Hacker News Reader

Comment by mfoy_ | Hacker News Reader

The greater point is that if you put something really useful next to something really annoying it will exacerbate the issue.

F1 should not be so bad, and it should not be so close to F2. Even just leaving alone how bad, and utterly useless, the help dialogues in Windows are it's just terrible UX design.

It would be like having a "eject engine block" button next to the "start car" button. One day you're going to hit it instead of the one you meant... Annoying / dangerous UI controls should be kept out of the way of the more common features.

View on HN

My favourite example of this is from the Apollo command module. Margaret Hamilton (one of the programmers) had her daughter in the simulator and let her play around. She managed to crash the simulator by launching a certain programme midflight. Margaret wanted to stop this from being possible, but was overruled because astronauts don't make mistakes. Eventually one of the astronauts made that exact mistake during the Apollo 8 flight.

Source: https://www.wired.com/2015/10/margaret-hamilton-nasa-apollo/

one thing that boggles me about the firefox dev team is their continuing refusal to add a "disable ctrl-Q" setting. it's right next to ctrl-W and in my firefox using days i accidentally hit it a ton of times.

You might like one of the add-ons that disable Ctrl-Q.

There used to be one such Firefox addon that even made it into the Debian (Wheezy/Jessie) repositories. Unfortunately it was written for the old plugin system and never updated and is now designated as blocking the new Firefox multiprocessing, so I already started looking into Firefox addon programming just to replace it. Somehow I never thought about looking for newer alternatives in the official addon store, where several modern ones seem to exist already, so I'd like to thank you a lot for your suggestion.

Chrome used to "honor" the backspace key means navigate backwards so much that if you hit tab (changed focus) while typing a textbox then hit backspace it would nav back and lose all your text. Made me cry so many times.

With several versions of windows, I learned to hate how close Help was to Run on the start menu. You're about to run cmd or some specific program, and then next thing you know, your computer is crawling to a halt while it attempts to bring up and display the help ui.

Solvable with keyboard shortcuts or creating a shortcut to cmd somewhere else, but still happened enough to be infuriating. In most cases, it was when I was doing work on someone else's computer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com