Mathematicians Report New Discovery About the Dodecahedron - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-report-new-discovery-about-the-dodecahedron-20200831/ <comment><USER2> > The solution required modern techniques and computer algorithms. "Twenty > years ago, [this question] was absolutely out of reach; 10 years ago it > would require an enormous effort of writing all necessary software, so only > now all the factors came together," wrote Anton Zorich, of the Institute of > Mathematics of Jussieu in Paris, in an email.

Right here is the most interesting part of the article for me. It's definitely cool that we're making these sorts of discoveries still, but it's more interesting how so many more problems are now being solved via computer. Had I gone all the way through my PhD (in math), I'd be some combination of worried that my computing skills were up to snuff, and intrigued about the increasing role of computers in mathematics.

<comment><USER3> The fact that these mathematical problems can be solved by computer doesn't mean that any computer scientist or teenage hacker can go around solving math problems. The solution to these problems is more a matter of mathematical skill combined with some programming than a purely programming effort. So I don't think that mathematicians have any reason to fear for their jobs, they just have another tool to learn to be good at what they do.

<comment><USER4> I think of computers as being telescopes for math. They can help you see deeper than you could before, but you still need to know where to look, make sure you have enough resolving power, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those interested in reproducible research, the authors have made their Sage notebooks available.

Arxiv link to the paper: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.04131](https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.04131)

Sage notebooks: [http://userhome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/aulicino/dodecahedron/](http://userhome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/aulicino/dodecahedron/)

<comment><USER2> > reproducible research

This has not been a concern in mathematics up to relatively recently, mostly because computers were generally too puny to be of much use. By "recently," I mean from the birth of the computer up through probably 15-20 years ago. Since then, there's been a real convergence of tools and computing power that's going to send mathematics in new and interesting directions over the next decades.

Unfortunately, the mathematics curriculum doesn't seem to have caught up. (Please correct me if I'm wrong here -- and I'd be _happy_ to be wrong.) If you wanted to learn these skills as a grad student even 10 years ago, you would have to go to the CS department, most likely, unless you were at one of the handful of departments doing formalized mathematics. I believe that's still the case.

<comment><USER6> Is Fortran still a thing these days in a mathematics curriculum?

<comment><USER2> More or less no, in my experience, unless you're specializing in such a way that it would be useful. And, in that case, you're probably better off doing your degree in a CS department, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's incredible is that the most basic statement can be proven with just a line: they just show a single, simple path that returns to the vertex without touching any other vertices. It's kind of amazing that we are proving this fact now, 2370 years after a dodecahedron was first described.

The project site has cool pictures and visualizations: [http://userhome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/aulicino/dodecahedron/](http://userhome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/aulicino/dodecahedron/)

<comment><USER8> I know they answered more than just the yes/no question but looking at that 2d diagram I find myself unable to believe a computer was needed to answer just the yes/no question.

<comment><USER9> Or even with a computer, this should have been trivial to brute-force, no? I mean, you wouldn't know that it would work ahead of time, but I find it hard to believe that no one tried it? Or am I missing some deep complexity of this problem?

<comment><USER10> I am wondering this as well. Disclaimer I did not read the paper.

On the one hand, there are infinitely many geodesics on a dodecahedron, of unbounded length, so you can't really brute force all of them.

On the other hand, the actual solution only goes through each face at most once. There are infinitely many unfoldings to try, but for each unfolding there are only finitely many paths to try, and you can get the solution on one of the minimal unfoldings.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I mean 12! is ~479 million, and there are 20 vertices, so that is very much within brute-force-on-a-laptop range. For some net, I think given a vertex + list of faces, there is a simple-to-get yes/no answer on whether a ray passing through the faces and returning to the vertex exists. I wonder if you can just write a Python script to do it...

Edit: Even simpler - there are 43,380 nets of a dodecahedron, and each has 20 vertices. So if you just draw ~8 million straight lines and see if any are both on the net and do not intersect another vertex, you'll find (at least) one that works!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is the exact rule here for how to follow a geodesic along a polyhedron? If we pick a vertex on a polyhedron and start marching across a face, in order for that to be a geodesic, how do we continue when we cross an edge onto an adjacent face? Is it simply that the there must be an equal and opposite angle of incidence?

(Like, suppose we imagine ascending an A-frame roof on an angle, and then, passing the ridge, descend down the other side, following a path that matches the ascent such that there is a 180 degree of rotational symmetry around the intersection. Both segments of the path lie in a plane that makes a vertical cut through the roof. Is that it?)

<comment><USER12> This sounds complicated. Couldn't one just flatten (temporarily) the two adjacent faces and draw a straight line across the edge? (I would imagine also that a geodesic crossing more than two faces or faces that just have a vertex in common might have to follow some edges or cross a vertex.)

<comment><USER11> > _Couldn 't one just flatten (temporarily) the two adjacent faces and draw a > straight line across the edge?_

You are right; that simple specification is equivalent to what I described. My brain was too temporarily foggy to see the obvious.

<comment><USER13> It is not merely simple, it contains an explanation of why it works as a definition.

(Un)flattening is an isometry, it doesn't change lengths of lines. If you flatten a polyhedron and draw a straight line between two points, it is the shortest path between them (property of Euclidean space). Now fold the surface back, it remains the shortest path (and the geodesic).

<comment><USER14> The _"Now fold the surface back, it remains the shortest path"_ part isn't true, in general. A different unfolding of the polyhedron may yield a shorter path. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_spider_and_the_fly_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_spider_and_the_fly_problem)

<comment><USER11> Even if we are discussing a pair of points on adjacent polygons? Wouldn't the shortest path go across the one and only edge the polygons have in common?

I'm looking at the diagrams on that Wikipedia page. It looks as if we require the path to visit certain polygons, then it is in fact the shorted path which visits those polygons.

In both solutions, the path traced along the unfolded jacket of the box is in a straight line, obeying the principle we have been discussing.

I don't think that what we are looking at there are simply two different "different unfoldings" of a polyhedron; they are different choices about which configuration of edges to separate in forming what is evidently called the net of the polyhedron:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_(polyhedron)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_\(polyhedron\))

They are different "nettings", if you will. We can crack a polygon into more than one net, but a given net has just one unfolding.

(If we choose a particular net of a polyhedron, can _that_ have more than one shortest path between some two points?)

<comment><USER14> _"Even if we are discussing a pair of points on adjacent polygons?"_

Yes. Consider a pointy triangular wedge of two 1 by 100 rectangles and a third one that's 1 by 1, and pick points on the two large rectangles that are close to the edge they share with the small one. The shortest path will visit all three rectangles.

Also: I was only refuting the claim that such a line is the shortest line between the two points. I happened to know an (IMO) interesting counterexample, so I mentioned it. I think the conclusion that such a line is a geodesic is valid, but not because of the argument given.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> numberphile did a video of this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9_l8QASobI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9_l8QASobI) with Jayadev Athreya one of the main people involved

<comment><USER16> This is very good. It's the same one embedded near the end of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I knew this rang a bell: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9_l8QASobI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9_l8QASobI) (from Jan 2020).

</comment><comment><USER18> Who's going to take advantage of these families as a strategy for "Hunt The Interpolated Wumpus"?

        You hear a quiet rustling. There is a cold gale blowing.

<comment><USER19> It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue

<comment><USER18> Grues are logic, not geometry: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction)

(I _did_ have to check to ensure Goodman was antecedent to The Great Underground Empire)

These days do we use temporal logics for these kinds of properties?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What could be the real world applications of this discovery? On a more general note, does all research have real world applications?

<comment><USER13> >does all research have real world applications?

The simple answer is: no.

To quote Feynman: "Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." \- this applies to all research.

Mathematics especially so, because it is not science, but an art form. The only difference between what people consider "good mathematics" and what isn't is what people consider beautiful, interesting, intriguing (usually, being _correct_ is necessary for being _beautiful_ , but not always: Fermat's Last Theorem has been on the minds of mathematicians for a very long time despite its proof being _incorrect_ ; and interesting conjectures are the driving force of this art).

It's a very humane experience, this mathematics of ours.

<comment><USER21> New vistas of mathematics open up when what was once ugly comes to be appreciated, usually two or more generations after its first exploration.

The history shows up in terminology: "irrational" numbers were once anathema, but had to be accepted (although the feelings about the word might have arisen in the other direction). "Negative" numbers came a lot later, and only after zero, which was disliked. "Imaginary" is another. After the bad numbers had to be accepted, we needed a name for the good ones: thus, "natural". Transcendentals got a free pass because of pi, so got a nice name.

Infinities are still causing trouble. Like irrationals, they are named for what they are not.</comment></comment></comment>


Who killed the Intel microprocessor? - <AUTHOR> http://www.asymco.com/2011/01/10/who-killed-the-intel-microprocessor/ <comment><USER2> The only real advantages ARM has over x86 currently is:

a: licensing cost / production cost

b: Power consumption

If you think that intel wont have both of those factors down to ARM levels shortly, you dont know intel very well. They are very competitive and dont like to get beat.

<comment><USER3> I disagree. Reason: I think the problem with Intel is that they are more of a manufacturing company than design company. What I hear from insiders (anyone at Intel care to validate/correct?) is that the company's culture as a whole value their design arm much less than their manufacturing. Their main advantage (also strategy) has always been that they can out manufacture their competition. (ie faster shrink, better yields) Intel does not have a good track record for processor design outside of the x86 CPU space. (and even in that space the P4 is pretty much a failure in terms of design) Looking at their repeated failed attempts at being significant in the graphics space. And then there is Xscale. They had a lot of potential with the StrongARM group when they acquired them from DEC, but they just ended up selling them to Marvell (who is now doing amazing stuff with them). Also how they are now capitalizing on their superior manufacturing capabilities by venturing into producing lower tech products like SSDs. Combine all of that with the notion that the x86 architecture simply does not offer any value on a mobile CPU, (another debate, but one I strongly believe) I really don't think Intel will have anything competitive against ARM "shortly". (Xscale was sold in 2006...)

<comment><USER4> I have no inside knowledge of Intel. But I've always thought it interesting that they use "tick" for their process upgrades and "tock" for new architectures. That appears to corroborate your point, that processes are perceived as more important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are really two markets for processors: consumer electronics, and real computing. ARM may be the best processor (whatever that means, as it's a design you license, not a piece of hardware) for looking at ads on a 3" display, but I think Intel is still going to be relevant in the server market for a while. Think about some of Intel's key assets like being really fast and having a C++ compiler that makes C++ even faster. This is important because programmers write horrendous code that needs hardware assistance to produce answers in a reasonable amount of time. (There are also problems to solve that require a lot of CPU power, like protein folding and finding the next Mersenne prime. ARM processors are not used for this.)

Now, if you're saying, "yeah, but not for desktops", I can agree with you. Desktops are going to become less and less powerful as the average computer user becomes more and more computer illiterate ("the Facebook dumb terminal", I'll call it), and ARM may help keep the cost down. But I'm probably not going to be running Emacs on an ARM box anytime soon. (Hell, I even use x86 for my _router_.)

<comment><USER6> Actually, a typical browser session tends to be more resource-hungry (in both memory and processor) than a typical Emacs session these days.

<comment><USER5> Hah! Clearly you do not use cperl-mode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Speculation, by the numbers:

AMD P/E: 5.46

Intel P/E: 11.12

ARM P/E: 86.94

<comment><USER8> These are number for 2009. For 2010 ARM P/E should be "only" around 50, for 2011 it might fall below 30. Still expensive but not as extreme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I take issue with the notion of Intel's model being obsolete in the mobile world. Quite the opposite; Intel's business model of treating CPUs as commodity is for market of mature technology, while current mobile model of heavily (and costly) customizing SoCs is one for technology being still insufficient for achieving market goals.

If anything, it's the current mobile model that will go obsolete at some point -- simply because it's costly, both in terms of customizing SoCs, taping out small batches of silicon and customizing software for it. Mobile will shift to commodity components at some point.

<comment><USER10> >Mobile will shift to commodity components at some point.

Selling tens of millions of a single hardware model doesn't count as commodity?

Even discounting that, ARM's business model doesn't preclude the emergence of 'commodity' ARM processors. Maybe such a shift might play to Intel's strengths, but then ARM has total domination of the mobile CPU market in their favour.

I have no idea where this market will go in say 10 year's time, but right here, right now ARM have a lot going for them and there are no short or medium term reasons to suspect that's likely to change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's a prediction, Intel will still be a dominant player in CPUs 10 years from now. ARM is making progress, great, good luck competing with Intel in FAB capacity and engineering capability. The world isn't going to suddenly switch to 100% mobile CPUs, desktops and severs are still not just a big business but the biggest part of the business.

<comment><USER12> FAB capacity?

Most ARM CPUs are manufactured not by ARM itself but by Samsung, Qualcom, Texas Instruments and the like. These guys certainly do have all the requisite capacity as they provide the silicon for all of the world's mobile phones.

Granted, the Big Gorilla is faster to shrink the processes, because they have no problem dropping a few billions on a brand-new fab, but what good did that do? On both supposed benefits of the smaller process (cost and power drain / performance) ARM CPUs are _still_ winning.

This whole situation is a replay of the Pentium 4 Megahurtz madness. Back then Intel was pushing raw performance disregarding power consumption, then they hit the heat dissipation wall, AMD snuck in from behind and punished them in a major way with Athlon-64. Intel regrouped with Core* series, won back the market share, pushed AMD back into oblivion, and relaxed about the whole thing. Now they are doing the same thing - prioritizing performance at the cost of power drain, and this time it will be ARM who will punish them. It's not clear how long it will take Intel to change their ways this time. The last time they still had Pentium 3 / Pentium M group of engineers to lean on, and that they did rather well. This time they are not so lucky - they have actually sold off their embedded CPU division a few years back, and now I doubt whether there is anyone left inside Intel to insist on a much needed pivot.

[EDITED for typos]

<comment><USER13> > Most ARM CPUs are manufactured not by ARM itself but by Samsung, Qualcom, > Texas Instruments and the like.

Not quite. With the exception of Samsung, those companies design ARM-based systems-on-a-chip, but do not manufacture them. They take an ARM core, perhaps modify it, add on a bunch of other stuff like graphics accelerators, memory controllers, ethernet MACs, and so on. Then once the design checks out, they send it to another company, like TSMC, UMC, or GlobalFoundries, that actually does the manufacturing.

The capital costs of building each new generation of chip fabs have grown tremendously, which led to this centralization and commoditization of chip manufacturing. Intel is one of the few holdouts, and they're usually a bit ahead of everybody else, which is one of their big competitive advantages.

<comment><USER12> Eh... I'm pretty sure TI has their own fabs. Do they not manufacture their own OMAPs over there and use someone else's fabs instead?

<comment><USER13> They specialize in analog devices. The OMAPs are sent out to other companies. (I think it was TSMC, and maybe UMC, for the OMAPs.)

<comment><USER12> Good to know. I used to follow these things closely a few years ago, when I was trading semiconductor stocks in my personal "savings" stock portfolio. At some point I have realized the folly of my ways and decided to instead spend my time on a subject I actually have a chance of knowing well - writing mobile apps. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Make sense. Although given that Honeycomb (next version of Android for Tablet) mandates dual core processor how this applies?

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if AMD could become the ARM of x86. They've already spun out their foundries anyway.

</comment><comment><USER16> Another terrible asymco entrant. Interesting how the author pushes one philosophy for processors (the inevitable superiority of a licensed model) but if you've read their many pro-Apple screeds, exactly the opposite conclusion is pursued relative to Android.

Quite humorous really.

<comment><USER17> It's worse than that. Asymco has this "modular"/"integrated" split, which they refer to in this post as well, though reversed from their usual position as you note, but they happily admit that Nokia and RIM are "integrated" but in trouble while downplaying HTC and Samsung's success (and Motorola's miraculous reversal) on the "modular" side. They leave these inconsistencies dangling as long as they can massage the data enough to conclude that Apple is great and so are the people who buy Apple products. It's blatantly pandering sophistry masquerading as overwrought analysis.</comment></comment>


Sun-powered Solar Impulse plane begins marathon Pacific flight - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/30/asia/solar-impulse-plane-pacific-crossing/index.html

<comment><USER2> How can a single pilot go it alone for 130 hours? Is it safe to sleep?

<comment><USER3> From the article: "At night, if there is no turbulence, Borschberg will be able activate the autopilot and nap, but only for 20 minutes at a time."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> its flight.</comment>


Hermes: A JavaScript Engine Optimized for Mobile Apps - <AUTHOR> https://code.fb.com/android/hermes/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just found the previous discussion from when they published the github repo: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20412588](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20412588).</comment>


Inside the ubiquitous 741 op amp, the circuits in silicon - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2015/10/inside-ubiquitous-741-op-amp-circuits.html <comment><USER2> Cheap op amps made everything in electronics work better. In the tube era, an op-amp was a huge device. It's also hard to make a DC amplifier with tubes and have the output voltage be near the input voltage, hard to get enough gain, and hard to keep the zero point from drifting. Tube op amps were used only for analog computers, including ones for gun aiming.[1]

Negative feedback was rare in the tube era, because gain was so expensive. An op amp with negative feedback throws away gain to get linearity. In the tube era, that was wasteful. In the IC era, having a few stages of amplification to get some insane but nonlinear gain, then throwing it away to get linearity, became a win.

Once op amps became cheap, they could be used routinely whenever you needed some gain. So audio gear filled up with them. A negative feedback amplifier behaves like an ideal linear amplifier up to a frequency limit determined by the slew rate of the device. But for most op amps, that limit is up in the megahertz range, so there's no problem using them for audio. (There is an audiophile cult which denies this, of course.)

Op amps with differential inputs can also be used as comparators; the output goes to one extreme or the other depending on which signal is stronger. Comparator ICs are op amps with a logic gate stage at the end. That's how differential signals such as twisted-pair Ethernet get turned into logic levels for processing. Any interference which hits both wires is subtracted out. This is why we can pipe gigabit Ethernet around over rather ordinary wire, rather than coax.

[1] [http://www.analog.com/library/analogDialogue/archives/39-05/...](http://www.analog.com/library/analogDialogue/archives/39-05/Web_ChH_final.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for this comment! The part on Ethernet in particular made me stop and think.

> But for most op amps, that limit is up in the megahertz range, so there's no > problem using them for audio. (There is an audiophile cult which denies > this, of course.)

As a hobbyist who does a lot of tube audio, I'm happy and sad. Not because you're right---you're definitely right---but because I know why you bother to mention it.

I love the history and the hands on aspect of the big, clunky guitar and kit amplifier circuits of the 50s and 60s. On my time, point-to-point is so much more fun than checking IC pads under magnification. But I often feel left out. The audiophile tube babble makes me queasy, but at the same time, it's all buggy whips to any real pro.

Thanks again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amusing having seen, decades ago, detailed articles describing how op-amps were engineered ... and now practically the same article showing op-amps being reverse-engineered. The excitement of uncovering the past is just as palpable as the excitement was of creating the future.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ah the 741, for a long time it was ubiquitous everywhere. I particularly like the Evil Mad Science "discrete" version ([http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/76...](http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/762)) which still works pretty much exactly like the real one except its easy to stick probes on it if you want to see the internal signal paths.

I still have half a tube left of the quad package one (four 741 equivalent op- amps in a 14 pin package. Really useful for building analog computer circuits.

<comment><USER6> My first tech job in the early 80s included testing batches of TI 741s. Since we always had bunches of leftovers we used them for all sorts of things. Wonderfully versatile little devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What a beautiful circuit. Recalling my first encounter with op amps as a struggling undergrad, faced with seemingly incomprehensible analog electronics, it was not pretty. I graduated but must note the significance and beauty of these circuits was lost on me.

Not surprising university was my last serious encounter with analog electronics. I do slightly regret not using the opportunity to explore and appreciate the elegance of it all. Working with software now, elegance and beauty are seldom the first thoughts that come to mind while debugging code.

Maybe Shaw was right, youth is wasted on the young :)

</comment><comment><USER8> >Doing away with the external capacitor made the 741 extremely popular, either because engineers are lazy[14] or because the reduced part count was beneficial.

Small comment on this, doing away with the external capacitor meant 99% of the time the things just worked. Where the previous designs were a royal pain to tweak so they were stable, not only on the bench, but in production.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I love the letter from marketing at the bottom; the excitement is palpable.

<comment><USER9> Manufacturing chips was an exciting business in the 1960s, with dramatically new products constantly being introduced. Seems like the excitement has moved to software now.

<comment><USER10> Analog IC design is in fact a largely incremental business these days and has been so for a while. Perhaps 10-15 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recall being told a rule-of-thumb to use when figuring out what a circuit using an op-amp does: the voltage difference between the two inputs is always zero, at least to a first approximation.

<comment><USER12> ONLY in the case of negative feedback do you have a virtual short.

This might be a weird place to ask, but does anyone know a good place to discuss analog electronics online? A particularly good forum or something, that isn't full of cranks?

<comment><USER13> I'm not qualified to answer so I will. Electronics.stackexchange.com, not analog only obviously but good q&a spot like all the se sites, even with the occasional crank. Chat room too.</comment></comment></comment>


Cake raises $5M for a swipeable mobile browser - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/30/cake-raises-5-million-for-a-swipeable-mobile-browser/ <comment><USER2> At first glance I cant think of anything I'd want to use less than this. It seems like the result of a "what if the internet was Tinder" pitch deck to marketing-centric investors.

Maybe I'm missing the point as it seems to me like the only results from this design getting traction would be that mobile data use will sky-rocket and stuffing ads into the top of pages would become the norm.

It seems incredibly person hostile.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't want webpages being preloaded on mobile because as it stands mobile carriers are still charging an arm and a leg for mobile data. Preloading means that pages are being loaded that I never see.

The clientside ecosystem is mad, average webpage size has ballooned to 3MB. I often choose to preload a podcast, in exchange for loading one single webpage. Therefore choosing which result I want before opening it is something I'm interested in.

Webpages are easily the heaviest use of my data as it is. I could spend all day on maps, reading email, or otherwise without any problem.

<comment><USER4> I pay $60 a month for 23 gigabytes of 4G on Virgin Mobile - it's almost impossible for me to use it, and I avoid work wi-fi and casually watch video. A year or so ago, I got 8 gigabytes for that $60.

Admittedly, Virgin is a bit of a value leader, but the world is headed toward extremely cheap data, so it's savvy for a startup to make a product geared toward that.

<comment><USER5> Cheap, fast, coverage. Pick two.

<comment><USER6> This is highly localized to India, but Reliance Jio offers all three. Widest LTE coverage, fastest and most modern data infrastructure, cheapest plans. They're literally killing incumbents like Vodafone and Idea.

To give an idea about the prices, I pay ₹349 ($5.46) for unlimited voice plus 1GB high speed data per day. Oh and this is not a monthly plan, it's for 3 months!

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I'm extremely jealous of the cellular plans I've heard of from other countries. The state of US carriers is a joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems like a "solution looking for a problem" type of thing. I doubt that the mobile search experience is huge pain point (at least their arguments didn't convince me) and with Cake, it limits you too much. I still want to look at Google my self and decide which pages I want to open.

I am shocked at how investors are still pouring this money into startups with no real traction and revenue.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been working on something similar for the last 2 years, so probably longer than Cake. I call it WonderSwipe, currently in beta on iPhones: [https://medium.com/wonderswipe/rethink-mobile- search-10-100x...](https://medium.com/wonderswipe/rethink-mobile- search-10-100x-faster-introducing-wonderswipe-6f2ff0d0e667)

While we are thinking similar in regards to the stupidity of clicking hit-and- miss links on a list of search results on mobile, fussing with history back and forth in browsers, Cake hasn't gone nearly far enough. Our goal is to not render HTML at all, but summarize text extracted from articles. Full browser views are there only as backup. Only then can we achieve something truly remarkable: 10-100x speedup compared to conventional browsers.

In short, we skip the bloat in dealing with the full HTML DOM and Javascript that's been so abused in ads and articles, which signicantly drain your phone battery and slowdown browsing. And then the summaries reduce your cognitive load in cutting through the noise and getting to an answer, faster.

And in the midst of all the social ails surrounding fake news and filter bubbles, I have plans to address those too. I'm just starting to market WonderSwipe after being in stealth developing it for the last 2 years, so even though it's still in private beta, I'd love your ideas and feedback in terms of what I'm proposing. As web search is like consulting the Oracle in ages past, I believe there's no more important issues to address than truly rethinking mobile search and knowledge transfer.

</comment><comment><USER9> Google's gonna snap this one up real quick if it gains any traction. Oh boy, they're not going to be happy about taking eyeballs away from their index page.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cool idea, but from the article it really seems like they want to license the tech rather than go head to head against established browsers.

This reminds me of something that I would see on dribbble as a UI/UX exploration.

Last point, the data consumption! I'd like to see the data and power draw for this app.

<comment><USER11> I don't understand how the would try to make money with license this go other browsers. Preloading search results and an interface to swipe through it can by implemented in many ways. I don't think Firefox or Chrome will pay them for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This feels like the CueCat from the 90s. A supercharged "I feel lucky" button. Honestly I can't understand why this is worth $5M funding.

</comment><comment> rwx</comment><comment> Can't the swipeable feature be implemented in a browser plugin for chrome/firefox?

<comment><USER13> Right, this is not a product, it's an interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> And just like that, you mobile data is all used up.

</comment><comment><USER15> So it's stumbleupon but only for phones

</comment><comment><USER16> This seems worse in a couple different ways. First imagine a google chrome browser with 8 tabs loaded all the time (i dont know how it choses to load pages but it can't be super clever if you are able to swipe to it that quickly). Sites are not engineered to be friendly in this way, without the Great Suspender chrome would be nearly unusable.

Even if there were a clever way to mitigate the fact that you are loading many pages all the time (often needlessly), you lose the index page which allows you to scan a summary of the content and navigate directly to the page you want to go to. Now you have to swipe through other pages, make a judgement based upon their content alone whether or not its relevant and keep moving.

It does add back in an element of browsing that has not existed since before search engines, but I dont think that was completely the intention?

</comment><comment><USER17> Great, a browser that permanently takes up about 20% of the screen with fixed controls on the top and bottom. And I guess if you go to a website that also uses that design pattern you'll have about half of the screen left for content.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've thought for a while now that while this is nice it's much better for me to have tabs be swipe rather than forward or back (or search). I've lost count of the times when I need to be able to switch between two information sources.

This isn't that though - I'm not sure how interesting is is being able to access every result in a search - I'm much more likely to want to flick between Stack overflow and Jsfiddle, or my bank and the tax man's account details.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's interesting that the startup raised a fairly large amount of money before the key technology is successfully patented. Is that a common practice? One would think that without other moats, successful patents would be the key value proposition of the startup. What if the patenting fails (as another commenter suggests)?

>> "We believe the technology we're in the process of patenting could have multiple applications. We believe a web browser's a great application," says Hulet.

<comment><USER20> Any idea what they are patenting exactly? While the idea is interesting, the app in the video doesn't seem to use anything new UI-wise, except the category selection bar above the keyboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This browser seems to be relying on a search engine underneath it. Presumably Google/Bing aren't too happy to serve up results without adverts in there for themselves to earn revenue... Seems like there would need to be some sort of agreement for revenue sharing here.

</comment><comment><USER22> You loose the gesture navigation within each website so it doesn't look that great. I also prefer to have a "bird eye-view" over the results instead to check them sequentially, especially if I don't know what I'm looking for.

</comment><comment><USER23> Tried it on a mobile with fibre wifi. Terrible user experience.

* Did a sample image search and pages didn't preload. * Couldn't find any app controls to adjust settings or delete history. * Deleted app immediately.

Can't see this gaining traction.

</comment><comment><USER24> This isn't a new, licensable or patentable idea - there are tons of apps out there that allow you to swipe to view different web pages.

</comment><comment><USER25> Nice app, but why does it need $5M?

<comment><USER26> Almost every time I ask this question (online or in person), the answer is mostly 'marketing'. I've come to interpret a lot of that as 'this founder can now say they've raised an $x round' and also now the founder's share of the company is with $y.

I just don't know why anyone would want to dilute their cap table so early on, before the product is even public, unless their intention is to exit before building a decent company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> They called it Cake cause it's a lie, right? I bet they think they can eat their Cake and have it, too.</comment>


A look back: The Bloomberg Keyboard (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/blog/look-back-bloomberg-keyboard/ <comment><USER2> My favourite trade floor keyboard I Own is definitely the Wey. Fully programmable. Swappable modules for Bloomberg and Reuters. Picked the thing up at a yard sale and recently locked myself out of the thing by accident

[https://youtu.be/e-5DDDd3Qzw](https://youtu.be/e-5DDDd3Qzw)

<comment><USER3> What the what?? That is one of the most intense things I've seen in a while! Three full color screens on a keyboard... woah.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bloomerg also use the keyboard as a "non-tariff barrier". As a systems integrator trying to work with their systems in the 90s they insisted that we buy a batch of a specific pantone gold colour for our keycaps.

So for people looking for easier to use data sources - even with more modern data feeds they're heavily license restricted and there's a lot of proprietary lock-in.

</comment><comment><USER5> That current "starboard" keyboard is atrocious. Over the last couple years I've killed probably five of them with trivial levels of coffee spills. They seem super-sensitive to any kind of debris. Way more than any other keyboards I use, including those of laptops.

<comment><USER6> We keep a running tally on our trading desk on how many starboard keyboards we each go through a year. Average seems to be about 3 per person! I did 5 last year, although one did get dirty and I just wanted a replacement hehe. Q/A must be terrible.

<comment><USER7> I have a stack of new ones next to my desk at work. It feels like not even a day goes by that I have to replace one. The typical culprit is coffee, otherwise the keys fall off with relative ease.

<comment><USER8> A day? Have you guys considered putting coffee in a place where you don't spill it so easily?

<comment><USER9> I'm guessing jnichols35 does IT support in a large-ish office?

<comment><USER7> That is correct, I just got a ticket in for another keyboard replacement due to a key popping off.

Edit: This is a new one for me [https://imgur.com/gallery/QTFMw2D](https://imgur.com/gallery/QTFMw2D)

<comment><USER8> So it's like, not just keycap? It's gone for good now?

I guess there's no incentive to make them more durable. You know this better than me, but I doubt corpos care about the cost of replacing those keyboards.

<comment><USER7> Just after I updated that comment I got another keyboard with multiple keys missing. I believe the keyboards are replaced for free as part of licensing them out.

I worked IT for a High School and kids would tear laptop keyboards apart. The school wouldn't replace them so I had to do my best to fix them. When I saw a keycap come off when I started here and they said replace the whole board I sighed with so much relief.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there any open alternative to a Bloomberg terminal? With Google Finance now gone I'd like to get see what is out there for free.

<comment><USER11> Data aggregation is how the Terminal built its user-base, but messaging is what actually keeps people there. Bloomberg Chat is where most large trades get negotiated -- so if you don't have a login, you don't really have an identity as a trader. Makes it hard to switch.

It's a terrific example of network effect as moat. Several years ago, six of the largest banks got together to fund Symphony as a Bloomberg-killing chat tool [1]. More than $100M invested later, it's still only successfully competing with Bloomberg for _internal_ chat at financial firms [2]. Inter- company chats are still happening mainly on full price terminals that costs 100x what Symphony costs for a seat.

[1] [https://symphony.com/press/releases/consortium-leading- finan...](https://symphony.com/press/releases/consortium-leading-financial- firms-invest-new-communication-workflow-platform) [2] [https://www.ft.com/content/f16d73ee-a910-11e7-ab55-27219df83...](https://www.ft.com/content/f16d73ee-a910-11e7-ab55-27219df83c97)

<comment><USER12> An interesting exception is the energy sector, which used Yahoo Messenger until it was shutdown: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-traders-yahoo- idUSKCN...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-traders-yahoo- idUSKCN10J0SO)

<comment><USER13> I'm curious what they use now.

<comment><USER11> WhatsApp is huge. It's an international market and end end encryption is valued.

<comment><USER14> My firm prohibits whatsapp for business use and I know it's not the only one.

<comment><USER11> Yes it's a compliance nightmare. Context for my WhatsApp comment is SE Asian market if that makes a difference. Also curious if prohibitions are effective or if people still negotiate on other channels and then document on official one.

<comment><USER14> At least in my products negotiation really does happen over compliance approved channels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Bloomberg excels at many things, but most of all it squarely nails the UX for users who're getting things done for a living. I really miss my BB keyboard; but I'm happy to still enjoy the Bloomberg font in my regular Unix terminal.

<comment><USER16> Any details about the font? Download links?

<comment><USER17> [http://www.bloomberg.com/professional/systems- support/downlo...](http://www.bloomberg.com/professional/systems- support/downloads/)

<comment><USER18> There's an installer, but it won't install unless you already have the full Bloomberg Terminal suite installed.

<comment><USER19> I have the font which I yanked from one of their pieces of software Year's ago, it's a decent font, can't share for obvious reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I truly do wish we have an open source / SaaS version of the bloomberg B-Unit[0].

I would easily pay $10/m for a "personal" version and I know companies that would pay 2x - 3x that for enterprise deployment. Although to an extent - it's redundant now that we have phones with biometric authentication.

[0] - [https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/support/b-unit/](https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/support/b-unit/)

<comment><USER21> >I would easily pay $10/m for a "personal" version and I know companies that would pay 2x - 3x that for enterprise deployment. Although to an extent - it's redundant now that we have phones with biometric authentication.

You're off by a factor of 10 on how much a service like that will cost, especially in enterprise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> That 1995 infrared keyboard seems to be exactly the same as the one used with the Virgin Webplayer [1], an internet appliance which Virgin peddled in the late 90's. I have a few of these around here, used one of them to create a solar-powered waterproof and possibly bullet-proof machine to take with me on a canoe expedition from Whitehorse to the Bering strait. Another one was used as a file server for about 6 years, yet another one as a remote camera monitoring terminal to keep watch over what happens in the barn. With 200 MHz of Cyrus MediaGX 'power' (comparable to a 125 MHz Pentium) it wasn't the fastest of machines but it still works for these purposes.

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

</comment><comment><USER23> A question about keyboards in general - don't you find that keyboards with numeric keypads are so wide, that the mouse has to sit at such a distance laterally, that it strains your wrist to use the mouse?

<comment><USER24> My mouse is to the left of my keyboard, are there any right-handed programmers ?

<comment><USER25> No, us righties just tape stuff from stack overflow together. I don't think that counts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Note that they've got the patent for keyboards with speakers in, which is why you can't get them anywhere else.

1

<comment><USER27> According to the article, their first speaker-integrated keyboard was released in 1992. That's 26 years ago. Patent term is only 20 years in the US. The patent must have expired long ago.

<comment><USER28> Compaq released a keyboard with speaker in 1994 (Vocalyst keyboard, as part of the Deskpro XL system).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I really love vintage computer design. Looking at these Bloomberg keyboards, although made for a high-end market, makes me wish we had good computer hardware today. Besides Apple/Microsoft/Thinkpads, I pretty much dislike every single piece of computer hardware out there.

Oh, and I want to see an complete and utter cessation of RGB lighting in computer products.

<comment><USER30> Besides my chair (a HM Embody whose price I still don't like thinking about), the most comfortable/enjoyable thing I've ever bought for my work was my first mechanical keyboard, a Vortex Pok3r 60% keyboard with a set of SA profile keycaps. A good keyboard makes a world of difference. At the moment, I'm actually in the middle of building a custom 65% keyboard. Just waiting on the PCB to arrive after the first one was damaged in transit.

It's a bug. Once you get bit, you'll gladly jump down the keyboard rabbit hole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Looking at the later keyboards reminds one how much common ground there is between traders and gamers....pscyhologically speaking.

<comment><USER32> I don't think its psychological, having dedicated keys is better for almost all applications than having to re-purpose a general purpose input device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Somewhat interesting video from Bloomberg on their hardware, starts with a bit of historical footage: [https://vimeo.com/90701077](https://vimeo.com/90701077)

</comment><comment><USER34> Can't help but think that the 1996 models look a bit like the old little toy Casio keyboards from back in the day, complete with tinny speakers protected by plastic grating. :-)

</comment><comment><USER35> <offtopic>

Anyone else finds their blog hideous?

[https://imgur.com/a/m8wtR1F](https://imgur.com/a/m8wtR1F)

<comment><USER36> not that part but their header disappearing and reappearing is annoying. I'm on a smallish laptop screen, scrolling up to look at a picture immediately results in less space to read and covering the photo I just scrolled up to see.

So I have to scroll up to the photo, and then scroll down a little to make the header disappear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> 2004 "Centerboard" and 2008 "Freeboard" were abominations. I don't know about traders but no self-respecting programmer at Bloomberg used these keyboard. Most replaced them with Microsoft Ergonomic or anything else to make typing bearable.

</comment><comment><USER38> Anyone in the finance industry know why the keyboard would require speakers? Did the terminals use audio to deliver financial information or news reports?

<comment><USER39> The keyboards had speakers because at that time not many business PCs had speakers connected if they had soundcards. This provided a physical volume slider to listen to news out loud as well as a headphone/mic jack for private listening. Later uses allowed using the mic for squawkbox like functionality communicating between employees on various desks. The Terminal has had streaming audio and video since forever now. (Audio use cases involve things like earnings calls, investor relations as well as news.) Aside from A/V, the Terminal also has had text to speech for news for a very long time as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> What a great review of the keyboards. This is such exquisite exotica in my view.

</comment><comment><USER41> Weirdly long gap in the visual story between 1996 & 2004

</comment><comment><USER42> Some of the early versions look like they were really trying to do some great innovation but disappointedly after all this time ended up at an IBM style keyboard that was around in the 80s.</comment>


Benefits of Open Source Technology for Enterprises - <AUTHOR> https://blog.digitalogy.co/open-source-technology/ <comment><AUTHOR> There are several benefits of open-source technology that proprietary software often lacks, making them a viable solution for businesses.

Picking the right software for running your business should always be taken carefully, considering the offerings available in the market while weighing-in its short and long term benefits on your company.

Open-source software is often the go-to choice of businesses if they're not particularly looking for a specific feature as they are easier to customize.</comment>


Never Mind The Bullets: a comic strip with HTML5/CSS - <AUTHOR> http://www.nevermindthebullets.com/

<comment><USER2> I just ran it through usual menagerie of browsers (Win7 - CH, FF, SF, OP, IE) and Chrome was the only one with really bad performance (surprisingly even on HW accelerated canary build).

It's quite refreshing to see MS guys pointing out performance bottlenecks in Google's code :).

Competition is good.

With IE9 MS managed to find one area where virtually all other browsers sucked (large / many / transparent image sprites), made a good implementation and created some clever demos that benefit from this implementation.

This may have hastened coming of HW acceleration to upcoming public releases of Chrome and Firefox.

Kudos for IE team for stepping up the game.

<comment><USER3> I tried it out with Chromium 7.0.533.0 on Ubuntu 10.04, with the hardware acceleration disabled. It seemed to me that it became sluggish only when the text bubbles were on the screen, which admittedly was most of the time. It could handle the images fine, but for some reason it seemed to have trouble with the text. It'd be interesting to know why this is.

I'm going to try it again with the hardware acceleration enabled this time to see how much of a difference it makes.

Edit: So with hardware acceleration enabled, it was smoother but still a little laggy. It also used up more of the CPU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ok, so I said to myself: Fine, let's download ie9, check it out and look at that demo page. So I google it up, I see the ie9 test drive.. Then, where is the [DOWNLOAD IE9 BETA] button? I can't see it.. so I google again: ie9 DOWNLOAD.. same page, no download.

Finally, reading a bit everywhere, I see a: Download beta9 now. Good.. I click on it. And I see: [Since you're running Windows XP, you won't be able to install Internet Explorer 9 unless you upgrade to a more recent version of Windows.]

So you know what? Fuck you, I stick with My XP/Mac and Chrome.

<comment><USER5> Huh. Wonder why they're not putting it on XP. Is it just that they don't want to support it, or are they using IE9 as the carrot-on-a-stick that (IMO) DirectX 10 utterly failed at?

<comment><USER6> utterly at... fail?

<comment><USER5> Heh, oops. Hit undo once too many times. Fixed :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Okay, someone answer me this:

Is this comic _so_ standards compliant that it _only_ runs well on IE9? Because, if so, this is a special breed of irony.

<comment><USER8> It's always been ironic - like people saying you should use Chrome/FF over IE because they were standards compliant... and yet only 30% of the market. Saying just because they were better browsers was fine, but standards don't really sell browsers :-)

There is a clear difference between a formal standard and a defacto standard and Microsoft is the king of owning defacto standards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My first thought was "what trickery did they pull to make this only run well on IE9?"

<comment><USER10> IE9 has GPU acceleration features that haven't shipped in the other browsers yet. I know Chrome is most of the way to shipping something competitive, but I'm not sure about the others.

<comment><USER11> Firefox 4b6 has hardware acceleration and comparable performance on Windows. Both of them are in beta.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Runs slow in Safari too. I dislike MS as much as the next guy but I guess you can't really berate them for trying. I'm fairly impressed by their release strategy and marketing. To be precise, I'm impressed that they started doing those things.

</comment><comment><USER13> Kudos to Roman Cortes for his ingenious work that I believe inspired this and many other works.

<http://www.romancortes.com/blog/css-3d-meninas/>

<http://www.romancortes.com/blog/3d-meninas-explained/>

</comment><comment><USER14> It's nifty, but I've never looked at web comics and thought "I wish they could parallax scroll."

I think it would be better if you could drag to move the frame. I don't like it auto-following my mouse. It was also a little choppy in firefox on windows.

</comment><comment><USER15> Its sluggish in Chromium 7.0.535.0 (Linux) but better in Chrome (Linux). Firefox did the job a lil' better than both Chromium and Chrome (although there is no reason for this!). Opera 10 (Linux) was the best.

<comment><USER16> Opera 10.62 in linux gives me this error:

Based on your current browser, you are not seeing all that this website has to offer. For the best 'Never Mind the Bullets' experience, we recommend you install Internet Explorer 9.

Seems to work okay otherwise, but I wonder what, if anything, I am missing.

<comment><USER17> Microsoft's hand in your wallet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This seems to have worked almost perfectly in the current Webkit nightly for me, and I think it's really a stellar example of what can be done with browsers. Now we just need one of the comic book giants like Marvel or DC (or even a smaller publishing house) to "publish" a few pages of issues in this format. I'm sure sales would go up dramatically.

I would really love to know just how long it took to make this, though, regardless of the actual artwork (the html-ification of it), because the time it takes probably isn't viable for my webcomic utopia.

</comment><comment><USER19> 1\. What an uninspired story

2\. This submission is a duplicate: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1715295>

</comment><comment><USER20> From an accessibility perspective, having the text available to a screen reader is a very good thing. Hope this becomes commonplace for web comics.

</comment><comment><USER21> This really annoyed me because it's not HTML5 that is powering most of this technology nor is it something that could not be accomplished on HTML4.

(I wrote a post about it. <http://zachinglis.com/2010/html5-is-not-that- powerful/>)

<comment><USER22> Yes, it's frustrating how this is being passed around uncritically as an example of the wonder of "HTML5", when it really just demonstrates you can do some fun things with plain old JavaScript, with all the inherent problems and arguably worse performance than Flash. It's also pretty grating to see "CSS3 Multi-background" being listed as a "feature" of HTML5.

Nice bit of marketing for IE9, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Works smoothly in Safari 5 on OS X. However, the various images that move around in each frame of the comic strip as you move the mouse around are, depending on how you hover with the mouse, completely off and move almost randomly, ripping the frame apart (f.e. being able to move the whisky glass around on the table, up in the air and off the table, and being able to rip the cowboy's arm off of his torso). I later found that this is the case on all browsers except IE9 - I am willing to bet that this is because IE9 is still broken.</comment>


Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/03/28/why-apple-and-google-are-struggling-to-design-simple-software/ <comment><USER2> Simple: The goal used to be create simple things that just work. Now its create thigs that push your platform.

As an example, to pick on MSFT: I thought hell froze over when I saw Word in the Android app store. Its a hugely wonderful word processor. I typed out a blog post and when to save, but... well I wasnt signed into sky drive. I managed to finagle my way around those prompts after 5 or so mins. Next time I opened Word, I got a message: "In order to continue to use Word, you must sign into a Microsoft Account". Really? The laws of the physical fucking universe make this impossible?

Needless to say, that crap is uninstalled. I already chose a cloud provider, I dont need yet another one, fragmenting my data storage.

<comment><USER3> Winter is coming for Microsoft. The rise of mobile and the slow down of PC speed improvements means they are having a hard time delivering real value that people want to pay for and need to find a way to generate recurring revenue through subscription services. Witness the rise of Windows 10. How can they make money if you permanently own your software?

What if Moore's law stops and we're sitting here 10 years later with computers that are only a little faster on single core performance?

<comment><USER4> > How can they make money if you permanently own your software?

Your hardware will die or become obsolete quickly enough that you still have to buy a new machine and with that a new windows license. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the churn for smartphones and tablets was a multiple of desktop pcs. Cars are a mature industry. You still have to replace your car regularly, but the new car doesn't go faster.

But I have the feeling Microsoft is even loosing their market share on laptops, everyone around me replaced their windows laptop with a mac. And despite being myself heavily invested in the windows ecosystem, I am very uncomfortable with their new OS and considering alternatives.

<comment><USER5> This is true. Their problem is that until recently they've existed in a growth market and their annual profits rely on new PC sales. Shareholders don't see "we're a $10 billion company but we'll be transitioning to a $2 billion company over the next 10 years" as an acceptable strategy so they're forced to try and wring growth-market profits out of a mature market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As the on-site support of a group of older and disabled users (sight, hearing, motor, coordination, cognitive), the failures of Apple's traditionally highly accessible designs are quite familiar to me. I'd written my own rant a few months back after discovering (usability error) that Apple's online feedback form couldn't ingest the full thing:

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/bs- wilowvb4-dvpfl_vruq](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/bs-wilowvb4-dvpfl_vruq)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for sharing this, I've looked but haven't read enough on accessibility in real world use cases.

Have you tried the iPad with anyone there? It may ratchet down the complexity some, and the accessibility features are very good.

<comment><USER6> Users are also very nearly pathalogically averse to new tech and devices. The suggestion has been made however.

<comment><USER7> I know exactly what you mean. One technique I've used is to express things in terms of what they can uniquely get with the new system that relates to their needs. In the case of iPads, some of the accessibility benefits such as requiring less fine motor control may tip the balance in favor of adoption for some. Best of luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> V-2 Related article I read not long ago (focusing on Apple, although it mentions Google unfavorably, too): [http://www.fastcodesign.com/3053406/how-apple-is- giving-desi...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving- design-a-bad-name)

Some interesting points:

* [http://b.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/inline/...](http://b.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/inline/2015/11/3053406-inline-figure-1.jpg)

* _' The headline of a Forbes article says it all: "Apple iOS 9 has 25 Great Secret Features." Secret features? If these are such great features, why are they secret?'_

* _' Today's devices lack discoverability: There is no way to discover what operations are possible just by looking at the screen. Do you swipe left or right, up or down, with one finger, two, or even as many as five? Do you swipe or tap, and if you tap is it a single tap or double?'_

<comment><USER8> I remember Windows 95 came with an interactive tutorial (with exercises) that explained how the mouse gestures worked and how to manipulate windows, files and folders and start up applications.

I wish something like that was still bundled with Windows Seven/8.1/10, Ubuntu, Android, etc. That would save the regular folks I have to help some time and frustration when they want the device `to bloody work`.

Anecdote: I met a lot of 40~50 years old people who are persuaded children and teenagers know the ins and outs of those interfaces. I stopped bothering explaining them they don't but that stereotype doesn't seem to die and it keeps on hopping to the next generation.

<comment><USER9> Not only that, it had Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry as well: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGYcNcFhctc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGYcNcFhctc)

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately (or not) the European version was just a five or ten minutes long session with a female vice over, a white background and some interactive exercises.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm gonna ask a different question - why Google is struggling to design _useful_ software? It seems that every iteration of their every product loses functionality and is being dumbed down to the point of uselessness.

<comment><USER11> Can you share a few examples? Google seems to be leaning more toward "normal users" but I enjoy the software nonetheless.

Are you sure you are the intended user? Catering to a different userbase might be their intent.

<comment><USER12> I think an obvious example is Hangouts. It's easily the worst messaging app I've used in years. It consistently fails at reliably delivering messages. It's very common for me to send a message on my laptop, and then have the response only show up on my phone, or vise versa. The read marker will often jump around, and people that just messaged me 3 minutes ago will have "last seen 5 hours ago" under their name.

Google chat was a product that reliably sent messages to people, told me if someone was online, and was fast, too.

<comment><USER13> That's interesting, I have the exact opposite experience. I use Hangouts regularly, on two Macs, a PC and on my Android phone and I have never experienced any of that stuff, except maybe the "last seen" being out of sync - but that's hardly a dealbreaker.

<comment> V-2 I used Hangouts intensively for video daily meetings throughout a software project that spanned for several months - on different machines (on my work laptop, mobile phone, sometimes my home PC).

These meetings weren't big - typically 3 to 5 people - but when it worked for everyone at once, without reconnecting, rebooting etc., we cheered. This was an unusual occurence.

I had Hangouts crash - especially on Android - I had it request a browser plugin to be installed over and over again, and I never managed to get it to work on Firefox (switching to a different browser for Hangouts only proved easier), I had no audio, or distorted audio, or people dropping out of calls...

I'm glad your user experience wasn't as abysmal as ours, or rcheu's, but in my opinion you're a lucky one

One good feature it has is that it recognizes keyboard tapping, and suggests you put yourself on mute when it's detected

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > managing their devices, or even just using basic software, is just getting > too complicated.

I am amazed how average users are often unaware of basic features of their smartphones, e.g. calendars that sync across devices (holy grail in the Palm OS days) as well as contacts that sync. How many times did you see FB updates that said "I lost my phone, please send me your number again"?

As there are now so many non-geeks using smartphones, it would be good to have more information for them on how to make the most of their phones.

</comment><comment><USER15> > So, with all of these factors at play and more changes to come, is there > anyone out there who's doing clear and simple design well?

> Mayden had an answer pretty quickly: Tesla.

I don't think one can really say that the makers of the glass infotainment console understand design for humans. Affordances (knobs, dials, switches, levers &c.) enable one to alter settings without taking one's eyes off the road and without interrupting the flow of conversation (like voice commands do).

</comment><comment><USER16> Focusing on iTunes to argue that Apple can't design simple software anymore seems a little bit unfair, while on the other hand I understand that it might be the only Apple desktop software used by people who run on MS Windows.

But still, it really not representative of the Apple ecosystem IMHO.

3D Touch on iOS for instance is a state of the art demonstration of how to transparently and smoothly add a layer of functionality to an existing interface.

<comment><USER17> I dunno. How about Apple forcing me to sync my music via their dumb cloud thing if I happened to have enabled apple music at some point? I have a phone linked via a cable to a computer, want to get two songs on the phone, can't do it unless I sync multiple GB of junk via the internet. Then they won't let me sync a song via their cloud because it's a voice MP3 I bought ages ago and isn't high bitrate enough?! Kill. After much Googling all I could do was turn off apple music, sync to the device, re-add itunes music. IIRC there are two levels/types of cloud, one where you can add music and the other where you sync everything via it. Whatever, it's just something my mother shouldn't have to know about.

On the iphone, the "for you" icon is a heart. The "like" icon is also a heart, but the relationship between the two is tenuous. The "plus" button adds a song to my music but I still have to hit "download" to keep that song on my device. I have to double-opt-in to music I want? Make it easy to add music! To really say you like something there's plus, download and like. And then there's still the 1-5 rating, which I just had to click around for 30 seconds to find again. No idea if Apple will feed me more of liked-plussed-downloaded-5-star music than simply liked.

I haven't found 3D touch that useful. I try it all the time but it just feels gimmicky. Half-push to get something, full-push to get the same thing I'd get if I just touched it lightly. Sometimes it's a menu, sometimes it opens up a preview, sometimes a combo preview and menu. I'd bet 70% of people just don't use it because it's too faffy.

And I just remembered Airdrop, where the "air" part seems to be more representative of Airdrop reliability than anything else. Does it want wifi? Proximity? The moon in a given phase? What incantations must I perform to move this photo two feet? Why can it see the ipad but not the other phone, when the other phone can see this phone? Can I add a favourite set of devices so it can find each other a bit more quickly?

Apple are fantastic at simple interactions, when there's one button and three things to do. They can distill better than anyone. But make things slightly tricky and they overload one button with 100 features and start falling over their feet.

<comment><USER18> >I dunno. How about Apple forcing me to sync my music via their dumb cloud thing if I happened to have enabled apple music at some point? I have a phone linked via a cable to a computer, want to get two songs on the phone, can't do it unless I sync multiple GB of junk via the internet.

You can turn off the iCloud Music Library and sync via cable

<comment><USER19> You cut out the part where they said: "After much Googling all I could do was turn off apple music, sync to the device".

Why? What point are you trying to make? It's not obvious and not simple. I also had to google how to do this. Are you claiming that this was obvious and easy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The article mixes simple-to-use software with software which functionality is easy to discover. These are very different.

There is a lot of programs that are simple to use if one manages to discover the functionality. This is bad on mobiles where the desire to save on screen real estate often goes to far with no clues left that one can do something simply with a particular gesture. But even on desktop this has been bad starting with that MS Office interface when one has to search internet to discover how to do basic things. And MS has not learned the lesson and tried another undiscoverable interface with Windows 8. But at least discoverability is possible to fix if developers willing to listen to the users.

iTunes problem is different. It is a typical feature creep where new functionality makes it harder to use what was there before. This is difficult to fix as scalable interface that allows to do a lot of things in a simple way is a hard problem.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't know about Google, I don't really use any of their products, other than search. As for Apple, it seems like their trying to make things simpler, but forget that people do development work on Macs. It's never huge things that bugs be, just minor tweaks Apple make, and sometimes half-baked features.

El Capitan has seriously made me consider if my next computer should be something other than a Mac. While I do like if to "normal" computing, such as browsing, word processing and browsing, I think it's getting increasingly worse as a development platform.

Yes, iTunes is a huge mess, and there aren't any good alternatives which support iPod syncing. El Capitan isn't the bug-fix version it should have been, it's an eye candy release the introduces subtle annoyances.

<comment><USER22> Curious what specifically.

For me the underlying graphics changes and other tweaks in El Cap made my 5 year old MacBook Air snappy again, I use Xcode the entire day and things seem better than before.

There is some initial flux around new release time (broken Homebrew or something else for a week) but they tend to settle down quickly.

<comment><USER23> For me what OS X provides is just great. Sane defaults, good UI, they're fine. It's what it doesn't provide that gets me, and Homebrew is a good effort and all, but too much hassle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So many good quotes in here:

> _" We've moved into an age where the ubiquity and complexity of toolsets > outpace the ability to leverage them tastefully,"_

"Tastefully" \- a much more _tasteful_ term than the self aggrandizing "beautiful" I've been seeing used in design circles.

> _"[iTunes] started out as a charming bungalow. Now it's got turrets, a > garage for a zamboni, and a helipad on the top."_

A Zamboni I have now discovered is one of those machines for resurfacing an ice-rink. _Totes Hillaire!_

> _You 've given people more of a skateboard or a unicycle. You can't bring > the groceries home on that_

Makes me think of that famous picture of the guy in china freighting a huge overarching load on his push-bike.

Brilliant article!

It doesn't really go into "why" as suggested by the headline (except maybe for to say that these businesses' product offering is now more complex than mere devices).

My personal suspicion is the rote application of established physical production that has worked so well on the hardware end (which we all know doesn't work for software) and the denigration of the software end to being "value added" (which IMHO was always "value gating"). This is perhaps somewhere that google/alphabet has the edge, albeit mitigated by being more "open" and "too much text".

</comment><comment><USER25> The impression I have, in the humble projects and companies I work with, is that it's more related to the decision-makers.

So many features are added based on whims, decided on meeting rooms and based on engineers or managers gut feelings, that it actually seems normal for software to get complicated. If we tried to keep the new features somewhat restrained to things we actually are confident that users want (by doing user research!), maybe the piling of new features would slow down.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've been using Android for years and I'm still struggling with their copy and paste icons.

</comment><comment><USER27> Balancing features and usability is one of the hardest problems product management has to face. Removing an existing feature is not a piece of cake, but companies are a bit too worried about it in my opinion.

Btw. don't think the Tesla comparison is fair.

</comment><comment><USER28> The author must try a chromebook. (OT- the author should tell it to her newspapers webdevelopers to design things simple - 20 % tracking requests in washpost)

</comment><comment><USER29> Part of the reason is not just the complicated infrastructure but also the huge amount of users you want to satisfy as market leader. You can't just focus on a niche. There are people who listen to music, people who watch movies, etc. So you can't just make your software manage music.

</comment><comment><USER30> I also wonder why they are producing such mediocre software, with so many qualified people.

Writing a web-based email service or an online document editor may be a lot of work, but these are just basic office tools, and it doesn't sound like rocket science.

</comment><comment><USER31> I thought the article was going to be about how a lot of software seems to be dumbed down so that less technical users can use them but that the more tricky stuff is either hidden away or just not present at all. I was wrong.

</comment><comment><USER32> As far as I can make out, the answer this article offers is just "same reason everybody else struggles: it's hard".

</comment><comment><USER33> Whenever somebody told me that 'Desktops are gonna be obsolete because smartphones' I always told them that screens on desktops have always gotten bigger so there is a demand for big things that are easy to work with but he won't listen because some article on some website said other wise.

smartphones are good for stay connected but not for actual 'doing stuff'.

</comment><comment><USER34> I agree about Apple - but Google? I'd say their situation is the opposite - their software is too simple.

<comment><USER35> Android? Simple?!?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Lean App Toolkit [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/lean-app-toolkit/LeanAppToolkit.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Lean Apps Create Winning Startups.

What it's for: Entrepreneurs have a difficult time finding actionable advice when getting started with an idea. Many of us waste a lot of time and money building an app that nobody wants. The Lean App Toolkit uses Lean Startup methodologies to provide a step-by-step plan for validating an app idea and defining an MVP. Entrepreneurs interested in building sustainable companies rather than just growth machines bound for an investor exit will find the Lean App Toolkit essential! It helps build a foundation for mobile and web app businesses that generate revenue from day 1.

Looking for feedback from entrepreneurs!

-Paul</comment>


Daily reminder of awesome you are for $10/month - <AUTHOR> http://awesomenessreminders.com/

<comment><USER2> You have _got_ to be shitting me?

</comment><comment><USER3> That's awesome. The perfect gift for your low-self-esteem friend.</comment>


Show HN: Format Indian money and convert to words - <AUTHOR> Just released initial versions of a package to convert Indian money to correct comma formatting and words. Lakhs and crores are unintuitive and non-standard, this makes them easy to work with.
https://github.com/sudhirj/paisa.js https://github.com/sudhirj/paisa.rb <comment><USER2> Thank you so much for creating this, it solves one of the biggest problem that I face everyday while lodging sales online. Now I can include this js file in my php file to convert the amount easily. Thanks bro :)

</comment><comment><USER3> IANAJS developer but why is that yarn.lock file so long?</comment>


The doctor's strike that nearly killed Canada's Medicare-for-all plan - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/29/18265530/medicare-canada-saskatchewan-doctor-strike <comment><USER2> My issue with a single-payer system in the US is that it won't get rid of the middleman. You are essentially replacing a bunch of insurance companies with one insurance company, which is the government.

Hospitals can now charge whatever they want and the cost continues to skyrocket. This is exactly what has happened with college loans.

I would rather the hospitals have to charge patients directly, which would drastically reduce costs..and then have a smaller layer of protection for people that can't afford it.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not how things work out in practice. Larger payer pools end up paying _less,_ because they have enough market power to force providers to meet cost targets if they want access to the customers in the pool. Medicare famously gets much more out of each dollar it spends than does just about any private insurance provider (see [https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20110920.01339...](https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20110920.013390/full/)).

A single-payer system just takes this to its logical conclusion and creates a single pool with nearly everybody in it. That pool is so large that only niche providers of extremely high-margin services can survive without access to it, so the single payer has the leverage to drive the rates it pays down to the bone.</comment></comment>


Why we broke BBC's iPlayer site - <AUTHOR> http://my.opera.com/sitepatching/blog/2011/09/12/why-we-broke-2

<comment><USER2> One thing I didn't see addressed was why it's a good idea to add in site- specific patches at all? I understand that taken as a whole there's no real fixed language that website used - it's all some of html5, some html4, some just totally broken stuff etc etc. But I cannot see why sitepatching can ever be a scalable solution to that problem. It just reeks of hackery to me.

edit: looking into it, it seems that the tech behind this is <http://www.opera.com/docs/browserjs/>

<comment><USER3> Opera uses browserjs as a measure of last resort. They use it only on very popular websites after everything else has failed. Opera needs to do this due to the large number of popular websites, which don't stick to the standards, or test their code properly across different browsers. Have a look at <http://my.opera.com/hallvors/blog> and you will realise how big a problem browser sniffing really is. Take a look at the websites that Opera fixes using sitepatches. They are websites like Facebook, CNN, and Amazon. If popular websites like these didn't work in Opera, users aren't going to sympathetise with Opera just because its not Opera's fault. They will simply switch to a different browser. Opera doesn't really have a choice. Also relevant: i) <http://twitter.com/#!/brucel/status/113529174316154880> ii) [http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/2009/11/05/the-lengths-to- go-t...](http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/2009/11/05/the-lengths-to-go-to-to-get- a-site-fixed)

This incident highlights an exceptional situation where the fault was Opera's. However, in most cases it is not so.

##Edited post to elaborate on my point.##

<comment><USER4> Incidentally, this is the same argument Microsoft makes for the various compatibility modes in new versions of Windows. If Vista breaks an app, and it's due to poor app coding, the users are still going to blame Vista.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The underlying bug is that if you through the DOM append a SCRIPT tag > loading an external script, Opera's parser will pause until that script has > loaded.

How is this a browser bug? I expect all script tags to execute when they are parsed, and make sure to trigger DOM-touching scripts only after the DOM reports being ready.

<comment><USER6> Indeed, it's rather sketchy code asking for a race condition.

I guess Opera looks at it from "Hixie" perspective: if 3 out of 4 engines do this and sites rely on it, then that's _the standard_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reading articles like this makes me wonder my Opera bothers having their own HTML engine at all (at least for desktop). Why not use webkit and help develop that? I cant see any advantages from Opera's point of view, just a big bunch of problems, and _another_ set of browser specific bugs for web developers everywhere.

I mean, how many man-hours were wasted (for Opera and the BBC) as a result of this bug alone?

<comment><USER8> You could make exactly the same argument about Webkit itself, or about any of the extant HTML engines, could you not? Why did any of them decide to complicate the web by multiplying the number of engine-specific bugs in the wild? Why didn't every browser project just start with the Trident engine in IE?

<comment><USER9> Only MS can improve and fix the Trident engine, for a start.

<comment><USER8> Yes, which is an advantage, if you're of the opinion that the existence of a variety of engines (and the corresponding existence of a variety of bugs) is a hassle that's hurting the web.

That's not my opinion, mind you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>