I'm rarely if ever troubled by UI changes but it took me a good moment before I figured out how to rerfresh your inbox in new Gmail. It's pretty obvious that you need to drag down when there are messages but without any (inbox zero) acting as an indicator, I went through all the options, and only picked the right move by accident.
If you're just starting out and don't have a feel for the mobile paradigm, those gestures may as well be magic. Maybe you're simply not supposed to refresh anything by hand any more. Maybe it's supposed to be magic.
The new gmail is ok although it has absolutely no advantages over the old one so it's merely irritating they changed it just because they could. Except for the compose button over the top of my text which is really awful and I hate it so much
> If you're just starting out and don't have a feel for the mobile paradigm, those gestures may as well be magic. Maybe you're simply not supposed to refresh anything by hand any more. Maybe it's supposed to be magic.
I agree that this can be a source of frustration. On the flip side, once you're used to it as a global UI pattern you might find certain buttons or indicators to be gratuitous. Now that I'm used to a global back button on Android, I feel totally lost on iOS when I want to go back/up. I'm no longer used to looking for a specific app button for that action because I'm used to it being a system-wide feature.
I'm wondering if this will become less confusing once the lion's share of Android phones and apps are using Material Design, as MD recommends that content is refreshed either a) automatically by sync or b) via the drag-to-refresh action.[1]
You set up a catch-all on your domain, and just make up whatever@domain.tld whenever you need an address. I have all my domains set up that way. Not even for unique addresses, just for convenience.
My explanation will be less entertaining than your imagined alternatives :)
There have been recent articles and company statements on workplace diversity in Silicon Valley, including gender diversity. And perennial debates on how to encourage more female students to STEM courses of study.
If billions of dollars in Silicon Valley market cap (which drives startup acquisitions and salaries) are currently dependent on ...
mobile ad revenue, of which a large portion depends on data mining to generate likely-to-pay customers for ...
F2P games like Candy Crush, which combine time-tested casino techniques with the ubiquity of mobile phones to addict mostly ...
women, it means there is an upside-down pyramid of leveraged technology financing teetering on the psychology of the very subgroup that is mostly absent from the development community.
:) Or, how much more efficiently could machine learning algos locate profitable F2P customers, if there were more female engineers?
Or, would more female engineers choose different mobile manipulation/psychology models, leading to less harm and more financially sustainable female "digital whales"?
It's not. It's on par with the rest of the western world[1], maybe except Finland which is an outlier whether you include the US or not. At least as of 2009, I doubt it somehow collapsed since.
Not to mention higher education, where Americans lead. Although judging by tuitions perhaps a little too far in the diminishing returns region.
This thread seems already to have aged off the front page, but it is dismaying to see that lazy blog post from 2010 still cited here on Hacker News years after other participants have pointed to better sources on international educational comparisons. The author's main point seems to be found in the opening paragraph serving as the thesis statement of his blog post: "What I have learned recently and want to share with you is that once we correct (even crudely) for demography in the 2009 PISA scores, American students outperform Western Europe by significant margins and tie with Asian students."
But this is factually incorrect.
1. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant margins nor are they tied with Asian students. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009,
and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science.
Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students
shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources.
2. The author, a person who did not grow up in the United States, has acquired English as a working language for his personal writing and scholarly publications after growing up knowing two other Indo-European languages. It amazes me that he didn't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis,
which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2012, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in those countries merely equal American levels of achievement in national-language reading, in mathematics, and in science, with additional knowledge of English as a second language, that is already an impressive achievement. As long as international educational comparisons don't include comparisons of second language ability acquired by schooling, it will be easy for the United States to rank misleadingly high in those comparisons.
3. Moreover, the author's conclusion is suspect even on the basis of the PISA mathematics scores, correcting thoughtfully rather than crudely for demographic factors. More experienced educational researchers who published a peer-reviewed popular article, "Teaching Math to the Talented"
dug into the same PISA 2009 data and reached a differing conclusion: "Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests."
The PISA program itself has published summary reports suggesting, based on the same 2009 data, that the United States schools underperform relative to levels of public spending on the school system,
with the report noting that "successful school systems in high-income economies tend to prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of classes," which is not the policy in most states of the United States. Based on those data, a scholar commented, "There are countries which don't get the bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them,"
and the United States underperforms the average of OECD countries in this regard too.
4. The blog author suggests comparing countries as "Asian" or otherwise belonging to a United States "race" category with students in the United States classified by the current official federal "race" categories. The latest TIMSS report,
consistent with a previous TIMSS report available when the author wrote his blog post, shows that the "Asian" average score in the United States in eighth grade mathematics (568) indicates American students underperform, not tie with" students from Singapore (611), Taiwan (606), and Korea (613). The group average comparisons understate the large gap in the percentage of students who reach the highest level of performance in the high-performing countries, which is visually quite apparent in the national comparison tables (e.g., Table 4, page 11 of the link immediately above). Similarly, "white" United States students mostly tie with, not "outperform" students from a variety of countries mostly inhabited by people of European ethnicity.
This methodology is "crude," to use the author's term, because the categories "Asian" and "black" in the United States do not have the same composition of persons from varying ethnic and language backgrounds as the categories "from an Asian country" or "from an African country."
The Census Bureau says
"The U.S. Census Bureau collects race data in accordance with guidelines provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and these data are based on self-identification. The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as 'American Indian' and 'White.' People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race."
5. The blog post author is counting on readers not to challenge his assumption that "once we correct (even crudely) for demography" is correct procedure for comparing varied national populations with culturally distinct historical experiences and differing school systems. The author's argument appears to be based on a discredited hypothesis built on poorly collected data about the origin of group differences in IQ, with the peer-reviewed refutations of the hypothesis published well before the blog post.
Dolan, C. V., Roorda, W., & Wicherts, J. M. (2004). Two failures of Spearman's hypothesis: The GAT-B in Holland and the JAT in South Africa. Intelligence, 35, 155-173.
Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., & Van der Maas, H. L. J. (2010). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence, 38, 1-20.
Anyway group differences of the kind to which the author refers are, according the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research, based mostly on environmental factors,
Nisbett RE, Aronson J, Blair C, Dickens W, Flynn J, Halpern DF, Turkheimer E. Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. Am Psychol. 2012 Sep;67(6):503-4. doi: 10.1037/a0029772.
Also, strike-through. Which is the one I find genuinely useful because I like the suggestive way to say s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ then visibly correcting to something else.
ACME sounds great. Copying codes from emails is suboptimal at best. Free certificate from command line and free revocation from the same client sound even better.
I just don't know about the automatic configuration tool. Like webpanels for managing a server, it has never worked for me.
I'm pretty sure the language barrier and a massive internal market do most of the heavy lifting here. Look at Yandex.
The Great Firewall is a wash at best. It protects local companies from international competition but it's part of a policy that makes foreigners trust Chinese products much less and will hurt their adoption.
I cannot treat complaints from journalists about digging up dirt seriously. This has essentially become their job.
Were was this criticism when some guy's personal phone calls were broadcasted and dissected? When Gawker was buying people's sex tapes? And not months ago, although then too, last week[1].
This is the world you created. Enjoy.
EDIT: And if you're downvoting, I'd love to hear why.
One can hope that once it happens a few times, journalists will maybe rediscover the basic ethics of their profession. Right now, they simply seem to demand a monopoly on digging for dirt.
Because the guiding committee can decide to call a vote and stop all discussion about the subject. In this case, he thought that 3 days of debate over a decision was not enough, but that's what the committee called for. Joey had some ideas he wanted to present before the vote, but the way the committee acted prevented him from presenting his opinion.
I believe it's about referring technical decisions in subgroups to project-wide political votes (general resolutions = GR).
I can see why trying to keep everything as a pure technical meritocracy is appealing, but I don't think it's realistic. Libre software is inherently political.
And yet, its only happened basically once in 20 years, due to a project wide coup lead by the desktop environment people basically taking over the distro.
I don't want to leave the mistaken impression that every time someone does a git commit to debian-policy or lintian that a GR is auto-proposed. Virtually all historical changes to Policy or TC "cabal" decisions have been extremely calm and compared to the recent coup. Debian minus systemd is pretty calm and well behaved. If anything, cracks are forming because its such an earthquake compared to all previous debate and discussion.
If you're just starting out and don't have a feel for the mobile paradigm, those gestures may as well be magic. Maybe you're simply not supposed to refresh anything by hand any more. Maybe it's supposed to be magic.