wild_preference

> As for their alternatives, kicking the user out to Safari would significantly reduce the usability of the app.

Not at all.

When you open a website in Safari from an app, the user gets a first class website-browser experience without your chrome, and a "< Back to your app" button in the menuline.

They really are. Does HN not do anything against accounts that so obviously advertise?

> people were praising the interface, and nobody listened to the few who objected.

Or maybe objecting had the same effect it had back then as it does now: absolutely nothing.

It's like me saying "the government is corrupt!" and, any time something happens or some time has passed, "shoulda listened! ;)" -- Seems a bit masturbatory at best.

Aside: Is there a reasonable way to get any non-American/non-English news in the news app?

I find it a bit mindblowing that "Discover Channels" and the topics list are all in English and for a country I don't live in. For example, there's an option to add every BBC subcategory except BBC Mundo (i.e. Latin America).

Unless your site involves something particularly terrible, their abuse form is only good for the fact that it gets forwarded to the underlying web host.

Most web hosts are going to be more strict than CloudFlare is, but you'll notice that most scummy sites use scummy hosts.

Interestingly, if you can demonstrate that your keyboard has gone to shit and they thus have to do a top-panel replacement, they have to replace the battery, too.

At least that's what they did with my new Macbook Pro when a few of the keys came off with my fingers as I typed because I thought I could power through the crunches of debris that got under them.

Possibly the one (cheeky) advantage of a hard to replace battery: free battery replacement when something else fails. :)

Safari 11 or 12 introduced a new extension system where Safari extensions ship as a macOS app with a Safari extension component that can communicate with the native app. And the macOS app has standard Mac Store sandboxing options (by default, no FS access outside of its bundle).

I've written some extensions for personal use and so far it's been a great trade-off.

Serde offers more out of the box functionality with its annotations, but it's also bit uglier than Swift's Codable when you do need to implement it yourself.

If it wasn't for a blog post that gave some simple examples, I couldn't even figure it out myself.

Possibly not fair to compare them this way, though. No clue what the trade-offs are.

Right, that would be an example of a "different problem."

I'd be hard pressed to let stupid things client/managers can do direct how this sort of tool should work. For example, it'd be silly to demand "score inflation" just because your client is unreasonable. Or rather, if a client is making your life hard, I don't think it's the world that needs to change.

What's your solution if your client measures your success by punching their website into https://www.worthofweb.com/calculator/? And doesn't take you seriously enough to listen to you in general?

Meh, these tests are just good ways to find obvious problems with your site.

Fixating on the overall score seems like an indication of a different problem.

For example, you can't change the caching behavior of google-analytics.js, and it's usually intractable to split apart your CSS to optimize for above-the-fold content. Oh well, you didn't get a perfect score. Stay practical.

Call it a major UI enhancement. Is it still appropriate use of "awful"?

I think a solution that generalizes and has the possibility of actually working is for the result of compromised hardware to show up in the consumers' bill.

We expect to pay a low, fixed, monthly price for unlimited bandwidth, but what happens when someone else gets their hands on that bandwidth?

It's nice to hold manufacturers accountable for their woes, like shipping routers with "admin":"" creds, but what about all the other reasons devices get pwned, like users downloading malware or falling for those fake download-button ads or using something like Hola VPN that turns them into an open relay?

Some ISPs will give you a phone call or shut you down entirely if they probabilistically think your bandwidth is compromised, but that involves a lot of complexity.

If ISPs weren't racing to the bottom with the meaning of the word "unlimited", they could be honest about bandwidth prices and service levels instead of using a complicated throttling system to maintain the facade that bandwidth really is unlimited.

Also, there would be natural filtering pressure against, say, insecure IoT devices that end up impacting people's ISP bill.

Well, the forum costs $250-300+/month. Ads on the same forum used to give me $3,000/mo back in the day which bought me time to enrich the forum. Now they only cover $200/mo at best, so I'm left paying $100+/mo out of pocket. It's not just server costs, but database costs and ancillary services like S3 hosting/bandwidth, $20/mo to CloudFlare, and more. And, most of all, the amount of my own time that I expend to run it all. Not to mention the constant anxiety of "is it still online" I always have in the back of my head.

Everyone's charity has a limit. I consider shutting it down all the time but it becomes hard when I browse my own forum watching people connecting and writing. And losing money on this forum over the years is one of the sacrifices I've made which accelerated my return from the beaches of Thailand. Sometimes I look at that with regret. The forum cost more than my rent.

Using off-the-shelf software like vBulletin/Xenforo is expensive. You end up throwing money at scaling issues because it's essentially a black box.

I ended up migrating to my own software to wrestle control over costs. But it was an incredible amount of work to rebuild a popular forum from scratch. I could do it because I was in my mid-20s living off savings in Thailand. But I'm not, anymore, and I'm left throwing money at scaling issues again because it's hard to commit serious engineering work to something that isn't a profitable venture. The opportunity cost is huge.

Nonsense is a strong word.

I run a collaborative writing forum for mostly a pre-teen and teen demographic. It's the ilk of what got me into writing as a young one. They don't have money to spend, but ads keep the forum alive.

It would be extreme to say my forum has nothing to offer these youngsters, or that my lone banner-ad eclipses any good my forum may be doing.

As ads die, we're just going to continue witnessing the centralization of the internet which surely isn't all that great, either.

Ranges from language to language.

For example, VS Code pulls TypeScript definitions of your JavaScript dependencies and thus has superior intellisense.

Also, the plugin ecosystem uses JavaScript, so it tends to be more cutting edge, especially if you're working on a JavaScript project (i.e. same language as plugins). For example, VS Code and Atom had Prettier code-formatting when IDEA didn't. And they sometimes have the best support for newer languages like Elm.

I'd be wary of painting people as junior developers just because they don't use your preferred IDE.

The other half of this is correctly using the connection pool in the application layer to begin with.

One of the most common performance errors I see in random http applications is grabbing db connections for too long, like in middleware, or too aggressively in parallel queries.

Also, hard to take someone seriously when they use the word "awful" to describe the lack of some minor UI enhancement.

Look again. For example, it has a #tag feature.

I'd wonder more about polished UX. Drag and drop just seems like something that's quirky to get right, especially across mobile devices.

GoT is a good example of people being irrationally self-entitled.

Every time the subject comes up on Reddit, there are people who are genuinely mad at the guy like he wronged them for taking so long to end-cap the series.

It reminds me of the subset of my forum users who get out their pitchforks just because I, the creator, haven't been around for a while, like I owe them yet more of my free time. Or as if they've paid me money and I'm squandering it.

One problem with simulation is that it's super resource intensive, particularly more than a video. It turns my laptop's fans on quickly which then fights for my attention with the relaxing audio and makes me acutely aware that I'm killing my battery and putting unnecessary load on my computer.

Maybe a better middleground is to use an animation with transparency that you can instead overlay any background, like a looping gif.

If you're going to bother recording a video of something, why not spend the extra 5 minutes playing through it first so that you're sparing the audience of watching you figure out even the most basic mechanics?

I could see them second-guess if it was even possible to interact with that vine. And then at 3:00 I'm pretty sure they put the controller down to google what to do.

My only experience with H1b was when I worked at Amazon.

Lots of pressure to come in on the weekend. I certainly wasn't going to sacrifice my weekends. I'd just tell them no. I could work somewhere else.

But the H1b guys I worked with from India constantly caved to the guilt. If they were to lose the job, they'd have to pack up their entire life and go back to India to try again.

Easy high-skill exploitation.

Why is this so common among people who probably consider themselves pretty intelligent?

Blew me away in that Facebook dating thread yesterday how many people were saying that nobody uses Facebook.

Festivals I've been to will, say, require deposits of 100 peso increments and then the beers cost 80 pesos. And you can't get your money out.

Even if you could get your money back, you're still waiting at lines to recharge the bracelet. It's a joke.

With cash, you just come prepared and withdraw at any ATM long before the festival. Bracelets didn't solve any problem except disconnect the money handling event from the purchasing event so that you lose track of it, like how microtransactions are never priced in actual currency.

What kind of cost does society bear because of smoking?

Since we share finite resources like insurance pools and the medical system, there's a case for society to restrict the actions of others.

You're making the case for why people don't want to match with their immediate friends, but there's a lot of value in matching with people just one degree of separation away, through a mutual friendship. After all, that's how a lot of dating already goes down in real life.

Your Jack example is true if you and Jack share a considerable amount of mutual friends. But almost all the people I meet on Tinder only have a couple mutual friends with me, no more. Often just one. Any sort of failures in our relationship don't have that much reach, yet I still have benefits like being able to query my mutual friend about that person, or leverage them in some other way like having them invite us both to an event to get the ball rolling.

You must've thought you were being contrary, but websites already do. They have a top navbar. They have sidebars. They have "edit/delete" dropdowns. They feed you content in a scrollable column.

Facebook is as vanilla-standard as it gets.

I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. That article even enumerates the trivial ways in which you can detect these scams.

Is email "powered by bots" because spam/phishing/scams happen there, too? Seems like a worthless distinction to me. What about in real life when someone scams you by asking for bus money but they didn't actually need it for the bus? Hell, maybe you even have to mess up a few times before you learn. So what?

It's pretty easy to evaluate the utility of a dating service: are you actually meeting people? That's not something bots can fake, yet.

Have you actually used Tinder and found yourself talking to a bot enough times for it to challenge your entire objective? Because I have a very hard time believing that just like I doubt you've fallen for an adultfriendfinder "girls in your area" advertisement more than once.

Some live, human women on dating apps even ask you to Venmo them some money. Well, you unmatch with them and move on. No dating app can give you an unending consecutive succession of mates that will blossom into an in-person meet-up and then a relationship. Real life can't give you that, either. You already have to deal with the interactions that fizzle out, whether it's someone who never even responded to you, a chat bot that drops you an adultfriendfinder link, or someone you ended up not clicking with after all. That's life.

Sex workers have a screening process that demands your IRL identity for safety.

Turns out doxxing/stalking can always happen, but knowing someone's identity still makes you safer. For one, it gives you recourse. In Facebook's case, it also gives people social proof and precisely helps avoid the sort of troglodyte that's going to stalk you. When I see that I have mutual friends with someone on Tinder, I certainly have asked my mutual friend about that person just like you would do when dating through your existing friends, like that woman you met at your friend's dinner party.

Also, most dating in human history has happened through immediate social channels where you know someone's identity. I don't see what alternative you're proposing except blind dating with strangers with zero social proof. Yeah, women aren't going to do that for safety concerns.