On the one hand, there are lots of articles explaining that #000000 is not true black, and #ffffff is not true white.
On the other, there are lots of articles explaining that black on white will cause readers discomfort so recommend camouflaged light grey on dark grey, or vice versa, as better.
HN pussy foots enough. That pussy footing is what causes pent-up voting - its trend followers and "i agree/disagree with this"ers not having the gall to cast first vote.
Justifying this will make it even worse, as a wall of text will be needed before anyone does anything. Then you'll get downvoted by the trend followers citing the wall of text dissenter rather than thinking still.
Not saying that should appear as normal comments, hiding them by default would make them less attractive both for wall-of-texters and trend-followers but would still make people risk exposing their ignorance.
Everyone's answering about using it for coding and deep knowledge work.
But what about the opposite: all the other stuff that's surface? Today I had it fill out a calendar, to generate test data meeting specs, to do some simple translation, to proof some reading, to search.
If there's a task that can be directed and it takes less time to direct than do, it's a productivity gain.
As a human construct, prices are also entirely made up. Treating them as a positivist 'given' akin to 'facts' from natural sciences misses the wood for the trees.
I'm curious what's cognitively loading about three horizontal bars arranged in a square located in the corner of an app or website.
Screens, somewhat counterintuitively, used to be wider. Because they were not on handheld mobile devices. Then we had the menubar and nested dropdowns, suckerfish, etc. It was an exciting time to see a menu, you were never quite sure what you were going to get - I believe there are positives to learning curves for power users.
But I digress. 三 means 3 in Chinese. It doesn't take cognitive load. Why does a hamburger? I really am curious.
I use to know a gamer who used a phone for something like a decade. He got stuck doing something and I had to point out the burger to him. The thing he was looking for was interestingly enough not there. Apparently all websites he used were perfectly usable without knowing the button exists.
In contrast, some people can't not-read something and it being a button is automatically parsed out. Symbols and icons have to be learned which is a more gradual process. The other day I didn't recognize the flower icon for settings.
Three bars means... the exact same thing the thousands and thousands of times it's been seen before.
People have no inate understanding of 'menu'. We don't even read short words like that letter by letter, it's read as a block and is far more complex than three bars.
People spend years specifically learning how to read starting in early childhood. It's expected in the current era that people above a certain age are literate to at least some degree. People usually don't spend years specifically learning how to interpret icons except when they have to in an app or on a sign they run into.
"Menu" has a consistent meaning (a list of items to choose from) which most people can be assumed to know. Icons aren't as easily parsed and take more of a mental load to reason about them. Or just trial and error to figure them out.
I've seen too many variants of icons for "general" menu. Three bars, three dots, square, square in square, tall rectangle, gear, company logo and probably a few more.
And if we want to focus on just three bars let's not leave out the skeuomorphism trend where three bars meant the "grip" area, something to use to rearrange items or windows.
> Three bars means what, exactly? There’s the cognitive load.
This was true early on when it was not a common convention, or only used in mobile apps. Now, it is nearly universal, though still not nearly standard enough in placement or presentation.
If we were to redo history, it would've been great to see an expanding menu closely positioned by a top-left logo. Sort of like a Windows Start Menu for each website.
On the other, there are lots of articles explaining that black on white will cause readers discomfort so recommend camouflaged light grey on dark grey, or vice versa, as better.