callum85

You could say that about any article about one's own experiences. This one is different.

This article is a vacuous, patronising, self-aggrandising ego-wank.

> I would not feel any measure of sympathy

She is clearly concerned about the situation. She is addressing it by blogging about it and asking a community for advice. And she's doing an important thing here by confessing and discussing the causes of discrimination from a perspective that you rarely get to hear (for obvious reasons). This is for the greater good. I would feel a lot of sympathy for her if she got in trouble over this.

Some fundraising campaigns aim for large numbers of small donations, others focus on getting a few people to make bigger donations. It's not either/or. Both are good.

Yes, it's just a suggested donation to the Building Tomorrow charity, you can donate whatever you want.

Just click the email link, and change the amount in the subject line to whatever you want. You get an email back from Square with instructions on how to complete the transfer.

Or donate via PayPal at http://www.buildingtomorrow.org/donate/ if you're more comfortable with that.

> That's basically a subscription model, no?

Not really. A subscription model means the software stops working when you stop paying. @entrode's pro-rating idea is just more granular about how much of a rebate you get off the next version.

You're not considering that a lot of people might just prefer to be explicit and specific about purchases. If I see I've run out of pasta sauce, I might want to scan the empty one to reoder it, because it's precise. I definitely wouldn't want to risk vagueness and inaccuracy just for the privilege of using an abstraction like saying "I'm out of pasta sauce" into a phone. What would that achieve anyway? Outsourcing the bit of your brain that says "we need more pasta sauce", so you've only got to worry about thinking "oh there's no pasta sauce"..? Scanning a barcode is simple and precise.

Ah ok fair enough. There's no less content on many other pages I compared though. And as for the amount of stuff on the homepage, I wouldn't say the old site necessarily had the 'right' amount. I find the new design a bit easier on the eye, easier to scan, and more conducive to delving into specific topic pages that interest me. I don't know though, I might just be subconsciously overcompensating for all the negative comments because I feel they're overly harsh. It's impossible to really know how good a redesign is until you've lived with it for a while.

I'm pretty sure it only seems like it. If you compare the sites side-by-side, it's all still there, it just feels less crowded. Which is a good thing.

I read the negative comments before looking at the site myself, and was expecting to agree with them. But now I've looked at it, I think it's pretty good.

The design could do with a bit more 'refining', but then so could the old one. It's just the old one has the advantage of being something that millions of people have already gotten used to. It's hard to fairly compare your feelings about something you use every day vs something new.

Are we looking at the same thing? I've got the new site open side-by-side with the last, and the total amount of content looks the same.

I know two women who have tried those. In both cases they tried for several months to get used to them, but they gave up eventually because they're so unpleasant to use, and it never gets any easier. Apparently.

"most json is machine generated and in most cases should never be manually created by people"

Except when sketching out a static JSON file that you'll eventually implement as a real API connected to a database, once you've experimented and arrived at a good structure. I do this a lot. I wouldn't output JSON5 from a live API, but I would use it for sample data in development.

Your comment doesn't seem to address what I was saying. I just described a situation where you might use JSON5 in development (so you can put comments etc in your dummy data) and JSON in production (so you get native performance).

I often use a JSON file containing dummy content when I'm working on a web app, and I manually edit the JSON a lot during development (then, when I've settled on a structure, use the static JSON file as the design for a real API endpoint). Comments and ES5 niceties would be useful for those situations, at least. You could even assign JSON5 to window.JSON in your dev environment only, and still get the performance of real JSON in production.

> "that's really a human issue ... ⌘-Z should have been adequate."

I hope you don't work in usability.

I've made exactly the mistake described, several times. When making small changes to a bunch of files, it's common to go through the whole open-edit-save-close sequence in a few seconds, and if you've got a few things open and someone's talking to you, it's easy to fuck up.

I think this is terrible advice. I got much better at motivation over the last year by thinking in exactly the opposite way from what this article recommends. I accepted that I had virtually no willpower, and that I wasn't just going to just magically develop some, and that I didn't need it anyway. Instead I needed to get more skilled at 'coaxing' myself into doing things – at steering my feelings into more constructive areas, and then letting my desires drive my actions. I applied my tiny amount of willpower to this 'steering', rather than trying to use it to drag myself kicking and screaming into doing things, which it clearly is not powerful enough to do. It worked, and I'm much happier. You can't "just" do stuff if you don't feel like it, as this article suggests. That's completely unsustainable. Any approach amounting to "just fucking do it" is going to last only as along as that little glimmer of resolve lasts, which is obviously short term. Instead you need to break down the wall between your gut desires and your cerebral strategies, and make those two parts of yourself acknowledge each other and collaborate.

Typo or lighthearted joke. Either way, chill out

Advert is British for "ad".

Wait, what?

The 'motivational' comments were hilarious and refreshing. I strongly disagree with the other advice you've been given here.

Don't 'turn it up to 11' to remove all the subtlety and ram the joke down people's throats. And don't turn it into "Oops, try harder next time!" like every other insipid thing in the world. Please. You made something that made me laugh. As much as I love HN, it's a strange, unrepresentative community and you should be very careful trying to appease the crowd here, which always bristles at anything that breaks character. People here are sometimes too focused on how to churn out templated startups, and not enough on art.

"Free will" is not black and white.

The lines of free will and accountability are blurred by things like mental illness, addictions, childhood naivety, etc.

That view is insanely simplistic. Sometimes people do things that are against their own interests because they are in the clutches of an addiction. In these situations, it is sometimes OK for someone to step in and overrule them. Sometimes it's not just OK, but morally necessary.

It can be better to temporarily infringe someone's rights if it stops them from doing something that they will regret for the rest of their life.

Good design isn't the only thing that's made them so valuable. They've also made a lot of very smart strategic decisions to do with their supply chain and finances, which enables them to execute designs that their competitors can't afford to.

I don't think that would be saying the same thing. His point wasn't just that restricted access meant it couldn't become popular, but that it left a bad taste in people's mouths so it might not take off even now. So his acerbic (not hostile) tone was kind of pertinent to what he wanted to say.

> What "new features" exactly, and how do they have a "positive impact" on the end user?

You've got to be joking? Even if it's true that you mostly use websites that don't make use of new features, then you are extremely unrepresentative. Anyway, even simple content-driven sites like Wikipedia make use of a lot of HTML5 stuff now in ways that aren't necessarily obvious to users. And although much of that stuff could theoretically be made to work in older browsers, it's not viable to do that because it would be prohibitively expensive to maintain. So not as much good stuff could get built. That's how end users benefit.

Thoreau 2.0 https://static.pinboard.in/xoxo_talk_thoreau.htm

Awesome! I am definitely going to use this now. Been looking for something like this for a while.

Big caveat: this doesn't work in strict mode.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Is this a rare occurrence? 198% of "very little" is still very little.

I would've thought the figure often fluctuates by much more than this.