skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Non-representativeness" is overused; we voluntarily take away our own voice about UX, and then complain that it sucks.

In context of UI annoyances and regular people, it's also worth remembering that the representative (i.e. not tech-savvy) population accepts what it's given. They don't have the mental models to conceptualize what exactly is it that annoys them, and they don't have a voice to express that annoyance. But they are annoyed, and you can hear that when you actually talk to them. The frequently heard things like "Why did they have to rearrange everything again?", "Google 'xyz contact form' because it's easier than finding it on the xyz site", or "My computer is slow it's probably viruses" are symptoms of that.
> you have to type your wifi info into a tiny little screen with buttons

WPS has been a thing for the last 10 years.
IRC users certainly experience arbitrary censorship by petty tyrants. Of course they can move to a different IRC server (or start their own), but that's not really any easier than moving from Discord to IRC or vice versa.
Ohh how I hate chatbots !

It's the digital version of the "automated phone guidance thing". The "press 1 for sales, press 2 for accounts, press 9 to kill yourself" !

I think many of the "smaller" websites has been sold a lie ! I see "silly/useless bots" that only makes the customer mad instead of helping him.

Just to show I'm not all hate and brimstone :) I found adding a "manned whatsApp" to your website is gold !
Silicon Valley destroyed ['] politics. The reason everything is political is literally because of social media and the internet.

I understand that these are hard issues; I don't think SV companies are sitting on the solution under locked doors. But the strategy of "we're totally neutral, whatever happens, happens ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" is clearly not tenable. Solving that literally requires employees (and stakeholders) to take a stance about the world they want going forward, instead of letting this machine coast.

['] supercharged, made malignant, transmuted, whatever.
I've been wondering why there are so many weird patches of low resolution old satellite photos covering up lots of tiny chunks of Stewart Island and the surrounding islands.

Just seems really strange when one considers the stories of the obscenely rich. How much do those folks pay to have public mapping companies "hide" their apocalypse projects?

edit:
just as an example: https://i.imgur.com/jg5dqji.jpg
Cool project, I keep getting booted but seems like it would be a fun little toy for a secret dev community or an interesting way to converse with your more tech oriented users who would like to report bugs.

Would love IRC like capabilities as well.
> I do not relate with either Tories or Labor

Nor do most voters. They have to keep FPTP because they know that otherwise, most people won't vote for them; the last 4 times the UK had nationwide elections held under a more proportional system, most voters voted for parties other than labour of the Conservatives.

> I don't think either has my best interests at heart.

Most people agree with you!
> The current director of the intelligence agency, Jeremy Fleming writes: "GCHQ is a citizen-facing intelligence and security enterprise with a globally recognised brand and reputation."

This sounds like some A+ BS. Since when do national intelligence agencies have globally recognised brands?
> Reminds me of 20 years ago when people kept the early HP LaserJet models going for their needs because they were such workhorses.

My family used this until 2012: https://i.imgur.com/QedZrsm.png

(They're on a newer LaserJet model now, and they've been using that one for the past 8 years.)
Indeed. I was briefly foxed as well, given Andy Grove talks about Intel bailing on the memory business back in the 80s right at the start of High Output Management.
> no data races for multithreading

This is simply not true. Rust borrow checker has no notion of memory models: i.e. sequential consistency, acquire, release or relaxed semantics.

The Tokio team needs an additional model checker to ensure no data race in Tokio:

- https://github.com/tokio-rs/loom

If you want to ensure no data races you need formal verification not a borrow checker, I've compiled my research and a RFC for Nim formal verification here:

- https://github.com/mratsim/weave/issues/18

- https://github.com/nim-lang/RFCs/issues/222
Political debates are not about arguing with the other party. It's a show to influence the audience.

Presidential debates are an obvious example. You don't believe your candidate thinks he can change the other's mind, do you. He thinks he can change the mind of someone in the audience. Or perhaps not even that, he just wants to boost morale by petting you, the passive follower of his, the right way.

The same dynamic is in play in any twitter or online forum debate, including here. Well-written posts gets lots of upvotes, likes and "engagement" which illustrates my point nicely. It's not the other guy thinks, it's what the audience votes.
Hi,

sorry that it came around this way. I was really interested in your honest opinion, as my personal experience with Jira is limited at this point with 7 months into my new role. I have been asked about it during past GitLab trainings in my old job, but never used it in production myself. May sound weird, but I learn the most from users sharing their experiences :) Hence my question, it would help my research.
> If I want support, that is.

Even then, too many sites replaced their point of contact with these trivial keyword kind of chat bot interfaces and it's annoying as heck.

I tried to report a phishing page hosted on some random SaaS thing yesterday. Instead of a contact form / abuse contact e-mail in the page footer I ended up on a FAQ page telling me to report it using their chat thing. Of course that chat was not staffed without any indication until you typed up a message (another frequent factor of annoyance for those not in US-adjacent time zones) and the keyword matcher asked me if the FAQ page I was on would be of any help. When I put the data in the thing to go on with my day it asked me for an e-mail to follow-up with me, something this interaction did not require.

Sure, I get when people get more customer interaction from these things but please folks, make sure it's not replacing functionality for other parts of your (potential) customer base.
that's like 500-1000 USD for the average middle class american - a steep price to pay for a membership with no obvious benefits

I wonder why can't score IDs by page-rank them - one's identity gets credibility based on the social score - hacker news manages to be quite effective at preventing spam using this technique
> The entire purpose of emotions is that they are they only place where human motivation comes from. Trying to separate "logic" vs. "emotion" when dealing with humans is a fools' game in my opinion.

Not only that. Another aspect is that emotions and "instinct" are much, much older, from an evolutionary perspective, than our very recent reasoning abilities, and way more widespread amongst the animal kingdom than reason.

So, while far from perfect, they work. Emotions and instinct kept most of our ancestors and most of the currently living animals both alive and thriving. Which means that, despite their limits, they have their place and shouldn't simply be discarded by a wave of the hand.

Took me some time to understand that. And I still have a hard time taking it into account in my everyday life and interactions.
https://jean-jaures.org/nos-productions/bas-les-masques-soci...
Schools teaching critical thinking? Hahahahahahahahah. Ok.
The only ones I really despise are the ones that pop open as soon as you open the page - I haven't even read the damned page title yet, so no, I would not like to ask any questions or tell you anything about my requirements! Just.. go away!

Actually, the ones I really despise with a burning passion are the ones like above, but which follow you around the whole site like some kind of demented Clippy 2.0 - you close the popup and navigate to another page and... BAM! It's back, again!
How to fund your startup with public grants
My understanding was that that was becoming more rare in collegiate debate societies these days. Have things changed since the below article was published?

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/tradit...
I generally agree, though do note that vitamin D and prawning do seem to make a difference - and are practiced in many places even without local study and tracking (because the risk is negligible).
The website took 4s to load, and doesn't get 100 in any category in Lighthouse. It has no favicon. The images are unoptimized and in the wrong format in some cases (eg photographic elements as PNG). The page isn't responsive (eg the Login button sits over the brand logo, the Testimonials section doesn't collapse, etc). The page loads with JS disabled but lots of content is missing.

If this is typical of the websites that this agency produces no one should be using them.
> And on the question of GDPR modals, I'm afraid I have to say that they are an absolute legal necessity.

They absolutely are not a legal necessity if you don't do things you shouldn't be doing. That's the point of GDPR :).

But of course doing these things, putting up the popups, and then trying to direct users' anger at Brussels is empirically the revenue-maximizing strategy, so here we are.
Google Assistant actually works, especially it's speech recognition that has been near flawless for me. I can totally see it becoming an integrated feature in future housing constructions.
> Their playful approach makes it fun to be there.

This right here was one of the biggest reasons for the popularity of the Mac and Apple’s other early stuff.

They’re not so playful right now, but the aesthetics are still a big part of why so many people love to “be there”, while other people can’t understand that and deride it as “form over function” and blahblah
Indeed, Kiwix is the proper solution for anyone who cares about knowledge access in places where internet connection is spotty. Given the file format it uses (zim) is compressed, and meant to be accessed compressed to pluck a specific article, you can have all the content of English's wikipedia without images and videos in just 36GB. Plus, the specs of the file format are published and it's easy to build your own implementation, I did it for my needs.

It's also great for privacy maximalists : I have wikipedia, wikisource and wiktionary in two languages locally, which means that most of my searches never leave my computer.

Kiwix/openzim don't provide only mediawiki projects either, I've recently downloaded stackoverflow's content (although, I'll need to build a dedicated search engine for it to be really usable).

You can have a look at the incredible amount of available content there: https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages
Ask HN: Good present for young tech teen?
My girlfriend and I have started our Christmas shopping this year. My girlfriend has a cousin that I usually hang out with during family gatherings, he’s a cool kid that is now 13 years old and is into gaming, YouTube and technology. I want to buy him something that he can tinker around with. I know that he owns a few Raspberry Pis and takes programming classes and was wondering if HN has any good ideas for a present for such a kid?
Wanted to jump to the comments complain about this.

Snark: Apparently anyone can call themselves UX/UI experts nowadays. I guess I shouldn't worry about getting qualifications and just slap that label onto my CV...
Since the CIA, FBI, NSA, Five Eyes?

I've also heard of GCHQ as they open sourced CyberChef which I quite like.
> People don't play études for fun.

I do. I wish I could play them well.
Please don't implement HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. Unless you are working on Firefox or some other thing that should compete with Chrome.

Complicated protocol, unfriendly to hackers, offering huge corporation some millisecond savings to enforce their walled garden supremacy.
I don't think anyone reasonable though the actions of those at Bletchley Park were solely responsible for winning the war.

I think BBC news has been overrated for some time now.
More like in covid-hiding.

Stranded implies he can't return, and also portrays a billionaire as a victim.
They got pressured by the EU to cancel it, the corruption concern is not exactly new (or surprising).
NZ starts at 3 m $ up to 10 m $ +. More $ gives more points. This is NZ $.
I don't think this is a good analogy. Farming is in fact more difficult than foraging. You need all kinds of technologies to actually make it work (you need to seed, you need to take care of it, you need to harvest, you need to store, you need to process it properly). And on top of that, some of the activities are really back-breaking.

Farming has now won because it was easier, but because it allows for bigger populations and bigger population means safety against other groups. Foragers are limited by the current amount of calories in the nature, which is not that high. This forces them to migrate, but migration limits the amount of young kids that you can have. A pair of hunter-gatherers would usually have kids every 4-5 years to that the youngest one can be carried and all the older ones can walk on their own. Farmers don't have to migrate so they can have a new kid every year (even though higher infant mortality will even this to some extent). In the end there is a hard limit on hunter-gatherer group size (tens of people), while farmers can scale their society to millions (as has happened in China fairly early on). When there is a conflict between these two groups (e.g. about who should use some land), it is easy to see who will win eventually.
Funny how the end result of all that Chatbot hype from 2017-2018 kinda just became these shitty Intercom boxes. My insurance company used an inapp chatbot around that time and I setup my account with it, that was a good experience but it didn't seem like a form would have been much different.
Goldman Sachs Open Sources Its Data Modeling Platform Through Finos
There is a chance of survivorship bias. You get a bunch of messages through the chat interface and all of a sudden you believe it adds value, when in reality you're potentially annoying a whole bunch of users that aren't necessarily telling you that they're annoyed.

A favourite story[1] (and I can't remember where I read it first) is the WWII bombers that the US military were trying to understand how to protect by analyzing the bullet holes. But the bullet holes only told part of the story. Any bomber that made it home to be analyzed had only been hit in a non-critical place.

I'm not saying there isn't a place for chat, because I believe that they're absolutely is. A good, direct to the person chat, or unobtrusive ability to reach out is great.

Shoving it in my face and breaking the flow of what I was doing is not.

While I agree that HN readers aren't representative, I have a hard time believing that other people don't behave the same way when presented with annoying website behaviours (even if they later want the contact with the human).

I've seen behind the scene of businesses that get customers asking stupid stupid questions, so I also understand the where the zendesk 'are you sure this doesn't answer your question' comes from. Doesn't make it any less annoying when applied badly to expert audiences.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
> the other thinks the CIA did 9/11

You're right that it's not true, or at least that memo about a month prior makes a pretty persuasive case for them.

Currently it's only clear that a few prominent people in the executive branch of the US government had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and then later covered up the participation of high level Saudi organizers like Prince Bandar.
"We make sandwiches, taking a side on segregation is beyond the scope of our mission".

Which sounds fine, but Woolworth's chose not to serve Black Americans. This was legal[0]. With the benefit of hindsight, we can claim that refusing to serve Black people was indeed "taking a side", but there were places where supporting the pro-integration people was breaking the law. And refusing to serve Black people, until they staged sit ins, didn't appear to be taking a side, because it wasn't uncommon. It was the way most places worked.

Even the mission to "serve everyone a sandwich" doesn't require addressing segregation, you can have separate lunch counters and serve everyone. Perhaps that's fine, people at the time certainly thought it was.

[0]: https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/the-greensboro-...
Except that it's not true.
Even proven mathematical algorithms can be breaked if not implemented correctly, or some side channels might be discovered along the way.

It's not just black and white.
5 of the "traitorous eight" from Fairchild Semiconductor were the investors who funded Intel
Nice! Do you know if it requires a licence to actually install/run, or if it's completely free now?
That whole period of the PC industry where 'multimedia' became mainstream was pretty magical. I know the Amiga was well ahead of the PC ecosystem for a long time in capability but it never hit schools (at least where I grew up in South Australia) like PCs did. So with the emergence of VGA and Super VGA, widespread availability (and relative affordability) of 486 DX class PCs, Soundblasters and Optical Drives, the PC overran the other home computers.

Games and applications were evolving at break-neck speed and the pace of change really made you feel anything was possible. Encarta was really a product of that time.

If you were doing primary / secondary school during the 90s, you'd have had to do projects where paper encyclopaedias were your primary resource. For me in a rural school it wasn't until the mid 90s we had 486PCs with CDROM drives and going from Britannica to the searchable rich media database that was Encarta was a massive force multiplier. It was a remarkable demonstration of how positive an effect technology could have on the learning experience.
Tl;dr: someone you’ve never heard of trying to get famous by saying something “edgy”.
> As developers who never need help, we tend to forget that some people might do

I think one of the most regularly overlooked areas in which people may need help is through accessibility features. I'm not neurodiverse myself, but things that pop-up and animate can be problematic for those that are.

Having the option there may be useful, but the intrusive pop-ups that the previous comment referred to do not seem useful to me, and could even greater confound the experience for groups of people. I'd expect the intrusive features are mostly driven by conversion rates rather than usability.
Pointing out or "whistle blow" legal or ethical wrongdoings by a single person has nothing to do with a group coming together and agreeing on not participating in political topics that aren't essential to the groups mission.

>...isn't this just a fancy way of saying that the ends justify the means?

No, It doesn't discourage anyone from questioning the groups action at all. It should stop companies from having to decorate their office according to the current pride month to make a political statement that is completely irrelevant to its mission.
> If you use terms such as "cancel culture" and "liberals", it's pretty clear you're either a right-wing US citizen or someone who wishes they were one.

So you can't say "cancel culture has gone too far" without signaling you're right-wing? I'm not up to speed with the exact politics, but I've heard the term in non-right wing contexts.

Seems to me like that would make it impossible to talk about things, which is what I'm seeing. How would you talk about Twitter canceling people without using the term "cancel culture?
> This feature is just evil from the start and every browser feature, no matter how trivial or benign will eventually be abused.

That's the problem, though. Motivated humans can weaponize anything. We spend too much time trying to stave off the impossible, instead of going after the abusers - which today often are the presumably legitimate businesses, as a lot of feature misuse became standard business practice.
I'm surprised it hasn't been. Someone should just implement this on an online store, so that your mouse doesn't appear to be over the "Buy now" button, but in actuality the click would register as clicking that button.

Or better, the click would cast a vote for the candidate the developer prefers...
We also have a really hot ultra-low-end property market where 2 bedroom homes go for $2.3m on the North Shore. Sigh...
hahaha thanks!
Since when do national intelligence agencies have globally recognised brands?

KGB, Mossad, MI6? All global brands with distinct reputations and images to maintain.
You claim that MitM attacks are possible because keys can change without being notified.

Can you provide more details on that? I’ve been using signal for years and often get key change notices.
Or maybe the browser should implement hiding the cursor after 10 seconds of inactivity if the user has full-screened something.

If a website made your cursor disappear immediately upon full screen that would be freaky, as if you lost control of your machine, thus, I don't think the websites should have this capability.
As a Swede I'm astounded by how Sweden have become a pawn in other people's politics just because we had the "arrogance" of doing something they did not, but here we are. This entire article is false, especially the headline.

Anyway, regarding this point; there's wildly different infection-rates etc in different big cities in Sweden as well.
Ah, I see!
serious: pi bits (gpio joysticks, analogue stick), alternative boards like beagleboard or a non-arm board like arduino clones. something to provide wireless comms. bluetooth usb dongle.

comedy: winrar licence printed and framed to post on twitter or mastodon.
Well, if you have about 3 million dollar to put away, you're welcome here too. We need more Billionares and tech businesses here.

https://www.newzealandnow.govt.nz/investing-in-nz/visas/inve...
Not from NZ, but consider this: do you want to San Francisco-ize (multiply living costs, entrench a landlord caste & create weird incentives for local politics) the place? Because lots of foreign money simply walking into a heretofore sedate local real estate and business ecosystem is how you do that.
Cf. Toronto, SF, Paris, London, Munich &c
GCHQ were only able to break the Argentine encryption because the Dutch gave them very strong hints on how to break it.

And the Argentines had no need to break British encryption as the BBC kept them up to date.

The BBC revealed for example that Argentina’s bombs weren’t detonating on British ships because the fuses were set wrong. And they revealed troop movements too. This is a matter of historical fact.
Alot of people from China / India who get rejected in Australia, will go to NZ to do just that, because once an NZ Citizen, you can live/work in Australia.

Edit: Well maybe not alot, but when I lived in NZ 15 years ago, it was enough that Australia would complain about it.
This is exactly right - and that initial website was written during the "peak of inflated expectations" part.

I still think that chatbots provide an entirely new way of interacting with software. We're very used to dividing our desktop up into windows, and giving each process it's own two-dimensional real estate.

Conversation-oriented UI design fundamentally is different to that: you are escaping the 2D arrangement and allowing applications to collaborate with teams of people in a totally new way.

Here is something I wrote about that: https://riskfirst.org/complexity/Betting-On-RPA