Floating Cities: The ocean as humanity's next frontier - <AUTHOR> http://www.factor-tech.com/future-cities/floating-cities-is-the-ocean-humanitys-next-frontier/

<comment><USER2> Here are some practical elements that mean that seasteading is not going to work the way it's current proponents want it to.

1\. Seasteads will require enormous amounts of hard, barely rewarding work to be even marginally functional at first.

2\. Much of that work will be farming, and much of the rest will be weather- related; preparing the vessel to deal with storms and dealing with the damage wrought by weather.

3\. Speaking of weather, the volume and intensity of open ocean storms has been increasing for the past three decades and will continue doing so for the forseeable future.

4\. Ocean aquaculture can be quite a difficult proposition, particularly if you're in an area that lacks an existing nutrient cycle.

5\. Political autonomy doesn't work the way people think it does. Sure you can give yourself some breathing room, maybe a new set of building codes; some structures that will let you run business a bit more freely; and those tend to be beneficial. But what about human rights? What if a group wants to experiment with allowing human slavery? Or post natal birth-control where only worthy warriors are allowed to become people? You can generate a whole menagerie of horror stories, but for the most part the upshot is "Autonomy within limits." And then you have to have an open debate about what the limits are. Or not, maybe the seasteasds will be a giant set of floating Dubai's without Islamic temperance to limit the abuses. Either way seasteads are likely to be fragile enough in the first few years that cohesive social structures will be a requirement for survival. Which argues against the Spencerian libertarianism that seems to be the default position of many interested in the topic. I rather suspect that successful seasteads will have social structures that look more like Kibbutzim than libertarian autonomies.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1) i love how credulous this article is. Even people who have only ever played the Bioshock games, and have never thought about anything else can see beyond the 9th grade level ethics/civics necessary to see what the problems with sea- steading are.

2) Are we seriously citing the _freedom ship_ of all things as an example of what the future of sea steading might be like? [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2514936/The-i...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2514936/The- incredible-mile-long-floating-CITY--complete-schools-hospital-parks- airport-50-000-residents.html)

Cities are complicated. Cruise ships are complicated. (Anybody remember [http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/11/travel/cruise-ship- fire/](http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/11/travel/cruise-ship-fire/) ?) I would looooove to hear someone explain what the logistics and supply chain management necessary to run a city-sized cruise ship would have to look like (note, none of these sea-steading articles ever discuss this question). And, sorry just to harp on the Bioshock thing again, but seriously: [http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/11/28/article-2514936-19...](http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/11/28/article-2514936-19B234F700000578-699_964x632.jpg) and [http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130412063520/bioshock/i...](http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130412063520/bioshock/images/e/e4/BSI_Lighthouse_Map.png)

3) If you have enough money to sea-stead, or get yourself onto a hypothetical freedom ship... is paying your taxes and following a country's laws really _so onerous_ that you would abandon your family and social network in order to move out onto the ocean onto platforms with experimental levels of quality & sustainability? (I mean, maybe you're an engineering nerd and you think it'd be awesome to live out on the water. But in what way does that dove-tail with the political aspirations of sea-steading? Why not just get yourself a boat if you've got that much money?)

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://inthesetimes.com/article/3328/floating_utopias](http://inthesetimes.com/article/3328/floating_utopias)

</comment><comment><USER5> "...creating communities that have political autonomy whilst existing under the sovereignty of a host state."

That is the part that is going to get interesting, IMO. I am imagining a weed smoking, hip hop loving, skinny jean wearing, cell phone using society just 5 miles outside of North Korea.

<comment><USER6> How do you protect against pirates? Honest question.

<comment><USER7> The same way you defend ports against vikings – by having coastal defenses and a navy.</comment></comment></comment>


Software Library: Amiga - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_amiga&tab=collection <comment><USER2> Greetings, Hackernews. Jason Scott, guy adding these to the collection right now. Great work by the team (they'll all get credited in the Internet Archive announcement when it goes up).

All together now:

* Still adding items (we're at 10,380) * AWS instances are screenshotting these to find issues * A notable amount of issues * Yes, we're using AROS kickstarter ROMs. * The emulator (Scripted Amiga Emulator) is excellent and will be improved over time * Enjoy what works * Have fun * Viva Amiga

<comment><USER3> You guys & gals do such good work over there @ archive.org and don't get nearly enough credit. Thank you to the entire team, I have to imagine that it's one hell of an effort to do all the stuff that goes on at The Internet Archive. Please, please keep on doing what you do!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is very cool.

The first thing I did was to click on Frontier: Elite II, seeing as how I grew up with it on the Amiga and now I play Elite: Dangerous.

To be emulating the Amiga in a browser is rather impressive, although it naturally does have a few drawbacks. Some comments/observations...

The emulator and game took a long time to start with no feedback as to what is happening (e.g. it would be nice to see 'Booting the emulator' , 'Loading the game', 'Optimising for running' or what have you).

The actual emulation within the browser was slow on my machine at least (An ageing AMD Phenom II X4, and using Google Chrome) - the frame rate is noticeably slower than the Real Deal running on original metal [again, it's an emulation therefore understandable]).

The sound is very very close - although if you scroll up and down the page a bit you notice the sound slows down (again understandable - you're probably stealing execution cycles from the emulator when doing this).

The full screen icon did nothing.

The sound icon did nothing except bring up a message window telling me it only did something if the emulator was running - even when the emulator is running.

Verdict: An impressive feat to be running old Amiga games in a browser, but at least on my system speed improvements, feedback on what is happening whilst it sets up the emulation environment and game, and having the full-screen and sound icons work properly, is desirable.

<comment><USER5> > The emulator and game took a long time to start with no feedback as to what > is happening (e.g. it would be nice to see 'Booting the emulator' , 'Loading > the game', 'Optimising for running' or what have you).

This would be an interesting area of research. Once we fire up the emulator, it starts drawing to its screen buffer (which is an HTML5 canvas). What you see is presumably exactly what you would see on the original machine (sadly, I never had an Amiga myself). You see the workbench, possibly some messages in it from the software, then the software takes over the screen and starts drawing pretty pictures. In between, a lot of these things seem to blank the screen, turning it black or grey, or filling it with noise.

Providing meaningful and accurate feedback on top of that would be a fun application of computer vision, but it could turn out to be a difficult problem in the general case.

Thanks for mentioning the fullscreen button, I hadn't noticed that it was broken; I'll see if I can fix it. Muting is a horror show, because MAME and DosBox don't yet support it. SAE does though, so we'll work on it next.

<comment><USER6> One option for better feedback is to add indicators for floppy and hard drive activity, like the leds on the original Amigas.

Some emulators even emulate the sound of the physical fdd :)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csjqX3bm2lc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csjqX3bm2lc)

<comment><USER5> Indeed, a disk activity indicator is actually an option now with SAE. It'll probably take a bit longer to do correctly, as it will touch more of the page than just the canvas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Many games are wrongly configured and do not seem to run. Games usually run best with KS1.3 on an expanded A500 (1MB), while later games with AGA, need to run on KS3.0 and an A1200 with 2MB+. it seems that many are configured to run on a KS2.04 A500.

BTW, they use the Scripted Amiga Emulator: [http://scriptedamigaemulator.net/](http://scriptedamigaemulator.net/)

Note: reach out to me... would really like to help with improving this.

<comment><USER8> This might be because they're using the AROS Kickstart (because it's free) and not the original Commodore Kickstart. (because you can still buy it and so it cannot be distributed)

<comment><USER7> LOL, I saw this news last night and thought I read "AMOS" instead of "AROS"... so I thought the game I checked was running a crackintro (written in AMOS?!?). Anyways, you are right; this is actually a great usecase and opportunity to improve AROS as kickstart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Amazing to see "No Man's Land" on there! That really made my day, such a classic! Two-player action/shooter, with player-vs-player on a single screen. Great detailed graphics and funky music.

Too bad it doesn't seem to run, it's stuck in what seems like an infinite loop of crashing and rebooting.

That's kind of embarassing, as I did in fact write the code for this game, back in 1990. Bad bad 15-year old me who couldn't stay compatible with an emulator written in a scripting language running in a web browser (none of which existed, basically, and certainly not to me, back then) and using a new non-Commodore ROM implementation. Heh. My mind is blown.

</comment><comment><USER10> So I'm trying to play music from "Turrican" because the Chris Huelsbeck sound is _awesome_ :

[https://archive.org/details/Turrican_Musicdisk_19xx_Andromed...](https://archive.org/details/Turrican_Musicdisk_19xx_Andromeda)

How does that work? I don't get any sound. I don't know what to do. I can select items in the upper menu by click, but I can't get anything else done.

Clicking on the audio button (which shows disabled audio) shows a popup "This button only works once the emulation is running" \- well, it _is_ running.

"Fullscreen view" does not do anything either by the way.

<comment><USER11> Same - seems to be a bug.

<comment><USER12> The same disk image crashes after the first logo on [http://scriptedamigaemulator.net/](http://scriptedamigaemulator.net/) although this might be because of the config I used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone want to recommend more things to include in the Showcase? See [https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_amiga_showcase](https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_amiga_showcase). We're looking for items with good screenshots and which are fairly straight- forward to use once they load up.

<comment><USER13> _Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior_ can't go wrong with that one.

Also, _International Karate+_

And finally, _Dungeon Master_ , just because. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there any plan related to an Atari ST/TT/Falcon section on archive.org? I know the Atari is probably considered sort of a "second class citizen" compared to the Amiga, but it had a very important role in the development of modern music software.

<comment><USER15> I think Jason plans on having _every_ system up there (all the things!) but they're just working through them one at a time...

<comment><USER16> Cubase in an Atari ST emulator works great with MIDI devices. I wonder if in the future there could be integration in these web emulators with the Web MIDI API.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of the real achievements here is that the IA is streamlining the process from going from a new MAME/MESS release to in-browser emulation very quickly. Along the way they're helping provide input to improve browser audio, transpilation, _and_ archiving and making available the efforts of millions of man-years of creative work.

<comment><USER18> IA?

<comment><USER19> Internet Archive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is amazing...

It shows how far PCs have come that we can emulate a machine that I once lusted after in a browser.

On a personal note, can anyone remember what the name is of an Amiga game that I once saw at a store?

I just remember that there were objects arranged I think in a grid, and there were laser beams, and you could rotate small mirrors on the grid to reflect the beams onto objects, I guess to destroy them. I only played it for a couple of minutes but I'd like to see it again.

I remember being amazed at the Amiga's graphics (I had a C64), and I'd love to see how dated they are now.

<comment><USER21> Deflektor?

<comment><USER20> Oh my god, that's it! Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "No results matched your criteria."

aaaand its gone

</comment><comment><USER23> One of my all-time favourite games: Mind Walker. Haven't really played anything else like it since:

[https://archive.org/details/Mind_Walker_1986_Commodore](https://archive.org/details/Mind_Walker_1986_Commodore)

</comment><comment><USER11> I have just learnt that the Amiga version of Chuckie Egg was woeful.

However - amazing library - thanks!

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice, but almost all the ones we used to play don't seem to be there.

</comment><comment><USER25> Oh, hah, "Maze Man"... What a great time software was back then!

</comment><comment><USER26> Ahh... The sweet taste of the Amiga without the hell of UAE4All. Yes, it really is that bad. No, really.

Now, if we could get saves (prob. not happening), I could run Ultimate SoundTracker in the browser...

</comment><comment><USER27> Very cool, but the selection is pretty arbitrary with not really any of the classics in there. Probably licensing issues?

<comment><USER5> The selection is basically all the Amiga software that IA already happens to have, and that we know about, and that we've gotten around to adding to the Amiga category. Most of them come ultimately from TOSEC.

<comment><USER6> Also cool that you have demoscene releases in the selection, but as far as I can tell it's mostly very early demopacks.

Some of the most popular releases that people will remember can be found here if you want to add them:

[http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?order=thumbup&platform%5B%...](http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?order=thumbup&platform%5B%5D=Amiga+OCS%2FECS&page=1)

These are the OCS/ECS chipset demos listed on Pouet sorted by popularity. Most of them have ADF files for the download link so should be easy to add.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> No Cosmic Bouncer :/ That was by far my favorite Amiga game.

Good to see Hardball, Kikstart II, and Zany Golf on there though.

<comment><USER17> I believe they're still adding new things to the archive all weekend. It's just taking time to package up the images, get a thumbnail and put it into the archive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Would love to see this for the C64.

<comment><USER30> Like this? [http://vice.janicek.co/c64/](http://vice.janicek.co/c64/)

Or this? [https://www.kingsquare.nl/jsc64](https://www.kingsquare.nl/jsc64)

Or this? [http://www.vizzed.com/play-c64](http://www.vizzed.com/play-c64)

There's dozens of them.

<comment><USER29> No, an archive.org version. With decent emulator + software library + nice interface.

<comment><USER5> Soon. Or soonish, at any rate. Join us in #jsmess on EFNet if you'd like to talk about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> no newtek video toaster?

<comment><USER32> That wouldn't make sense without the hardware (where hardware includes the Amiga itself; a modern PC doesn't have composite video output suitable for combining with other composite sources).

<comment><USER33> Maybe an HTML5 video element could be used as the emulated other source</comment></comment></comment>


Norton I, Emperor of the United States - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton <comment><USER2> Now I know where Emperor Norton's Boozeland gets its name. Thanks!

Reference: [https://www.yelp.com/biz/emperor-nortons-boozeland-san- franc...](https://www.yelp.com/biz/emperor-nortons-boozeland-san-francisco)</comment>


General Purpose, Low Power Supercomputing Using Reconfiguration (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ILu5SMis9E#t=29

<comment><AUTHOR> With news of Intel's acquisition of Altera, I thought HN would enjoy this excellent lecture on the use of reconfigurable architectures for the next step in improving computing efficiency. I watch this every couple of years and consistently find it exciting.

Although we're very heavily invested in the current paradigm, maybe with Intel's weight behind Altera and some popular trends in programming languages, we'll start to see more of a push to move beyond the Von Neumann model.</comment>


Flat Design vs. Traditional Design: Comparative Experimental Study (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281628009_Flat_Design_vs_Traditional_Design_Comparative_Experimental_Study <comment><USER2> As a personal anecdote, I've spent quite a bit of time watching toddlers interact with the world. In my experience, if it looks like a button, a toddler can tell it's a button and will be interested in pushing it. (And might even say "button"!) If it looks like a switch, a toddler will be interested in switching it. If it looks like a button on a touch screen, a toddler might still think it's a button. If it's a flat blob that looks like every other flat blob designed by that designer (but looks nothing like a flat blob by other designers!), toddlers don't recognize it as a button. Shocker, I know.

Obviously, the majority of computer users aren't toddlers, but I think there's a lesson here. I really miss the old Windows 3.1 / 95 / 98 days when controls were more or less standardized and you could reliably tell which were buttons, which were radio buttons, which were okay buttons, etc.

<comment><USER3> When my youngest daughter was still a toddler, she would try to swipe on our 32" bedroom TV that was more or less at her height. What I'm trying to say is that your mileage might vary. I think it all depends on their experiences.

If something looks like a button and they try to push it, is because in real life buttons have a certain look and feel.

But I'm pretty certain that if you teach them at an early age to discern what does what in a flat UI, they'll have no problem switching from one UI to the other (I actually learned _from her_ that in the Android YT app you can swipe those pesky lower right corner videos to make them go away). And we're still to try flat in real life ;)

<comment><USER4> > _And we 're still to try flat in real life_

Plenty of appliances have electronic buttons, which are close to flat (though definitely not flat) and commonly paired with a flat visual style on top of them. They work pretty well, in that context.

And now plenty of appliances have capacitive controls, which are in my experience normally a _disaster_ and literally _never_ good (I exclude situations where a screen is involved; those are hit and miss). To take an example, microwaves: almost without fail, I find that the newer it is, the harder it is to use—though the old dials were only easier to use in certain ways, lacking precision. I now have one with a capacitive touch surface, and it's very hard to use unless the room is brightly lit, at which point is's merely quite painful unless I want to turn it on for exactly 30 seconds.

Decide for yourself whether these things are "real life".

<comment><USER5> My brand new (just arrived today!) stove has these capacitive buttons, and in terms of visual style it does indeed function perfectly; it's entirely clear which parts of the interface are buttons, even though most of them have only unadorned text.

But I think that analogy falls short in one major way, which is that these buttons are logically grouped and evenly spaced across a surface that consists of _nothing but_ buttons. If there's silkscreened text there, you can press it and do something. The visual display of information happens in an LED display set aside in a well-defined area, so things to look at and things to press are 100% clearly delineated. In a desktop/mobile/web app, where content and interactive elements are interspersed, you lose that obvious context clue. That inevitably adds cognitive load, even if the interface is still technically usable.

<comment><USER6> An additional problem for capacitative buttons in the kitchen is that my fingers are often moist or even wet, and this is a disaster when it comes time to punch cap. buttons.

Not only do they not work, no only do they sometimes trigger adjacent controls, but to get function back I now have to dry both my hands and the control surface.

I will never purchase a kitchen device with capacitative controls, but I run into them enough when traveling to experience this frequently. It's a mess.

<comment><USER7> This _is_ bad, but then again they will be easier to clean.

<comment><USER6> The old paradigm of sealing a rubber dome button under an unbroken sheet of plastic worked just fine, my folks had a microwave for 20 years that worked that way with no switch failures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nielsen Norman Group have also ran a study, with results similarly unfavorable for flat design: [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-ui-less-attention- caus...](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-ui-less-attention-cause- uncertainty/) (Possibly it's not the only study of theirs on the topic.)

Notably, NNG uses a more 'real world' methodology, testing realistic user tasks in browsing websites. For the unfamiliar, 'Nielsen' is Jakob Nielsen, an authority on usability, working and writing on it for two decades now, and he's a big advocate of usability testing in design process. (BTW, "Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity" of his is an excellent writeup on how websites should function—I'd bet it's as valuable today as it was in mid-2000s for me, because the functioning of _humans_ doesn't change.)

They also noted that flat design has made some steps back to the immediate recognition of the olde pseudo-3d interfaces, notably with 'Material design': [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat- design/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/) But not many steps.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's remarkable how UI design followed architecture (as in: buildings) down the dark alley - both went on a crusade to expose inner substance of things by cleansing it from "redundant ornamentation", both ended up steamrolling over the ergonomics, the human comfort, in the fight for the inhuman ideal.

This is what I see when I look at the web (+Electron) today: [https://www.google.com/search?q=modern+architecture&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=modern+architecture&tbm=isch) [https://www.google.com/search?q=brutalist+architecture&tbm=i...](https://www.google.com/search?q=brutalist+architecture&tbm=isch) This is what I would prefer to see: [https://www.google.com/search?q=victorian+architecture&tbm=i...](https://www.google.com/search?q=victorian+architecture&tbm=isch)

<comment><USER10> There has to be a better approach than to just settle on one of the two extremes: what architecture styles have a mix of moderate ornamentation, but with straightforward and utility-driven design?

<comment><USER11> McMansions.

<comment><USER10> Oh my.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One possibly explanation for these results which would be less interesting that their suggested conclusion: bigger items with smaller margins are better than smaller icons with larger margins.

The difference on the icon results were particularly large and convincing, and if you look at their example icon stimuli, clearly the flat icons are simpler (as expected) and presented with more margins (perhaps also as expected in flat design), but that also means to get the same number of icons on screen, the icons were smaller.

I think it's at least worth considering whether that might explain a large part of the difference.

Another limitation is that tiny and non-diverse sample size, and the fact that it's a few years old. They had just 20 students, almost all male, Russian university-student-aged - it's just not a huge or diverse sample; and the experiment was run in 2014; people have a few more years of flat design expectations under their belts now.

Looks pretty decent, those results, but I still think it's a little early to draw solid conclusions based on this alone.

<comment><USER13> To back up your more skeptical points, and to hint at the linked study being a symptom of the file drawer problem, here's a study that cites the linked one and which finds no statistically significant difference using a more diverse set of subjects (although still only 21 of them): [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326069864_Affordanc...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326069864_Affordances_and_Metaphors_Revisited_Testing_Flat_vs_Skeuomorph_Design_with_Digital_Natives_and_Digital_Immigrants) It does commit the fingernails-down-blackboard sin of talking about "trends" for non-significant results, but otherwise seems relatively sound.

Here's another that effectively finds no significant differences, while subjects perceived flat design as more usable (although full text isn't available so I'm not sure about the methods): [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325563195_A_Compara...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325563195_A_Comparative_Study_of_Skeuomorphic_and_Flat_Design_from_a_UX_Perspective)

Caveat - this is just from a quick search through studies that cited the linked article. There may be more robust studies around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I worked in design, I was always a fan of clean, modern, Swiss inspired design. But, that was mostly print (magazine ads, direct mailers, etc). When I moved into GUI design (early 00's), I went overboard on beveled, 3D, overly ornate designs. As did many people.

"Flat" design was a natural response to the endless bevels. Which, was also taken to an extreme. iOS 7 was, imo, the worst representation of this. The icons, the palette, and especially the entirely-too-thin font weights were all awful.

I think a flat base design, with dimension added in appropriate areas is a happy medium for GUI's. I'm still on MacOs 10.12.6, which I think represents this pretty well. As does the the Material Design widgets. Even if I think they're a little boring stock.

<comment><USER15> I'm a fan of _clean_ design, which is most definitely not flat.

The trouble is UI and UX stopped being anything about productivity and became simply empty fashion.

iOS 6 was an excess of 3D shine and starburst effects, and skeuomorphism excess like news looking like a set of library or newsagent shelves. Mitigate some of that and the UI would have been lovely. _And finished._

Since iOS 7 the excess flatness detracts from usability and discoverability. I still feel the camera icon looks annoying wrong and bland, as do settings, photos, calendar, passbook, compass, safari. Games and Passbook are determinedly unrepresentative of _anything at all,_ just random blobs of colour conveying nothing at all.

Still, on the plus side MacOS and iOS have not followed through with the excess of bland extreme flatness that is Windows 10. That still seems to want to push the propaganda of a phone GUI on the desktop that started in 8. Several years of regular use and I still hate it at every touch. Even adding every tweak I can find to make it more like 7 and it's still a significant step back from 7, and two headed in typically Windows fashion in that settings are partly in apps partly in old control panel. Usually control panel is required for basics that for some reason aren't felt necessary to allow configuration of any more. Never a complete transition from one to other.

After all this progress? I find the app based settings worse in every respect, and perfectly typifies the ethos. Fixing a ton of things that were not, in any respect, broken. I guess they knew that or they'd have continued to permit theming. :)

<comment><USER16> The News app didn't exist until iOS 9, and was never skeuomorphic. Maybe you're thinking of iBooks, which had the bookshelf.

<comment><USER15> Used to be called news stand, and had a picture of some empty shelves as the icon. Was replaced by, or renamed news.

<comment><USER16> Replaced by. Completely different app. Newsstand was really a wrapper around the App Store, in that every "magazine" you could buy or subscribe to were in fact actual iOS apps, which were only visible within Newsstand, and they each provided their own way of reading a digital copy (usually just PDF version of the print version) if the magazine. The News app has none of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here are some examples of how flat design has made things worse in MacOS and iOS: [http://uxcritique.tumblr.com](http://uxcritique.tumblr.com)

<comment><USER18> I really like that site and the concise descriptions of the problem. ..it's also a little madding to read for too long as one starts to ask themselves "why did they do that" over and over again.

<comment><USER19> Why? Because design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Our results suggest replacing the flat style user interfaces with interfaces > based on the design principles developed over decades of research and > practice of HCI and usability engineering.

Apple should just revert HEAD to the iOS 6/OS X 10.6 branches and back-port any bug fixes. Almost all of the last near-decade of work in UIs has been a mistake.

<comment><USER21> > Almost all of the last near-decade of work in UIs has been a mistake.

You keep saying this, and it's just not true. The extreme skeuomorphism in the older iOS versions was just as maligned as flat design is today. I wouldn't mind adding some more shading to buttons to make them more easily identifiable, but let's leave the cheesy leather textures in the Calendar app dead and buried, please.

I'm not a fan of the Windows 95-era design either. As an example that comes to mind, traditional menus have atrocious usability. Ribbon-like interfaces that feature actual buttons you can click or tap on, with more important buttons larger and/or highlighted, have been a huge improvement over trying to wade through a sea of identical-looking pull-downs full of text. It's important to remember that the move away from pull-down menus _was_ informed by a good deal of end-user research, a lot more than this article.

Regarding iOS, I'd like to see this study try modern UI fonts like San Francisco. There's a reason why Apple, Google, and Microsoft invested in new fonts, and that's because faces such as Helvetica (which, by the way, was used in iOS 6) that weren't designed for screens are harder to read.

<comment><USER22> How do you navigate the Ribbon using a keyboard? How do you learn about shortcuts now that they are displayed nowhere?

The Ribbon traded a bunch of text pull-downs for a bunch of icons pull-down that you have to hoover to discover what they mean, it kept the "multiple levels of pull-downs" problem, but now the extra levels have no icon or text with even more levels because each one has a limited space, and threw away the icon toolbars that had a much larger density of icons.

<comment><USER23> > How do you navigate the Ribbon using a keyboard?

Mostly the same way as you used to do with pull-down menus. Press alt to display tooltips with shortcuts over ribbon buttons. Then you do bunch of alt + [letter] to get the option you want. The underscored letter in traditional pull-down menus in my opinion was similarly non-obvious.

<comment><USER24> Menus show the hotkey by default. Needing to know a hotkey to figure out what hot keys are seems backwards.

And I don't mean the underscore, that was for fast access in the menu. Most menus would say actual hotkey on the right side of the menu by default.

But even the underscore gives a default visual clue that you can do something with that letter, and you can then ask what. If you're new to computers, the concept of anyotkey may not be obvious to even ask about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I was one of the original beta Mac developers, back in '83\. Before the Mac was released. The idea then was to visually duplicate real world interfaces, and I gotta say they are easier for everyone, across the board, to grasp. Still, to this day, there are many people who do not use computers on an hourly basis, and they certainly do not get familiar with flat interfaces. However, the much maligned over-done interfaces are grasped immediately. Imagine that. It is because the software operates to mimic a real world item that person of many is familiar using already, without software. It is as if the entire reason for the UI is being missed by modern UI "experts" because duplicating real world objects and their innate feedback is too boring, or something. Imagine it as a stepping stone to n augmented reality where you are mimicking real world items, if you must. Real world mimicry is intuitive, and that is hands down easier. I don't need a study.

</comment><comment><USER26> Flat design is form over function and this study appears to prove it. Usually in design there's a reaction against the tyranny of the mainstream. I never liked flat design, even just aesthetically, and I've been waiting for the backlash in this case, but when will it ever arrive!

<comment><USER27> Never? 1) Users didn't ask for flat design 2) There's absolutely no evidence that flat design are better and there are evidence that they are worse

Yet I don't expect that UI will go back to 'classic UI', many of those who create UI care more about being perceived as modern (or more accurately not being perceived as outdated) than efficiency, so flat design will probably be replaced by another 'fashion driven design'..

<comment><USER28> Just like the current inexplicable vogue for illustrations of humanoid figures with bizarre body forms. Which designers seem to love and be very proud of using.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I feel like I experience the downside of flat design daily while using the gmail and google calendar interfaces. Finding items and discerning the different areas seems to take longer than it used to. N=1, so your mileage may vary.

<comment><USER30> When I use Safari on macOS I find myself misclicking tabs more often than I'd like to admit. It's like I have to stop and actively process what I'm selecting, which has never happened to me before in a browser. The all-gray UI is such a downgrade for me. [0]

[0] [http://uxcritique.tumblr.com/image/107150709190](http://uxcritique.tumblr.com/image/107150709190)

<comment><USER31> What bugs me more is how Apple removed scroll bars. It's left me staring at a Finder window thinking I'm going crazy because ls said there's a file there.

<comment><USER32> In case you didn't know: You can choose to always display scroll bars in the macOS system preferences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Rant:

Everyone who has put at least a little bit of thought into UI design knew from the beginning that flat design is bad.

But no, it is 2019 and we still have scrollbars and buttons that are barely visible. Just because Google and Microsoft unreasonably decided to do it that way and every other one blindely copies that (because how can a those big, big companies be possibly wrong?). Fuck accessibility, even though we serve billions of customers on a daily basis.

<comment><USER7> Simplification. I know what my scroll bar looks like and prefer it not to have multiple borders and shadows. It's easier on my eyes and mind.

(I don't love everything about "flat design", but not everything needs to be super skeumorphic)

<comment><USER34> Makes sense: a scrollbar is super common and isn't something you interact with directly that often because there are alternatives (swiping, or on a pc the scroll wheel, up/down, pg up/down). But most other controls don't have that many alternatives and/or don't nearly always appear in the same position so then some actual visual recognition is needed. Of which the results are described in this and other papers.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. There is some value in slight hints through gradients or borders.

Ideally we could all choose our preferred themes like we can with GTK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> When Apple did the flat redesign of iOS, it caused a lot of problems for my grandma who could already barely tell something is a button. I know I've struggled with toggles and check boxes that don't make it apparent they're active.

</comment><comment><USER35> Minimalism is one of those things where simplicity is the goal, but not the measure of success. It seems many people (I'm looking at you Windows 10) forget the design part of flat design. Making all the icons indistinguishable general forms is simpler, sure. This study makes the same mistake: it finds removing indictors of function make things harder to read. But they forgot to indicate function in other ways to compensate. It's as if you intended to prove goto isn't bad by removing it from a language without break, return, continue, or loops.

<comment><USER28> I often have a hard time finding an app I want to use on my iPhone. And I don't even have that many apps. Either I'm finding it hard to distinguish the icons from each other, or the icons aren't distinct enough for my brain to firmly associate an icon with its app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> We shouldn't have to rely on post-hoc science to tell us that. Designers should not be allowed to execute in counterproductive ways in the first place, and there was nothing non-obvious about this. We have rules about how road signs should look. How are we going to get back the time lost now?

<comment><USER37> > We have rules about how road signs should look.

Probably a bad example because its signs on public, state owned roads. Private roads don't have signage requirements, you can even have your kids drive your cars without a license on private roads.

However we do have building code and more importantly the ADA which sets standards for businesses (like, ya know, websites) to meet minimum accessibility standards.

The problem is I don't see any congress where the average number of mathematicians within their ranks is within a margin of error of 0 or rarely enough scientists to fill counting on one hand being capable of writing actually good regulation in this or any software related regard.

<comment><USER36> I believe most big companies employ psychologists or at least someone with knowledge of how psychophysics and human perceptual systems work. None of them would have approved "flat" as a sane choice

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> A question to any design enthusiasts and experts here: What currently maintained web/CSS framework has not gone the flat-design way, is inline with HCL guidelines, and has a reasonably complete widget set.

<comment><USER39> I enjoy Palantir's Blueprint.

[https://blueprintjs.com/docs/](https://blueprintjs.com/docs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> If I wasn't a grumpy old product manager, I would be tempted to get cynical and say that flat imposed higher cognitive load which keeps you on the page/UI longer which gives more time for other things to get your attention and create the mental lock in thru mix of attraction and sunk (time) cost...i.e.ive spent so long to figure this out I may as well stay and look around.

Another Responder pointed out that material design is better. Maybe I'm ignorant but I don't see how. Perhaps icon quality/diversity is better these days but the basic premise of 2D facsimile for real world 3D objects is still there.

Personally I prefer that UI things can be easily and uniquely related to action. This can be achieved by education I. E. sliders now look like nice rounded corner progress bars of yesteryear but we have gotten used to them thru their imposition on us by G and A.

That said I have used a few very old GUI programs and their look now is jarringly uncomfortable even though the tools are great and the UI is clear.

Progress?

<comment><USER41> > Another Responder pointed out that material design is better. ...I don't see > how. ...the basic premise of 2D facsimile for real world 3D objects is still > there.

Material design uses shadows to add a third dimension. The shadows cause boundaries and can help indicate parts of the interface that can move independently.

I would definitely not claim this is much better, but it is at least a little bit better.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A related thing is contrast ratio of text on background. I try to test on at least a few computers/displays and when choosing between two almost equally subjectively good pick the one with higher contrast.

</comment><comment><USER42> I expect that they would see even stronger results if their population were in a developing country. Flat design shifts the processing load for the user interface from the designer to the user, and it depends heavily on the user being used to computing interfaces so that they can guess correctly.

</comment><comment><USER43> > Our results suggest replacing the flat style user interfaces with interfaces > based on the design principles developed over decades of research and > practice of HCI and usability engineering.

This feels like a straw man argument. Of course nicer _looking_ design is usually worse for _function_. If nothing else, just sticking to ONE type of consistent design lets all users rely more on memory. They seem to assume that user interfaces are designed with the sole goal of being usable. Have they seen any modern furniture?

When they say "our results suggest that" they don't mean that the product (e.g. a web site) would be _better_ in some sense such as making more money long term. They say it would be _easier to interact with_. I completely buy that. But that's the easy part of the equation to prove! The hard part is: does a site that's nicer looking according to a majority of users but 5% harder to interact with get enough extra business to offset the more difficult UX? Does the company valuation or other metrics such as ease of attracting talent improve? This is the similar to the question "would a furniture maker sell more of this chair if it was 10% more comfortable but a bit uglier?".

<comment><USER44> Since when is relying on memory exclusively a good thing? It has downsides as well, particularly blind flight when using software. Sometimes a user should be required to think at least once before clicking, for example when sending money. In this case, UX should cause him to do exactly that.

Pavlovian responses to interface design play into malicious actors hands after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Good to read this work, more work like this is needed and the design community needs to pay attention to it.

Watch a six year old try to use google for the first time; results are swamped by a blizzard of ads and maps and diversions. This is design driven by greed and a/b testing at it's worst - our tools are only just fit for purpose and the costs that that imposes on us are hidden and absorbed personally.

</comment><comment><USER46> The results are reported, but the inputs - the websites and screenshots used as test data - are conspicuously absent.

</comment><comment><USER47> Flat design was a mistake. I correctly called this out years ago. It's a horrible choice Johny Ive was only able to poison the world with once Steve Jobs wasn't there to force good design guidance on him. Everyone followed suit and the pendulum has swung _hard_ towards the objective failure of flat design. It's slowly swinging back. Look now at how you reacted to it and analyze your choices. This is a good exercise in realizing an industry trend was a terrible idea and making sure you learn from it if you ever thought flat design was a positive move.

<comment><USER48> I thought the world had gotten beyond "Steve would be rolling in his grave". Apart from anything, Windows Phone and its flat design came out in 2010, three years prior to iOS 7. Windows 8 came out in 2012, one year before. Please don't pin an entire phenomenon on one man, especially the wrong one.

<comment><USER28> That's the saddest thing. Apple copying flat UI from Windows Phone, which is dead now.

<comment><USER48> I don't think Apple copied the flat UI from Windows Phone. It had already become a trend by that point, and OS X had started to move to lighter gradients and flatter buttons in 10.7, released in 2011. I'm sure the web had already started getting flat by then, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> design is about solving problems given constraints. flat design is oftentimes (more-so in the past than right now) a reasonable solution _for the web_ , due to constraints related to latency (sending graphics over the wire) and the computational cost of rendering complex graphics/interfaces. from that perspective, flat design makes total sense to me, even if I don't always care for it personally. browsers can't even agree on how to render vector graphics or what falls on CPU vs GPU. projects like pathfinder[1] are sorting some of that out, but we've got a long way to go. flat design is only a very small percentage about aesthetics.

IMO, flat design takes the "best for the most for the least" approach of charles and ray eames (and so many others who followed the same ethos but maybe stated it less eloquently), and perverts "the least" to mean least amount of effort/money for the _computer_ (or, cynically, the _designer_ as well), rather than for the _user_. it either skews the idea of a design constraint, or highlights problems with the web as a platform. whatever flat design accomplishes, it isn't perfect for all cases, but it isn't necessarily bad, either. we just have to remember that as technologies mature, it's always possible we're designing for constraints that no longer exist.

I say this a lot, but when talking about web design, in retrospect, flash was like future alien technology that got taken away from us. although I understand the attack surface that came with it and why it had to go.

1\. [https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder](https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder)

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems like you've made an reasonable explanation but it doesn't follow the timeline of how things happened. Flat design has been coming about recently _after_ significant increases in hardware and network capabilities. Current web apps that use flat designs are just as heavy as any other.

<comment><USER49> > Flat design has been coming about recently after significant increases in > hardware and network capabilities

sorry, I should have emphasized the web/browser part of my explanation more. the chip in an iphone could support these things, but could safari? we didn't even have a <video> tag back then. 3D transforms in CSS were brand new (i.e. unusable if you wanted to support legacy browsers), same for WOFF files, requestanimationframe, drop shadows, and so many other modern conveniences. 4G was also brand new -- and uncommon. the web was going through some serious growing pains, and that's just in the highly developed world -- this doesn't really touch on the global availability/use/implementation of the tech we're talking about. it's possible my timeline is off, but designers were still constrained by those doing the engineering during this time. maintaining web apps with hacks to support as many browsers as possible was a nightmare. and so compromises were made -- clearly. and I think flat design came out of that, for better and for worse.

> Current web apps that use flat designs are just as heavy as any other.

that's what I was getting at toward the end of my comment with regard to observing constraints that may no longer actually exist.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and I was suggesting that the motivation was not due to constraints as the trend emerged degree after these constraints were long since relevant. I tend to agree with other comments here that it has come to serve as fashion (different for its own sake) rather than any UI/UX benefit.

<comment><USER49> ah, yes, I agree with you on where we're at now, it's not coming from any sort of necessity currently. my initial comment was only meant to say "there's a time and light in which this might have made some sense."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Nice to see this type of research coming out of МГУ (Lomonosov Moscow State University)!

Haven't gone through the study, but seeing the examples wondering if there is also selection bias - many older Russian sites still look fairly dated and users may be more used to that look, finding it more familiar and easier to navigate.

</comment><comment><USER51> I think the extra brightness and contrast of modern screens has something to do with the UI design "fashion". It's now possible to use contrasts instead of 3d/depth, and it's even more effective then print as the contrast on (new) screens are much higher.

</comment><comment><USER52> I remember trying out an Android sleep app that had a "flat" design. It never worked. On the last day of the trial I realised why - part of the flat "design" was actually a button that I also needed to press. I was so annoyed I deleted the app.

</comment><comment><USER53> Flat Design seems to take its cue from advertising (instead of editorial). Ads (especially in magazines) often look great - clean, elegant - and editorial designers can be envious. But some hoariness is not only functional, but helps offset substance from marketing.

</comment><comment><USER54> I tried to read this, but the ads and spam for random crap is all over the site... how did this even make it to HN top page?

</comment><comment><USER55> Typical example is iOS design (Traditional) vs Android (Flat). Android design is a mess. Learn from iOS instead.

</comment><comment><USER56> the paper is unconvincing and doesn't control for bad design vs good design

The argument that interactive elements must be skeuomorphic doesn't work today since _every_ element is interactive

<comment><USER36> our perceptual system hasn't gotten any faster just because designers wished so

<comment><USER56> in real life everything is interactive - that's the environment we evolved in

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> "19 female and 1 male university students" participant is a laughable small sample group. How can any insight be drawn from that?

<comment><USER58> All depends on the effect you are measuring. 20 can be enough if the effect measured is big (if you test an ebola cure on 10 contaminated persons and 10 of them survived, you have with a very high probability found something great). The real question is "Is the effect measured big enough to be signifiant with a sample size of 20" ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> This is all in all a bad way of talking about things. Flat vs. traditional is in the title. I think this can't be taken seriously, and that you all should know better. No time to read this in full, but they start by comparing windows 8 and windows 7 - so the problem is not the functional redesign, no, the problem is that it's flat? What is this</comment>


SecureMe scans your Android phone for publicly known vulnerabilities - <AUTHOR> https://secureme.securitycompass.com <comment><USER2> Before you send all your APK to this company - who are they?

What laws are they subject to?

<comment><AUTHOR> From the talk they are doing about this at AppSecUSA ([http://sched.co/3VgM](http://sched.co/3VgM)):

        The only information which gets accessed and transmitted are listed below:

            1. Application Name
            2. Application Package Name
            3. Application Version Number
            4. Application Version Name
            5. SecureMe – Droid Search Depth setting (1-5 only)
            6. SecureMe – Droid Vulnerability Details settings (1 or 0)

You aren't sending anyone your APKs. The application exists to make searching Mitre's CVE database more convenient and automagic.

The developers are security consultants at Security Compass. The application is hosted in Montreal, Canada. (I work there as well, and can ask them to add an FAQ about this this stuff.)

<comment><USER3> Any chance of opening up the code for the client app? Given that the database is basically your golden egg, and given that this is security software, it would make sense to open it up.

<comment><USER4> I am member of the team behind SecureMe Droid. Right now we don't plan on open sourcing the Android code. But I would like to mention that the source code is not obfuscated.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


IPv4 route lookup on Linux - <AUTHOR> https://vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2017-ipv4-route-lookup-linux <comment><USER2> We seriously need more articles like this. As someone who would really like to understand more about the kernel source code, but without prior kernel knowledge (no classes in that direction) and barely any C knowledge the kernel is not the easiest part to read oneself into. Articles like this one help a lot, since they already provide an abstract model of what the code does and intends to do and why.

<comment><USER3> Technical articles get downvoted on HN a lot these days. It became super hard to promote technical stuff here.

Just look at this article - it's successful (on the front page) but it's hovering around 20th place, without any chances of raise: [http://hnrankings.info/14631808/](http://hnrankings.info/14631808/)

<comment><USER4> > articles get downvoted

You can't downvote articles. (You can flag them, but flagging fine submissions is obviously abusive).

<comment><USER2> flagging is basically downvoting

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unfortunately IPv6 stack doesn't match IPv4 one on features and optimizations. IPv6 is still using regular radix tree and a route cache.

<comment><USER6> Do you have any insight into why this is?

<comment><USER7> Author here. The weaknesses are known (see for example [http://www.netdevconf.org/1.1/proceedings/slides/kubecek- ipv...](http://www.netdevconf.org/1.1/proceedings/slides/kubecek-ipv6-route- lookup-performance-scaling.pdf)). IPv6 doesn't have the same features as IPv4 (notably, IPv6 can do a route lookup using both source and destination addresses). Therefore, it's not just a matter of reusing what is done with IPv4.

<comment><USER6> I guess you are referring to scoped addresses then in ipV6? That would makes sense. Thanks for the interesting link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The removal of the route cache caused a notable change in behaviour for equal cost routes.

When there was a cache, you got a kind of session stickiness for free. Which meant you could do some fairly good load balancing at the network layer by advertising multiple routes to the same IP locally. The router would choose one of the routes when it saw the first packet, cache the decision and send the rest of the packets to it (the cache key was configurable and could include src address, amongst other things).

Now you just get round robin between all the advertised paths - no good for tcp load balancing.

<comment><USER7> This behaviour has been fixed in 4.4. It has been mostly unnoticed until then! See [https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/4q3wmq/ipv4_flo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/4q3wmq/ipv4_flow_based_ecmp_broken_in_linux_kernels_36/)

<comment><USER8> oh super! thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How does this 50ns compare to commercial hardware routers like Brocade, which have dedicated memory (TCAM) for their routing table, which should be extra fast memory - as e.x. Brocade claims?!

<comment><USER7> Hardware usually scales at line rate without any issue, something Linux cannot.

From a pure latency point of view, a medium-range router (using the latest Broadcom Tomahawk chipset) takes around 500ns to route a packet (note that such a chipset cannot handle a full view). It doesn't seem unlikely that Linux can do the same job in certain configuration in about 100ns (notably, no netfilter rules). However, this takes a whole core to do that. If you have 24 of them, you get 12Gbps of transfer rate. With an hardware platform, packets are pipelined, so with some relatively small buffers, you can still achieve several hundreds of Gbps of traffic (per chip), something Linux cannot do in software.

I can't say about TCAM performance alone. Are there super fast or are there able to perform parallel lookup?

<comment><USER10> > I can't say about TCAM performance alone. Are there super fast or are there > able to perform parallel lookup?

I think this doc[0] helps to understand the parallelism/performance from a TCAM perspective.

[0] [https://www.renesas.com/pt- br/doc/products/memory/r10an0013e...](https://www.renesas.com/pt- br/doc/products/memory/r10an0013eu0100-memory.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why is this image [https://d1g3mdmxf8zbo9.cloudfront.net/images/linux/lpc- trie-...](https://d1g3mdmxf8zbo9.cloudfront.net/images/linux/lpc-trie- struct.svg) jumbled in Firefox beta?

<comment><USER7> Author here. I am also using Firefox (on Linux) and the image is displayed fine. I don't know exactly what you mean by jumbled, but I don't hard-code fonts in the SVG: it uses the default sans-serif font of your system. May this explain what you get? I am usually careful with the anchor points and leave some additional space to ensure it is displayed correctly with whatever font is used.

A solution would be to convert the text to paths, but I didn't find any tool that would do that efficiently. With Inkscape, there is a serious size bump when doing that.

<comment><USER4> > With Inkscape, there is a serious size bump when doing that.

Yes, you can't really avoid that when converting text to path objects, there is no way to do something similar to PDF's subset embedding AFAIK.

I've tried to get SVG diagrams with text to work, but they just always fall apart somewhere. High-resolution PNG or inflated SVG seem the only viable methods. svgz (svg+gz) helps with the size inflation, but is not supported by Firefox when accessing local files.

It's kinda a shame that web browsers can't display single-page PDF documents in-line, as images.

[http://i.imgur.com/x0TuCMC.png](http://i.imgur.com/x0TuCMC.png)

<comment><USER7> SVG can be served gzipped transparently. Ideally, when converting text to path, each letter (or group of letters) should be put in a group which can be referred with <use>.

Thanks for the example. Is the text in other figures OK?

<comment><USER4> No, they're all affected like that which is also my general observation. I'm not sure what causes it (possibly differing default font sizes, zooms or font selection). Chrome seems to generally use less defaults from the platform than Firefox, as is the case here as well — Chrome renders the figures fine. It usually does, though it can't help with missing fonts.

> Ideally, when converting text to path, each letter (or group of letters) > should be put in a group which can be referred with <use>.

Oho, that's a very interesting idea! Might be possible as a post-processing step, depending on how exactly Inkscape converts runs of glyphs (I never looked inside one of those 1.5 MB SVGs...).

> SVG can be served gzipped transparently.

Yes; in my case the figures are mostly in docs, so checked-in size matters; colleagues have to pull changes and pushing xx MB for figures (and frequently updating them as well — something that git does not handle well) is not nice. For open source, it ends up in the source distribution. I think in one of my projects it was inflated by xxx % due to that :D

Some hard numbers: A not-that-complex figure showing a workflow. The .vsd is 145 kB, the PNG is—after optipng—about 1 MB and the SVG was iirc around 2.5 MB (Visio->SVG->Inkscape on the same machine otherwise results are bad->Convert To Paths->SVG), not gzipped since that kinda breaks local editing (with Firefox). While the high-resolution PNG looks good in print, scaling it to displays ain't that great and text doesn't look sharp. SVG needs a separate conversion for print (SVG[->PS]->PDF).

<comment><USER7> > Oho, that's a very interesting idea! Might be possible as a post-processing > step, depending on how exactly Inkscape converts runs of glyphs (I never > looked inside one of those 1.5 MB SVGs...).

I would hope that something like svgo could do that. BTW, due to an error on my side, the SVG images didn't get processed by SVGO. I just fixed that, maybe this would help.

<comment><USER4> > I just fixed that, maybe this would help.

No luck

> SVGO

Interesting tool, didn't know about it. It certainly works and reduces the size of a SVG with path-based text by ~50 %. Further, gzip'ability is increased as well. I tested this with a 1.4 MB SVG, SVGO shrunk it to 765 kB, and gzip compresses it further to 100 kB. The original SVG is only compressed to about 260 kB, thus gzip compression is enhanced by ~20 % by SVGO.

On the other hand, neither Gwenview nor Karbon display the SVGO'd figure as it was. Firefox and Chrome seem to render it fine. rsvg-convert results in a large and slow PDF.

At this point the "technically best" option to me seems to be

(1) create an SVG, convert text to paths on the same machine, use SVGO and gzip (and just use python -m http.server or sphinx-livehtml or similar for local editing) for HTML and

(2) create a PDF completely separate from the SVG processing chain for print, since no SVG to PDF conversion is satisfactory (file size, preservation of contents, rendering / printing time—stuff that is slowly rendered is slow to print as well!).

... and then tell the rest of the content pipeline that figures are now in two formats. Ugh.

Anyway, my illustration troubles are a bit off-topic to your great article :)

<comment><USER7> This problem was bothering me. After digging more, I have found this bug: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=935056](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=935056).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Need an updated resume?  Maybe something like this... - <AUTHOR> http://www.gigtide.com/

<comment><USER2> Three thoughts.

(1) I can totally see LinkedIn buying this a year from now.

(2) I would be less likely to hire someone if this was the only way I could see their resume.

(3) The front page doesn't address my most immediate objection, which is "how does it produce email-safe resumes in plain text?".

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I was kinda thinking the same thing. I didn't sign up for gigtide, because the killer feature for resume sites like this is to be able to send out via email in all of: text, rtf, word, pdf, html. Having a nifty profile with a sort of interactive resume feel to it is good (and right up LinkedIn's alley), but it has to export in all those formats seamlessly or it defeats the purpose (yet one more resume format).

<comment><USER3> I always send out my resume in whatever format is asked for, however I make sure that the cover letter, email and resume include links to other formats for convenience.

I assumed that there was therefore no way that I would meet someone who hadn't been able to read it. Even after it had gone through a recruiter and HR to get to an enginering manager they would still be able to grab a PDF/HTML version if they wanted to.

Turns out that this was over optimistic. A recruiter modified my CV before sending it on, stripping out the links at the same time. So I turned up for an interview where the first questions was:

"Oh, yeah, it was a pain reading your CV, this is a UNIX shop. Are you ok with that or do you only do Windows? We really weren't sure if we should get you in at all."

It got worse from there - the second question was about a non-existant qualification (in a totally different field!) that the recruiter had added in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, recruiters - especially the ones that troll craigslist - are a real pain. Most of the things I've responsded to have turned out to be fake. The recruiters just make up jobs and post them to get your resumes, and then they give some excuse like "oh, that company has a hiring freeze now" or "you're not really a fit, but I might have something else for you". The longer posts with overly grandiose yet vague descriptions and very vague candidate requirements are a dead giveaway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Related: <http://www.emurse.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Hah! I was working on something almost exactly like this as a personal project.

Wonder how they did the doc/pdf creation? I thought about using LaTeX, and there are (commercial) html renderers, but I was trying to keep it cheap and easy.

<comment><USER6> I did my resume in LaTeX, with a free template I found a while ago. I've gotten a couple compliments on it.

<comment><USER7> The currvita package works well for me.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I've used that...but the problem I was referring to is more general, and more difficult: given blocks of plaintext that compose a resume, how do you render these blocks into _any_ popular format (i.e. Word, PDF, text, HTML) in any of a number of different styles.

HTML and text are easy. PDF is do-able through several different tools (including LaTeX). Word is hard. Supporting multiple resume styles is harder still.</comment></comment></comment></comment>