abanana

Please don't change expected behaviour!

Excel does, as the author mentions, and it's a massive pain in the arse because it doesn't do what it should.

The "cut" action is supposed to immediately put it into the clipboard, so you can paste that text into other programs if you want to.

Thinking you know better, is really not a reason to break your users' expectations and normal workflow. It's quite possible your idea is a good one, but it's not worth breaking it for the majority, to improve it for a few.

I took a quick look because that sounds odd. They've made a mess of the article's image sizing - only 270px wide if the viewport is <768px. (That top image is 1024px wide on desktop.) There's so much wrong with that decision, regardless of the huge difference between 270 and 768, e.g. apparently not being aware of hardware pixel density on smartphones.

That was my thought exactly on reading that line: that is not a backup. (Ok, the word isn't strictly defined, but you know what I mean.) They have said there's a "real" (offline) backup as well, luckily, but that just reinforces that the "pretend" backup was irrelevant and wasn't even worth mentioning in the writeup.

I'd give this article multiple upvotes if I could.

The first section did a great job of grabbing my attention. It feels like these days, all creative works are lumped together as "content", anything not brand-new and bleeding-edge is labelled "legacy" (I see this more on HN than anywhere), and everything is distilled down to "engagement" and "conversions".

I hate business buzzword-jargon, the corporate in-group lingo, and I've also always disliked this use of the word "content". It's too generic - we might as well be calling it "stuff".

As a child, I used to notice that there were some other kids who, upon hearing a word that was new to them, would immediately start using it incessantly, replacing the (sometimes richer) choice of words they'd thus far been brought up to use. Very often wrongly, by slightly misunderstanding the meaning, the context, or the word itself, and never checking first. It was clear how the choice of words used, or even the meaning of words, could subtly change within a small group. As I grew older I realised these people appeared to be in the majority, and that it showed how, via various methods of trying to sound clever or in-group signalling, changes in speech patterns spread out across the larger population.

Anyway that's my view, now I'll go back to yelling at clouds.

one of the more distinguishing features of a venue

It depends a lot on whether your customer base is made up mainly of one-off walk-in casuals, or regulars. Getting to know the regulars, and having a chat with them, can improve the feel of being in work for the staff themselves, as well as providing a more friendly and welcoming atmosphere.

The OP described this particular case as being in a small town, with not many other options for entertainment, i.e. a small captive audience. You could say the customers don't have much else to do so it doesn't matter if you're a miserable git, they'll still come. But just being friendly and chatty makes all the difference to a lot of people, and can help you build a loyal audience of core customers who'll choose your place over the few alternatives, will keep coming, keep bringing more friends and family, and sometimes even support your business in unexpected ways.

closer to something like ice skates for ice skating

That's a good way to put it.

Bowling is very rare for me these days, but because they used to require you to wear bowling shoes, I've become used to the slide and can't bowl without them. I have tried a few times in my normal shoes, and found it almost impossible not to go arse-over-tit when letting go of the ball.

It's because the way the sole slides is an integral part of bowling the ball. You can't play "properly" without a proper sliding bowling shoe.

I was a little surprised when the local bowling centres stopped bothering to make everyone use the proper shoes. I get what you're saying about playing casually, but when I last went bowling with colleagues, and won comfortably, and others were asking for tips because they just can't roll the ball properly, but won't try proper shoes, they tried to wind me up by telling me I was "cheating" by using the proper shoes that are offered for anyone who wants one - I can't win :)

The focus of the most commercial sets changed.

They used to be toys, aimed at children's imagination, meant to be dismantled and rebuilt into other things.

Now they're display models, aimed at adults. They're sculptured art pieces that just happen to be built out of LEGO.

It's just the most commercially visible stuff though, because it's the best stuff financially speaking for the LEGO company themselves. The children's ranges are still there. You could even say that adults buying those display models are what's kept the toys alive.

hammering in the metal dowel pins (that interlock with the rotating cams)

Are there many hammer-in versions around then? I've assembled a fair amount of IKEA bookcases, wardrobes, kitchen cupboards etc (in the UK), and those cam dowel pins have always been screw-in.

Hear hear. This was why I could never quite understand why there was so much love for MUI in some of the monthly Amiga magazines at the time (although I agree it looked pretty). Even on my beefed-up hardware, that general lethargic feel to the UI was noticeable. Later, ReAct came along, was even worse, and I just didn't get it.

Yep, seems they pretty much all do! I couldn't find a sensible case last year when putting together a new PC for my brother, who wanted it to include a CD/DVD drive. (He regularly buys CDs at 10 for £1, listens for a bit then sells them for a lot more on eBay - the demand is there.) I ended up reusing the case from an old computer of my own.

I'm sure on my own next upgrade, I'll continue to stick with my existing 20-year-old case, for the same reason.

And the drives themselves are 2-3 times the price they were at the peak of their demand (makes sense, they're almost a niche product these days).

I thought I lost the ability to read longform on the internet

Same here. It's great to read a well-written piece that keeps my interest. I'm sick of reading the overused AI cliches and all the long-form articles that spend many paragraphs on irrelevant parts of the life stories of all involved, before getting anywhere near to the point.

The link I gave there explains the problem. The picker is perfectly usable if you know how it's meant to be used - like most things really. The problem is the flat design, controls looking like headings rather than controls, leading to a surprising number of people not having any idea of how to change the year.

I don't agree with your thesis that users hated websites on mobile. It's not so much a question of being "honest about root causes" if consensus on the root cause doesn't really exist.

Apps initially looked like the fancy thing to do (so marketing departments loved them), and very quickly snowballed into becoming simply "the way it's done" on mobile.

Most of them are just their website wrapped into a webview. They're sometimes awful, but they mostly do the job well enough - exactly as well as if it was a website instead (coming back to this thread's article).

I'd understand a developer in e.g. America not being aware of it, but to one in Switzerland, France is right next door. A developer working on something as important as their government login system should be well aware of different keyboard layouts surrounding, and leaking into, their country.

We had a discussion about this one not too long ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887957

Unfortunately, with the mobile OS's datepickers being so bad from a usability perspective, it's a long way from being a solved problem. Typing the date directly into a single textbox is great for some of us but not for others, so an alternative has to be provided.

Yes, some date selection widgets can be poorly designed and user hostile, but the well-designed ones tend to be fine. The ideal, based on real user research by gov.uk, appears to be to use 3 separate textboxes, instead of <input type="date">.

Santander's banking website uses both in some places, e.g. confirming a new payment. "Enter your 5-digit PIN and the 6-digit 2FA code we've just sent you", with 5 little input fields for the former, and a single standard input field for the latter. Perhaps a deliberate decision to make them look different, but it just looks like they couldn't make up their mind.

That sounds quite likely. Not the stopping bots part, just the idea that someone chose to do it for some reason, and everybody copied them without knowing the reason. Happens all too often.

Yes, "marketing". Ability to market your business, not marketing the concept of an app.

Businesses have an app developed because they feel the market demands it. Their marketing departments feel they have to be able to tell prospective customers "we have an app!" and if they can't, they feel they'll be seen as inferior, not with the times, thereby losing customers.

I totally agree with the article that apps shouldn't be the automatic first choice, but that's the way it is. We've reached the stage where it's seen by users as the default. App icons on the homescreen can be seen, for many, as the modern alternative to bookmarks in the browser. And regarding "sharing a slick URL isn't always easy", perhaps the App Store is, for many users, the modern alternative to Google Search?

That's the theory. Others in this thread are reporting the reality.

In practice, any profit-making enterprise will not want to miss out on the income they were previously getting, so will find other times and charges to load it onto. Also, they know some people will specifically choose an energy plan that seems to give them something free, so it's easy to take advantage by increasing the prices they pay less attention to.

(Context: similar to you)

I suppose it's similar to how people used to buy things like Directory Opus. The point isn't so much that the default one doesn't work. A bunch of functions like those listed here, e.g. batch rename and easy image conversion, would be a great help to power users, and should be better than having to install a separate program for each one.

I doubt it's aimed at everybody, but it shouldn't need to be. Software tailored to a specific group's needs is likely to be better for them than something too generic.

This article seems to be worse than most, as if someone's deliberately overused the LLM tropes as much as possible. This is not good. It's bad. This is not human. It's AI. This is not nice to read. It's awful.

This is betraying a way of thinking that suggests what's normal now is the way it's always been.

Given "there was a time that subscriptions for software were virtually unheard of", it's safe to assume we're talking about more than a couple of years ago. To talk as if most users always used to upgrade, suggests you might be young enough not to remember the software industry before a decade or two ago.

In general, users very much didn't upgrade. That's exactly why the industry forced subscriptions on us. They weren't getting income anymore, when the older version of their software did the job perfectly well.

Hah, that makes sense then. Thanks for the followup.

Indeed, unreadable typography (and the need for Reader View) is one of my most common annoyances with sites posted to HN - but I don't see how it's applicable to this site in any way?

"Beyond bizarre"? Why? "3:59pm" (and 7:30pm, regarding the post above) is exactly what's usually written in the UK. Technical use (24-hour) is different from the standard use used by the general population.

It probably does a better job of getting the point across to a general readership than if they'd used overly technical domain-specific jargon about quantity of cases and speed of its spread.

social engineering was a small part of his work, and it's OK that you don't know that... totally blatant ignorance... Kev was a good person. Full stop.

I understand you're defending your friend, but that's a little uncalled for. Personally, my first real knowledge of him was from his 2002 book The Art Of Deception, which is specifically a book about social engineering. That is how he himself chose to present himself - as a successful social engineer - so you can't criticise others for that.

There's good and bad in all of us. I don't think the person you responded to said Kevin was all bad, and made it clear it isn't hate.

Indeed, no relevance at all. Sorry rob74, that's a misunderstanding of how large applications most often tended to work on the Amiga. They didn't generally open a window on the Workbench screen, they opened their own screen. The keyboard shortcut <Amiga key>-<M> cycled between them. A word processor's screen could then have 16+ colours.

Wow, yes, those are a pisstake. I hadn't seen them when reading the article because I used reader mode.