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I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

skeptrune.com

181–190 of 218 posts

Re: I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

#181
post #67

The software quality is so low that if a bug bothers you, it's easier to get hired to fix it than for the company to fix it! Wow. It reminds me of the programmer who mitigated the GTA 5 loading time problem. If even with a lot of money of GTA 5 the quality doesn't improve...

It's nothing to do with quality. It's prioritization. Companies pick things they think people want (or what the team wants to build) without testing or experimenting with users and data. This is actually an example of the problem, not the solution. There are probably much more useful things for the team to be doing but they let one guy add the thing he wanted.

You'd think search on a docs site would be important :D

Re: I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

#182
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest Amazon annoyance. I'm often looking for some product, reading Reddit and other reviews. They usually link to amazon.com. Then it asks me to switch my profile to American/$. But then in order to order I need to switch back to Germany/€. It's just super cumbersome. Just let me view stuff from any region without switching profiles. If I order from that region you can tell me to switch profiles. But not just f…

> In the same vein. Why is there no, I want this thing, but from a German seller. eBay used to let you filter results by region, but apparently that ruined some kind of metric and the option is gone. When buying games or books or what have you I only want sellers in the EU. I don’t care that it’s available in the US or UK, shipping and duties are going to be 4x what the product is worth.

This https://i.imgur.com/fTRrVnP.png is not gone, look it's right there.

Re: I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

#183

> I added an AbortController to the debounced search function, so that it aborts any previous queries when a new one is made. This means that the search results are always relevant to what the user is currently typing. To me one of the most annoying things an application can do is go off and do something before I'm done telling it what to do. Filters that apply themselves without an explicit indication that I'm done…

When I implemented search-as-you-type on my blog, I decided to wait for the current search suggestion request to complete before doing a new one. Seemed like a reasonable balance between responsiveness and not overloading the server.

The earlier search will be on a shorter input which will find more results; imagine waiting for everything that contains "e" before you can get the one result for "europa" that you wanted. Isn't that pattern going to happen most of the time - waiting for a large amount of useless generated and transferred and disposed-of, before the search you want will run?

Re: I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

#184
post #149
post #55

Reminds me when I got banned from Amazon for suspected fraud (had an old account, but deleted my email and number since it was in a lot of DB dumps). After I got hired, I reached out to the guy in charge of the anti-fraud team at Amazon, and got unbanned. Emails to support etc. did nothing before I reached out internally (unbanned by 1am the next day).

My biggest Amazon annoyance. I'm often looking for some product, reading Reddit and other reviews. They usually link to amazon.com. Then it asks me to switch my profile to American/$. But then in order to order I need to switch back to Germany/€. It's just super cumbersome. Just let me view stuff from any region without switching profiles. If I order from that region you can tell me to switch profiles. But not just f…

its a pain, and the option to switch it back is hidden inside the accounts section, which is hard to find and even take 3-4 clicks.

Re: I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True enough, but considering most websites these days consider "a comfortable margin" to mean "4-6 inches", I'm delighted to see a site which actually lines things up close to the left side of my monitor. Like I said, that's how text should be.

Unless you have a wide screen display and have to physically move your head to read the text.

Comrade, we have invented tiling window managers. You can simply move the window

E: I still like margins though. A visual delineation from the window border is nice.

Re: I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

#186
post #116
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also while you're there, if no car ever in the history of your app goes down the road at the speed limit ever it's a good indication you'll never be able to ever do it at that speed. e.g. small narrow single lane country roads which are only theoretically 60mph roads.

Imagine the data they must have on the speeds people actually drive on every mile of every road, they’d easily be able to warn you not that you’re “over the speed limit” as in driving 70 on the freeway, but more usefully, if you’re in the top X percentile of speeds usually or even currently driven, which actually is a decent measure of unsafe was and would also be a great predictor of likelihood to get a ticket.

I share your intuition that your likelihood of getting a ticket is related to the speed of other vehicles. Presumably, police choose to prioritise ticketing the worst offenders when there are too many offenders to handle.

But I don't share your intuition that safety is also relative in that way. If you're driving dangerously (too fast, or while drunk), you're driving dangerously, even if everyone else is driving dangerously too. If you're in a country where nobody wears a seatbelt, it's still prudent to wear a seatbelt, just as much as in a country where that is the norm. I don't think Google Maps should encourage people to drive as dangerously as everyone else. Quite the opposite!

Re: I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

#187

If Google Maps would like to hire me so the km/miles switch can remember I only ever want to see distances in km, my contact details are in my HN profile. I must have changed that back from miles once a fortnight since Google Maps launched 20 years ago. That's 500 times. Totally ridiculous for a company who core goal is profiling their users...

And language. I’m so tired of seeing the map in Portuguese because I went to Portugal 5 years ago.

The same here. Oftentimes Google Maps switches to most exotic language "because of reasons". Then I set it manually to my preferred language, for decades now, and it's been the same language all the time. Are they trying to say with poker face "we don't track you"? I don't think my home-grown privacy habits are that good, somehow they manage to show me an ad of "blue sneakers" someone in the household mentioned this morning.

Re: I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

#188
post #96

Good PR, but AbortController doesn't really help with stopping the server from processing the request. I have seen so much of this type of search that just continues processing in the backend even if the client has long gone caring.

I agree. I was expecting the author would implement debouncing or throttling to reduce the number of unnecessary requests, alongside fixing the data race issue. Here's an excellent article on debouncing and on throttling, and the difference between them:

https://css-tricks.com/debouncing-throttling-explained-examp...

Re: I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, there's a setting for this? I've lived in Australia for over 16 years now but everything is still in miles instead of Kms and I have never been able to find a setting to change it (although it sounds like even if I did find itz it would be mostly useless).

Ive lived in Australia for 45 years, everything is in km.. never had to touch it for miles. However i did go to the US and it showed units in miles on my phone which made no sense. In Gmaps, Tap your profile picture, then select "Settings" and "Distance units". Choose between "Automatic", "Kilometers", or "Miles". Pick the units you want.

That's in the mobile app. In the web browser, there's no such setting. Or at least, none that I can find.

Re: I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself

#190
post #178
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suggestion to use an offline app that will save you from such surprises. https://www.comaps.app/

I clicked the link with nothing better to do, and woa, that's a really good maps app. Like, "I haven't seen something like this before" levels of good. Reorients itself with my phone, accurately - and in real time, not after I'd already walked ten steps in that direction. With other maps, I thought that maybe my phone's compass is broken. The default but optional 3D top-down view is the most comprehensible-looking ma…

Happy to have made you discover something cool :-)

> 3D top-down view is the most comprehensible-looking map I've seen in a long time

The 3D top-down view with building heights is possible thanks to OSM providing this data, thanks to people improving the map with apps like Street Complete and Every Door. Make sure to check them out :-)

There's with this 3D view though: it sometimes hides streets. I usually end up disabling it at some point.

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