' just like numi. [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.burton999....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.burton999.notecal.pro&showAllReviews=true)

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> Bare bones terminal design is great for power users just like vi is great for power users. The saying is as you get more competent in linux, the more you stay in the shell/terminal with the keyboard and the less you use the mouse. But for ordinary folks ( especially beginners ), they are drawn towards animations, mouse clicking, visual, etc. And most beginners don't advance to the power users stage. My guess is that this pattern will hold in the future.

</comment><comment><USER113> I few months ago, I changed a developer-options configuration on my Android phone to increase the speed of the animations to the maximum. My phone felt _so_ much more responsive, it was like I got a major processor upgrade.

IMHO, two big curses in UX today are unnecessary animations and webfonts that render ugly when font smoothing is off.

</comment><comment><USER114> I agree that we need more speed. Some websites and apps are too slow.

We need faster network and faster websites.

<comment><USER115> > We need faster network and faster websites.

We need less bullshit on websites, that'd solve both problems. See e.g. [https://www.techtimes.com/articles/229533/20180606/thanks- to...](https://www.techtimes.com/articles/229533/20180606/thanks-to-gdpr-eu- version-of-websites-are-faster.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER117> What is a console?

Definition:

Console: (verb) To comfort someone in a time of grief because they are forced to use the command line.

Oh, wait. You thought console was a noun?

<comment><USER118> It is a noun as well.

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/console](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/console)

Specifically:

3b. a combination of readouts or displays and an input device (such as a keyboard or switches) by which an operator can monitor and interact with a system (such as a computer or dubber)</comment></comment>


Scaling A JavaScript Codebase   - <AUTHOR> http://yeungda.com/2010/02/26/scaling-a-javascript-codebase.html

<comment><USER2> This looks a little overengineered to me. I'm always suspicious when I see a lot of 'envelope' code but no examples of code that actually does anything -- it reminds me of the guy who wrote a blog post about developing a sudoku solver with TDD who got to the point where had a few tests, but he never finished the app.

In this case we're seeing a few snippets of code, but no real sense of the structure of the app other than to see the particular way that 'main' gets called. In particular we get no information about how they've solved the difficult problems, such as how to organize complex asynchronous activities. (That's the scaling problem in Javascript, Flex, Silverlight, GWT, etc that used to keep me up at night)

I'm also a little disturbed that he wanted to write a DOM abstraction layer. Today there are many libraries such as dojo and jQuery that abstract away some of the worst problems with the DOM and with XHRs. Most of us could complain about the details of said libraries, but I'm very happy that other developers are doing the hard work to ensure browser compatibility, which is a real, not a hypothetical problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback. This is my first article and it's a bit confronting to see only negative feedback in a comment.

Sadly there weren't more examples and that I didn't address every piece of the puzzle here! I do hope that despite this, you were able to take away something useful from reading the article.

On overengineered, why not have a look at the value of each part of the structure described and remove what is not providing value? We found that each part was valuable to us.

On asynchronous work - I shied away from it since it's such a big topic. If it helps, our most complicated interaction was three concurrent asynchronous calls. We wrote a small state machine that was notified of the result of each call and managed the complexity of deciding what to do.

On the DOM, it would seem that the DOM bit left too much room for interpretation. Unless we had to trade of simplicity for performance, we always used jQuery to access the DOM and do XHR. We certainly appreciate and even take for granted the safety that such a library provides. The point was more about reducing the surface area of the application code that interacts with the DOM, for reducing complexity and having a well known part that is good at working with the DOM. And anyway, we never did it - which says something too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I thought this was a pretty good read. Here at blip.tv, we have a few sizeable JS projects in the wild (our HTML5 player, our distributor dashboard, and our destination site), each with shared dependencies.

Keeping discrete files in JS is one step from bringing your work from quick hacks to complete projects. I disagree with a few of the patterns in the post, but I thought it's on the right track.

As far as handling many asynchronous events, we follow a naming paradigm similar to Apple's Obj-C. It works surprisingly well for JS. We deviate a little bit with global (page) events via our own fireEvent() methods. There are also local (component) events that communicate within pieces of a page itself. We maintain a loose coupling of all elements on the page and thereby increase usability. We still provide a messaging system for other components to listen to, which allows us to have strong and consistent integrations across pages.

I'll write a followup on exactly how we do our concatenation and minification in a later post. I think it could be useful!

<comment><USER4> could you give us some idea on how big your sizable js apps are? I suspect this is a case where quantity does turn into quality. I.e. as continues to get bigger problems morph.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Coffeescript makes many of theses things seamless. Reminds me of another article called Scala == Effective Java?

[http://grahamhackingscala.blogspot.com/2011/01/does-scala- eq...](http://grahamhackingscala.blogspot.com/2011/01/does-scala-equal- effective-java-bloch.html)

<comment><USER6> CoffeeScript looks great, but doesn't it mess up the workflow to have to compile in order to fix a bug? Or do people typically download CoffeeScript into the browser during development? Or is using it enough of a benefit to outweigh having to do the extra step?

<comment><USER7> Running

        coffee -cw *.coffee

will watch all of the CoffeeScript files in a directory and compile them to JavaScript whenever they change, which is what I use for keeping things updated in development, and the production deployment scripts I run compile the CoffeeScript to JS before deploying.

Aside from having to set up a terminal running the compilation task when I start a dev session, the fact that it has to be compiled doesn't affect me at all.

<comment><USER8> Here's ./dev bash script for node.js projects

#!/bin/bash

coffee -wcl public/ && coffee -wcbl ./

Uses the local function scope wrapper for js files served to client side in the public folder and removes function scope wrapper for server side files in the entire directory tree.

Type ./dev and I'm up and running.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Entrepreneur has solution to too many passwords - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/montreal-entrepreneur-thinks-he-has-solution-to-internet-problem-too-many-passwords/article15410645/

<comment><AUTHOR> This article came into my Google News feed this morning. I thought it was baffling: Connected entrepreneur raises millions of dollars in VC money to build...LastPass?

I don't understand.

<comment><USER2> Quite - we are probably all already running something just like this. i suspect that what this "entrepreneur" is adding is a central repository to store the user's passwords - like Dropbox or Google Drive or what have you.

Not sure this solves enough of the problem to get major consumer adoption though.</comment></comment>


Moderate Alcohol Use and Reduced Mortality: Systematic Error in Studies (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.annalsofepidemiology.org/article/S1047-2797(07)00007-5/pdf <comment><AUTHOR> And here is a more recent research with control for confounding factors from abstaining:

Late-Life Alcohol Consumption and 20-Year Mortality [http://www.drjkoch.org/ETOH/Readings/Late_life_alcohol_consu...](http://www.drjkoch.org/ETOH/Readings/Late_life_alcohol_consumption.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> [pdf]

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10260174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10260174) is recent and related, but maybe not quite a duplicate.</comment>


The story of Computer Space, the first mass-produced video game. - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2011/12/11/computer-space-and-the-dawn-of-the-arcade-video-game/

<comment><USER2> If you enjoy stories about early video games, Pong-story.com, a site focused on the Magnavox Odyssey (the first home video game console) is fascinating: <http://pong-story.com/intro.htm>

</comment><comment><USER3> Very inspiring story. Best part is when they discovered that all their four demo units had been damaged during transport to the debug trade show:

"They got three of them working, but the forth one proved damaged beyond repair. Thinking quickly, they made the best of the situation by turning the damaged machine around, opening up the back, and showing off the internal workings as if they had always intended it to be that way."</comment>


Differentiable Programming Manifesto - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/docs/DifferentiableProgramming.md <comment><USER2> This looks like it's going to be a really big deal unless they totally fuck it up. Autodiff greatly simplifies all kinds of continuous mathematical optimization algorithms, and using mathematical optimization means you only have to write code that can recognize things that look similar to a solution instead of code that can find the solution — in a sense, mathematical optimization derives your code from tests.

Autodiff is useful for other kinds of things too, not just mathematical optimization, as they mention in the manifesto. This weekend I wrote a real- time SDF raymarcher in a page of Lua ([https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/sdf.png](https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/sdf.png) [https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/sdf.lua](https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/sdf.lua)), but the surface shading is pretty lame because without sampling the SDF multiple times it doesn't yet have any way to calculate surface normals. Guess what a surface normal is? It's the gradient of the SDF, and reverse-mode autodiff can sample the SDF and its gradient in only double the time of just sampling the SDF.

Pretty much anything you do in continuous domains can get simpler and/or better-performing with autodiff. This is why I've written so much about it in Dercuano.

It's worth pointing out that you don't need to redesign your language to get first-class differentiable programming. Source-to-source transformation has been used to do autodiff in FORTRAN for at least ten years, including on pretty massive applications. (This is mentioned in the manifesto.)

<comment><USER3> Conal Elliott (the guy who co-invented FRP) did a nice project on shading computational surfaces by extracting derivatives from code more than a decade ago: [http://conal.net/Vertigo/](http://conal.net/Vertigo/)

He is now very active in the differentiable programming community, but he got started on the problem in the graphics field.

<comment><USER2> The manifesto links one of his papers, "The simple essence", which I've started but haven't finished.

<comment><USER3> He has been working on that for a long time. Though much of his earlier work is symbolic differentiation, I'm not very familiar with the more recent AD stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like differentiable programming a lot, but can anyone explain the motivation for Swift as their language of choice for this? I assume it was simply because they wanted to get Chris Lattner, and Swift was his baby. Julia seems like a much better target for this, I wish they had just dedicated some money or resources to that. I don't have a problem with Swift's language design per-se (although Julia's dynamic nature really lends itself more naturally to the sort of problems you might be trying to solve using differential programming, in my opinion) but its cross-platform support is terrible. Why would you choose Mac's boutique language as the foundation of your new paradigm?

<comment><USER5> > I like differentiable programming a lot, but can anyone explain the > motivation for Swift as their language of choice for this?

Back in January, Jeremy Howard (of fast.ai fame) wrote up a blog post talking about why he was exploring using Swift for this purpose:

[https://www.fast.ai/2019/01/10/swift- numerics/](https://www.fast.ai/2019/01/10/swift-numerics/)

The post is quite in-depth; but just to give a brief take on other potential languages:

8<\---

Here's my personal view of some languages that I've used and enjoyed, but all of which have limitations I've found frustrating at times:

 _Python_ : Slow at runtime, poor support for parallel processing (but very easy to use)

 _C, C++_ : hard to use (and C++ is slow at compile time), but fast and (for C++) expressive

 _Javascript_ : Unsafe (unless you use Typescript); somewhat slow (but easy to use and flexible)

 _Julia_ : Poor support for general purpose programming, but fast and expressive for numeric programming. ( Edit: this may be a bit unfair to Julia; it's come a long way since I've last looked at it!)

 _Java_ : verbose (but getting better, particularly if you use Kotlin), less flexible (due to JVM issues), somewhat slow (but overall a language that has many useful application areas)

 _C# and F#_ : perhaps the fewest compromises of any major programming language, but still requires installation of a runtime, limited flexibility due to garbage collection, and difficulties making code really fast (except on Windows, where you can interface via C++/CLI)

<comment><USER6> Not sure why Julia is ruled out as not a general purpose language here - I got the impression that Julia was for numerical ie Technical programming

<comment><USER7> Because it would be a challenge to implement, for instance, an actual user- facing application in Julia.

<comment><USER8> Mostly because the end-user application community is not as strong in Julia (though you can create web services/sites and GUIs right now), in the same way the scientific/numerical computing/machine learning/HPC isn't as strong in Swift. Perhaps the point he made was that since his area is ML, then he could contribute better in trying to create a community around that in Swift than he could bring the other domains to Julia up to par with those languages by adding another competing library.

And in terms of the language itself, Julia is very much a general purpose language. Exceptionally general purpose as it's basically a Lisp below the surface, so it can not only support any domain, it can be comparatively easily extended to better support them. Differentiable programming is one such example, as the compiler was not designed for that, but you can just import this functionality as a library. Though the focus is still from desktop to HPC, as opposed to mobile/IoT to desktop (and apple focused) like Swift, which makes so having both languages supporting differentiable programming an overall positive over having only one of these languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So now everyone's pet project gets a language extension in Swift? Apple extended the language with @_functionBuilder for SwiftUI. Now Google wants to extend it with this differentiable stuff for TensorFlow.

Why won't they implement proper metaprogramming support instead of proliferating the core language?

<comment><USER10> > Why won't they implement proper metaprogramming support instead of > proliferating the core language?

Proper metaprogramming support is hard. Polluting the language with special case hocus pocus is relatively easy.

<comment><USER11> > Polluting the language with special case hocus pocus is relatively easy

or if it's well done is it still hocus pocus pollution?

<comment><USER10> Then it's pollution with compiler magic. But only if it's _really_ well done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone else dislike the usage of the word "manifesto" in computing? It always seems to me to indicate a faith-based rather than evidence-based commitment to some train of thought.

Seems strange to see manifestos discussed in the ML space, which is nominally a measure-oriented world. Mind you, when has statistics not been polemical.

<comment><USER13> My experience is that evidence-based commitments are overrated and are usually a post-hoc rationalization for faith- (or gut-feeling)-based ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Meanwhile, Google researchers (Plotkin and Abadi) are going to present "A Simple Differentiable Programming Language" at POPL20[1] in January.

I can't find a preprint though :'(

[1]: [https://popl20.sigplan.org/track/POPL-2020-Research- Papers#e...](https://popl20.sigplan.org/track/POPL-2020-Research-Papers#event- overview)

<comment><USER15> Went up this morning on arXiv: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.04523](https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.04523)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Striving for concise syntax for mathematical operations is a noble intention, but it's hardly a good idea achieve that by shoehorning changes into an existing language.

A language framework designed for extensibility has to be the basis allowing for the implementation of concepts such as differential or probabilistic programming, and it's not Haskell, i.e. we're not there yet.

<comment><USER17> Julia,'s source to source autodiff is implemented as a custom compiler pass in a third party package. Similar approached are bring taken by prob programming packages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Pardon my ignorance but I have a few questions...

1) This seems like it would only work for varying the values passed to variables in a function. Can you differential a function other than just changing some values -- like using a genetic algorithm. Seems like this is just finding the right values to pass to a function not finding a different function itself.

2) Is this limited to only continuous / ordered values? How can you differentiate logic, branching, and what other functions to call? Seems like to do so would require mapping a function to some kind of n-dimensional euclidian space / manifold.

3) Why does this need to be an extension to a language? Can't ordinary interfaces in the OOP sense or monads in the FP sense be used to wrap functions and give them this functionality for free?

<comment><USER8> 1) It's not restricted to the variables being passed, for example Zygote [1] has an example in the README with IO gradient(x -> fs[readline()](x), 1), and it's not using numerical differentiation (varying inputs to check the output), but finding a formula (approximate, not a closed form like a symbolic differentiation) of how changing the output affects the input. Genetic algorithms is a black box metaheuristic, so people would favor using gradient descent given that the code is differentiable, but how the model is optimized is technically open to any method.

2) Yes, it can differentiate all control flow. What happens is that each forward/backward pass will have a different graph based on what branches it would follow (effectively a subderivative). Each one of these graphs is independently differentiable and do not contain the control flow by themselves.

3) It doesn't need a language extension (Julia doesn't, but that's because you can access Julia IR using the language itself, not many language support this level of metaprogramming). The OOP strategy (like Pytorch) overload methods so every time you call the overloaded method it builds the graph. It depends on customized types and methods and does not support code that isn't using those custom types that can hold the graph (native/custom types), native control flow (only implicitly by changing what graph is being created), reduces the possible optimizations (you only have one subderivative, not the complete graph to optimize) and end up creating a DSL with it's own error messages and quirks that is less natural than just using the host language. I can't say how it would look using monads though.

[1] [https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl](https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So the software is improving by leaps and bounds but where is the hardware?

OpenCL --> deprecated

Cuda --> No Nvidia GPU

ROCm/HIP: does it work on Mac or are you strong-armed into using Apple Metal?

Metal --> I couldn't find an AXPY example

</comment><comment><USER20> I was recently looking at a library in F# that does something similar: [https://diffsharp.github.io/DiffSharp/](https://diffsharp.github.io/DiffSharp/)

Also related: [https://github.com/fsprojects/fsharp-ai- tools](https://github.com/fsprojects/fsharp-ai-tools)

</comment><comment><USER21> There is a simpler way to do this; [https://github.com/keithalewis/epsilon/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/keithalewis/epsilon/blob/master/README.md).</comment>


Pivot, don't jump to a new vision - <AUTHOR> http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/06/pivot-dont-jump-to-new-vision.html

<comment><USER2> Most valuable article on HN in recent times, and it got only two upvotes. How sad.</comment>


Is the Internet a Mob Without Consequence? - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/24/is-the-internet-a-mob-without-consequence/?hp&_r=0 <comment><USER2> The real issue is not the mob, it's the companies kneeling over to bad PR.

We've already got mobs in our streets fighting for X and Y (I won't go politically into whether the reasons are right or wrong), except governments (mostly) don't care about bad PR from a mob. The real issue is that for any single thing, Twitter mobs can rally and ask for the firing of anybody.

Look at our most recents "mobs": DongleGate, libUvGate,... The common denominator is that all people participating in these lack any empathy to see human beings as anything else than a commodity and don't care about any kind of consequences while companies just fire people because "we have to issue some kind of punishments".

Sure, there have to be consequences for "bad behavior" or anything that hurts the company's public image, but is firing at the first offense really the only way to punish a bad employee?

Well, good job tech scene! We've disrupted the scene and built Witch-Hunt-As- A-Service. Free of charge!

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's an idea for NYT - stop writing about Sacco, and start writing about the people who publicly threatened her. The right thing to do isn't complain that no one is going after her attackers. The right thing to do is go after her attackers.

"Yet the people who threatened to rape and murder Ms. Sacco, who attacked her family and friends, aren't held in contempt or fired from their jobs."

<comment><USER4> Hm, I don't agree.</comment></comment>