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have been making efforts to remove or replace the usage of the floppy disk icon as the symbol for "Save", as floppy disks aren't in everyday usage anymore.

However, could efforts like these be considered a waste of time?

Consider the ampersand symbol "&", which is recognizable to many people who don't know the French word "et". The main reason is its continuity.

Should we, from a cultural perspective, recognize the value of continuity in cases like these, instead of chasing design trends, and keep the floppy disk symbol?"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Should we accept the \u201cfloppy disk icon\u201d as the default save symbol?"}},"_tags":["story","author_acadapter","story_30357695","ask_hn"],"author":"acadapter","children":[30357866,30357947,30357999,30358007,30358126,30358217,30358743,30358813,30359588,30360261,30360452,30360621,30360997,30361165,30361259,30365803,30368114],"created_at":"2022-02-16T08:49:16Z","created_at_i":1645001356,"num_comments":40,"objectID":"30357695","points":24,"story_id":30357695,"story_text":"People have been making efforts to remove or replace the usage of the floppy disk icon as the symbol for "Save", as floppy disks aren't in everyday usage anymore.

However, could efforts like these be considered a waste of time?

Consider the ampersand symbol "&", which is recognizable to many people who don't know the French word "et". The main reason is its continuity.

Should we, from a cultural perspective, recognize the value of continuity in cases like these, instead of chasing design trends, and keep the floppy disk symbol?","title":"Ask HN: Should we accept the \u201cfloppy disk icon\u201d as the default save symbol?","updated_at":"2024-09-20T10:32:11Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"anon1m0us"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["ampersand"],"value":"Password requirements for a government website:

  Must be changed every 180 days\n  May be changed only once per day\n  Must contain a minimum of 8, and maximum of 20 characters\n  Must contain at least one uppercase and one lowercase letter\n  Must contain at least one number\n  Must contain at least one special character\n  Must be different from the last six passwords\n  Cannot contain the User ID\n  Cannot contain any commonly used words, and only two letters may be used in a row, for example: Hr1hi2Hi$\n  Cannot contain any of the following special characters: \n     Question mark (?), \n     less than (<), \n     greater than (>),\n     left bracket ((), \n     right bracket ()),   \n     apostrophe ('), \n     quotation marks ("), \n     forward slash (/), \n     backslash (\\), \n     and ampersand (&)\n
\nYou also cannot CTRL-V (paste) into the password field.

How did it get like this? How do we fix it?"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: How can we expect users to create these passwords?"}},"_tags":["story","author_anon1m0us","story_19287794","ask_hn"],"author":"anon1m0us","children":[19287843,19287854,19287902,19287947,19295216,19296050],"created_at":"2019-03-02T05:44:43Z","created_at_i":1551505483,"num_comments":14,"objectID":"19287794","points":14,"story_id":19287794,"story_text":"Password requirements for a government website:

  Must be changed every 180 days\n  May be changed only once per day\n  Must contain a minimum of 8, and maximum of 20 characters\n  Must contain at least one uppercase and one lowercase letter\n  Must contain at least one number\n  Must contain at least one special character\n  Must be different from the last six passwords\n  Cannot contain the User ID\n  Cannot contain any commonly used words, and only two letters may be used in a row, for example: Hr1hi2Hi$\n  Cannot contain any of the following special characters: \n     Question mark (?), \n     less than (<), \n     greater than (>),\n     left bracket ((), \n     right bracket ()),   \n     apostrophe ('), \n     quotation marks ("), \n     forward slash (/), \n     backslash (\\), \n     and ampersand (&)\n
\nYou also cannot CTRL-V (paste) into the password field.

How did it get like this? How do we fix it?","title":"Ask HN: How can we expect users to create these passwords?","updated_at":"2024-09-20T03:55:36Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"8611m"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["ampersand"],"value":"Digging through Strobelight and Scuba traces, a performance engineer at Meta filtered on a specific std::vector call and spotted an unexpected deep copy hiding behind the innocent-looking auto keyword. The culprit sat in one of the company\u2019s busiest Ads service paths. Swapping auto for auto&\u2014a single ampersand\u2014eliminated the copy and is projected to free up the equivalent of 15 K servers annually. A reminder that even trillion-line fleets can hinge on one character, and profiling tools still pay for themselves many times over."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"One-Character Commit Saves 15,000 Servers at Meta"}},"_tags":["story","author_8611m","story_44465972","ask_hn"],"author":"8611m","children":[44466416],"created_at":"2025-07-04T16:42:16Z","created_at_i":1751647336,"num_comments":1,"objectID":"44465972","points":3,"story_id":44465972,"story_text":"Digging through Strobelight and Scuba traces, a performance engineer at Meta filtered on a specific std::vector call and spotted an unexpected deep copy hiding behind the innocent-looking auto keyword. The culprit sat in one of the company\u2019s busiest Ads service paths. Swapping auto for auto&\u2014a single ampersand\u2014eliminated the copy and is projected to free up the equivalent of 15 K servers annually. A reminder that even trillion-line fleets can hinge on one character, and profiling tools still pay for themselves many times over.","title":"One-Character Commit Saves 15,000 Servers at Meta","updated_at":"2025-07-04T19:50:01Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"crux"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["ampersand"],"value":"The age of moleskine mania has thankfully mostly left us by now; only a couple years ago it seemed like the whole internet had agreed that one simply could not get any work done unless one had a Fisher Space Pen and one of several very specific notebooks at hand at all times. Nevertheless it seems that some people still do find it useful to keep a notebook with them, and are generally still interested in the process of writing things down\u2014even while the majority seems to think that writing by hand is a skill as worthy of personal development as, say, horse-buggy skills.

For several years now I've been developing my own system of shorthand. It started as, simply, my own system of letter shapes, because I had terrible handwriting\u2014I just devised a single, consistent, attractive character set for myself and then trained myself to use it exclusively and always, so that my handwriting was more attractive and even.

But as these things go\u2014informed by a personal interest in historical text systems\u2014I started to include extra-alphabetical characters into the mix. First an ampersand, then a couple special double characters, a dollar sign; quickly I moved on to ligatures\u2014some pre-existing in the Roman alphabet, but some of my own creation. And then characters for common words, prefixes, suffixes. I started using superscripts and subscripts and drawing inspiration from historical scripts like old Anglo Saxon writing, Tironian Notes, the Abbreviationes of the Middle Ages, et cetera. And so now I've got a relatively sophisticated system with several hundred different characters in it, and a whole set of rules of composition.

Partly this is an exercise in efficiency\u2014my writing is much shorter and faster than plain English\u2014but it's also an aesthetic undertaking. I do derive a lot of artistic pleasure from it, from the system of it, and from the look of it on the page.

So my question is: does anybody care about this? Of all the people I've told about it, many of them thought it looked awesome when I showed it to them, but only one person ever expressed any interest in learning it for himself, and so I don't even know how learnable it is. I wonder if there's some geeky demographic out there on the web who would find value in my documenting the whole thing, writing a couple explanatory essays, scanning all the characters, etc., et cetera. If there isn't, by the way, that's ok. Like I said, I am quite proud of it for its own sake and it's fun to trot out at geeky parties. But if I thought that I'd get any kind of response from the web at large, I'd think hard about putting in the (non-trivial) effort to really document the whole thing and try to make it as learnable as possible."},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: How do you feel about shorthand?"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""}},"_tags":["story","author_crux","story_1831766","ask_hn"],"author":"crux","children":[1831824,1831877,1833807],"created_at":"2010-10-25T21:49:13Z","created_at_i":1288043353,"num_comments":5,"objectID":"1831766","points":1,"story_id":1831766,"story_text":"The age of moleskine mania has thankfully mostly left us by now; only a couple years ago it seemed like the whole internet had agreed that one simply could not get any work done unless one had a Fisher Space Pen and one of several very specific notebooks at hand at all times. Nevertheless it seems that some people still do find it useful to keep a notebook with them, and are generally still interested in the process of writing things down\u2014even while the majority seems to think that writing by hand is a skill as worthy of personal development as, say, horse-buggy skills.

For several years now I've been developing my own system of shorthand. It started as, simply, my own system of letter shapes, because I had terrible handwriting\u2014I just devised a single, consistent, attractive character set for myself and then trained myself to use it exclusively and always, so that my handwriting was more attractive and even.

But as these things go\u2014informed by a personal interest in historical text systems\u2014I started to include extra-alphabetical characters into the mix. First an ampersand, then a couple special double characters, a dollar sign; quickly I moved on to ligatures\u2014some pre-existing in the Roman alphabet, but some of my own creation. And then characters for common words, prefixes, suffixes. I started using superscripts and subscripts and drawing inspiration from historical scripts like old Anglo Saxon writing, Tironian Notes, the Abbreviationes of the Middle Ages, et cetera. And so now I've got a relatively sophisticated system with several hundred different characters in it, and a whole set of rules of composition.

Partly this is an exercise in efficiency\u2014my writing is much shorter and faster than plain English\u2014but it's also an aesthetic undertaking. I do derive a lot of artistic pleasure from it, from the system of it, and from the look of it on the page.

So my question is: does anybody care about this? Of all the people I've told about it, many of them thought it looked awesome when I showed it to them, but only one person ever expressed any interest in learning it for himself, and so I don't even know how learnable it is. I wonder if there's some geeky demographic out there on the web who would find value in my documenting the whole thing, writing a couple explanatory essays, scanning all the characters, etc., et cetera. If there isn't, by the way, that's ok. Like I said, I am quite proud of it for its own sake and it's fun to trot out at geeky parties. But if I thought that I'd get any kind of response from the web at large, I'd think hard about putting in the (non-trivial) effort to really document the whole thing and try to make it as learnable as possible.","title":"Ask HN: How do you feel about shorthand?","updated_at":"2023-09-06T20:12:05Z","url":""},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"paulkrush"},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"What character was removed from the alphabet? (2020)"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["ampersand"],"value":"https://www.dictionary.com/e/ampersand/"}},"_tags":["story","author_paulkrush","story_36370108"],"author":"paulkrush","children":[36370109,36370141,36370312,36370332,36370352,36370430,36370461,36370467,36370512,36370607,36370627,36370631,36370638,36370655,36370662,36370718,36370776,36370796,36370802,36371414,36371560,36371595,36371850,36372829,36373772,36375325,36376066,36376966,36379421,36380084],"created_at":"2023-06-17T13:47:17Z","created_at_i":1687009637,"num_comments":195,"objectID":"36370108","points":261,"story_id":36370108,"title":"What character was removed from the alphabet? (2020)","updated_at":"2026-07-28T02:23:55Z","url":"https://www.dictionary.com/e/ampersand/"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"adito"},"story_text":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":""},"title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"(&) = flip ($) in Haskell"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["ampersand"],"value":"http://vemod.net/ampersand"}},"_tags":["story","author_adito","story_5546657"],"author":"adito","children":[5546801,5546831,5546892,5546906,5546922,5547258,5547381,5550519],"created_at":"2013-04-14T11:45:29Z","created_at_i":1365939929,"num_comments":17,"objectID":"5546657","points":45,"story_id":5546657,"story_text":"","title":"(&) = flip ($) in Haskell","updated_at":"2023-09-06T21:17:24Z","url":"http://vemod.net/ampersand"}],"hitsPerPage":50,"nbHits":89,"nbPages":2,"page":0,"params":"query=Ampersand&tags=story&hitsPerPage=50&advancedSyntax=true&analyticsTags=backend","processingTimeMS":16,"processingTimingsMS":{"_request":{"queue":381,"roundTrip":15},"afterFetch":{"format":{"highlighting":1,"total":1},"merge":{"mergeLoop":{"prepareNextHit":2,"total":2},"total":2},"total":2},"fetch":{"query":11,"scanning":1,"total":13},"total":16},"query":"Ampersand","serverTimeMS":399}