> If people could understand what computing was about, the iPhone would not be a bad thing. But because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that Guitar Hero is the same as a real guitar.
-- Alan Kay
Direct your complaints to the source of your problem, namely the shitty browsers on mobile. Even suggesting to let HN fix their abysmal stylesheet would be wrong. Go to the source -- and if it turns out they don't care about requests to provide actual tools, tell them off.
For the CMS I make for myself, the general rule is, it's fine to require it for admin, and if I had users it would be fine to require it for them to edit content, but it must always be optional to just browse content as visitor. I don't see that becoming "nonviable" as a principle anytime soon, at least for private non-commercial stuff where I really don't care if other sites are fancier, as long as mine works as it should.
> yet they want better and cheaper products - even free if possible.
I want good things, I have them, and now I want greedy, needy people to stop pushing their mediocre, poorly understood imitations to drown out the really good things we might use and nurture instead, hurting us all and even themselves in the process.
> How do you think a company gets to improve and optimize their product? By surveys?
If what you make serves a purpose other than generating needs to make a profit from, then you'll probably be fine with mostly simply paying attention to what you're making, using it yourself, and occasionally making surveys and collecting metrics from volunteers to see if there's anything you missed.
> you assume you're an authority on what a "good look" is
They don't assume that, they know that. Everybody is the authority of their own moral judgmement.
> But you're doing this while the reader is noting that you failed to express a real argument,
They pointed out that what they're responding to is subverting the desires of people who would like privacy, that's the meat, "that is not a good look" is just a bonus statement, something that would be implied anyway even if left out.
> It seems that search engines now are always trying to guess your intent, and always think they know better.
I complained about this from day one, and not once did I get anything but patronizing handwaving in response.
If I want to buy a pizza, I'll enter "buy pizza in $city" or something, but if I just enter "pizza", I want to see what every person on the planet would see if they used the English language version of the search engine (and then on top of that have the option of personal customization that I can undo or suspend anytime). IMO the convenience of "just typing 'pizza' when you want directions to the nearest pizza place" is nothing at all compared to the fracturing of the public space, for lack of a better way to put it.
If you want to say that the public has no control over the government, or more control over corporations, then actually argue that, instead of hiding the sophistry behind sarcasm.
Some of them could be from just about anywhere, anytime. In an age of HD video being the norm for even consumers, grainy footage that then ALSO doesn't have a source or date and is posted by anonymous people on social media? Just no.
Oh, fuck off. It's obvious from your username that you're simply into watching people drown alive as their lungs fill with liquid, and furthermore a simple character count + tea leaf analysis shows you pooped on a pigeon yesteday at 4 pm, while praying to Satan for SARS2 to wipe humanity away. Any attempt to deny it would just prove it further, if further proof were even possible at this point of 100% proof.
> whether that’s for financial gain or to demonize Chinese/Asian people is hard to tell
I love how you add this as if to offset you just making an authoritative claim about the inner motivations of a person you haven't spoken a word with in your life. How very fucking scientific.
Facebook (or anything with these particular features) set to "everybody can send me a friend request" and "only friends can message me" already has that.
They don't forget that, that's why they say it's a joke to compare it to actual engineering. Try treating an civil engineer that way, say "we actually wanted a tunnel". If they have the means to, they might sue you into the ground, and if they had the clout and publicity, no other civil engineer, ever, will work for you. Not in 5 years and not in 20, not until you made super clear you changed. In software dev, you just wrap the stupid or dishonest thing in a new euphemism and go harvest a new batch of suckers, with zero real repercussions.
I saw this yesterday and didn't know if I should laugh or cry, starting from the jingle at the very start of the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJGCZCaIZkQ&t=20m06s Imagine an architect conference where a vendor proudly expains how in a building the average tenant lifespan increased a lot -- after their automatic turret was moved from lobby to a less frequented room in the basement. I know that's the opposite of a hardcore SW engineering talk, but still. Everybody wants to be nice, nobody wants to get blacklisted, kool-aid makes the dissonance go away. The main issue was that Linus sometimes called people idiots, and that's solved now.
Maybe other professions also started out this way, as cliques of fools making policy based on what they dreamed last night or how the birds flew, with the main driver being greed -- but being hundreds of even many thousands years more developed, they are on a totally different level than software engineering is today, and just calling it something noble and serious doesn't make it so.
> Why is Russia so special and unique in this regard?
Also holding Russia responsible doesn't mean singling it out. Pretending that holding it responsible at all would be singling it out is, in practice, like asking for special and unique treatment it doesn't deserve, neither being special nor unique.
> watching anyone die is hard. no matter what we do, it will probably have a factor in our death.
Then outting long prison sentences on selling cigarettes wouldn't make a difference, either. It's always hard to watch someone die, anyway. If you make sweet love to them, put them in prison, or just walk by them on the street without looking up, it will probably have a factor in their death.
That's like snickering when someone mentions that sugar is unhealthy in large quantities because you smoke 5 packs a day or something. That doesn't make it less valuable to those who aren't yet stuck with crap.
> Gotta love organic db schemas with long history...
I much more love the fact that I always have the option to start with a blank file and an empty db schema. I love the fact that decades of ignoring "social" advice about doing it this or that way because "everybody" does that, and just looking at the docs I could find/understand and making a decision, programming gets more fun and effective every year for me. I love that there is still development to be had outside of corporations and more or less unfettered by their regression.
"How do I learn Javascript?" "Use a framework, they do the hard work for you. Don't learn Javascript, learn this wrapper around Javascript."
"How do I learn CSS?" "Use Bootstrap or install this theme generator with a compilation pipeline. Don't learn CSS, learn this wrapper around CSS."
"How do I set up a DB that doesn't suck balls?" "Use an ORM, just describe things to it, and it will do all the boring stuff for you. Don't fuzz about with a DB though, or SQL or anything, that has so many pitfalls... you might lose data or have a slow query one day, and then you obviously die."
"tech" as seen and practiced by too many people mostly does 2 things: enable total control, and infantilize people so they can't even meaningfully discuss what they're creating. The rest is toys, breadcrumbs, distractions -- plus minor improvements that will be completely undone when the fruit of totalitarianism is ripe.
That was true about the Dodo too, at some point. And even for things that still are around: so? If the only defense of something you have is that it exists, it might be "good enough", but it never ever is good.
I had something like that with my previous desktop (~ years ago, so not ancient) because the onboard audio was really crap or badly shielded, and amplifying the line-out and listening to that with headphones, every single application had it's own signature pattern of high-frequency chirping when starting up or doing certain operations, websites sounded different from each other when scrolling them. It was kind of neat.
> being coerced to kill someone with a gun to your own head
no such thing.
> There was a widespread conviction that it is impossible to withstand temptation of any kind, that none of us could be trusted or even be expected to betrustworthy when the chips are down, that to be tempted and to be forced are almost the same, whereas in the words of Mary McCarthy, who first spotted this fallacy: "If somebody points a gun at you and says,'Kill your friend or I will kill you,' he is tempting you, that is all." And while a temptation where one's life is at stake may be a legal excuse for a crime, it certainly is not a moral justification.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"
That's the problem, not the solution.