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Why our website looks like an operating system

posthog.com

101–110 of 504 posts

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#101
The critique of modern websites is on point.

Yet, I'm not convinced that Windows 95 is the right vibe.

But it's better than many others. There's a lot of damage done by the GUI & design 'experts' who keep up with the 'good looking things' that change routinely.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#104

This must have taken them a really long time. That worries me, don't they have other things to do? If engineers have so much free time that they can work on nice & fun things like this that aren't totally necessary, they must have overhired (which is wasteful and a sign of impending layoffs) or they don't have enough actual work to do (which is a sign the company is stagnating). Or the time and money required to do t…

I'm still junior, as in I spend more time reading docs than writing code because most code I have to write is stuff I haven't written before.

IMO, first impression? This is just a straight-up better way to show docs to me. To quote the landing page: "Often times, I’ll want to refer to different pages at the same time. So I’ll CMD + click “a couple times” while browsing around and before I know it, I have 12 new tabs open – all indistinguishable from each other because they share the same favicon."

Wow. They fixed it. First of it's kind, at least in my career so far. If you're got an example from DOS then yeah, I missed out, and agree that something important was lost along the way.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#106

This must have taken them a really long time. That worries me, don't they have other things to do? If engineers have so much free time that they can work on nice & fun things like this that aren't totally necessary, they must have overhired (which is wasteful and a sign of impending layoffs) or they don't have enough actual work to do (which is a sign the company is stagnating). Or the time and money required to do t…

I disagree. I think it might even be a positive signal, especially for startups.

Imagine a startup with an engineering team that has this much creative energy, ingenuity, and vision unencumbered by bureaucratic processes, committees, and all-day meetings.

A sense of "play" is so important in creating fantastic software. Some of the best products are the result of engineers having full creative control and the liberty to "play". See, for example, Google's "20% time policy" in the early 2000s which birthed Gmail, or 3M's "permitted bootlegging" policy which birthed Post-it notes.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#107

This must have taken them a really long time. That worries me, don't they have other things to do? If engineers have so much free time that they can work on nice & fun things like this that aren't totally necessary, they must have overhired (which is wasteful and a sign of impending layoffs) or they don't have enough actual work to do (which is a sign the company is stagnating). Or the time and money required to do t…

Oof...! A lot of innovation originates in engineers' "boredom".

I've been at a company that mandated innovation by having a mandatory annual innovation day, and full productivity for the rest of the year. "Be innovative for 8 hours, damn it!". That never worked. Not once. Never ever. Innovation was limited to evolution, and evolution was so slow that our customers had started implementing what we provided in house instead. Stagnation, as you call it.

I've also been at a company where people got... bored (didn't have enough to do). A guy single handedly re-wrote the firmware for a neat little hardware box that ended up saving the company an absolute ridiculous amount of money as they no longer needed to buy another much, much more expensive proprietary box.

So in my opinion having bored engineers around could very well be a sign of great success.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#108
People have been making websites exactly like this since the 90's.

Every single one of them have ultimately been massive failures, because you are re-inventing the wheel and putting a window system that you control to sidestep the window system that I control.

> I had a lot of fun in building it

Yeah, me too! But I learned my lesson.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#109
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's practically required, because it lets everyone know that the absence of the banner is not a violation of the law. Your "logic" is baffling

What I mean is that if they don't add it, they're going to get threatening emails from regulators saying "Hey, you don't have a cookie banner". Those regulators don't have any way of knowing how their site operates, so the small banner at least manages to inform them and keep Posthog from receiving emails. That is what I meant by "practically". I mean "in a practical sense" as opposed to in a theoretical sense.

What's your source for regulators sending emails to sites not having banners for essential cookies?

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#110
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that prevent sites from selling their users' data to third parties without consent server-side? GDPR is not about third party cookies, but about requiring informed consent.

The 'selling of data' is separate of course, but the banners do nothing to actually ensure that they aren't collecting data you don't know about. They're honor system, which is dumb when you could have browsers not send that data back without opt-in. In other words, of course Facebook knows you like bacon if you've followed 5 bacon fan pages and joined a bacon lovers group, and they could sell that fact. But without…

> They're honor system, which is dumb when you could have browsers not send that data back without opt-in.

Given that there is no objective way to differentiate between functional and tracking cookies, your "technical" solution would also boil down to honoring marking certain cookies as such by the website owner, effectively being the same as what we have today.

(Though I do agree that the UX would be nicer this way)

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