playpause

I agree, autofocusing a search field that's in the header of every page is not generally appropriate, but that's not specifically about accessibility. It would be annoying for anyone on a mobile device (keyboard pops up on every page), and the focus ring and/or blinking cursor would be distracting.

What about cases where it is appropriate to autofocus the search input (as it's the primary action on the page) but where there also might (sometimes) be an important text notice above the search input? Sighted users would see the notice fine, while screenreader users would be 'teleported' (MDN's word) straight past it, missing the notice.

This looks like a great resource. Human checklists are not perfect but they tend to be better than automated checks for this sort of thing.

But there is a common form of accessibility guideline that I have a problem with, and this one illustrates it well: "Avoid using the autofocus attribute." The problem here is it quietly pits users with special accessibility needs against the rest - "Just don't use feature X." OK, but what should I do instead for the rest of my users who benefited from feature X? What if I'm making a search engine landing page and I want to automatically focus the input on page load (and automatically bring up their keyboard if touchscreen)? Is there some other approach that achieves the same UX as the autofocus attribute but without creating accessibility problems?

According to MDN, "When autofocus is assigned, screen-readers 'teleport' their user to the form control without warning them beforehand." OK, but really? Why? Why don't they offer the user the option to not do that?

For the last 2 years I’ve been using an iPod touch as my “downtime” device. I usually put my iPhone away in a drawer from early evening until I’m ready to start work the next day. I found this impossible to stick to until I got an iPod touch, because in the evenings and mornings I often need to manage things like HomeKit devices or other Apple ecosystem things like Reminders. I don’t have any distracting or time-sucking apps on the iPod touch, and the screen is small and fiddly, so I barely use it except for a few seconds here and there for something practical. The difference in stress levels and mindset has been huge. I can’t recommend highly enough separating your phone usage into ‘social/work/news/comms’ and ‘practical/home/calm’ categories, on different physical devices.

I have tried using the new iOS Focus and Downtime features to make my iPhone work a similar way (hide all the time-sucking apps at certain times of day etc), but having a dedicated device for the purpose is much simpler and much more effective.

I imagine your comment was meant with a bit of humour, so don't read too much into the following! But it got me thinking about optimism and pessimism.

The HN post title (at time of writing):

Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people

Yours:

Being constantly trapped in a world made of concrete and drywall causes enormous emotional and cognitive detriments to people

It's just "Things could be better" vs "Things are bad". They are pretty much the same in terms of what they say/imply about current reality.

I think the HN title is actually closer to an objective statement than yours. Yours is ornately, floridly pessimistic. I think a lot of people (esp. engineering types, including me) suffer from a recurring tacit belief that: pessimism is better than optimism for getting at objective truth. I used to argue that both leanings are equally likely to result in poor judgement, with 'realism' smack in the middle. But I now go further and believe that fostering a slightly optimistic lean is actually better than 'no lean' – not just in the sense that 'you'll have a nicer time', but in terms of maximising how often you are correct in your observations of reality, in the long term. Because zero lean is impossible to maintain all the time. Our observations almost always rely on heuristics to accommodate for incomplete data or insufficient time. So you are going to err in your objective judgements about reality sometimes. And when you err on the optimistic side in a way that matters, reality tends to tap you on the nose and correct you fairly promptly. Which can hurt a bit, especially for someone who spends most of their waking life working with complex systems that are unforgiving about tiny details being incorrect - this trains us to to think of all the ways something might go wrong, so we feel bad when we failed to predict a negative event. But for most of life outside of solving engineering problems, eg, dealing with more organic/nebulous things like 'other people' or 'long term goals' or 'relaxing', being optimistically incorrect in your judgements and then being corrected by reality is better than being pessimistically incorrect and not being corrected. When you make pessimistic errors in judgement, you don't get actively corrected as much, so your ability to make objective observations drifts further pessimistic, worsening your decision making, worsening your situation, and it cycles downward. Eventually some kind of correction comes, but usually after hitting a new low, by which point a few things have gone wrong in your life and the climb back up is difficult. A slightly optimistic lean doesn't seem to have the equivalent problem (of drifting ever more optimistic until you're problematically divorced from reality). At least for me, anyway. I think this might be because a positive state of mind tends to be more active and therefore able to run more thoughts in parallel, including thoughts that can gently correct others that have gone a bit too far, while a negative mindset is more monotone.

spending a bit more to get good quality paper straws

I am yet to see one of these

Your implied plan (doing less of what made the problem in the first place) seems like more of a stretch to me. It would be nice, but I can’t see many countries giving up plastic. It’s too useful. I think focusing international collaboration efforts on better waste/pollution management (eg getting more waste plastic into properly managed landfills) seems a lot more plausible.

He’s the chief engineer and product designer at Tesla, and the chief engineer at SpaceX, as well as CEO of both. He led the design and engineering of rockets that land, cutting the cost of space travel by one order of magnitude. Meanwhile he created the most valuable car maker in the world and forced the rest of the industry to bring forward their electric car plans by a decade. And these things weren’t accidents, he often tells the world what his goals are before accomplishing them. And he’s the richest man in the world. He’s many things, but not unaccomplished.

My feeling is that the 'undermining' the author refers to is not a conscious attempt to keep the lower classes down. It's just middle/upper class people spouting fashionable political views, going along with the 'right message', and not really thinking about it. When it comes to their own personal behavioural decisions that will affect their kids, they take it more seriously, basing their decisions on their deep-down sense of 'how things really are', and then they come up with some kind of rationalisation of how this conservative behaviour actually fits in with their anti-conservative political views. This rationalising process has become second nature and they don't notice they are doing it at all.

Is this because such visualizations are useless clutter or because film makers have better tools for creating them than actual programmers do?

Another reason is that real visualisations are hard. You have to faithfully represent some actual data, and make it ‘usable’ in the sense of well designed keys/labelling etc, and choose a chart type that is appropriate for the data and the point you are making, plus you somehow have to make it pretty and not overwhelming. These constraints all fight each other, you go round and round in circles and eventually you have something passable. It’s a professional field at the intersection of data science and design, it’s not like there is some magic ‘tooling’ that solves it for you.

Fake visualisations are very easy to make pretty - you can just generate data that looks nice, the design doesn’t have to have any real utility or even make sense, etc. It just has to look like a data visualisation.

I never said you violated anyone's free speech. I shouldn't have called you a dick though, I just got frustrated. I was trying to make a nuanced point, maybe it was a dumb one, but if so, it would be nice to be put right rather than dismissed.

You call people assholes, dismiss people's arguments out of hand, and quote people saying things they didn't even say (in quote marks, too). I think you're just a dick. I'm glad you consider yourself a free speech absolutist though, that's something I guess.

Coming to this late, but I am interested to know if your view is still the same as when you wrote this 13 hours ago.

I don't think you have really answered the question about the logical incoherence put to you in another comment [1], which was replying to this comment by you (now flagged, sadly):

If a bunch of people are saying "this thing hurts me" and your stance is "well you shouldn't be hurt so shut-up". Yeah, you're an asshole.

Honestly, genuinely: my feelings are hurt by reading your comments here - I find it a bit chilling, it makes me uncomfortable. I'm a free speech advocate, and I perceive (rightly or wrongly) a frightening swing away from free speech values in the last few years, and your comment triggered uncomfortable feelings. Perhaps I'm wrong about this, perhaps my view is biased somehow. We could debate it, and maybe you'd point out something I hadn't considered, and maybe I'd change my view. But until then, the fact is, my feelings are hurt by your comments. And I'm definitely not the only one - there's more than a "bunch" of free speech advocates in the world who find this line of argument chilling.

As a free speech advocate, I believe you should have the right to say what you want, and that my hurt feelings should not prevent you from doing so. But don't you see the logical incoherence in your position? How can you argue that you are not an asshole under your own logic? (To be clear, I am not calling you an asshole, just pointing out that your own logic would seem to conclude that you are an example of one, while also containing the statement that you are not one.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31088745

Most of my non-tech friends believe that nuclear apocalypse would entail at least the end of all human life. I think this only makes them more complacent in a strange way. They can shrug it off with gallows humour - if it happens, well, that was that, I only hope it’s quick. They don’t have to think about the reality of how life would change in the years following a nuclear war. The myth of nuclear apocalypse is a kind of licence to stop mentally engaging with the issue, which I don’t think is good. Not to mention the nihilistic side effects of believing one is going through life on borrowed time. Pushing falsehoods for the greater good always has unintended consequences.

I’ve always felt the DK effect is cynical pseudoscience for midwit egos. It’s a sophistic statement of the obvious dressed up as an insight. But worse, it serves to obvert something interesting and beautiful about humans - that even very intellectually challenged people sometimes can, over time, develop behaviours and strategies that nobody else would have thought of, and form a kind of background awareness of their shortcomings even if they aren’t equipped to verbalise them, allowing them to manage their differences and rise to challenges and social responsibilities that were assumed to be beyond their potential. Forrest Gump springs to mind as an albeit fictional example of the phenomenon I’m talking about. I think this is a far more interesting area than the vapid tautology known as the DK effect.

They could simply offer a “move to trash” approach to get around any legal restrictions of the kind you are imagining.

This would also be much nicer UX. Just click a button to delete something, and it says something like “This has has been moved to Trash, and will be permanently deleted in 30 days”. No big scary warnings needed. And you can still delete it immediately if you want (by emptying your trash afterwards) so it’s not in breach of any laws.

I said falsely yelling fire

Free speech absolutism doesn't mean you can get away with any crime just because it involved you saying something.

Even free speech absolutists agree that falsely yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre in order to cause a fatal stampede is (and should be) a criminal act. But the crime is not the utterance of the word. You could commit the same crime by setting off a fire alarm. In either case, the crime is in the action of tricking a group of people into stampeding.

Similarly, impersonating a police officer is illegal. You could do this by lying (telling a gullible person that you are a police officer), or by wearing a police uniform in public. The criminal action is tricking people into thinking you're a police officer, whether you do it with lies or clothes. Lying itself is not illegal, but a lie may constitute an action that is criminal.

One thing I do (and am curious if anyone else does anything like this) is I dynamically generate PDFs, generally to print out planning sheets and stuff. I like using templated printouts for planning my day/week, because I can scribble over them and break out of the predefined structure when necessary. But I also like digital calendar-type tools for their extra powers - they can pull in weather forecast data, events from shared work calendars, stuff like that. So I have a script that dynamically generates a day-planning PDF in my preferred tabular format, augmented with info from digital sources, before sending it to my printer. It's the best of both worlds.

Can you expand on this? Can you give an example of a kind of image it might work well with? I’ve always assumed the apparent detail of mental images was a kind of illusion, a bit like the illusion of detail outside the centre of the visual field.

The comment I replied to clearly stated…

No it didn’t. You’ve just quoted a few words out of context and prefixed it with “missing”, adding an accusative tone that was not present.

Good lord. Have you ever made anything that explored "the potential of the medium" as much as this? What makes you feel equipped to call its creators "stupid"?

I actually don't think this is about personal preference.

The person who made this website apparently prefers something different to you and me.

The OP literally says this:

I think it boiled down to a realization that no one really gave a damn about me, my writing/work/creations/etc. So then, what's the point? Is it entirely ego driven? Chasing dopamine hits when your post or your project is tweeted about?

The comment you’re replying to is kind, insightful, constructive, and non-judgemental.

I also prefer websites that keep it simple. But I downvoted you for conflating “what I prefer” with “what everyone in the world must always do”.

The UI could have been better, but it worked and it was something I’d never seen before and it made my day. Rich web experiences like this are difficult to pull off at all. I’m glad they made it. People who write empty, sneering comments about other people’s hard work shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near computers.

I used to think exactly this - whatever Twitter has that makes it so popular, it can’t be its dumpster fire UI. But in the last year I finally got into it and it became a go-to place for me at certain times of day to get a kind of social/conversational fix that is just not provided by any other social networks. At some point I realised I no longer find the UI baffling, I seem to sail around it intuitively and enjoy it. Now I think it might be a smart decision not to ‘fix’ it. Yes you are constantly hunting around for the context of things, but I wonder if that’s a big part of what makes it work, makes it more enjoyable for your social brain. It’s that sense of “what’s going on? What’s this thing about?” and then being rewarded, over and over. It’s the closest thing online to a bustling marketplace where you bump into people you see often and overhear interesting things that draw you in.

Adding to clarify: I agree the snobbish attitude you describe does exist. I just think it’s exactly what this article addresses. He gives an honest report of what it’s like from his perspective, in good humour. And sums it all up with this:

I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin. At the same time, the physicists on my team like to help others understand more about science and appreciate the opportunity to apply their knowledge outside academia. In connecting both sides, everybody wins. And who knows? Maybe we’ll be the first to learn of the new Theory of Everything.

I don’t think they're logically equivalent at all.

“Are you being a baby?” - Are you temporarily being a bit of a baby, like, at the moment? Could you maybe be a teeny bit braver to get through this current bit of anxiety you're feeling, and then we'll worry about the next bit tomorrow eh?

“Are you a baby?” - Is it possible you have always been a baby? Is it time to grow up, ie, make a real, permanent change to how you think? To start taking responsibility for managing your own emotional responses to the all the inevitable sources of potential anxiety that life will continue to throw at you forever? To break the cycle of weak/passive/burdensome social behaviour once and for all?

I couldn't disagree more about the tone of this article. Is it possible you are projecting your past experience of that snobbish attitude onto this article? To me it seems to be an article about a real, practical attempt to bridge the gap between autodidacts and academics, and is written with empathy and honesty.

What I’m not getting is how you get from “making damn sure screwups won’t reoccur” to “you don’t need more than a simple apology” when a screwup occurs. These seem like opposing sentiments.