While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

https://twitter.com/foone/status/1440014690831126528

by soneca • 5 years ago

364 251 5 years ago

IshKebab2• 5 years ago

Just hotkey detection gone wrong. Not that big of a surprise because implementing hotkeys on a website is a complete minefield. I don't think you can conclude that Tumblr is badly written from this. Badly tested maybe.

eptcyka• 5 years ago

Did you read the whole thread?

IshKebab2• 5 years ago

No because Twitter makes it completely unreadable.

znpy• 5 years ago

I cannot help but wonder, why does this person still spends their time on tumblr if they dislike it so much?

Just move somewhere else.

nixpulvis• 5 years ago

Probably because of other people.

javajosh• 5 years ago

why does this person still spends their time on tumblr

Because it's not all bad? Because the problems they experience are relatively minor and fixable, and that by complaining about this bug it might get fixed?

kosma• 5 years ago

Tumblr is still the best place to be for many people - even despite all those flaws. For many, there is no better "somewhere else" people can "just" move to.

Mashimo• 5 years ago

last post:

so I think I should make it clear that when I say "I love tumblr" I mean I love the userbase, at least most of it (obviously not the cyberbullying people with death threats part), and not the staff. the staff have no idea what they're doing and are only making the site worse

He/she loves Tumblr :)

bitwize3• 5 years ago

Foone is a they.

bombcar2• 5 years ago

A dying social media platform can be as good as a new one - the incentive for spammers et Al doesn’t exist and neither do many trolls (no audience) so the remaining group can be a good cross-section.

jdofaz• 5 years ago

For me google+ was like that for a while towards the end, but eventually there was a resurgence of trolls posting hate speech that drove me away.

floatboth2• 5 years ago

the incentive for spammers et Al doesn’t exist

Ha ha ha.

Tumblr is the place where you get followed (sometimes even messaged) by porn spam accounts regularly.

This problem is so infamous that even some ARG creators literally used the "spam bot aesthetic" (but with weirder messages) to pull people in: https://youtu.be/ZaYioM_bsb0

asplake2• 5 years ago

tumblr is fractally broken. it's not wrong in any specific way, it's wrong at every possible scale.

hamburglar• 5 years ago

Once, many years ago, my company was working with Tumblr on some kind of integration, and for some reason, the engineer I was working with emailed me a filed called something like tumblr.php that was the “show the main blog page” source. It was one of the most spaghetti-ish overly-long unreadable pieces of shit I’d seen in decades.

So this excellent set of tweets does not surprise me in the least.

tmcneal• 5 years ago

I remember visiting tumblr.com once a long time ago and they were actually serving the index.php file as a download rather than rendering the homepage. It was indeed a several thousand long file of spaghetti code.

zxcvbn4038• 5 years ago

I used to work there and indeed the source code is a huge monolithic PHP nightmare based on an ancient version of some forgotten framework and hacked on by hundreds of developers over the years. There was a huge amount of code dedicated to rendering content that depended on bugs from the application’s earliest days plus new behaviors that were introduced over time. Every request required a full start of the entire tumblr application - they didn’t trust the code to process more then one request per invocation so it exited after sending a reply. Developer turnover was huge due to the code base being a nightmare and no management support for refactoring.

But if you could stomach working with the code the catered lunches from Dos Toros and Luke’s Lobster were epic.

Karellen• 5 years ago

This line is likely inspired by the concept of "Fractal Wrongness": https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fractal_wrongness

and 2012's "PHP: a fractal of bad design": https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

asplake2• 5 years ago

I believe so too. Love the definition here though!

SahAssar• 5 years ago

Fractally wrong people are often immune to the stopped clock rule because they are not exactly stopped clocks. More like clocks losing a random number of seconds a day, in the wrong time zone of the wrong planet, in the wrong solar system.

That's a wonderful definition.

alfonsodev3• 5 years ago

So you are typing "Don't" and the ResetCursorPosition() function gets called and you look at the textbox and now it says "on'tD"

I had this bug trying to implement a text editor using Draft.js but not sure it was for the same reason.

I guess tumblr devs tried to implement a text editor and at the same time have some vim like shortcuts(jkl).

This makes you appreciate how less can be more.

awiesenhofer• 5 years ago

That's what that was! I experienced this behavior for years writing posts or comments on facebooks mobile site, helped me a lot to wean myself of that one.

alfonsodev3• 5 years ago

Thanks, indeed seems to have been raised on the Github repo.

https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/issues/1077

SilasX• 5 years ago

Yes! I had something like that and it was so frustrating I wrote a post (on FB, sigh) about it, looks like it was August 10.

I had written a comment with multiple paragraphs (which I guess they don't expect people to do, or test for) and I wanted to add something to the next-to-last paragraph, and when I tried to type "matters" it would keep locking me in autocomplete tagging for friends name "Matthew", and as soon as I dismissed the cursor would leap to the end of the comment. If I tried to click back, the cursor kept jumping to the end!

MattKimber• 5 years ago

Javascript editors trying to reinvent desktop paradigms but without the 40-odd years of practice and having all the events arrive whenever they feel like is one of the most frequent irritations of web-based platforms for me, because you use a text editor so frequently and therefore encounter its problems similarly often.

For example, earlier today I was editing a small internal app in Retool. I typed something, instinctively went for Cmd-Z, and it reverts a bunch of changes I made in the query I had open 5 minutes ago. Of course, by the time I spot it and hit Shift-Cmd-Z, the internal state has updated so now it redoes some other unrelated undo operation and I have two broken things to fix.

And then of course there's Notion, the champion of "you've hit a keyboard shortcut and it's applied it to something halfway across the screen from the selection, or possibly just given up trying to do anything useful and deleted a few paragraphs of text at random". Perhaps they were pining for the outrageously janky experience that was attempting to make even the most innocuous of formatting changes in earlier versions of Word For Windows.

MauranKilom• 5 years ago

MS Teams is just as terrible.

If I accidentally fat-fingered e.g. the \ key at the end of a message ("Got it!\"), I want to

1. press the up key

2. press backspace

3. press enter

to delete the last character in the last sent message.

But unless you actually wait at least a second after step 1, the UI is so sluggish in starting the edit of your last message that you instead get "please type a message to continue" because you pressed enter while the New Message text box still had focus.

Things are much worse if you want to do anything more complex. Say, capitalize the first letter of the last sent message (up, home, delete, type capital letter, enter). Usually results in complete gibberish, like appending the capital letter to the message, or sending it in a new message (depending on how fast you are).

alfonsodev3• 5 years ago

having all the events arrive whenever they feel like is one of the most frequent irritations of web-based platforms for me

How does VSCode handle this? Because I’ve never had an issue typing on it, I’ll definitively have a look to the repo, but does someone know?

coldpie• 5 years ago

implement a text editor using Draft.js

on'tD do this.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 5 years ago

Why not just let a text area do its job? Why do you need a special "text editor"?

throwaway889900• 5 years ago

How else are you going to give your front end devs work to do?

floatboth2• 5 years ago

most users would like to decorate their posts with bold underline color whatever and would not want to learn markdown

hnick• 5 years ago

I had similar issues in Ontraport where if I typed too quickly my cursor would suddenly jump to the start of the textbox. I noticed I had to slow down like a hunt and peck typist and it wouldn't happen. I wonder if it was better for people who live near the server since it could be due to cross-Pacific latency.

I did try copy/pasting from another program, but formatting bugs made that unreliable.

Doxin• 5 years ago

Spotify sometimes manages to somehow get into a state where typing in the search box will end up typing everything in reverse, so instead of "Don't" the box contains "t'noD". The only thing that seems to get it out of this state is losing window focus. Just losing focus on the search box doesn't help.

pitched2• 5 years ago

That’s really nice of him to put together such a concise, well-described list of issues for them. Hopefully someone sees this and adds it to their issue tracker. It’s very rare to see anyone internal grab something from outside like that though.

bombcar2• 5 years ago

There’s evidence in the list that they know about them and can’t seem to fix them. It’s likely a pile of bandaids and trying to fix one breaks another thing unrelated.

pjc503• 5 years ago

Bold of you to think Tumblr has an issue tracker or indeed any remaining technical staff...

germ• 5 years ago

Heads up, foone uses they/them pronouns.

I love their write ups, I know whenever I see their posts on here to cozy up with a coffee because it's about to get fun.

pitched2• 5 years ago

Thanks, I did miss that! Looks like it’s too late to edit now though

nowherebeen• 5 years ago

I still can’t believe it was sold for $1 billion.

pjc503• 5 years ago

There were a huge number of users.

It was only after it sold that Yahoo realised how many of them were using it for porn, which in retrospect should have been obvious: it's an image hosting site.

evanelias4• 5 years ago

No, the percentage of porn content was actually relatively small at the time of the sale. Low to mid single digits if my memory is correct.

During Tumblr's peak heyday (~9 months before the sale iirc), Tumblr's daily posting volume was around 1/5th the size of Twitter's at the time. Keeping in mind that Tumblr had no character limit and much greater multimedia support, the amount of content being posted on Tumblr was quite significant.

It was a widely-used general-purpose social network / social publishing platform. Most major brands had a presence on Tumblr, and for a while it was extremely common to see a Tumblr icon on their sites right next to Facebook and Twitter icons.

From my POV as an early engineer there, what went wrong was poor execution in response to many simultaneous existential threats:

* Instagram succeeded at peeling off all the "just want to post photos on mobile" users, and also became the hit new thing with the teenage users

* Pinterest succeeded at peeling off all the "just want to digital scrapbook" users

* Although the porn percentage was relatively low at the time, it still scared advertisers

* Difficulty fundraising / running low on money at particularly bad timing. Facebook's stock performed poorly for its first 15 months post-IPO, and this temporarily made fundraising difficult for existing social platforms... especially when growth was relatively flat (due to the first two bullets) and revenue was disappointing (due to third bullet).

* Ever-growing tech debt. The early team was extremely solid, but very small relative to the amount of traffic, so we often had to creatively cut some corners. Later on, management didn't want to allocate staffing to fix existing things, and a lot of time was wasted on unrealistic big-bang rewrites that were abandoned. Meanwhile the hiring bar kept being lowered over time once the company was no longer a rocket ship.

I left just before the Yahoo sale, as working at Tumblr had gone from my dream job to a stagnant grind during my tenure there. I later returned for another year in the late-stage Yahoo into early Verizon days, with idealistic hopes of helping to prevent a Vine-like fate, but let's just say that was a poor personal decision and leave it at that :)

JohnWhigham• 5 years ago

I mean, at the time it was teeming with potential. But then Marissa Mayer gutted it, all its refugees flocked to Twitter, and it's been a walking corpse for years now.

nicoburns• 5 years ago

I hope someone reimplements tumblr as an open platform at some point. They got a lot right from a UX perspective.

httpsterio• 5 years ago

It's literally the UX that is wrong. Community and their content is why it's still a thing.

mst5• 5 years ago

I think maybe OP was talking about the overall UI paradigm. The details are janky as all get out, certainly, but the concepts aren't bad at all.

nsv• 5 years ago

Kind of like what the mastodon/pleroma network is to Twitter?

drdeca• 5 years ago

There’s waterfall.social which has been made open source (Idr under which license. I think it might be AGPL?) Not sure whether that’s what you mean by “open platform”.

It also has a number of nice features added compared to tumblr, like changing which blog of yours is the “main blog”, having a separate dashboard and following list for each blog in an account, a system to detect uncredited art-re-uploading, etc.

NaturalPhallacy2• 5 years ago

The UX is designed from a user perspective, a lot right. The implementation is from a developers perspective mostly wrong.

smcl• 5 years ago

These hotkeys in websites are an utter curse. So many times I've started typing in Jira, then something weird happened that caused my keystrokes to be interpreted by the page instead of entered into a comment box ... then the ticket gets reopened, unassigned, etc.

shantnutiwari• 5 years ago

yeah, and bonus points if then you then spend 10 minutes trying to figure out what happened, and how to undo it

drcongo• 5 years ago

And most of them don't check to see if the user is also holding down a modifier key, thereby overriding your system keyboard shortcuts. Yes. I _am_ looking at you Google Spreadsheets.

kps• 5 years ago

Firefox used to not send those to the site js; I think that broke with the Quantum update. Just one of its thousand cuts.

Steltek• 5 years ago

(I feel like we jumped topics from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597895)

JIRA's Search is far worse than the regular JIRA hotkeys. The Enter key will incorrectly tab-complete JQL just before executing the search. Meanwhile, the Tab key doesn't tab-complete and instead focuses the Search button (which lets you execute the uncorrupted JQL). You have to actively train yourself out of how everything else works just to avoid going insane. Well, that or use the mouse just to click Search (eww).

Every ticket tracking system sucks. Trello was the closest thing to joy.

ep1033• 5 years ago

Above a certain level of complexity, Jira is the best work tracking and managing solution I've worked with.

Its curse, is its developed by Atlassian. A company that was capable of buying Stash, and, somehow, somewhat, turned that codebase into what we now know as bitbucket.

smoldesu• 5 years ago

Every ticket tracking system sucks. Trello was the closest thing to joy.

Absolutely this. I grew up working on an FRC team that used Trello, and I think we got more done as high-schoolers than most modern Agile teams could.

AshamedCaptain• 5 years ago

It's easy enough for me to try to load a Jira page, start typing something on the search field before the page is fully loaded, which causes all keystrokes to be interpreted as shortcuts. With obviously funny results. It is not uncommon for users in our project to suddenly select all the issues in the product, and assign all of them to themselves by accident (which, unlike delete, shows no confirmation whatsoever).

BoxOfRain2• 5 years ago

Jira somehow manages to perfectly capture the soupy grottiness of a hangover with its user experience. The cloud edition especially is like swimming in treacle, there's just so many little glitches and random bouts of sluggishness it feels like you're dealing with a quick proof of concept someone wrote when they were drunk one afternoon, not the polished product of a billion-dollar juggernaut.

ljm3• 5 years ago

Gitlab is another culprit for this and their UI/UX is growing to be as awful as every other complex enterprise tool on the market.

The search/filter box on the MR and Issues list has the appearance of accepting free input, but what you need to do is use some ridiculous no-code query UI to click your way to a valid query.

I can't type 'author: xxx' into the field, because that will tell me that searching that way is unsupported (so why let me do it?). Instead, I have to start typing, select the word 'author', then another box will appear and I have to select '=' in it, and then a third box will materialise where I can search for a username. At this stage, it's basically a coin toss as to whether you get the desired input or the whole form breaks and you have to start again. Someone, somewhere, thought this was more intuitive than parsing a string or offering some predefined filters.

My only question is: why?

sneak• 5 years ago

I wish I could turn off js's ability to handle keypress events on a per-site basis.

pjc503• 5 years ago

So many times I've started typing in bash, and then realised that my focus has been on a website instead, which starts doing some ridiculous stuff in response. There's no way to discover hotkey functionality otherwise, of course, because "thou shalt not discover" is a modern UX guideline.

mjevans• 5 years ago

Underlined hotkeys for menu context and for thought to be hot-path actions dedicated keyboard combinations outside of the menus.

Aside from auto-complete searchbars, I think UI functionality peeked in the mid to late 1990s.

mst5• 5 years ago

A non-zero number of websites have followed web twitter in making '?' produce a hotkey display.

Naturally tumblr isn't one of them.

MiddleEndian• 5 years ago

They've replaced discoverability with "repeated unwanted notifications about mundane updates"

nerdponx• 5 years ago

Github has (or maybe had) some hotkey that not only opens a clunky browser-based text editor, but also forks the repo under your account. Then you have to go back and manually delete the repo that you didn't intend to fork. Ugh!

Also a lot of web-based code editors override the standard Ctrl/Cmd-L shortcut ("go to URL bar") to mean "go to line". It's nice having IDE-like affordances, I guess, but not when it interferes with the basic functionality of the browser.

Joker_vD3• 5 years ago

Isn't the "standard" shortcut for "go to line #" actually Ctrl+G?

clumpthump• 5 years ago

Squarespace's "ESC to go to Squarespace login" is a huge pain for me as well. I think it's on by default. I CTRL+F pretty often. I press ESC to clear it. I get redirected to Squarespace if I'm on a Squarespace site that hasn't turned off this "feature".

dddddaviddddd• 5 years ago

Gmail shortcuts are great, until focus jumps away from the search field while typing in it. This happens if you try to search before the page has fully loaded.

remram• 5 years ago

This happens ALL THE TIME. At first I thought I was touching the touchpad by mistake, but I now have no touchpad and it's definitely Gmail forgetting where I'm typing. Then I have to figure out what actions I may have triggered and undo.

johnsoft4• 5 years ago

This is why desktop apps use the Ctrl key for shortcuts. I'm not sure how that bit of common sense got lost in the transition to webapps.

blacktriangle• 5 years ago

The lack of Ctrl is sadly a feature for web apps. You don't know which browser, and thus which set of shortcuts your user will be using your app from. However assuming that shortcuts will be prefixed is a pretty safe assumption, so the non-prefixed letters are really the only safe option for web app hotkeys as they form a relatively safe space of shortcuts.

_moof2• 5 years ago

I feel like the modern web is an exercise in adversarial UX. I am constantly fighting with it to get it to stop doing - and pardon my Anglo-Saxon here but I think it's warranted - obnoxious bullshit. Hotkeys, pop-ups (er, sorry, modals), text fields with paste disabled, login walls and other dark patterns... just let me use your website!

I get why the hotkey scourge came about, because folks are trying to build apps on a platform that isn't actually a platform. Browsers provide some but not all of the facilities of a real operating system (I'm using "operating system" here in the larger sense of "an integrated software platform that includes a complete toolbox a la Windows, macOS, etc."), so everyone's forced to reinvent square wheels. But understanding it doesn't make the experience as a user any less painful. And although I very much prefer to be able to work from the keyboard whenever possible, hotkeys as they exist on the web today ain't it. They're inconsistent, undiscoverable, and aren't integrated with fundamental UX principles like "don't destroy the user's work" and "let the user recover from mistakes."

ryandrake• 5 years ago

The infuriating part of this is, we keep complaining about all this horrible web UX over and over, on a web forum that a large number of web developers read daily. There are probably web developers browsing this thread right now, maybe reading this very comment, who are actively doing this to the web. Hey! Web Developer Reading This:

    PLEASE STOP making the web terrible.

The very people who can fix this are reading HN. Just stop. Put the keyboard down. Put away the Javascript. Forget those modal pop-ups and newsletter sign-ups. Now do some meditation. Think about what you are doing to the user's experience when you start typing again. I'm really talking to you, mister web developer reading this, who has a JIRA ticket up next in the queue asking you to add a dark pattern to a web site. Please stop. Articulate to your manager why this is horrible, and don't do it. All it takes is people (us, here on HN) to stop doing these things, and things will slowly start getting better.

bitwize3• 5 years ago

There's a reason why I call it "Fumblr". I've never experienced a hotkey conflict like this yet, but it's just so full of UI fails that the experience of posting something is rough and cumbersome, even before you get to the comically catastrophic fails like this.

notacoward• 5 years ago

When this was happening to me it turned out to be bad interaction with '@' followed by a punctuation mark. I can reproduce it at will right now. Something to do with name auto-completion, but once I knew how to avoid it I stopped debugging their code for free.

rmilk• 5 years ago

Same darn thing with Outlook. They added mentions, and now anytime you type @something it goes looking for that person. Examples of how this goes wrong: @10pm or when I type to send to a colleague in a language that has @var type syntax. Reply from MS was that there isn’t any way to turn off the mentions.

keeganjw• 5 years ago

This reminds me of when the spacebar stopped working in the YouTube search box. I thought my keyboard broke for a sec until I realized it worked just fine everywhere but YouTube. Then later I found out it wasn't just me...

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/10/22323716/youtube-search-b...

greenyoda• 5 years ago

Interesting... I've seen spacebar not work in Flickr's search box too. It happens to me sporadically.

dredmorbius3• 5 years ago

Spacebar fails to work in the PocketBook e-book reader search dialog, when using an attached Bluetooth keyboard.

Rather than insert a space in the search term, it scrolls the document.

The backspace key fails to work in Pocket when editing tags. Instead it's necessary to either use the <delete> key (if available), or to highlight and overwrite text to be replaced.

dbatten2• 5 years ago

True story: One day, Windows wouldn't let me type the letter p.

I was trying to log back in from the Windows lock screen. Typed my password, got it wrong. Typed it again, got it wrong. Eventually got locked out of my account, despite being extremely careful to type my password correctly. Went to IT and had them unlock my account...

Went back to my PC and tried to log in again. Typed my password very carefully, letter by letter, watching each letter come up on screen as I went. When I went to type the letter p, nothing happened. I hit p repeatedly, nothing.

I figured the switch for the p key on my keyboard had died or something, so I went to IT and got a new keyboard. Unplugged the old, plugged in the new. Still no p. OK, this is getting ridiculous. Clicked on accessibility tools and tried to use the on-screen keyboard to type in my password. _Still couldn't type the letter p, even with the on-screen keyboard._

Ended up having to hard reset the machine, and then everything was fine and dandy. Still have no idea what could have happened. It ended up being the last straw that pushed me to Ubuntu, and I've never looked back.

Intermernet• 5 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOP_(code)

dEnigma• 5 years ago

Okay, I've never thought of NOP as "no 'P'", so this caught me completely by surprise and made me laugh out loud.

civilized• 5 years ago

Getting a "Who's on First" vibe, but I can't quite make it into a real joke...

- "I can't get a p, no matter what I do there's no p at all!"

- "No p?"

- "Nope!"

- "Well if it's a no-op of course there's no p!"

- "It's not a no-op, I'm telling you there's no p!"

atribecalledqst• 5 years ago

You can get into a similar state on MacOS by pressing a key multiple times in a row (option I think). It just quietly disables a large number of keys. I figured it out by accident one day because I assigned the key as my "push to talk" on Discord. That was a fun hour trying to figure out what had happened.

miah_• 5 years ago

On MacOS if you remap your capslock to control there is a race condition on the login screen. If you use the control/capslock key to wake up your laptop and manage to time it right, you can enable capslock but not have a way to disable it (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?)).

treeman79• 5 years ago

Remote learning with a 1st grader showed me just how many ways a computer can get screwed up by random impresses.

formerly_proven• 5 years ago

Windows 10 has this funny bug where sometimes for some reason your individual windows don't get focus any more. You can click at their title bar, and they'll be drawn as-if they have focus (darker shadow and foreground titlebar), but no window actually accepts or processes any user input (while updating normally in the background, and also redrawing). The only way I know how to fix this is to go into the Ctrl+Alt+Delete screen; just bringing up task manager doesn't change anything.

nitrogen• 5 years ago

Could you have something running with an invisible window, e.g. keylogger? Less scrupulous friends from way back used to talk about writing such things.

dreamcompiler• 5 years ago

MacOS has had a similar issue as far back as 10.7. In 10.6 and before if you see a window with red, green, and yellow buttons in the corner, that window has focus, period. It was an enforced invariant.

In later versions it's pretty common to see such windows that don't actually have focus. Clicking again on the title bar usually fixes the problem but I find it very annoying. There's a race condition in the system somewhere that Apple doesn't recognize as a bug.

johnsoft4• 5 years ago

I think I've had this happen too. My fix is win+l to logout, then log back in.

ctraynor• 5 years ago

The reason why this will fix it is because Ctrl+Alt+Delete has a higher level of system interrupt than alternate ways to get to task manager. Ctrl+Alt+Delete fixes a surprising number of issues by interrupting runaway issues.

Arainach• 5 years ago

It sounds like you've installed some sort of app with a low level keyboard hook that's discarding the input. The login screen is in a separate desktop and not subject to such meddling. If it was an accessibility tool it might be able to hook into the login screen, I forget.

not1ofU4• 5 years ago

A couple of things to try that may help:

Alt+Tab (switch between open programs) - might help change the focus

Windows 10 has an advanced version of ^ as I understand, which uses the key combo: Win + Tab. The cycle of these commands can be reversed by adding "shift" to the mix (in case of many open programs / windows and you dont want to cycle through all of them)

Win+x has different, but equally useful menus for win 8 / win 10 - I was overjoyed when i first discovered this, as it retired many many other shortcuts I used over the years. (to get to device manager / control panel / event viewer)

and if all else fails: Alt+F4 - closes active (focused) program / window. If no programs or windows are in focus, then it will bring up the "shut down" dialog box, which allows for reboot / signout / shutdown / Switch user / sleep and hibernation if its enabled.

rawling• 5 years ago

My favourite W10 bug is that if I maximise an Office window and then try to close it by mashing the mouse right into the top right corner, it actually clicks past and closes whatever window is underneath.

sixothree• 5 years ago

My first thought would be one of those mouse sharing programs (synergy, multipliciy, mouse without borders). They really screw up _everything_.

Nothing sucks like mouse without borders. Nothing. Except for Synergy which is worse. But nothing sucks like synergy. Well except Multiplicity.

not1ofU4• 5 years ago

Meanwhile a printer somewhere was unloading a rainforest worth of paper all over the place.

(thinking your CTRL key was stuck and activating the print shortcut, but unplugging the keyboard rules that out)

Rd6n63• 5 years ago

Button presses are often handled by state machines at a driver level so that a single “press” only registers as a single press. Otherwise, it will register as a lot of presses because the physical switches bounce on contact. They call this debouncing. Probably, a drivers state machine did not transition out

dbatten2• 5 years ago

This doesn't seem to explain how it would happen after plugging in a new keyboard, or trying to use the on-screen keyboard, though...

Nextgrid4• 5 years ago

Pretty sure this would be done at the hardware level, as otherwise this behavior would differ between the BIOS, Windows, Linux & Mac. As far as I know no such debouncing code exists in operating systems for HID keyboards.

t-writescode• 5 years ago

At a job I worked at, we had servers that were given several internal IP addresses to map to external IP addresses.

One day, one machine just ... stopped having a bunch of those IP addresses. They were just gone.

We didn't understand, troubleshot as much as we could, and eventually just gave up and went "forget it, just try restarting the machine."

It worked.

It's amazing what weird states a computer can get into that "did you try turning it off and on again?" is a very real and legitimate and helpful piece of advice.

kevin_thibedeau• 5 years ago

Bit flips from cosmic rays happen all the time. It's inevitable that they sometimes change state in deleterious ways.

vvatermelone• 5 years ago

I've been having bizarrely similar issues with my XPS lately, except that none of the keys work except the i key, even with the on-screen keyboard. Only happens once in a blue moon, but as in your case, requires a hard reset.

a13692099932• 5 years ago

One day, Windows wouldn't let me type the letter p.
It ended up being the last straw that pushed me to Ubuntu, and I've never looked back.

On Ubuntu, that would be:

  $ Q=$($(echo /usr/bin/*rintf) \\x70)
  $ echo hel$Q
  help

right?

justinsaccount• 5 years ago

  $ echo hel$'\x70'
  help

da_chicken• 5 years ago

I have actually seen this before. It wasn't the P key; it was a different key. X or C, I think. However, the symptoms otherwise seem to match. I don't remember if we tried a second keyboard, but we definitely tried the on-screen keyboard and were confused when it, too, didn't work.

The only things we could guess were something related to the Windows Search, Cortana, or telemetry services. Unfortunately, it's been since the early days of Win10 since that happened so I don't remember any other details. We also had to physically restart the system to fix the problem.

drewzero1• 5 years ago

Wow, I'd nearly forgotten about this. The exact same thing happened to my sister-in-law a few years ago when she visited with her Windows 10 laptop and couldn't connect to our wifi.

Eventually we figured out the 'p' (or maybe it was 'n'? Can't remember for sure.) in the password was getting skipped, but it was hard to tell with the password masking. Tried a USB keyboard, onscreen keyboard, same thing. I think we might have given up and let her use one of our computers at that point. It was (and still is) very confusing.

octopoc• 5 years ago

Reminds me of how sometimes my developer workstation running Windows gets into a mode where it won’t type anything except emoji’s.

asdfasgasdgasdg• 5 years ago

I wonder if it's a bad interaction between one of this person's extensions and Tumblr. Presumably if this were a problem for everyone, new blot posts would have cratered and Tumblr's SRE would have been notified and any recent releases would have been rolled back. So I would assume this issue affects only a small fraction of users. Could be wrong but I guess we will see.

Kuraj3• 5 years ago

I don't know how many Polish people who owned a Radeon card in the 2000s are there on HN but I'm sure they can all relate :-) as the card software would overwrite the key combination used to type the letter "ć" and open the Catalyst Control Center instead. Argh!

marcosdumay• 5 years ago

I just don't remember what DOS game it was that had actions linked to all of CTRL, ALT and DEL.

It were some actions that one wouldn't usually use together. I, as a bad gamer just didn't at all, but some people were able to put more commands per second there...

maccard• 5 years ago

I worked at a gaming event a while back, where the players were using hardware we had bought them to match what they had at home. One of them changed the crouch binding from Ctrl to alt (to use the thumb) and the default bindings for the keys on his moise were f1 through f4... He alt+f4'ed out of his competitive game in the middle of the round, twice, before we actually figured out what was wrong.

numpad0• 5 years ago

Sometimes I wonder if there will come a day when everyone just switch to IME based inputs for all semantic text entries. "anthropomorphillistic" is "anth[tab][tab][tab]", "Здравствуйте" is "zdravstvuyte[space]", "豚骨醤油" is "tonkotsusshouyu[space]" and so on. In IME off state input reverts to US.

It might lead to a dystopia where typing o-r-a-n-g-e somehow yields "a bright spectrum at dusk" but that's an issue for a separate discussion.

dotancohen2• 5 years ago

I would hate to type my language in English letters. Which English letter do I use for ח? How about ע? What about needing to add a צירי to a letter? How about the occasional RLM mark?

And forget about the technical aspects, the cultural aspects of suggesting to use a foreign alphabet to write in one's native language is insulting. This is a technique often used by conquerors, just ask any southern ex-Soviet state. Even if the Japanese have accepted it due to technical limitations.

SSLy3• 5 years ago

altgr-z still opens nvidia's bar instead of, you know, just typing ż. In 2021, not 2004.

Kuraj3• 5 years ago

Wait you mean the GeForce Experience overlay? I must have reassigned that right after installation so I didn't remember. But at least this one warrants having a hotkey in the first place!

ygra• 5 years ago

That's why Ctrl+Alt hotkeys should be avoided completely. Someone hasn't told Jetbrains, though, and as a user of US International I run into a fair number of weird issues due to that.

Semaphor• 5 years ago

Someone hasn't told Jetbrains

They also didn’t tell Microsoft. Outlook, MS Teams, and Jetbrains IDEs are my main offenders (using the EURKey layout).

Recently tried a HN-recommended todo app. It actually registered some Ctrl+Alt combination as a global hotkey.

uxp100• 5 years ago

Another fun day a year or two ago on Tumblr involved the old classic top-posting vs bottom-posting debate. I don't remember the details precisely, but it was something like this:

They switched the default from one to the other one day, so that mid day your replies started being top posted. And so you got that wonderful mix of top and bottom posting. Then they fixed it, and so you could have a thread that had just top posting in the middle. Neato. Thanks Tumblr.

pram• 5 years ago

You just reminded me that if a Tumblr conversation went on long enough the quotes became smaller, pushed out of the div to the right. Literally unreadable lol

aembleton• 5 years ago

Threadreader link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1440014690831126528.html

account42• 5 years ago

the same site that then fixed that bug and forced all blog descriptions to be utf-8, but then implemented size limits as a number of bytes. so they truncated mid-utf-8 character, which made parsing the XML A REAL FUN TASK LET ME TELL YOU

How is this a problem unless you do UTF-8 validation when parsing the XML, in which case stop doing that for data you don't control.

JimDabell• 5 years ago

If you truncate a UTF-8 string mid-character, then can’t that sequence swallow the next byte, such as <, which would break XML parsing completely?

toast0• 5 years ago

No, UTF-8 is self synchronizing... The first byte of a code point is clearly the first byte of a code point, so it's possible to tell that there was a truncated code point, as long as the next one starts correctly (if you lost two bytes in a row, you might get a mashed up code point, but that's a different loss scenario)

_moof2• 5 years ago

UTF-8 encoding works like so:

  0xxxxxxx
  110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
  1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
  11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

...where the "x" bits encode the code point. So if you're halfway through a four-byte sequence and see a byte like 0xxxxxxx, you know something's wrong.

Joker_vD3• 5 years ago

Right, Postel's law: validating the data you receive reduces the interoperability, so don't do that.

torstenvl• 5 years ago

    if (c & 0b10000000) continue;

mproud• 5 years ago

“I could refresh my browser page, or I could write a bunch of stuff about it on Twitter!”

phreack• 5 years ago

god I love tumblr. it's one of the best social networks on the internet because it's just a complete fractal dumpster fire

Couldn't agree more. Everything is just so awful I can't even imagine the staff turning it into some boring Twitter like dumpster fire all about sucking up to celebrities. They have chronological post order by default, that makes it instantly better than nearly all other social networks.

It's unsalvageable and due to that, an accidental refuge from the current mess of the Internet.

Arch-TK• 5 years ago

This entire thread reminds me of all the issues I had programming in Clarion 8. I could write an equivalently long thread about clarion if I still remembered half the issues.

What's scarier is that at some point Clarion got support to publish software as websites... Maybe Tumblr is written in clarion.

not1ofU4• 5 years ago

The full thread is the most epic rant I've ever read, and I am not even finished yet... It so good, <strike>I am going to go and check every response to each of the ops tweets after I do finish it.<strike> - apparently I need a twitter account for this.

Edit: Currently I am here:

"and my favorite part of this is that every time tumblr has fucked up and created some weird bug, the user base almost immediately weaponizes it."

black_puppydog3• 5 years ago

I feel like in a thread like this, Asana deserves a shout-out for utterly fucking up the UX in any firefox version I've tried, up to and including nightly.

Typing in the various text input fields has ~1s of lag. It's a TEXT FIELD for fuck's sake!

shrimp_emoji• 5 years ago

JS bby

seph-reed2• 5 years ago

I could do this with any language. It's just bad code.

SSLy3• 5 years ago

Facebook's fake text boxen do the same (if they let me type in at all…)

Nextgrid4• 5 years ago

Since a few years ago ruining text fields seems to be a rite of passage for front-end developers. I echo the Asana issue and I also noticed Slab (some kind of Notion alternative) both managed to make text lag.

bhl2• 5 years ago

Asana uses ProseMirror and Slab uses QuillJS, and neither of them lag by default if you look at the standalone libraries.. so :shrug:

If you have free time, I'd pop open Chrome Dev Tools, run a performance monitor on both and try to diff out what each of those products do that cause the additional input lag (if there's no code obfuscation).

dredmorbius3• 5 years ago

Pocket, again.

It can take upwards of one full minute for text to start appearing when typing tags.

shreyshnaccount• 5 years ago

can we go back to when Javascript wasn't used in EVERYTHING please

subpixel• 5 years ago

My personal pet peeve is what every Squarespace-powered site on the internet (many millions!) does to the esc key.

Example: https://www.folioeast.com/

I never realized how often I use the esc key until I started getting routed to Squarespace logins all over the place.

athorax• 5 years ago

Oh. My. God. I have been wondering why when I come back to my PC after it being asleep I've been on random squarespace login pages. I usually tap esc a couple of times to wake up my computer.

macintux• 5 years ago

I learned years ago to use as “safe” a key as possible to wake up my computer, so I settled on Control.

Wish I could remember what led me to that decision.

junon• 5 years ago

Side note, @foone is a great account to follow on Twitter if you're looking for weird Hardware hacks and commentary on tech.

vultour• 5 years ago

They have like 500 tweets just in the past day. I don't use Twitter, but doesn't that completely drown out your feed? How do you follow someone who's posting every few minutes?

fknorangesite2• 5 years ago

They're arranged in threads. You just scroll up to the top of the thread you want to read.

superasn• 5 years ago

And ironically @foone hates Hacker news with a passion(1) for some reason and yet these threads make the front page of HN every 3 months or so!

(1) https://twitter.com/foone/status/1310432709273989120?lang=en

fknorangesite2• 5 years ago

@foone hates Hacker news with a passion(1) for some reason

Here's their most recent thread (in response to this post) on why: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1440703149585563652

efdee• 5 years ago

A long, long time ago, I "broke" my dad's MS Works word processor. The D key just stopped working. Turns out that, during my fiddling around, I had created a macro that did nothing and had 'D' as a hotkey. It was the first time ever that I had "broken the computer".

asdff• 5 years ago

gui needs a log just like the cli and it should have happened 30 years ago

egoisticalgoat• 5 years ago

That's something I discovered the other day on my pc. At some point during the last year or so, I accidentally assigned a macro to the C key that did nothing but press the C key, so it was pretty much impossible to notice during normal use, except that holding it down behaved out of the ordinary.

haddr2• 5 years ago

Another weird thing: some programs like to capture key combinations that are used to input some diacritics. It is exceptionally bad when it’s a mouse driver, and even worse when it happens on your company laptop where you have no admin rights to remove it…

haddr2• 5 years ago

One more funny story: we used to have some weird errors from time to time, when someone accidentally committed code with some letter L placed randomly in the code. We soon happened that it was a result of people blocking windows machine (win L), when somehow the letter L got propagated to the IDE running under Linux in VirtualBox. Yeah, we used Linux on top of Windows machines back then…

handsarebags• 5 years ago

Feel for op ;D

Appreciate the description “fractally broken“. oh dear :)

Has a similar predicament[1] (though completely different cause); felt very uncivilised copy and pasting the character I wanted from the internet…

Still wondering what the most elegant way I could have gotten that character, especially if I didn’t have internet access.

Scroll through random files?

Perhaps I might’ve known a little about ASCII and tried converting a few numbers to characters till I found the character I wanted.

At the time I did not, and was thankful the internet provided the character I needed.

Still feel like I got away with something and would have been stumped without that… :)

[1] http://www.bagsend.net/posts/best_problem.html

sfteus• 5 years ago

Somewhat related, Teams on Ubuntu recently has stopped letting me use the left/right arrows to navigate around a message I've written. However, shift + arrow or control + arrow still work fine. Haven't had a chance to dig into why, but it's been mildly amusing.

notwhereyouare• 5 years ago

I just noticed this today on my windows. They probably pushed out a change to the underlying web interface that broke stuff

adamrezich• 5 years ago

say what you will about tumblr's UI/UX, I'm still a bit shocked that Twitter never copied their "hold down mouse click/finger tap on reblog button to immediately reblog without adding commentary" feature. years ago when I still used tumblr I found that particular feature to be groundbreaking on par with pull-to-refresh.

NaturalPhallacy2• 5 years ago

this is the site which used to let you figure out who sent you anonymous questions because you could block anonymous users, and that user would then appear in their uncensored name in your blocklist.
They fixed this by completely changing how anonymous blocking worked, so that it worked by IP address instead of by username, but for a while that information was exposed to the user
which meant if someone sent you an anonymous question you could block them and then find out their IP address

lmao! What a dumpster fire. I'm glad I never used it for anything remotely serious and exclusively consumed content second-site by people who actually went to tumblr.com.

spaztastical2• 5 years ago

That is an amazing thread. Thank you for posting it.

10GBps• 5 years ago

Reminds of of reddit. Man that text edit box is so dysfunctional. Sometimes you type and nothing happens. Sometimes typing will start selecting random stuff on the page, hiding comments, saving some, and other weird stuff. Cut and paste is a 100% gamble. Random keys won't work some times. Sometimes you post a comment and only half shows up or other weird things.

It's really bizarre and I think has to do with some sort of logging/spyware they run on the site.

TonyTrapp• 5 years ago

I really wish websites would stop using single-letter hotkeys. I regularly accidentally mute people on Twitter because the mute hotkey is in the position where my fingers naturally rest when using a trackpoint for scrolling. I think there was a guidelines (from W3C or WHATWG probably) that such hotkeys should not be used or at least should be turned off by default, but I guess noone sticks to those recommendations these days.

avnigo• 5 years ago

The missing 'e' is definitely on brand, at least!

nonsince• 5 years ago

Can we please stop posting Foone to HN? They’ve stated multiple times that they don’t want to be posted here and every time they end up posted they complain and ask for it to be taken down.

masswerk• 5 years ago

BTW, for an ironic twist, as this is posted on Twitter:

On Safari/macOS, you can't refocus on a Tweet by clicking anymore (if not signed-in already), as this inevitably brings up a sign-in dialog, which resets the view selection in the same instant. As this is not the case with other browsers, I guess, it's not the intended behavior. However, as it has been so for a while now, Twitter seems to be happy with this.

While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

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