It's funny that you can't get HN commenters to unanimously agree on much of anything concrete, but we are all united in our belief that we know better.
The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
291–300 of 458 posts
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#292A good part of that is a disguised sense of superiority. Life becomes way lighter when you realize other people are also smart and what you’re “fixing” can very likely be: - something so unimportant that no one felt it was worthy working on - something that was supposed to work like that, and you simply don’t agree and want to make it your way
All of programming comes from a sense of superiority. Programming is the closest humanity has ever gotten to godhood. We're creating entire structured universes out of unstructured bits. The system reflects the understanding of its creator. We're all pretending to be gods, warring over the system's design.
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Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#293Oh wow. This hits hard in the feels. Here's my personal submission for "UI problem that has existed for years on touch interfaces, plus a possible solution, but at this point I'm just shouting into the void": https://medium.com/@pmarreck/the-most-annoying-ui-problem-r3... In short, an interface should not be interactable until a few milliseconds after it has finished (re)rendering, or especially, while it is still in…
Yes, 1,000%. The one I don't quite know how to solve is when I'm tapping a device to connect to -- whether a WiFi router or an AirPlay speaker or whatever -- and I swear to god, half the time my intended device slides out from under me a newly discovered device enters above and pushes it down. Or sometimes devices disappear and pull it up. Maybe it's because I live in an apartment building with lots of devices. I've…
I also wish you could blacklist/permanently hide individual devices so that I could prune the list of 400 smart TVs, Bluetooth speakers, electric toothbrushes, other people's phones, smart fridges, etc that come up every time I try to link to my earbuds in my apartment.
It seems like a super easy fix.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've -literally- been writing Swift, every day, seven days a week, 52.4 weeks a year, since June 2, 2014 (the day it was announced), yet, I still have huge gaps in my knowledge of the language. I speak it without an accent, but not at Ph.D level. As to home projects, that's pretty much all I do, these days, ever since I "retired"*, in 2017. I'm quite good at what I do, and generally achieve every goal that I set, but…
Unrelated question since you've got the Swift experience: How would you recommend a modern day Mac utility get sold? Is grabbing some hardware ID of a device and then charging money for a license keys somehow still the way to go for some small utility (eg window management app like Rectangle) if you want to sell to users outside of the Mac app store?
With Mac, you have choices (as opposed to iOS). There’s licensing libraries that you can use. These can do things like hardware keys.
The App Store is very secure, but Apple gets their vig…
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#295There's a quote I learned when doing theatre, which I've seen attributed to either the stage magician Doug Henning or possibly Stanislavski, describing the process of art as taking something that's difficult and making it habit , then taking something that's habitual and making it easy , and then taking something that's easy and making it beautiful . For example, as an actor, you learn your lines by rote (they become…
"Kneel down and you will believe."
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me the BIGGEST annoyance is the iOS “End call” button. Just as I’m about to tap it, the other person ends the call and what I’m actually tapping is some other person on my call list that it then immediately calls. Even if I end the call quickly they often call back confused “You called, what did you want?” Apple: PLEASE add a delay to touch input after the call screen closes.
My solution would account for this as well. The solution needs to be global. Literally, if any part of the screen just changed (except for watching videos, which would make them impossible to interact with), add a small interaction delay where taps are no-op'd.
Video shouldn't count as the screen changing, it should just be an area of "media". It's appearance or disappearance could be counted as a change, but not the contents of the area itself. That could be a global rule to save much exception making.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#297One of the ways psychologists classify people is between those who are maximizers/optimizers and those who are satisficers/stop when things are "good enough." As someone who is very much on the optimizer side of things, and experiences the struggles described in this article, the lesson I take to heart is that while satisficers tend to be happier, optimizers get more done. Your optimizer tendencies make you into an e…
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." (George Bernard Shaw)
But are those really different classes of people? Isn't everyone a maximizer up to a point where they think "good enough"? Where that limit changes between people, and for each person probably depending on area of interest, area of expertise, and so on?
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that Android even has a notification history is huge. iOS does not!
TIL Android has a notification history. I've been using Android phones for over a decade and never new.
You can use this fact to see deleted messages on whatsapp. Just enable the notificaion history and Now whenver someones sends you somethign regrettable and deletes it you can still see it in notif history. The reason you need the notif history is whatsapp actually live wipes the notifictions for deleted messages.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of programming comes from a sense of superiority. Programming is the closest humanity has ever gotten to godhood. We're creating entire structured universes out of unstructured bits. The system reflects the understanding of its creator. We're all pretending to be gods, warring over the system's design.
I wish this meme would die already. You're just writing some mumbo jumbo that you've learned (at least most of it) in a couple of years, chill out.
The tools we use shape us. Habits have inertia. The parent may be hyperbolic but it's not wrong.
But it didn't start with computers or programming, this tendency has been a long time developing.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me the most annoying one is the cookie consent banner. Very few sites have clearly defined buttons like “Allow all” “Deny all” etc. but majority of them have a (intentionally) convoluted UI so that a lot of users just accept all.
I frankly wish the web standards group had released an API for these so they could be handled at the browser level.
We've had multiple standards, mostly recently https://www.w3.org/TR/gpc/ . They always fail, because they're never mandatory, so surveillance capitalists just decline to implement them – or, worse, quietly sabotage them.