> Something more niche is that I also enjoy the mouse buttons above the trackpad, I can move with the thumb and click with a finger.
This logic is why I like the tiny arrow keys. I find it pretty easy to move my pinky over and tap one of those keys. With full size keys, I find that doesn't really work.
I had lots of experience writing Perl5 before the company switched to Python3.
> The inability of the Perl community to push forward collectively in a timely way should be taken by every other language community as a cautionary tale.
I think this is a good point that I hadn't considered before.
I think Perl stopped being able to attract new users. There is always going to be users leaving. If they aren't replaced, you will slowly shrink.
I think the point you raised is part of why they couldn't attract new users. I also think people asked themselves "why chose perl now, if I know I need to re-write when Perl6 comes?" and decided Perl5 was bad choice. I also think the fact Perl had this reputation for being ugly, difficult, and "write only line noise" kept people from even considering it, even if that reputation didn't match production codebases.
For work I will have VS Code and a web browser side-by-side. Every ticket I work on gets its own instance. I find it keeps me organized so I can focus on the work.
If Apple ever got rid of fullscreen mode I could probably just do this with normal virtual desktops. But this is slightly better than that.
I use Teams on the daily, and think it is a legit question.
On the one hand, the app crashes at least once a day. On the other, haven't seen this issue of distracting notifications or important discussions being drowned out by chatter. Those are constantly brought up with Slack.
> The whole point of Substack, specifically, is that people can sign up to get your writing via email, no?
I think Substack certainly thinks that. And because I believe they think that, I don't think this qualifies as a dark pattern.
But as a user, I don't get that model at all. Why send me an email when I already have the article in the Substack app? The app can already show me the latest posts from the authors I follow. It will notify me if someone responds to my comments. For me, the emails are just extra work that produces no value.
I agree MS is probably being scapegoated here. I was using Linux around this time and I don't remember hearing about this threat either.
> At the time, KDE, GNOME and Ubuntu developers alike, were simply drunk on popularity.
But I don't agree with this.
I think a more charitable explanation is they listened to a loud minority, one I would have been part of.
I used Gnome 2 at the time, but I also changed a lot. It's been a decade, so forgive me for forgetting most of the specific app names but: I used compiz then later beryl. I replaced the bottom bar with a dock. I removed the application launcher and instead used the dock plus a Spotlight clone. I switched apps with the Expose plugin provided by compiz/beryl. My top panel had a clock, system tray, and I don't think anything else.
We were definitely loud, but maybe also a minority. Threads, blogs, newsites, etc constantly had discussion on new apps you could use to mod your Linux (mostly Gnome) desktop experience. I remember cycling thru several docks and several spotlight clones within a couple years. The people behind Gnome 3 and Unity very well could have seen all that buzz as an indicator that this is what people really wanted. So that's what they built.
But in retrospect saying that you find the defaults fine and there isn't a real need to change them doesn't make for a very interesting blog post. So the people who were just fine with Gnome 2 didn't get heard until Gnome 2 was gone.
When I started my career, most teams at my company were doing waterfall. The team I was hired onto was one of a couple guinea pigs for scrum.
The other teams would spend 6 weeks doing nothing but planning activities. After the planning was done, they'd do a 12 month dev cycle. Once that was done they would throw what they have over the fence for the QA cycle.
That is the world scrum was introduced to. People already thought planning and separate and couldn't be mixed. Scrum dragged them closer to interweaving them. People resisted, saying it was reckless and unprofessional. They looked at this and thought "so the plan is we don't plan anymore? we just wing it?".
I think Agile has won enough that perhaps many specific processes meant to bridge the gap are now dragging people away from being more Agile.
Those videos all sound like things that would be _very_ popular and if we could see it have a very good like to dislike ratio. They would likely be over 99% like vs dislike. If dislikes were still visible, you'd merely just see that your tastes doesn't match what the masses want.
This stuff does very well. It gets good clicks, good watch times, good engagement (likes and comments). Hence why everyone does it and it is what's most recommended.
It does do terribly with a lot of the subcultures that hang out on Hacker News, but we are small in the grand scheme of things.
A better explanation is they changed The Algorithm to try and promote more stuff that is new to you. A common complaint about The Algorithm last year on HN was it tended to recommend the same small set of videos over and over again. Mostly stuff you have seen multiple times before. This was leading to people getting bored with YouTube and going to Netflix or whatnot.
So instead of that, it is now trying to recommend you new stuff. And it is not finding stuff you'll like. What you listed all has a theme of general science topics. Its probably now trying to push the most popular stuff in that category to keep your recommendations from getting stale. The usually means will take care of it (disliking the videos, clicking don't recommend video/channel).
Waterfall definitely existed. I've been at places that worked that way. I think Agile (and corruptions of) have replaced waterfall well enough that people no longer think it used to exist.
> in reality, being able to sell your house for 1.5MM isn't that much of a windfall when other houses are at least 1MM and rising rapidly, and renting is more expensive than having a mortgage.
This is starting to hit a lot of my parent's social circle. They are retiring, mostly from the edge of a big city.
About half plan to or have retired in a small town. In that case they are able to get something with the $1.5M they sold for, but they are driving prices up in those towns in a way locals can't afford.
The other half wants something else in the city. Some remaining in the suburbs, others move more into the city, others "in the sticks" and are all surprised that that's going to use up all of their $1.5M. They expect to buy something for $200k and have the rest for retirement lol.
Because those like me who don't install any of those apps don't have anything to share on HN. Showing that you have a nearly default desktop isn't interesting except when people are claiming that no one does that.
There are also a few bads, some that can be seen from the map:
- Quite a few stroads[0]: Granville around 70th, Granville around Broadway, Cambie around Broadway, 4th West of Burrard, most of Broadway, many sections of Kingsway, the section of W 41st Ave under the Kerrisdale label, and others.
- In general, getting East-West by vehicle is notably worse than North-South. While I 90% agree with your highway comment, this does make the situation frustrating at times.
- Vancouver is less bad than most of the cities that surround it, but it still has job areas a little too clustered in a few spots.
- Most land is low density in a city that has a huge housing shortage.
- Skytrain doesn't cover the majority of this map.
- Residential neighbourhoods have so much street parking that kids can't play street hockey these days. In general, there are too many cars in residential areas that kids can't play outside with the minimal supervision I had as a child.
I will add one more good:
- Grid designs tend to have a problem where local roads don't remain local roads and instead become side streets for cars. Vancouver has done a good job of using tools to keep these local roads serving just local traffic: narrow streets, tight visibility, forced turns, etc. Besides the benefit this provides to locals, it also helps with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
[0] - Stroad is a portmanteau of street and road. By trying to be both, if fails to do either. Stroads suck no matter what type of user you are:
Car perspective:
- For thru traffic they suck since they are "too busy", traffic usual goes slower than the speed limit.
- For traffic stoping at a local destination they suck because getting to your destination is difficult: the road is busy so you need to focus 110% on driving, but you also gotta find parking, places to turn around, etc. A lot of people put pressure on themselves if they block traffic while parking and that is a necessary aspect of driving to a business that is on a stroad.
- Unprotected left turns usually only allow 1 vehicle per cycle of the lights. There will be a lot of unprotected lefts happening in these areas.
- For locals they suck because your community has congested traffic all the time.
For pedestrians:
- The area is loud due to all the cars. God forbid if people start honking. And this is Vancouver. I've seen people honk at parked cars a few dozen times in the last 5 years.
- If you have to cross the street, it can be a real bother as you will have to wait for a crossing signal that may take a few minutes. When you finally get your turn, you have to deal with drivers who are desperate to make their left turn.
- Walking distances are higher than they'd otherwise be on a proper street.
For cyclists:
- Commuting: Prepare to Die Edition
For business owners:
- While the traffic does get you some amount of visibility, a lot of that traffic will simply never stop at your business. There is also a portion who won't go due to the difficulty in driving in the area.
- You probably get way more business from random people walking by than from random people driving by. The artificially high walking distances mean fewer walkers.
- You have to soundproof your facade to deal with the noise.
- Prior to the lockdown, Vancouver city council was quite against patios and balconies at businesses. These days, they are allowing more of them. These will necessarily be loud and there is nothing you can do. Customers will complain.
> I feel like it’s almost an attempt to appease citizens by blaming the issue on “foreigners”
As a Canadian, I agree with this.
Part of the problem is that the federal govt doesn't have jurisdiction over the actually issues causing the problem. I _think_ the provinces own it but delegate it to the cities. But for some reason, this isn't an issue in those elections. BC had an election less than a year ago and housing wasn't an issue outside of Reddit. And BC has the second worse housing market in the country (Vancouver).
EDIT: Actually, that BC election was a year and a half ago. I even looked that up before posting and got it wrong. The covid time warp strikes again.
It shows test cost vs test isolation. I agree with the assumed correlation. My experience though is the real correlation is above the assumed correlation, not below it. My guess is that the author's organization moves part of the cost somewhere else where the author doesn't have to see it. At the start of my career, I was one of those people who had this cost dumped on them so that the devs could ignore it: I was an on-team QA engineer.
> What do you do when you work for a company where you think managers are bad, and their managers are bad, but they all think they are great and they think you're the problem? How do you objectively (not subjectively) determine if a manager is bad? If 200 people in the organization are "happy enough", it's your word versus theirs on what a good manager vs a bad manager is.
If you notice you are the only one in 200 people have any issues, a reasonable question to ask yourself is if the problem is you. If you end up believing you aren't, you should at least be able to articulate why you're the only one.
I'd also add that the political compasses and candidate choosers have been a place where you can see the leftward lean. I think it is a similar root cause to the coverage selection issue.
In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt talks about a particular failure mode that some people on the left exhibit when asked to fill in a political questionnaire the same way a conservative or libertarian would. I think that is what's happening here.
This logic is why I like the tiny arrow keys. I find it pretty easy to move my pinky over and tap one of those keys. With full size keys, I find that doesn't really work.