I have almost the same problem. With Poetry, I managed to work around it using this technique, involving a combination of groups and extras: https://github.com/lucaspar/poetry-torch
It's a hacky workaround, but it seems to work so far. It would be much nicer to see this solved in a better way, though!
> I currently hold a position in an academic lab, where we blend design, research and engineering to study social sciences-related question within large data sets.
I strongly agree. Nonetheless, many places aspire to be a second Silicon Valley, and it's certainly worthwhile pointing out how close or far away they are from that goal. In particular, those behind Station F probably want their project to develop in a SF/US-like direction.
It would be interesting to see if there can be a third way - an attractive location for startups with a culture that is open to entrepreneurship without being overly obsessed with quick unicorn money and without being entirely dominated by startups and VCs?
However, as long as you are not directly affected by any of those, e.g. you are not LBGTQ, you might consider staying to defend LGBTQ rights and thereby have a more meaningful impact. Even if you're not a politician, voting, educating your children and talking to friends and coworkers can have a significant impact.
What ethnicities/races are you talking about here in particular?
I suppose African-Americans will probably experience less animosity in Japan than in the US. But I think the ones subject to severe racism in Japan are rather other Asians, such as Chinese or Koreans.
Japan is a very ethnically homogenous country with almost zero immigration, and it is my understanding that that is due to the fact that foreigners are not very well accepted. Since people of different races hence represent almost negligible parts of the Japanese populace, you might consider it less of a problem than in the US, where racisms exists between citizens of the same state.
Disclaimer: I've never been to Japan, please correct me if I have the wrong impression.
> I'd add that though we've adapted to the look of a cursor, the designer in me cringes at the thought of outlined text (though I'm willing to allow that there are probably applications of this that work elegantly; I just can't picture any).
Outlined text is quite common in videos (e.g. for subtitles or credits). The outline doesn't disturb at all if done properly — it doesn't have to be thick, a subtle shadow will usually suffice.
That's strange — I've always had the impression that the battery usage of GPS was the main obstacle for location tracking services, so that any way to sidestep expensive polling would be a greatly welcomed remedy. I can't imagine that this would be technically impossible.
I haven't used G+' location features a lot so far, but if they are anything like Facebook's, they certainly don't replace Latitude. This comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6019298) seems to affirm this.
I hope this will give rise to some replacement services; Latitude was actually pretty useful. I'm still wondering why they didn't implement "asking" for locations via push? That would save a lot of battery compared to updating in intervals and would be a lot more accurate.
Text in a carousel is a no-go; pausing when hovering is a neat idea, but not possible on touch screens, nor easily discoverable by the average user. Even if the timing is long enough, I still feel stressed out by the fact that I know the text could be dragged out of my sight any time, which stresses me out so much that I can't concentrate at all on the content.
The second terrible mistake is using page indicator dots (which do a good job of indicating the page) for navigation, let alone using them as the only means of navigation!
When you take into account these two things, a carousel can actually become comfortable to use and may no longer enrage its users. But that's still a far cry from being better than showing the content in a regular list:
> I've used them and my clients and the customers of those clients were happy with them.
What do you mean with "happy"? Did the customers actually understand how to use the carousel, did they discover its content, did they click on it? Not being annoying does not suffice to qualify as useful.
Why wouldn't it be safe? Nuclear bombs don't just explode by accident or when they are hit by something, they need to be deliberately triggered, so I wouldn't estimate the danger of this to be very big.
Furthermore, nuclear weapons have been sent to space before, both for regular long-range missiles and for EMP-like tests.
The "gaining real traction" part is exactly the issue. Of course, we'd all love our governments to force everyone to learn Dvorak or something similar, but usually, no authority worries about our keyboard layouts, and people just use what others use.
How is that? Somebody who doesn't know how to touch type is usually having a pretty hard time locating the keys on a QWERTY keyboard. Tactile typing (I just made that name up) doesn't require exact knowledge of the key placement as you need it when touch typing, but you still need some kind of muscle memory if you want to achieve a reasonable speed.
"Someone smarter than you" perhaps is a bit too bold of a statement, but generally, it is true that using available code should usually be preferred over writing one's own code. It allows you to focus on your main task and spend less time implementing helper functions that someone with more time (I guess that's a better expression than "someone smarter") has already optimized.
Sure, but that will require users to get used to a different layout. Dvorak (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard) does this. It isn't very popular though, as it's few people want to spend time relearning how to touch type.
I just skimmed through the project description, but it seems like they're hiring a developer and don't code it themselves. If you're hiring somebody to build this with great attention to details, I can imagine those 100k being quite reasonable. Consider internationalisation as well (perhaps not for Chinese, but to different languages with Latin writing).
It's a hacky workaround, but it seems to work so far. It would be much nicer to see this solved in a better way, though!