Well, those few needed tweaks never stop piling up. On top of that, UX research and (more importantly) user expectations continue to evolve.
What research? Which users? "Users" aren't a monolithic group, you know. Slashdot attracts a very different crowd from, say, espn.com.
And "UX" is a stupid buzzword. When I go to a website--any website--I'm not looking for an "experience." I'm looking for something that loads quickly, renders readably, and provides the functionality I expect.
To keep up with that, websites either need to constantly change in small increments, or to do it in big chunks.
Or not change at all. That's an option. It really is.
The classic design in 2014? Not too bad. The classic design in 2018? Probably not going to cut it.
It's been "cutting it" for fifteen years, more or less; it's certainly changed some during that time, but it's still recognizably the same site. Why shouldn't it be good for (at least) another four?
In another post, you wrote:
For example, fire up the Wayback Machine and look at some popular sites from a decade ago. Many of them look radically different. Can you honestly say they wouldn't look out of place alongside modern sites? If you were browsing through modern news sites and you stumbled across this, would it not give you pause? At some point, your website just looks old and unmaintained -- that's why virtually every major website updates their design.
That BBC page isn't bad. Not great, but at least as good as the current one. And really, a decade ago was when the web was at its best. The browser wars were over, and it was reasonably easy to code a standards-compliant page that rendered well in the major browsers of the day. Sites offered all the functionality you expected, and still managed to load quickly even when a lot of people were still on dial-up (often faster than they do now over DSL and cable).
And for the most part, they looked great! I was a regular Salon reader in those days; please don't try to tell me that the current crapflood looks better. Yahoo was still a useful web index in those days, as opposed to... whatever it's supposed to be now.Google News was attractive, fast, well-organized and information-rich; it's still not bad, but it's definitely not as useful as it once was. And you know, there was this really nifty technology news site that I absolutely loved; there's still something at that URL, but it looks like the domain might have been hijacked or something.
Apparently the only responses you consider "reasonable" are the tiny minority supporting the beta. Okay, now we know unequivocally what the terms of the "discussion" are.
Normally I'd consider this a real dick move. But under the circumstances, I think it's perfectly natural for Turkey to want to defend itself against Slashdot Beta. The rest of the internet is just collateral damage.
First of all, thanks for replying. It's nice to know that someone in the/. hierarchy is paying attention...
We've implemented a number of changes since the first October rollout in response to feedback. We'll be implementing more in response to today's feedback. I'm sorry we can't make all those changes instantaneously; our engineering team is small and flooded with work. But that's why the classic site is still available.
... or are you? Because seriously, I think it's pretty obvious from the feedback that the best thing to do would be to give the overworked engineering team some time off. As in, stop having them work on the beta. Because there is no way to fix the beta. The only change we want to see is the beta deleted forever.
I can't promise that the end result will be to your exact preference; a hundred different people will have a hundred different opinions on how the site should look.
Several thousand people--which is probably just about Slashdot's entire active user base at this point--have made their single opinion quite clear. Please stop pretending there's a debate about this.
But I can promise that we'll take all the feedback to heart.
Our current president is the most conservative president our country has ever had
Okay, I'm about as liberal as it gets, and I have to say this is a ridiculous statement. He's not even more conservative than his predecessor, to say nothing of serious conservatives like the unholy trinity of Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan.
That's EXACTLY how you get to a disaster -- you hire people who get off on coding and write throw-away crap "because it works." It works once. And, usually, only on your desktop.
Sure, one-off "because it works" coding is one way to get to a disaster. Another way is to spend so much time on "development methodology" as opposed to actual coding that you can't possibly produce a working application before the deadline. My bets are on the latter in this case.
On an unrelated note, your signature is unrelated to the argument it makes. Correlation is not causation. That's a truism. Correlation is correlation. The statement which actually says something is "correlation does not imply causation."
I'd have used the longer version except it wouldn't fit in Slashdot's.sig limit.;) Either way, I stand by my statement--both "correlation is not causation" and "correlation does not imply causation" are true, but if you use either as an argument, odds are very good you have no idea what you're talking about.
... I personally know several people, in several states that have not established their own exchanges, who have signed up for "Obamacare" using the federal site and are now taking advantage of much better coverage, at a much lower price, than they could have received before the ACA went into effect. The problems are real and clearly need to be fixed, but beware of confirmation bias--every single problem is going to get lots of press, while successes go unnoticed because they don't fit the "if it bleeds, it leads" paradigm.
We know a whole lot more about geology now than we knew about ecology when we started burning coal, and then oil, for fuel. Not to say it's not risk-free--no method of power generation is--but you can be reasonably sure that the people running the project have carefully estimated both the costs and benefits.
Er, yes it is. You can't just make this assertion and expect it to be accepted as fact. (Or rather you can, as the authors of TFA have done, but you shouldn't.) As things stand right now, humans can each produce two kidneys, one heart, one liver, and two lungs over their lifetimes. That's it. The supply is inelastic, and will remain so until we can produce artificial organs, at which point the donation argument becomes irrelevant anyway.
It seems to be a vicious cycle that every large American tech company goes through.
IBM and Microsoft in their heydays, sure. Who else? I don't recall serious calls for the breakup of, say, Oracle or Apple, however much people may complain (often quite justifiably) about some of their business practices.
A lot of people seem to have fixed on the notion that the prospect of immediate financial gain is the primary driver of innovation. These people are fools, but they're influential fools.
Of course, Kool Aid drinkers such as yourself will first have a problem with the link because of the site and completely ignore the linked material, a sign of a partisan and sophomoric imbecile. Once you finally do figure out it's a link to Nature, where one of the Holy Gods of the Church of Global Warming admits to the pause, you will start blathering about unsupported and unreviewed theories, completely reversing previous insistence on peer reviewed material only.
Then why don't you link to the actual Nature article, instead of Watts' cherry-picked sound bite? For that matter, why doesn't Watts link to it himself? The only real information in the Watts post is a graphic of the masthead showing the volume and issue, so it's reasonably easy to track down the article, which is open-access... but Watts is probably calculating, correctly, that most of his readers won't bother.
I can't help but wonder how many people with plenty of "curiosity, passion, hard work, and persistence bordering on obsession" we've never heard of. In other words, we don't actually know--and likely can't know--how likely people with these traits are to be remembered by the world as geniuses, and how many will be regarded by their families and friends as obsessive workaholics with lousy personal lives and utterly forgotten outside those circles.
What's a better term than "business logic" for that which should be kept separate from presentation? There's "game logic", but that too is domain-specific. "Application logic" perhaps?
Yes, I think "application logic" would be good. The problem with "business logic" is that it's domain-specific too; an awful lot of interesting algorithm development and implementation is taking place outside the realm of what would normally be considered business applications. Games are one example; scientific programming is another. In both cases, many of the principles that are useful in business programming can be usefully applied, but the purpose of the final application is very different.
Would someone still steal a car or shoplift if they knew they'd be executed if caught? Probably not as often...
Back when execution was a legal punishment for theft and public hangings were popular entertainment, pickpockets were known for circulating in the crowds.
The hypoxia research lab where I work has a USAF hypobaric chamber dating back to the early 1950s, still perfectly functional. So not quite that old, but pretty impressive when you think about it.
I know you're joking, but quite seriously: one liter of water weighs one kilogram. (This is no longer exact since the units have been more precisely defined, but it's close enough.) So if you know what a two-liter bottle of soda feels like, you know roughly what two kilos feel like. Figuring out what 48000 such bottles feels like might be a bit tougher, but at least it's a point of reference.
I should note that, contrary to the summary, Taleb is not properly a statistician--he's an economist
To be fair, economics has contributed a lot to the growth of statistics as a field of study. Due to various historical quirks, econometrics developed as almost a separate field from statistics for decades, and economists have often looked at statistical problems with a fresh eye, and had insights that people working in the mainstream of statistics and biostatistics might have missed. In my own work, biostatistics-flavored bioinformatics, I've often found myself referring to the econometric literature.
I have no idea if any of this applies to Taleb, though. Certainly TFA doesn't strike me as a particularly profound example of statistical reasoning...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, those few needed tweaks never stop piling up. On top of that, UX research and (more importantly) user expectations continue to evolve.
What research? Which users? "Users" aren't a monolithic group, you know. Slashdot attracts a very different crowd from, say, espn.com.
And "UX" is a stupid buzzword. When I go to a website--any website--I'm not looking for an "experience." I'm looking for something that loads quickly, renders readably, and provides the functionality I expect.
To keep up with that, websites either need to constantly change in small increments, or to do it in big chunks.
Or not change at all. That's an option. It really is.
The classic design in 2014? Not too bad. The classic design in 2018? Probably not going to cut it.
It's been "cutting it" for fifteen years, more or less; it's certainly changed some during that time, but it's still recognizably the same site. Why shouldn't it be good for (at least) another four?
In another post, you wrote:
For example, fire up the Wayback Machine and look at some popular sites from a decade ago. Many of them look radically different. Can you honestly say they wouldn't look out of place alongside modern sites? If you were browsing through modern news sites and you stumbled across this, would it not give you pause? At some point, your website just looks old and unmaintained -- that's why virtually every major website updates their design.
That BBC page isn't bad. Not great, but at least as good as the current one. And really, a decade ago was when the web was at its best. The browser wars were over, and it was reasonably easy to code a standards-compliant page that rendered well in the major browsers of the day. Sites offered all the functionality you expected, and still managed to load quickly even when a lot of people were still on dial-up (often faster than they do now over DSL and cable).
And for the most part, they looked great! I was a regular Salon reader in those days; please don't try to tell me that the current crapflood looks better. Yahoo was still a useful web index in those days, as opposed to ... whatever it's supposed to be now. Google News was attractive, fast, well-organized and information-rich; it's still not bad, but it's definitely not as useful as it once was. And you know, there was this really nifty technology news site that I absolutely loved; there's still something at that URL, but it looks like the domain might have been hijacked or something.
I wish I had a million mod points for this post. It really says everything that needs to be said, and says it beautifully.
Thanks for the reasonable response.
Apparently the only responses you consider "reasonable" are the tiny minority supporting the beta. Okay, now we know unequivocally what the terms of the "discussion" are.
The Taliban and al-Qaeda are desperately hoping that the software is written by the Slashdot Beta coding team.
Normally I'd consider this a real dick move. But under the circumstances, I think it's perfectly natural for Turkey to want to defend itself against Slashdot Beta. The rest of the internet is just collateral damage.
First of all, thanks for replying. It's nice to know that someone in the /. hierarchy is paying attention ...
We've implemented a number of changes since the first October rollout in response to feedback. We'll be implementing more in response to today's feedback. I'm sorry we can't make all those changes instantaneously; our engineering team is small and flooded with work. But that's why the classic site is still available.
... or are you? Because seriously, I think it's pretty obvious from the feedback that the best thing to do would be to give the overworked engineering team some time off. As in, stop having them work on the beta. Because there is no way to fix the beta. The only change we want to see is the beta deleted forever.
I can't promise that the end result will be to your exact preference; a hundred different people will have a hundred different opinions on how the site should look.
Several thousand people--which is probably just about Slashdot's entire active user base at this point--have made their single opinion quite clear. Please stop pretending there's a debate about this.
But I can promise that we'll take all the feedback to heart.
Uh-huh.
Our current president is the most conservative president our country has ever had
Okay, I'm about as liberal as it gets, and I have to say this is a ridiculous statement. He's not even more conservative than his predecessor, to say nothing of serious conservatives like the unholy trinity of Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan.
Nobody wants to have to lay off 15% of its employees
Massive layoffs from time to time are useful pour encourager les autres.
That's EXACTLY how you get to a disaster -- you hire people who get off on coding and write throw-away crap "because it works." It works once. And, usually, only on your desktop.
Sure, one-off "because it works" coding is one way to get to a disaster. Another way is to spend so much time on "development methodology" as opposed to actual coding that you can't possibly produce a working application before the deadline. My bets are on the latter in this case.
On an unrelated note, your signature is unrelated to the argument it makes. Correlation is not causation. That's a truism. Correlation is correlation. The statement which actually says something is "correlation does not imply causation."
I'd have used the longer version except it wouldn't fit in Slashdot's .sig limit. ;) Either way, I stand by my statement--both "correlation is not causation" and "correlation does not imply causation" are true, but if you use either as an argument, odds are very good you have no idea what you're talking about.
... I personally know several people, in several states that have not established their own exchanges, who have signed up for "Obamacare" using the federal site and are now taking advantage of much better coverage, at a much lower price, than they could have received before the ACA went into effect. The problems are real and clearly need to be fixed, but beware of confirmation bias--every single problem is going to get lots of press, while successes go unnoticed because they don't fit the "if it bleeds, it leads" paradigm.
Or instead, maybe they should have hired architects, engineers, and/or developers and not "coders" or "programmers".
No. They need more people who know how to do this.
We know a whole lot more about geology now than we knew about ecology when we started burning coal, and then oil, for fuel. Not to say it's not risk-free--no method of power generation is--but you can be reasonably sure that the people running the project have carefully estimated both the costs and benefits.
Common mineral. Common as dirt.
And yet, the primary industrial source of phosphorous is phosphate rock. Which has to mined. And of which we're running short.
Maybe you should consider that there's a reason for that?
Sponge Bath wins the internet for today.
Which isn't really in dispute.
Er, yes it is. You can't just make this assertion and expect it to be accepted as fact. (Or rather you can, as the authors of TFA have done, but you shouldn't.) As things stand right now, humans can each produce two kidneys, one heart, one liver, and two lungs over their lifetimes. That's it. The supply is inelastic, and will remain so until we can produce artificial organs, at which point the donation argument becomes irrelevant anyway.
It seems to be a vicious cycle that every large American tech company goes through.
IBM and Microsoft in their heydays, sure. Who else? I don't recall serious calls for the breakup of, say, Oracle or Apple, however much people may complain (often quite justifiably) about some of their business practices.
A lot of people seem to have fixed on the notion that the prospect of immediate financial gain is the primary driver of innovation. These people are fools, but they're influential fools.
Of course, Kool Aid drinkers such as yourself will first have a problem with the link because of the site and completely ignore the linked material, a sign of a partisan and sophomoric imbecile. Once you finally do figure out it's a link to Nature, where one of the Holy Gods of the Church of Global Warming admits to the pause, you will start blathering about unsupported and unreviewed theories, completely reversing previous insistence on peer reviewed material only.
Then why don't you link to the actual Nature article, instead of Watts' cherry-picked sound bite? For that matter, why doesn't Watts link to it himself? The only real information in the Watts post is a graphic of the masthead showing the volume and issue, so it's reasonably easy to track down the article, which is open-access ... but Watts is probably calculating, correctly, that most of his readers won't bother.
I can't help but wonder how many people with plenty of "curiosity, passion, hard work, and persistence bordering on obsession" we've never heard of. In other words, we don't actually know--and likely can't know--how likely people with these traits are to be remembered by the world as geniuses, and how many will be regarded by their families and friends as obsessive workaholics with lousy personal lives and utterly forgotten outside those circles.
What's a better term than "business logic" for that which should be kept separate from presentation? There's "game logic", but that too is domain-specific. "Application logic" perhaps?
Yes, I think "application logic" would be good. The problem with "business logic" is that it's domain-specific too; an awful lot of interesting algorithm development and implementation is taking place outside the realm of what would normally be considered business applications. Games are one example; scientific programming is another. In both cases, many of the principles that are useful in business programming can be usefully applied, but the purpose of the final application is very different.
Would someone still steal a car or shoplift if they knew they'd be executed if caught? Probably not as often...
Back when execution was a legal punishment for theft and public hangings were popular entertainment, pickpockets were known for circulating in the crowds.
"They laughed at me, you know, at the Institute. They called me mad!"
The hypoxia research lab where I work has a USAF hypobaric chamber dating back to the early 1950s, still perfectly functional. So not quite that old, but pretty impressive when you think about it.
I know you're joking, but quite seriously: one liter of water weighs one kilogram. (This is no longer exact since the units have been more precisely defined, but it's close enough.) So if you know what a two-liter bottle of soda feels like, you know roughly what two kilos feel like. Figuring out what 48000 such bottles feels like might be a bit tougher, but at least it's a point of reference.
I should note that, contrary to the summary, Taleb is not properly a statistician--he's an economist
To be fair, economics has contributed a lot to the growth of statistics as a field of study. Due to various historical quirks, econometrics developed as almost a separate field from statistics for decades, and economists have often looked at statistical problems with a fresh eye, and had insights that people working in the mainstream of statistics and biostatistics might have missed. In my own work, biostatistics-flavored bioinformatics, I've often found myself referring to the econometric literature.
I have no idea if any of this applies to Taleb, though. Certainly TFA doesn't strike me as a particularly profound example of statistical reasoning ...