ken

You joke, but I've wondered the same thing. Apple, of all companies, is happy to re-examine (or discard) the status quo. They dropped the headphone jack on many products -- as they said, it's "over 100 years old, used to help quickly exchange in switchboards". Yet their keyboards still look pretty much like a 19th-century Remington.

Black people in America have a measurably lower life expectancy than white people [1]. For people born in 2015, it's down to about 5%, but as recently as 1970, it was over 10%. That's a lot of years of life being cut short.

(There are well-known social causes for this which are direct consequences of racism, like access to quality health care, housing, education, credit, etc.)

COVID-19 deaths aren't taking nearly that many years. According to [2] (about 1.5 weeks old), 1 in 1850 (or around 0.05% of) black Americans have died from COVID-19. Even if this continues for the rest of the year, it still can't hold a candle to plain old racism.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2017/015.pdf [2]: https://www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race

What point are you trying to make? Systemic racism is way bigger than just police killings.

Do you want to ignore the (non-lethal) evils of prejudice, and just play a numbers game with fatalities? From some back-of-the-envelope math, the average POC in America will still lose more years of their life from simply living in a racist society than from COVID-19.

Life isn't a pissing contest of "my problem is bigger than your problem".

I never understood why ortholinear keyboards aren't the standard. It's bizarre that the fingers on my left hand would move slightly to the left for the top row, but the fingers on my right hand would also move slightly to the left for the top row. And to the right, on both hands, for the bottom row. Fingers don't naturally move like that! My hands have mirror symmetry. Why doesn't my keyboard?

The number 6 exemplifies the problem. Touch-typing classes teach that it's pressed by the right hand, but the number row has drifted so far left that it's actually closer to the left hand. Sure enough, (non-ortho) split keyboards can't agree which side of the split to put it on. Sometimes even different models from the same company disagree.

Staggered keys is even crazier, to me, than QWERTY. There's no spending 2 weeks relearning where every letter is. There's no messing up spatial mnemonics like Z/X/C/V. It just instantly fixes your fingers from being slightly out of alignment.

And the craziest is when touchscreens do it. Keys were only staggered in that funny way to make room for the keylevers. Computer keyboards never had keylevers, but touchscreens really never had keylevers!

You're trying to exploit a slippery slope. There are many churches which have had no such scandals, and are not associated with any who have.

Just because Monitor (dozens of offices, thousands of employees) worked for Gaddafi doesn't mean "John & Jane's IT Setup Helpers" around the corner must also be an inherently immoral institution.

And the tester just happened to pick two friends, who live 20 miles apart in different cities, who have never ordered from the restaurant? That is both a remarkable coincidence, and a bizarre choice of test data.

You do not communicate the full state of your system or even a small portion thereof when you use speech.

Right, but that's not even the purpose of speech. Abstraction is a feature, not a flaw.

Even with electronic systems where perfect and complete transfer is possible, we prefer simplified serialization of messages.

So whatever the feeling of "I'm being direct" or "I'm being clear" is, it is almost certainly itself faulty. We're not built for that and language isn't either.

I half-disagree with you here. Given that language is so ambiguous, it's admirable to try to reduce unnecessary ambiguity, when your goal is to communicate a specific message.

Cool idea. Would you also limit the volume of the computer to typical human skull capacity?

A window manager may be only 2000 lines of source code but it implements a host of formal and informal standards and interacts with hundreds of other programs on my computer.

You may need only a day or two to orient yourself to the source code, but that’s on top of months or years of experience with X11R6 and ICCCMv2 and EWMH and such. How much debugging did you first need to do to discover your current issue was even in dwm?

EDIT: I especially love the phrasing in Wikipedia's ICCCM article: dwm "can be configured for compliance". If 'configuration' can include editing source code, I'm sure that's true!

Their window manager dwm is just a window manager. It doesn’t handle things like transparency, compositing or volume control.

That is a strange division of labor. I thought transparency and composition were aspects of window management. What else would they be?

Wings and tail, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Airlines_Flight_261

And assuming the wings haven’t lost their lift due to ice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Eagle_Flight_4184

Planes can glide, but there’s still lots of ways to drive one straight into the ground.

Different article about the same event: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23422469

That's sort of true, in the abstract, but it wouldn't explain what's going on here. Even JavaScript (with a JIT, but not a separate compilation step, and certainly no type annotations) is faster at this than compiled Crystal. There's clearly other factors which are much more significant than simply having a compiler.

Maybe, but these two languages don't exactly have similar semantics.

You can't make a Ruby program that uses fixnums-only. You also can't make a Crystal program that's dynamic like Ruby. Interestingly, though, when the Crystal implementation is modified to use bignums, the Ruby implementation is over twice as fast while still being dynamic.

What I get from this is that Crystal's static compiler is slower than Ruby's dynamically dispatched interpreter, and Crystal's bignums are so slow you'll need to think hard about whether you want a 50x speed boost or correct arithmetic in all cases.

I think Crystal is a good concept, but it's only version 0.34.0. Every implementation is bad at version <<1.0. Ruby <<1.0 didn't have good performance, either. I'm sure Crystal will be great by the time it gets to 2.6.5, too.

When people scream “this is a bug”, it is irrelevant what it is caused by. It is a scream of a significant expectation mismatch. The team should work on resolving it, regardless of whether it was caused by a developer diverging from the designed intent or because of the original intent going wrong.

As a user, it's extremely relevant to me. I paid for your product/service because of what it claimed to do. Bugs are ways in which it doesn't do that. (It doesn't matter to me if some other hypothetical features don't exist yet, because I was happy to pay for the product/service knowing it didn't have those features.) As far as I'm concerned, a bug is your company not holding up your end of the bargain, even though I've held up my end by paying for it. That's not a good look.

Another way to look at it is that a bug is downtime for a feature. Elsewhere, you say (system) downtime should be #1, "top priority of everyone" until it's fixed. But what good is the system being 'up' if it's still broken in the way that I need? When I lose power at home, it's no consolation to hear "The power grid as a whole is still up -- it's just your neighborhood that's not working", nor would I consider this reasonable justification for de-prioritizing fixing it.

Maybe your company is at the stage where attracting new users with features is more important than keeping existing customers with quality. But they say it's always easier to keep customers than it is to acquire new ones, and I've blackballed several companies because they no longer place the priority on quality that they once did. You should be aware of what you're giving up by de-prioritizing 'bugs', or pretending they don't exist. I see comments here on HN every day complaining about specific companies whose software quality suffers. It takes years to dig yourself out of that hole.

I know someone who got a highly paid job by first doing it for free for 3 months to prove his skills

And I know dozens of people who got burned by being talked into working for "exposure".

Not every new line must have the same meaning. Do you also look down on James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound?

Not all of it. Any bug attachments which don't have previews are served from https://github.com directly, for example.

Here, I uploaded that image from the other day that crashes some phones. I gzipped it so it wouldn't generate a preview, and attached it to a bug. When you click the "github.com" link, it downloads the file, and (at least with my web browser) uncompresses it and opens it with your default application. It's bit-for-bit the same as what I uploaded.

https://github.com/kengruven/strukt-bugs/issues/40

I don't know if this is exploitable. I haven't spent any time trying to break GitHub. This is just something I happened to notice once.

In case anyone considers writing this off as a partisan or economic issue, it's worth remembering that both of the acts mentioned here -- the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act -- were enacted by a Republican president during a recession.

He was hardly an environmentalist, either. That's how important this was 50 years ago.

The Macintosh model, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. The system doesn’t deal with character streams. Data files are extremely high level, usually assuming that they are specific to an application. When was the last time you piped the output of one program to another on a Mac?

And yet, at least it's possible to have more than one Macintosh application use the same data. Half the world has migrated to web apps, which are far worse. As a user, it's virtually impossible to connect two web apps at all, or access your data in any way except what the designers decided you should be able to do. Data doesn't get any more "specific to an application" than with web apps.

I've traveled to several countries outside the U.S., and never had my fingerprints taken, even at border crossings which required seeing my passport.

Yup. "If you owe the bank $100 dollars, that's your problem; if you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."

Every time there's a new programming language which claims to be "safer" than existing ones, I look at what they do differently. In some cases, they've come up with a new way to restrict computation so that undefined/error cases aren't possible. In many cases, though, their solution is more along the lines of "don't do that", often with syntax that discourages (but doesn't forbid) it.

The trouble is that it's really easy to say "access the 10th position in a 5-element array". It's possible to make a programming language that doesn't allow you to say this, but it either makes it really awkward to do anything with arrays, or simply pushes the error somewhere else -- or both.

How do meth/opioids change the equation? They're not (for the most part) legal.

Alcohol causes tremendous destruction, too, but I thought there was general agreement that national prohibition was worse.

Unions are great, but strikes are actually pretty rare. In the short term, they’re bad for workers, too! Striking is always a last resort.

Unions have been on a serious decline the past several decades, but striking isn’t their only power. It’s just the only one you see on the 5 o’clock news, or in Hollywood movies, because it’s the most dramatic.

It’s a good thing I’m not upset by it, then.

the Smalltalk value proposition was: Pay a lot of money to be locked in to slow software that exposes your IP, looks weird on screen and cannot interact well with anything else; it is much easier to maintain and develop though!

Sounds like another framework we’ve got today, except now at least it’s free.

I've never gotten AirDrop to work. I wasted a whole day, once, double-checking software versions and hardware capabilities and reading every manual and specification and forum post I could find. It seems to be one of those features that magically works, at some times for some people, and leaves no clue why it doesn't, at other times and for other people.

It sounds like a neat feature. I wish I could use it.

What if (hypothetically) those 'people' are an organization that needs to organize work, and they're using it because they've tried email and other methods for years, and found that those didn't work?

A lot of us use FB for organizing, not just for seeing what our friends ate for dessert last night. It's not reasonable to tell people abandon one channel without suggesting a replacement. You might as well ask people to give up email, or their phone.

Facebook is the last major social network where people are able to speak their minds.

Do LinkedIn or Reddit or Medium not allow you to speak your mind? In what way?