2,028 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2020
    1. JSON parsing is always pain in ass. If the input is not as expected it throws an error and crashes what you are doing. You can use the following tiny function to safely parse your input. It always turns an object even if the input is not valid or is already an object which is better for most cases.

      It would be nicer if the parse method provided an option to do it safely and always fall back to returning an object instead of raising exception if it couldn't parse the input.

    1. DESIGN is the creation of a plan to build an object, system, or human interaction. DIVERSITY is quantitative. It’s the composition of different people represented in what you make, and the decision makers on your team. INCLUSION speaks to the quality of the experience you’ve designed for these diverse folks, so they experience themselves as leaders and decision makers. EQUITY lives in how we design our systems and processes; the way we work, and who we work with, so we are upholding our commitment to diversity and inclusion. FRAMEWORKS are the basic structures that enable complex systems to function. MISREPRESENTED COMMUNITIES are communities that have been defined by dominant culture, denied the ability to define themselves on their own terms, and are therefore falsely or narrowly represented. We use this instead of “underrepresented” or “marginalized,” because those identifiers again center the POV of dominant culture.

      I love these definitions and want to remember them

  2. Jun 2020
    1. News can no longer be (only) about the mass update. Stories need to be targeted to those who might be able to improve the situation. And journalism’s products — which are more than its stories — must be designed to facilitate this. News needs to be built to engage curiosity about the world and the problems in it — and their solutions. People need to get lost in the news like they now get lost in Wikipedia and Facebook. There must be comprehensive stories that get the interested but uninformed up to speed quickly. Search and navigation must be improved to the point where satisfaction of curiosity is so easy it becomes a reflex. Destination news sites need to be more extensively hyperlinked than almost anything else (and not just insincere internal links for SEO, but links that are actually useful for the user.) The news experience needs to become intensely personal. It must be easy for users to find and follow exactly their interests, no matter how arcane. Journalists need to get proficient at finding and engaging the audience for each story. And all of this has to work across all modes of delivery, so it’s always with us. Marketers understand this; it’s amazing to me that the news industry has been so slow to catch on to multi-modal engagement.

      everything would work perfectly if we had all of these and people are actually rational and diligent with infinite resource.

    1. you could say the same thing about a lot of new productivity apps as well - they’re trying to capture something intangible about the way we work, collaborate, share and organise. Now that we’re all locked down, half the software engineers on earth are sitting at their computers swearing at their tools and thinking of new ways to collaborate, with video, text, voice, screen sharing, or something else again, and with synchronous or asynchronous models, or something else. But the interesting ones here aren’t just ‘video’, or ‘screen sharing’ or ‘notes’ - they’re bets on how to present that differently, and to work differently. They’re bets on psychology and on how people might feel about working that way.
    1. For me the best part of Upcoming was being able to see what events my friends are going to. With their redesign, Upcoming decided to hide that behind two clicks. Now when you go to the site, I see whats popular in San Francisco, but I have to click to see what my friends are upto. Even on an events page, I can no longer easily see if any of my friends are going there. Instead I am shown the groups and tags. But I have to click to see who is attending.

      tiny changes to the UX. not understanding the JTBD of your product

    1. I kind of wish there was an HN like job site that was widely used in corporate America but didn’t have all the ‘content’. Just an online resume

      wondering what's the original purpose of adding the news feed to LI, the product decision.

      lack of understanding I think. to drive "engagements" and keep eyeballs? what's the incentives and how do they relate to LI's biz model?

    1. However, a ActiveRecord::Rollback within the nested transaction will be caught by the block of the nested transaction, but will be ignored by the outer transaction, and not cause a roll back! To avoid this unexpected behaviour, you have to explicitly tell rails for each transaction to indeed use proper nesting: CopyActiveRecord::Base.transaction(joinable: false, requires_new: true) do # inner code end This is a safer default for working with custom transactions.
    1. Note that we are not making the common argument that making new tools can lead to new subject matter insights for the toolmaker, and vice versa. This is correct, but is much weaker than what we are saying. Rather: making new tools can lead to new subject matter insights for humanity as a whole (i.e., significant original research insights), and vice versa, and this would ideally be a rapidly-turning loop to develop the most transformative tools.
  3. May 2020
    1. Also, with more design styles and choices, many websites opt to not use an underlining style for an embedded link in text, nor will they use a traditional blue color to indicate an embedded link.

      Fortunately Google's ranking algorithm penalizes against this in addition to requirements for better online accessibility that help to encourage against these sorts of dark patterns of web design. Users still need to be aware that they exist however.

    1. Don’t go to code academy, go to design academy. Be advocates of the user & consumer. It’s not about learning how to code, it’s about translating real-world needs to technological specifications in just ways that give end users agency and equity in design, development and delivery. Be a champion of user-centric design. Learn how to steward data and offer your help.

      The importance of learning to design, and interpreting/translating real-world needs.

    1. the i18n object with all the strings

      They don't require supplying all keys for other objects that can be overridden, such as banner: the default value is used for whatever keys are not provided within the banner object. In other words, values are merged, with the supplied values overriding the defaults. The i18n object should work the same way. Often you only need/want to override a couple phrases/translations, not all of them.

      See: https://www.iubenda.com/en/help/1205-how-to-configure-your-cookie-solution-advanced-guide

    1. calls for cities to focus on health in their planning have been growing. “For the resilient, sustainable cities we all want and need, urban plans need to be designed, evaluated and approved using a health lens,”
    1. Suppose someone with a lot of clout in your organisation makes a decision, but that decision conflicts with your organisations’s design principles. Instead of having an opinion-based argument about who’s right or wrong, the previously agreed-upon design principles allow you to take ego out of the equation.
    2. I like design principles that can be formulated as: X, even over Y. It’s not saying that Y is unimportant, just that X is more important: Usability, even over profitability. Or: Profitability, even over usability. Design principles formulated this way help to crystalise priorities.
    1. I dismissed the idea, though, because I thought that cloning even part of a repository with git-svn required scanning every commit in the entire repository, in order to build the local history. With almost 1.5 million commits in the plugin repository, that would take roughly 4 hours to clone a plugin.
    1. “As I enter the office floor, I see my colleagues, wave to them, and find myself a desk. I overhear some guys talking about an old client of mine. I give them some tips on how I used to handle this client, but I really don’t have time to chitchat. My new client will arrive in an hour; a key account and we cannot afford to lose him. I’m damn nervous and I need to prepare. So, I pick up my laptop and move into one of the available quiet rooms. I close the door and start working.” This straightforward story explains the advantages of the open office, as well as the users’ fears of not being able to concentrate, and the potential business implications of distracted workers. And the story provides a possible design solution (creating ‘quiet rooms’), which proved to be valuable input in the design process (they got their quiet rooms).

      Example of an effective and authentic narrative.

    1. Scientist's Guide to Poster Presentations, by Peter J. Gosling; Preparing Scientific Illustrations: A Guide to Better Posters, Presentations, and Publications, by Mary Helen Briscoe; Displaying Your Findings: A Practical Guide for Presenting Figures, Posters, and Presentations, by Adelheid A. M. Nicol, et.al.
  4. Apr 2020
    1. One thing is certain when it comes to navigation trends, users and designers seem to be fed up with completely hidden styles and demand options that work in similar formats on desktops and mobile devices. This might be one of the reasons a vertical pattern is trending.
    1. A top navigation conserves more vertical page space than a left navigation. With a left navigation, the navigation links occupy the left column of your page. This shrinks and narrows the content area of your page, which means you will have less space for your content. A top navigation, however, uses minimal vertical space, which allows you to occupy the content area of your page with content only.
    1. Privacy is at the heart of our design: Your usernames and passwords are incredibly sensitive. We designed Password Checkup with privacy-preserving technologies to never reveal this personal information to Google. We also designed Password Checkup to prevent an attacker from abusing Password Checkup to reveal unsafe usernames and passwords. Finally, all statistics reported by the extension are anonymous. These metrics include the number of lookups that surface an unsafe credential, whether an alert leads to a password change, and the web domain involved for improving site compatibility.
  5. Mar 2020
    1. I discuss the flaws of this in regards to spreadsheets in Spreadsheets Are Sabotaging Your Business. In brief, when people inevitably started using the more complex formulas available, they unknowingly broke the fundamental design concept of paper spreadsheets: that humans can understand what’s happening between the cells.
    1. In contrast to the previous studies, for the switch dilemma,consequentialist agents were rated to be no less moral (Z0.73,p.47,d0.10) or trustworthy (Z1.87,p.06,d0.26)than deontological agents.

      To me, this seems to weigh against their main claim. In the one case in which a majority favored the consequentialist choice, the consequentialists are not disfavored! They are really playing this down. Am I missing something?

    2. The amount of moneyparticipants transferred to the agent (from $0.00 to $0.30) was usedas an indicator of trustworthiness, as was how much money theybelieved they would receive back from the agent (0% to 100%)

      Note that this is a very small stake. (And was it even perhaps hypothetical?)

    1. For several reasons the Simple backend shipped with Active Support only does the "simplest thing that could possibly work" for Ruby on Rails3 ... which means that it is only guaranteed to work for English and, as a side effect, languages that are very similar to English. Also, the simple backend is only capable of reading translations but cannot dynamically store them to any format.That does not mean you're stuck with these limitations, though. The Ruby I18n gem makes it very easy to exchange the Simple backend implementation with something else that fits better for your needs, by passing a backend instance to the I18n.backend= setter.
    1. Layouts uses the Bootstrap framework, so everything you build with it is responsive. Sites that you build with Layouts display great on desktops, tablets and phones. The Bootstrap grid will shift and adjust automatically according to the screen size. Layouts gives you additional control over the exact appearance in every width. You can manually select how the grid will appear, to get perfect positioning on every device. You can even completely hide parts of the page if you don’t want them to appear on narrow screens.

      Good illustration

  6. Feb 2020
    1. Specifically, instructors should seek to minimize extraneous cognitive load and should consider the intrinsic cognitive load of the subject when constructing learn-ing experiences, carefully structuring them when the material has high intrinsic load.

      Break those chapters into smaller 3 to 5 day assignments. Tie the video presentations to each assignment.

  7. Jan 2020
    1. Standard fare. User joins to other things like author profiles too, but those aren’t relevant here.

      Interesting layout/design: 2 columns with commentary on right column. Don't see this often, but it can certainly work well.

      Also like the horizontal lines.

      Shame this site is no longer around.

    1. with the Flickr architecture each shard would need to be updated or searched (or a search service would need to be created to collate that metadata—which is in fact what they do).

      Search service for collating data spread out in shards.

    2. Deconstructing a system into a set of complementary services decouples the operation of those pieces from one another. This abstraction helps establish clear relationships between the service, its underlying environment, and the consumers of that service. Creating these clear delineations can help isolate problems, but also allows each piece to scale independently of one another. This sort of service-oriented design for systems is very similar to object-oriented design for programming.

      Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA)

    1. ssh doesn't let you specify a command precisely, as you have done, as a series of arguments to be passed to execvp on the remote host. Instead it concatenates all the arguments into a string and runs them through a remote shell. This stands out as a major design flaw in ssh in my opinion... it's a well-behaved unix tool in most ways, but when it comes time to specify a command it chose to use a single monolithic string instead of an argv, like it was designed for MSDOS or something!
    1. How To Make Thousands of Gold In Guild Wars 2 - Guide & Advice From The MMOs Richest Player [2019]

      29.20 / It all comes down to trust. (ingame-otc desk instead of using game's own marketplace.)

      Trading posts between servers.

      Merchant Guilds with grand-bazaar like reputation tracking.

      GW2 economy design decisions necessitates the formation of guilds / trading communities.

      Bypassing tax of "Trading Post" via P2P bartering.

      Reddit exchange.

      Only reputation metric is your trading history in that specific subreddit. Use people with high reputation as escrow.

      No middle-class in GW2. Rich records 2 hours long podcast for more players to make money.

      Achievement system integrates with how fast you make gold and progress on other parts of the game. Golden idea to be included into social economy design!

      "Do x,y,z like "recycle 1 ton of plastic" - earn "plastic recycler badge and get a %0.02 reduction on your bills." This can also get out of hand quickly, slippery slope. Still, implemented responsibly, can work wonders for a society.

      We want money to flow through people and make it flow through your community first.

      Sell to your community first. Then use global trade post as plan B.

      When we changed the way we trade, the nature of gold in game changed. We were prioritizing materials, not gold. Resources became money, a multi-currency economy.

      Community became tighter, engagement increased, people socialized more and started to enjoy the game more. Middle-class emerged!

      Players learn how to achieve goals. Make money just playing the game.

      "Trade post guilds" changed the whole game.

      Peg the spirit shards value to play time value, all of a sudden everything matters (in the game)

      Economical decisions in this game forces people to cooperate if you want to achieve a goal.

      Maps (levels) are designed in a specific way, you are expected to flow through the entrance to exit and earn map currency.

    1. le numérique permet l’optimisation des flux et des ressources, rassemble des compétences, orchestre le dialogue et les échanges. Lien entre les différentes composantes de la ville, le numérique crée désormais des ponts entre les environnements tangibles et virtuels. Dès lors, cette ville « augmentée » rythmée par les connexions et la mobilité, offre de nouvelles opportunités pour le design dans la conception de services et la création de nouvelles expériences pour les citadins.

      esquisse du rôle du numérique dans la nos manières de penser l'urbanisme

  8. Dec 2019
  9. plaintext-productivity.net plaintext-productivity.net
    1. Avoiding complicated outlining or mind-mapping software saves a bunch of mouse clicks or dreaming up complicated visualizations (it helps if you are a linear thinker).

      Hmm. I'm not sure I agree with this thought/sentiment (though it's hard to tell since it's an incomplete sentence). I think visualizations and mind-mapping software might be an even better way to go, in terms of efficiency of editing (since they are specialized for the task), enjoyment of use, etc.

      The main thing text files have going for them is flexibility, portability, client-neutrality, the ability to get started right now without researching and evaluating a zillion competing GUI app alternatives.

    1. Directly on the Switch: Some third-party games including Fortnite and Overwatch don’t need a separate app. You just connect a standard headset to the single 3.5 mm audio jack on your Switch and chat without the app, just like a smartphone. Again, Nintendo’s own games won’t work with this.

      This seems like the obvious solution. Why would Nintendo make you get a separate app on a separate platform (Android) when they could just let you chat directly via the Switch device like these games do?

    1. There are thousands of to-do list apps out there, in part because no system works perfectly for everyone. I’m not going to say todo.txt is the exception, and that it will work for everyone, because that would be crazy. But todo.txt is the most flexible tool I’ve come across. In part, this is because of the sheer number of clients available, but also because the simplicity lends itself to improvisation.

      First time I've seen improvisation used like this.

    1. We have pulled together some resources to help you plan the "flow" of your activities as they alternate between online and face-to-face sessions. This is arguably the most difficult aspect of designing hybrid/blended courses. We are happy to sit down with you and walk through the material below or feel free to peruse these resources on your own and let us know if you have any questions.

      Blended learning course design toolkit from Seattle University

  10. blendedtoolkit.wisc.edu blendedtoolkit.wisc.edu
    1. The Blended Learning Toolkit – created by Blended Learning Fellowship participants – helps instructors new to blended learning develop the necessary skills to create a successful and engaging blended course. The key to this success is planning and good design.  The resources below are organized around the four phases of course creation: design, develop, deliver, and evaluate. They have been created to help those new to the idea of blended learning become oriented to ideas and concepts related to blended learning and to guide them to helpful programming.

      University of Wisconsin Blended Learning Toolkit

    1. It is designed to protect only system files and settings. User files such as documents, pictures and music are excluded. This ensures that your files remains unchanged when you restore your system to an earlier date.
    1. In a nutshell, the King's Keys deck started as an experiment to see what card games would be like if you rebuilt playing cards from the ground up. Instead of using ranks and suits, each card has a number (from one to four), one of four items, and one of four colors. The result is what I call a 4x4x4 deck where 64 playing cards each have a unique combination of these three parts.
    1. Arguably, the rails-team's choice of raising ArgumentError instead of validation error is correct in the sense that we have full control over what options a user can select from a radio buttons group, or can select over a select field, so if a programmer happens to add a new radio button that has a typo for its value, then it is good to raise an error as it is an application error, and not a user error. However, for APIs, this will not work because we do not have any control anymore on what values get sent to the server.
  11. Nov 2019
    1. Training and Development Policy Wiki

      This webpage, under the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) .gov site, provides an extensive list of technology resources that can be and have been implemented into a variety of employee deveolpment programs. These tools allow for more personalized learning, active participation, collaboration, and communication.In the first section of the site, examples of Web 2.0 tools are listed that can promote collaboration and constructive learning. You can also find technologies that are used in specific sectors, such as the Federal Government and the Private Sector. Clicking on the links redirects you to additional resources on the tech tools, including how to use them effectively and professionally for employee training. Rating 10/10

    1. 1Engaging Adults Learners with TechnologyThrough

      Instruction Librarians from the Twin Cities Campus Library created this instructional gudie as a workshop for implementing technology for adult learning. First, the authors describe key characteristics of adult learners as identified in the theory of andragogy. Examples of these characteristics include the need to know, learner responsibility, past experiences, and motivation to learn. The authors then suggest instructional practices and activities to meet the needs of adult learners, Finally, they provide examples of technology tools for effectively engaging adult learners. Rating 10/10

    1. Epiphany aims to present the simplest interface possible for a browser. Simple does not necessarily mean less-powerful. The commonly-used browsers of today are too big, buggy, and bloated. Epiphany is a small browser designed for the web: not for mail, newsgroups, file management, instant messaging, or coffeemaking. The UNIX philosophy is to design small tools that do one thing and do it well.
    1. REST and GraphQL are wonderful tools to create an API that is meant to be consumed by third parties. Facebook's API, for example, is consumed by ~200k third parties. It is no surprise that Facebook is using (and invented) GraphQL; a GraphQL API enables third parties to extensively access Facebook's social graph enabling them to build all kinds of applications. For an API with that many consumers, GraphQL is the fitting tool. But, to create an internal API (an API developed and consumed by code written by the same organization), RPC offers a simpler and more powerful alternative. Large companies, such as Netflix, Google and Facebook, are starting to replace REST/GraphQL with RPC for their internal APIs. Most notably with gRPC which is getting popular in the industry.
    1. Il apportait les soins les plus exquis aux enduits qu’il faisait passer sur les murs de simple pierre.

      Le design, comme l’architecture, relève d’une réflexion totale (notamment heuristique), constante et rigoureuse sur l'objet dans son environnement, autant dans sa réalisation que dans sa planification.

      Elle implique de nombreux cycles d'aller-retour (travail de perfectionnement – le terme est un peu mal choisi, puisqu'on ne vise pas la perfection, mais un projet fini).

  12. www-chronicle-com.libproxy.nau.edu www-chronicle-com.libproxy.nau.edu
    1. Technology

      This website explores technology news within the field of higher education. The site contains a wide variety of news articles on current issues, trends, and research surrounding the integration of technology in universities and colleges. This includes technology's prevalence in teaching and learning, institutional decisions, and societal trends of higher education. The articles are published by authors for "The Chronicle of Higher Education," a leading newspaper and website for higher education journalism. Rating: 7/10

  13. learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.s3.amazonaws.com learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.s3.amazonaws.com
  14. developer.mozilla.org developer.mozilla.org
    1. As educational technologies, instructional design and online learning/content delivery platforms keep evolving, more learners with more needs and motives will be drawn to taking online courses – a growing demand that in turn will spur further improvements in technology and delivery.

      Educational Technology offers free articles with sources.

      Rating: 5/10

    1. Problem-based learning (PBL) in a growing trend in approaching adult learning, particularly in ESL/ELL classrooms. In this text, the basic principles and methods of PBL for ELL/ESL classes are covered for instructors to implement. Key aspects of PBL include relevance to student lives and the opportunity to practice English in a heterogenous group with the end goal being application to another area of life. Multiple resources are helpful for implementation of PBL including technology. A review of the benefits of PBL is summarized as well as drawbacks with embedded suggestions to resolve possible difficulties. Rating: 8/10

    1. In this text, authors Kit Kacirek and Michael Miller explore adult learning for mature adults, or those identified as senior citizens. Research into mature adult learning programs centered around leisure activities, reveals situational pedagogy in which some traditional adult learning theory may need to be adapted to suit the cognitive changes in adults with advanced age. A brief description of the research methods reveals that adults in advanced age prefer lecture, use of media, and field trips. The implications for such a study are useful as the population of mature adults grows due to advancements in medicine and thus the demand for learning opportunities increases as well.

    1. Section 508 compliance is discussed to support instructors knowledge of section 508 and how to begin the process of ensuring instructional content is 508 compliant. Section 508 of the federal Rehabilitation Act governs access of media to all persons whether they have a disability or not. Including captions, audio description, and accessible video players are vital to compliance. Compliance with 508 is necessary given that data that illustrates the percent of employees that have need for accommodations to support their learning. This brief article seems highly related to Universal Design of Learning. Rating: 10/10

    1. The Northwest Center of Public Health Practice's toolkit title "Effective Adult Learning: A toolkit for teaching adults," is . a highly comprehensive resource for instructional design for adult learning instructors. Sections include course or training design, objectives of adult learning, various tools to help in the process of course design, and brief overviews of adult learning methods and theory. The embedded section review charts make it easier for quick references. Rating: 10/10