It's all subjective, of course, but if a Material app starts getting more complex the bare bones nature of the UI actually starts making it more confusing to use in my opinion. Maybe I just haven't used it enough, but every time I look at a Google Cloud Platform console or something it takes me longer than I think it should to find what I'm looking for.
Yes, a thousand times, yes. To me, this is the worst and most offensive redesign of something so pivotal to research, investigative reporting, everything beyond the surface. Being able to dig and dig and find out who is reporting what pieces of the story. I don't CARE if there are 12 articles about the same thing if there are truly 12 different legitimate reports about the event of interest. I want to see all 12 sources in their original place, date stamp, author, etc. The original links are where the real stories hide... not in this curated crap.
Thomas Jefferson said: "Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper." Google already has all the news indexed; why it is choosing to provide less surface area over which to sell its ads is something that makes absolutely no sense.
Company press releases are a gold mine of information. These used to be so prominent in news.google.com; they are completely gone. Multiple pages of results. Gone. All so the already-digested news can belch all over cell phones.
I see it as an attack on our democracy. Basically, censorship. But apparently they don't care.
I found myself laughing the other day when I went to Bing for what I used to use Google news for... because of all the alternatives tested, it seemed to provide the best breadth of what I was looking for.
Redesigns like this make me wish more designers thought in terms of a toggle option for users who don't want the slick and shiny. Seems like such an obvious, idiot-proof solution to pissing off your users en masse.
Material design just doesn't work on desktops. Speed and information density are the way to go, and I'd argue they played no small role in reddit's ascendance.
I'd disagree. I like some of the Material related changes to Google Maps, for example, others seem like they were only done for consistency's sake with no benefit to Google Maps UX. Also IMO they managed to make YouTube even worse with the recent attempts to shoehorn it into their Material design.
The problem with a unified design language is you end up with the lowest common denominator for vastly different products. Material works great for Google Now, somewhat okay for Google Maps, pretty meh for GMail and terribly for YouTube. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.
There's few things in the world I hate more than Google's design. Maybe GoDaddy's control panels. Possibly Ubuntu's installer.
It's absurdly wasteful in terms of space on desktop applications. So many uselessly gigantic buttons with no effort to describe what they do other than an icon.
It tied their apps together, but I don't think it made them easier to use. I feel like I get around in the apps that I use most frequently just by rote. In an unfamiliar app, it's often unclear if something's a touchable option or just a text label. In previous versions, buttons stood out more from the background. I liked that, and I think it was clearer and easier to use.
Late to the game here and apologize if this has already been mentioned but may shed some light on what is actually stored. A while back facebook officially announced what they "store" in regards to what they record when the app is open and has access to your microphone. The app itself turns your voice audio into a profile that is then sent to the server, it does not send your actual audio. This light(er) weight audio profile is then matched to words which are then used for marketing. I wouldn't be surprised if Echo, Google Home, etc do something similar since sending the full audio recordings would be both bandwidth and storage heavy.
"Audio profile" meaning MFCC coefficients? That's still enough to fully reconstruct a meaningful audio stream. Obviously, since it's enough to do speech recognition.
I don't know about this. Co-workers and myself can run console commands so quick that for moments at a time (esp with console text scrolling, deploying, etc) it looks like we're hacking. I've heard more than one sales/project manager who's hovering mention it looks like Hollywood hacking. The part that looks like BS in Hollywood hacking to me is the green "matrix" text.
I'm anything but fast at my typing, etc. I've never been that way, but I've also experienced the "soul crush" of taking down a production system because I was doing things too fast, not paying attention, and then BAM - bye-bye production DB - so since that time I take a more cautious, think-before-hitting-return attitude (it was the early 90s, I was 18, blah-blah - we eventually got things back to normal, and somehow I kept my job).
That said, I once worked with a guy who could type, switch windows, desktops, etc - at what seemed like lightning speed. I mean, when he was at it and "in the groove" - his screen, fingers, etc - were a blur of frantic activity. In some ways, it even reminded me of "hollywood hacking". He was expert at what he did, though - more often than not, his solutions and designs were spot on, and even these "quick fixes" or whatever - would work right first time out the gate.
Definitely when I get "in the groove" my typing, editing and code navigation are at least 3x faster. That's why I know it always pays off to learn all the hotkeys and optimize my workflow in the software I use.
When at normal speed the increase in productivity may seem minimal, but after a while, when you get that groove moment, the benefit compounds.
Another way to see it is that the less time and effort you spend on actually doing the thing the less it stays in the way of your mental process.
I'm a designer first and foremost, have been for well over a decade. Started coding (Basic) a decade before that.
However, circumstances have led to me being more than that. I'm a copywriter, social media manager, web developer. Content manager, product designer and manager. This means a TON of switching tasks.
But sometimes, I have to do something small, like spend a couple of days launching a WordPress site. Switching between the mockup PSD and the template files, the various browser tabs where I have the CMS open, the FTP client, etc.
I've always loved keyboard shortcuts and all the tiny little hacks, hidden double clicks and ctrl+alt+right-clicks that made this go faster.
And when people watch when I'm plugged in like that, "magic" is the word most people use to describe what I'm doing. (Even some medium level devs do!)
Not boasting btw. Just happy about life in the industry. We're lucky fucks.
The tab key with autocomplete really makes you look like you're typing more than you really are. Not to mention the amount of output relative to the input. Sure, all you typed was 'ls -al' but look at all that useful output!
Question: Can anyone comment on how important HTML taxonomy in terms of SEO (disregarding accessibility). Will the use of <header> and <article> make any difference in how a page is indexed and ranked directly or indirectly?
One indirect way I can see SEO benefiting is via sharing. Facebook crawling will have an easy time grabbing the <h1>Title</h1> along with whatever comes first in <p>for an excerpt</p>.
Is there any no-brainer reasons or supporting evidence proper taxonomy helps rankings?
I have seen no evidence to suggest that search engines care about HTML5 semantic tags. While the tags may be one particular signal, their algorithms use a lot of signals, so don't rely on markup alone. I suspect if they did give them any value, they would quickly be abused by the black-hats, so they don't bother.
As always, do what's right for your (human) users, and you will eventually get the SEO benefit.
Agree with your overall sentiment, but should clarify this:
> I have seen no evidence to suggest that search engines care about HTML5 semantic tags
I think you mean "HTML5 sectioning elements" (header, footer, section, article, aside, main). Because search engines absolutely positively do care about proper "semantic" use of other tags (especially h1...h6).
Don't disregard accessibility. Think of the search engine crawler as a disabled user. The ARIA roles (and many HTML elements have good, sensible defaults) carry a lot of information that a search engine can use as easily as a screen reader can. Good a11y is good SEO.
Thing is that wcag recommends following defined web standards, but no screen reader I tried could handle html5 style of relative h-tags, like multiple h1 tags. So if you want to adher to wcag rules, and support screen reader, you need to stick to html4. This will probably change, but in order for us to support screen readers, we ended up with some badly written html5.
As for SEO, my experience is that the big crawlers handle html5 better than screen readers, and that atleast Google puts more emphasis on font size as a measure for the pages h1. "If it looks like the pages heading, people will see it as the h1, so we should consider this a better cue than tags the users don't see" sort of logic.
Outlines are still broken in browsers, yes (so multiple nested-level <h1>s ain't gonna work in <main>), but things like the banner and nav roles work just fine and come free with the appropriate tags.
I wonder if Google should put some time/effort into making a better (ideally free to use) screen reader? They seem to have pretty advanced technology for finding the human-relevant parts of a web page.
The first no-brainer that springs to mind is <nav> so that search engines can tell words related to the current page apart from words related to pages you might navigate to.
For the last 2 years I've been receiving calls from some call center in India sometimes up to 5x a day asking if I want viagra. I've asked, pleaded, demanded and have blocked by now hundreds of the numbers they call me with which can range from a local number to one across the country.
I've had my number since I was a teenager and don't want to stop using it but I've been seriously considering it lately because the calls feel like harassment. I don't get how they are able to do this and why something hasn't been done about it.
I believe ravens and crows are very similar, this is a personal (long, and not the great) story about a raven I messed around with in Yosemite National Park:
When I was up on north dome (not to be confused with half dome) there was a group of raven's hanging out on the rocks watching us eat our late lunch. I had an apple core that I tossed to the side and watched as a raven warily tried to approach it. I walked over and grabbed the apple core before the raven could grab it so I could entertain myself teasing the raven for a bit before we started down the mountain. I started by putting my arm back ready to throw the apple and as I did that I noticed the raven kneel a bit as if getting ready to launch itself. I thought this was interesting as it showed it was anticipating me throwing the object based on my arm motion. As I relaxed my arm the bird also relaxed.
I tried grabbing a rock and again watched it brace itself to launch from the rock then tried switching the apple core and the rock behind my back and tossing the rock hoping the bird would dart after it thinking it was the core. The bird didn't do as I expected and instead just watched me carefully never motioning for the rocks.
I tore a piece of the apple from the core behind my back and tossed it just as I had with the rocks and before the piece of apple even left my hand the raven leaped from the rock in its direction.
This blew my mind. Not sure how the raven knew it was a chunk of apple and not a rock.
I messed around with that particular raven for a good 10-15 minutes tossing various things in its direction, testing its reactions and trying to mess with its little raven mind. All I managed to do however was be impressed at its level of experience in dealing with Yosemite tourists such as myself.
Here's a different perspective, which I will admit in advance is kind of ridiculous, but it makes me think...
Why are humans not considered to be a part of nature? I think it’s because we consider ourselves to be more intelligent than other animals/organisms and therefore assume it to be our responsibility to actively protect nature. However, this is based on our own moral standards, which were created by us, likely as a result of our ability to empathize.
A human eating an apple and discarding the core seems pretty natural to me (though it’s not, by definition). If this has an impact on the wildlife population, then perhaps it was “meant to be”.
Going out of our way to preserve nature seems more unnatural. Nature should have no expectation of our intelligence, so perhaps the human-caused destruction of the world is itself natural.
Then again, perhaps our increased intelligence is natural, so going out of our way to preserve nature is natural.
As you can see, I basically have no point here. It’s just an interesting thought train that I felt like expressing.
Of course, this argument could be extended to just about anything that a human does, including pumping oil directly into the ocean, which is why I’m not actually trying to argue this point.
I guess what I am saying is that if humans are left unregulated, nature seems to find a way to restore sanity. An example of this is the over prescription of antibiotics which has led to a decrease in their overall effectiveness. It seems like nature will always win in the end.
Sure, throwing one apple core seems pretty natural. But a national park is full of visitors every day. If it isn't a strict policy not to throw trash and food where animals can scavenge it, they learn to expect and rely on it. This brings them in more frequent contact. With crows that's no big deal, perhaps an annoyance to visitors at worst. But other animals can be much more dangerous. Keeping a healthy fear of people in animals (and honestly of animals in people) is incredibly important.
The most extreme example of this is trash feeding bears in Yellowstone up until 1970. Humans naturally ate at hotels which naturally tossed their trash into giant piles nearby. Bears naturally came looking for all that food they smelled and naturally ate it. The humans then naturally started watching and the park naturally made that easier by putting up grandstands around the trash heaps.
Eventually a new Yellowstone park chief saw the ridiculousness and danger of this and stopped it. It then took a while for the bears to adapt their behavior back to their actual natural behavior without such a rich food source.
Unregulated humans have lead to the extinction of hundreds (thousands?) of species. Largely by hunting, but also unintentionally by destroying habitats. It's also a safety hazard: when you feed wild animals, they learn to associate humans with food and are more willing to approach humans, which places humans in danger. Aside from animal welfare, garbage is just disgusting. If one person sees an apple core, perhaps they'll assume it's OK to leave their Doritos bag, and someone else a beer bottle, and now the area is spoiled for everyone. Not to mention health hazards for both humans and animals from rotting food.
> If one person sees an apple core, perhaps they'll assume it's OK to leave their Doritos bag
Let me nuance that a little bit: They don't actually believe it's OK, they're really just lazy and inconsiderate. If they were actually unaware of the difference between food and plastic packaging, the problem would be solving itself.
Well, we're talking about a National Park. Which is a part of nature we explicitly try to keep unaffected by humans as much as possible. So elsewhere you may have an argument, but in this case any visitor influence on nature is bad.
I disagree. Discarding the core is unnatural. The only part of an apple that I discard is the stem.
I also ensure that I do not crush all of the seeds with my teeth, thus honoring "the deal" between fruit-bearing plants and animals (even though sewage treatment plants may be involved after the fact).
I draw the line at plums, though. Those are pretty much the largest fruit seeds that I will swallow whole. Peaches, you're out of luck.
But when you put toilets and sewers in the equation, tossing the seed-bearing portion of a fruit to another animal is probably the most natural thing you can do. The animal receiving the food has no cause to object. The plant that bore the fruit has no cause to object (unless it is seedless). And the only reason a human might object is if it somehow upsets the environmental equilibrium, such as if 10000 humans are all throwing their uneaten apple cores in the same place.
...like tourists at a national park.
When you're in a "natural" area that somehow gets a lot of human activity anyway, you're actually better off burning your garbage, and either packing out the ash if local soil is basic, or spreading it and peeing on it if the local soil is acidic.
That's not true. It depends on the plant species, but some seeds require physical or chemical abrasion of the seed coat before germination can occur. Some fruits have germination-inhibiting plant hormones in the fruit flesh, and cannot sprout until that is either digested or rotted away.
Some seeds require seasonal cycles of cold and hot, but that doesn't involve animals except insofar as they may cause the climate to shift.
That's not really why I swallow the seeds. I do it because it makes less of a mess to clean up after a meal or snack. Someone else might have to walk their apple core to a garbage can, and worry about whether it will rot and stink in there. I just put the stem on my desk and throw it in the landscaping mulch later.
Yes, I have spent a lot of time out in nature and parks, and I generally am aware of not leaving a trace or litter. However, with something like a banana peel, I'd rather it end up as tree food the in a landfill, so I usually toss them in bushes.
The issue is that leaving food for the animals alters their behavior and can cause issues. You're probably not the worst offender wherever you are, as there are many people who just give food to animals, but the argument would be that it contributes to the problem.
Please don't do that with banana or orange peels, they remain present for a long time. I have no problem personally with people tossing apple cores in more remote, little-visited areas (though it still makes sense to crack down on such things a bit more in heavily visited areas like National Parks) but various peels don't rot well and remain in place.
I'm not sure about Yosemite or even nature in the US so maybe this wouldn't be an issue, but even biodegradable things like apple cores or egg shells can spread diseases to local populations of trees or birds. That's a real thing to take into account in natural parks with endemic species at least.
I don't have a link though, it's just something that was been repeated at length by the Natural Reserve agents and the ecobiologists to the personnel and visitors while I was on Kerguelen island (precisely about apple cores and egg shells - most of the vegetation is actually in the same Rosaceae family as apple trees, and there are many local bird species).
It makes sense to me, seeing how a single disease like chestnut blight or phylloxera can be very devastating to a population on a whole continent, it could be both as bad but also less noticeable in a natural park.
It was an apple grown in one of the 3 orchards around Yosemite purchased from the store in the valley. It was a native apple.
Also, I don't consider biodegradable native fruits to be trash. People argue the birds will choke on seeds or something which is absurd. I hike in Yosemite dozens of times a year and I can't recall ever seeing so much as banana peel and I know people are tossing those on the ground everywhere.
What most people don't realize is that most live forms lower on the chain can read our minds. So if the crow's reaction was different based on what you wanted to throw, it's because it knew what you wanted to do before you did it.
It was reading your thoughts.
Dogs and cats do it too.
A few years ago I went to a farm to buy a goat. The younger goats did not know why I was there, but when an older goat saw me and our eyes met, it knew, and took off.
But we have domesticated dogs for a long time, and some might argue that they are a lot better and quicker to pick up on our body language, than we are at picking up on theirs.
Dog Behaviorists spend a lot of their not training dogs, but training dog owners to understand and read their dog.
Sorry, no citation. Just my personal knowledge and experience.
And it's not just reading body language, but actual reading your thoughts. In the case of the crow, what body language tells it that the guy is about to throw a piece of rock or a bone when it can't SEE the object?
I know it's not something I can prove to you, but that doesn't mean it's not happening.
>what body language tells it that the guy is about to throw a piece of rock or a bone when it can't SEE the object?
Tons of things, from being able to understand body cues that the guy is up to some BS (like we can tell a liar), to smelling the thing he has in his hands...
Plus who said it "couldn't see the thing" in the first place? Even if it couldn't see what in his hand, it could have watched his moves before, as he left the apple and picked up the rock etc.
Smaller animals are incredibly faster than humans in reaction times because of the difference in the length of their nerves. Birds are also far smarter than people give them credit for. Nothing can read minds tho. That's pure fantasy.
I'm just curious what your thought process is. I mean, what makes you think something so wacky as reading minds is happening (come on..) when the explanation is probably just that the birds have quick reflexes.
>A few years ago I went to a farm to buy a goat. The younger goats did not know why I was there, but when an older goat saw me and our eyes met, it knew, and took off.
It could have took off for 100000 reasons, non of which end being "because it read your mind".
For example: it got scared, it did it randomly, is afraid of strangers because it had some bad experience, etc...
The most "advanced" behaviour I'd attribute that to would be possibly having recognised that when strangers come, other goats disappear and don't come back.
But I'd expect it to be more likely to just be one of your simpler suggestions.
It's just bizarre to attribute it to mind reading, when we'd apply far more mundane reasons if we saw the same behaviour in people.
Don't downvote, it's true. Animals can read your thoughts. The mechanism seems to be that they can see your visualizations: I can call my sister's cat in from outside "telepathically" by clearly "seeing" in my mind's eye the cat walking in the back door and "sending" the imagery to him.
Sometimes the if the back door is closed and I'm not distracted by computer or something he "calls" me to open the door. Subjectively, I get this subtle "ping" that feels like "I should open the door for the cat" so I do and he's there waiting.
This sort of thing is pretty easy to develop. It's innate, you're already doing it, you just have to learn to pay attention and calibrate.
> Sometimes the if the back door is closed and I'm not distracted by computer or something he "calls" me to open the door. Subjectively, I get this subtle "ping" that feels like "I should open the door for the cat" so I do and he's there waiting.
I've experienced similar things, as I have both small children and a very fat cat that doesn't like to jump over our toddler gate. I've been playing games with headphones on in an entirely separate room and suddenly felt that the cat wanted me to go open the gate. Sure enough, when I got there, he was waiting by the gate.
That said... I don't attribute this to telepathy. Animals get on schedules after a while, and perhaps it's likely that I merely intuited that the cat was very likely to want to go through the gate at that specific time.
It's like that episode of the Office where they put an increasing number of nickels in Dwight's phone handset over a long period, then take them out all at once and he smacks himself in the face with it - we humans often exhibit behaviors that are primarily driven by unconscious stimuli.
>Don't downvote, it's true. Animals can read your thoughts. The mechanism seems to be that they can see your visualizations: I can call my sister's cat in from outside "telepathically" by clearly "seeing" in my mind's eye the cat walking in the back door and "sending" the imagery to him.
Unsubstantiated nonsense. Your perception that this is a real phenomena is not evidence that it actually exists.
No, I'm sorry, you got this wrong. When you do that, you are not "calling" the cat, you are effectively controlling it with your mind eye. You need to be very careful with that, doing it long term can result in damage to the cat.
I am picturing in my mind's eye someone beating you on the dome of your skull with an oversized elementary science textbook.
It is not generally useful to say someone else is "wrong" about their religion or superstitions, unless you have statistically significant data from a controlled, reproducible experiment that contradicts their implied hypothesis. Without the support of facts, you're just in a pissing contest over who writes the best fiction.
If you're going to talk about this on HN, in terms of correct or incorrect, you're going to need to show the differences in medical scanner images between cats that have been continually mind-controlled by psychic humans over their entire lifespans and control cats with similar breeds and ages.
Because of that, I'm not going to say that your hypothesis is wrong, as it remains untested, but I will say that it is so implausible that any research experiment intended to test it is very unlikely to get public funding.
> I am picturing in my mind's eye someone beating you on the dome of your skull with an oversized elementary science textbook.
Yeah well that's not going to work, obviously. You can't have both elementary science textbooks and mind-projecting them through a non-physical mystical plane of existence.
And even if it could be done, it'd be highly unethical. Imagine a non-corporeal entity finding out they've been violating physical conservation laws during their whole existence.
I don't know what to say other than I'm sad when I see reddit-ish comment chains like this on HN. Someday I'll be a big kid and be able to downvote, but in the mean time I shake my head.
Okay let's get one part straight here. I don't believe any of this bullshit but I'm pretty sure I know a lot more about it than whatever you're making up right now.
The "mind's eye" is strictly input-only. Associated image of a silver mirror (or the Moon or my favourite, the pineal gland), which carries a reflection of the realm(s) of the Gods (or Godlike), which are beyond comprehension of mortal Man yadda-yadda etc, you can only witness the reflected image, which can be a divine/true vision or a false vision/hallucination (or a meaningless vision, or any combination thereof). Hence why the moon is associated with insanity.
I like reading about these kinds of things for fun, and because it has some weird and twisted yet surprisingly consistent logic to it (by which I mean, not very consistent but still surprisingly so). I've never read anything (outside the explicitly fictional) about it being hurtful to cats, though. And somehow I doubt you'd be able to provide me with a source either :)
On the average household debt. I'm always curious what these families financials look like. My guess is they made a few common mistakes (that most of america doesn't view as a mistake) starting with buying a house (150-400k debt) assuming that's counted towards the "average", followed by having kids. Tons of people have school loan debt and medical debt but if you look at it objectively it's not "how bad it is" but how financially illiterate people are these days.
I'm one of those "quit the job and traveled the world" types except I didn't travel the world, just did a healthy 6 month dose of travel but my friends and family look up to me like I did something they are completely incapable of and I might be because I had the self control not to have children and buy a home, go to bars regularly, eat out all the time, etc, etc.
I met tons of people who were doing the same with a lot less money then I had and they made the same sacrifices I did. Anyways, end rant. I agree debt is out of control and much of it designed but I also know people made a shitton of bad decisions with money.
