Oh I love these! It just reminded me of a small project I had in which I was creating experimental watchfaces using SVGs and JavaScript, this is before the AI boom so I made all of these by hand and, although there's nothing impressive here, I'm proud of them as a designer who learned basic code by myself.
> If you doubt this, ask yourself the work of which contemporary novelist, poet, composer, or painter you are eagerly awaiting. I’ll pause here a moment while you fail to find any.
I don't want to use the term "gatekeeping" here, but this type of posture on a topic as subjective as personal preferences is quite odd. While the author thinks they're "making a pause while you fail to find any", I'm here coming up with examples of contemporary creators that I can't wait for them to release their new stuff. (In painting, writing, and cinema).
I don't consider we're in a "low state" as described, but I think we may be coming at this from different definitions about what low state means.
> "America's global brain drain might have been the single most effective strategy"
The website has a section titled "Bring your AI Skills to the U.S.", and then a button with this label "Learn about pathways to work in the U.S.".
This is very encouraging. And it reminded me of Eric Schmidt's recommendation on this topic [1], which was published on the final report of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence:
Chapter 10. Page 178:
"Nations that can successfully attract and retain highly skilled individuals gain strategic and economic advantages over competitors." [...] "Unfortunately, international students in the United States are increasingly choosing to study in other countries or return home. One reason is the growing backlog of green card petitions. Indian immigrants face a particularly long wait. Many will spend decades on constrictive work visas waiting to receive their green cards, hindering both the technology sector’s ability to recruit talent and Indian immigrants’ quality of life."
The report recommends to focus on building better Immigration Policies. Maybe this .gov initiative listened to the advice from the report.
TL;DR: One blog post I wrote had a big impact on me getting a job opportunity in the US.
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I grew up and lived in México most of my life.
Back in 2014 I was a consultant working in Accenture México. One weekend I wrote a UX analysis of the "Settings" screen in mobile platforms, and I posted it on my personal site. (Long lost, but reposted [here](https://72mena.com/the-ux-of-mobile-settings/)).
I don't know how it happened, but after a few weeks of no traction, it suddenly got a ton of traffic and my site went down.
One year later I was interviewing for a contractor role that required relocation to the US. My last interviewer (and decision maker) mentioned to me something along these lines: "hey, I saw your name and it reminded me about your "UX of Mobile Settings" article, I remember reading it and I liked a lot the analysis you did."
I suspect this article (with all its flaws and broken English) had a big impact on me getting the UX position I was applying for, which made me relocate to the US.
From an engineering perspective, the entire project is genuinely useful:
It serves as a fantastic example of applied ingenuity. It's inspiring in fun ways, especially for the younger audience. It shows the value of prototyping, craftsmanship, DIY skills, and not taking things too seriously (key for trying new things).
Not to make this sound too grandiose, but I'm confident some children watching this guy will become engineers because they were inspired to build stuff. It is educational, and thinking "I'd love to see him put this much effort into something genuinely useful" seems to be missing the point on how useful this type of content is.
Question related to this:
Is there a tool out there that let's you spin a Medium-like text editor for your personal site? Curious to hear about HN's recommendation about whether a tool like this exists or if someone has considered building one.
> Once they figure out how to animate this stuff, it puts the movie industry out of business.
I'm also intrigued about the potential of AI-generated animation.
However, I don't think the industry would be "out of business", but rather they would simply evolve into a new phase. The established movie industry will most likely have access to the most expensive and performant AI models to make short and long form animations, which would be time and cost prohibiting for hobbyists.
I like how this rule sounds, but am wondering whether you live in a high-cost area or not. Having two incomes at the level of the fast-food industry seems somewhat limiting, but this depends on where you live and how frugal you are.
In other comments I'm also noticing that having a mortgage is part of the need to stay in a high-paying job, so maybe renting can alleviate some of that pressure and be more flexible to adjust to live below your means?
Question about your last statement (I may need this clarification because English is not my first language). The statement might mean that he makes 10x more money than you, or that his output is 10x greater than yours (or both!). Based on the context of your reply, I think it means his output is 10x greater than yours. Is that correct?
If someone has experience with Game Development I'd like to know your comments on the timeline from the last page. The pitch mentions 1 developer and 2 junior-devs, and the timeline shows 11 months of work (4 of those are for testing).
How does that timeline compare to current processes? Any other insights that can be shared from it?
Thanks.
I found this course to be very helpful, it has a good balance of reading material and labs to apply what you learn. The course is from the Austin’s Department of Statistics and Data Sciences.
Note: In this course, Dr. Michael J. Mahometa uses R. But I'd recommend you not to focus on R vs Python debates; the goal of this course is to learn about Statistics & Data Analysis in real-world scenarios. With that in mind, even just going through the reading material and lecture videos will be valuable enough if you're starting from scratch (but I'd recommend you to take the extra step and complete the Labs too).
I asked something similar when AirBnb announced Lottie, and the team (Jon Gold included) replied with great insights.
I hope you find this helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13547053
> people have come to associate the circle head with masculinity, and because of this association, we felt that it was important to explore alternate head shapes. […] As a result of these iterations, we ended with a more gender-balanced figure. We chose grays because they feel temporary, generic, and universal.
This approach reminds me of the Greendale mascot, the "Human Being”.[1] The egg was better imo, it treated identity in a more light, not-so-serious manner; no need to think of genders, and you could even see it as a symbol of possibilities waiting to happen.
buba447, therealsalih, jongold:
Thank you for taking the time for the detailed answers. The workflow and the mindset from your teams sounds inspiring.
I've been trying to create something like this but on a much smaller scale within my team, however, most of the time the challenge ends up being intimidating for designers, even experienced ones.
I'm sure the openness of Airbnb also helps to recruit top talent!
Good luck, and thanks for sharing, it's inspiring for the ones of us with the ambition of designing the future tools designers will use.
My questions may be off-topic (maybe more fit for an AMA with the design/engineering Airbnb team).
First of all, thank you for making this an open-source project.
I've noticed Airbnb has been very open with the design community about the internal processes and tools, whereas most companies keep their employees under NDAs. So my 2 questions are:
1. Did your team have to advocate for budget to create these tools, to write blog posts and to share them for free, or did Airbnb already had a plan to support this kind of research? How does this "make sense" for the typical budget-oriented PMs?
2. Did your team approach Adobe to see if they were already working on a tool like this? How does the initial planning go for these kind of projects?
Lottie looks super interesting, but the first questions that pop up in my mind are all about the planning and research behind such amazing (side?)projects and the people behind them.
"Now that I've got the degree, I'm in much better shape to pursue further learning on my own."
Could you explain a bit more what do you mean with this statement? Is it that you feel better prepared to study advanced topics (like advanced ML/Data Science) or was the degree a requirement for something else you wanted to pursue?
I'm curious about what other "doors" having this degree opens, other than the bump in salary mentioned by others.