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llanowarelves commented on Etsy: Company escaping 'race to the bottom', getting back to its artisan roots   cnbc.com/2024/07/09/etsy-... · Posted by u/pseudolus
ToucanLoucan · a year ago
I've never had a place to complain about this, but if you haven't experienced it, Etsy's platform has the most remarkably awful, bad idea/execution, ludicrously shitty method to handle accounts I have ever fucking seen and as a software dev I find it actually offensive.

If you use one account and buy everything with one account and are always signed in, you're fine.

If however you order something and use your email address but are not logged in, you get your invoice and tracking to your email address but that order does not appear in your account, and if you go to the website/app and try to use it to track your order/respond to seller messages/whatever, you can't find it there. You have to go to a different page, a link in the email, and "claim" the order with your account.

Oh, also, if you aren't logged in and use a different email, a different account is created, based on that email, and the order is... half-claimed to that account, meaning you can't claim it with your actual account unless you jump through some hoops. Otherwise you can create an account with that half account to track that one order, and there's also no way to transfer orders without contacting support.

Also, if you use PayPal and aren't logged in, they just go ahead and create an entirely new account without a password, so you reset the password to eventually track that order, and all the other issues above.

I have something like four etsy accounts now and I've never seen a website make such a dog's dinner out of something as otherwise straight forward as accounts.

llanowarelves · a year ago
Same happened to me on Gumroad. I ended up with 5 or so before I had to contact customer support to merge them all.
llanowarelves commented on Forgejo forks its own path forward   forgejo.org/2024-02-forki... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
beardicus · 2 years ago
i guess if you think enforcing a code of conduct is a "scandal" and a "weapon" then maybe it's not for you? most people don't get hung up on this stuff though.
llanowarelves · 2 years ago
Some people rightfully want to see what the engineering effort and roadmap is gonna be before becoming invested in it, since there's always a cost.

Simple aesthetic changes and codes of conduct / political alignment for contributors are not enough for forks to become full things of their own. Even if they can help (branding, community, etc.). Or hurt (Forgejo is harder to pronounce. And CoC have potential downsides, possibly excluding good people, ironically, over banal minutia and hostile environment around being "not hostile" - like you saying he is "hung up" on it...).

Gitea was already a fork of Gogs, so why should contributors use this fork of a fork?

These forks (and direct clones) are like little political secessionary/independence movements, both making lofty statements and splitting would-be contributors. Sometimes it works out very well and they become full independent things of their own (GNU stuff), but it's fair to want to get on to see the actual engineering side of things.

llanowarelves commented on Show HN: Librarian - Semantic Bookmark Search Using Transformers   github.com/oto-labs/libra... · Posted by u/kashyapa95
mccruz · 2 years ago
Why is this necessary, I can just export my bookmarks, use ChatGPT to create a python script to download all of their contents, put it all in a big text file, and then CMD+F what i am looking for
llanowarelves · 2 years ago
It's so you don't need an exact term, you can search for a synonym or something "similar" in concept.

So more like a search engine than just a Ctrl+F in a file for a string of tokens

llanowarelves commented on Cutting down AWS cost by $150k per year simply by shutting things off   tuananh.net/2024/01/21/cl... · Posted by u/tuananh
null3cksor · 2 years ago
Couple of years ago I saved about 14 mn of revenue per year for my company. I got a 250$ bonus for it.
llanowarelves · 2 years ago
Learned a lesson that you only have to "spend" (forgo) $250 to cause that company $14m in losses (that you could have prevented)
llanowarelves commented on Launch HN: Diversion (YC S22) – Cloud-Native Git Alternative    · Posted by u/sasham
jupp0r · 2 years ago
Having worked with SVN a decade ago and Perforce more recently: that part of the market is waiting to be disrupted. I'm a little unsure whether it was actual technical reasons (vs cultural) that kept git out of those use cases. Many devs were working with git locally and using git-svn or git-p4 to interact with the local repo. Best of luck!
llanowarelves · 2 years ago
Indeed the choice for me as recent as 1-2 years ago was still SVN vs Perforce. Despite only having ever worked with Git
llanowarelves commented on Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel   wsj.com/business/cancel-s... · Posted by u/hhs
nunez · 2 years ago
I can't wait for services like Privacy to enter the mainstream. It's coming. (I'd like to think that it's coming.)

When 90% of your user base is using super-easily-createable disposable credit cards from valid BINs that self-destruct after your free trial's over, the way free trials work will have to change.

llanowarelves · 2 years ago
I liked the one Pennsylvania bill introduced where subscription services have to email you that they're about to charge you again.

Throws a wrench into the "was hoping you forgot about it, now ask/argue with customer support on the phone" dark pattern.

llanowarelves commented on A 2024 Plea for Lean Software   berthub.eu/articles/posts... · Posted by u/Teckla
stakhanov · 2 years ago
I think there was a kind of "golden period" that goes in between.

In the 90s, the economics around software had already heated up to the point where there was an insatiable appetite for software engineering manpower, but the university system wasn't yet geared to churning out specialists in this field in such large numbers, so a lot of software engineers back then were people coming from other professions who picked it up autodidactically and were just not very good. At the same time programming languages and tooling weren't yet at a point where they were good at guiding people towards good software engineering practice, and this lead to a kind of software quality crisis.

But this situation changed fast. I would say from maybe roundabout 2003 to maybe roundabout 2013 there was a bit of a "golden period" where we had good reason to be optimistic about the future of software quality. The software quality crisis of the 90s was largely overcome through better education, better software engineering methodology, and better programming language ecosystems and toolchains. Back in those days we still had purpose-built tooling for doing things like desktop UIs. Windows Forms based in C# and Aqua-era MacOS GUI programming in ObjC were actually quite a good experience for both developers and users. We also had cross-platform ways of doing GUI programming like Swing on Java.

In the next ten years, i.e. the ten years leading up to now, things took a decided turn for the worse. If I were to speculate about the reasons, I would say it was related to the rise of mobile, and the continued rise in the importance of the web platform over the desktop platform, meaning that application development now had to straddle web, mobile, and desktop as three distinct development targets. This created a need for truly cross-platform application development, while Apple and Microsoft continued to make plays to fortify their monopoly power instead of giving the world what it needed. Swing/JavaFX lost its footing when enterprises decided that web was all they really needed.

So, to answer your intial question: Has software quality really gotten worse? I would say, yes, over the last 10-15 years definitely. If you compare now to the mid-90s, then maybe, maybe not.

llanowarelves · 2 years ago
Well-written comment. I would love to read an extended version of this with examples, pictures, etc. as a blog post / youtube video.
llanowarelves commented on Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)   cs.umd.edu/~ben/goldenrul... · Posted by u/luu
DonHopkins · 2 years ago
I worked with Ben Shneiderman at the UMD Human Computer Interaction Lab developing pie menus, and one of the important principles of pie menus, especially in comparison to both traditional linear menus, and invisible gestures as used by the iPad and mobile apps, is that they smoothly TRAIN novice users to become experts by using "rehearsal".

Pie menus can lead, follow, or get out of the way. The way a novice uses them is actually rehearsal for how a more experienced and experts use them.

Unlike invisible gestures, they can pop up and show users the available items. They also support reselection and browsing, which gestures don't. They also utilize 100% of possible "gesture space" as meaningful predictable actions, as opposed to gesture recognition which squanders most possible gestures as syntax errors.

Gesture Space:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/gesture-space-842e3cdc7102

Unlike pull-down menus that have keyboard shortcuts, pie menu "shortcuts" are exactly the same action a novice takes to use them in the first place, only quicker, so using them in the slow way trains you to use them in the fast way. While selecting from a linear menu with the mouse is a totally different action than selecting a menu shortcut with the keyboard.

Ben Shneiderman introduces Don Hopkins' work on pie menus in Spring 1989 on a Sun Workstation, running the NeWS window system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg

After an 1991 intro by Ben Shneiderman we see the older 1989 demo by Don Hopkins showing many examples of pie menus on a Sun Workstation, running the NEWS operating system.

This is work done at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland.

A pie menu is a menu technique where the items are placed along the circumference of a circle at equal radial distance from the center. Several examples are demonstrated on a Sun running NeWS window system, including the use of pie menus and gestures for window management, the simultaneous entry of 2 arguments (by using angle and distance from the center), scrollable pie menus, precision pie menus, etc. We can see that gestures were possible (with what Don call "mouse ahead" ) so you could make menu selections without even displaying the menu. Don uses an artifact he calls "mousee" so we can see what he is doing but that extra display was only used for the video, i.e. as a user you could make selections with gestures without the menu ever appearing, but the description of those more advanced features was never published.

Pretty advance for 1989... i.e. life before the Web, when mice were just starting to spread, and you could graduate from the CS department without ever even using one.

This video was published in the 1991 HCIL video but the demo itself - and recording of the video - dates back to 1989 at least, as pictures appear in the handout of the May 1989 HCIL annual Open House.

The original Pie Menu paper is Callahan, J., Hopkins, D., Weiser, M., Shneiderman, B., An empirical comparison of pie vs. linear menus; Proc. ACM CHI '88 (Washington, DC) 95-100.

Also Sparks of Innovation in Human-Computer Interaction, Shneiderman, B., Ed., Ablex (June 1993) 79-88. A later paper mentions some of the more advanced features in an history of the HyperTies system: Shneiderman, B., Plaisant, C., Botafogo, R., Hopkins, D., Weiland, W., Designing to facilitate browsing: a look back at the Hyperties work station browser Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101-117.

PS: For another fun historic video showing very early embedded graphical links (may be the 1st such link) + revealing all the links/menu items + gestures for page navigation

• HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Browsing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319498

DonHopkins on March 19, 2016 | parent | context | favorite | on: Motion Design Is the Future of UI

User interfaces should always be able to lead, follow, or get out of the way. Animation should never delay interaction, and it should never interfere with gestures and mouse-ahead (or whatever the input device is).

The user should never have to wait for animation to finish before they're able to do something, and the interface should never be disabled during animation, or ever ignore the user's input under any circumstances.

User input should always pre-empt and interrupt feedback and animation.

The interface should always support quick gestures (mousing ahead, touching ahead, or whatever), without ever requiring the user to pause and wait, or focus their attention on the screen to watch the animation play out before they know it's safe to make the next move.

I developed a gestural pie menu tabbed window manager for the NeWS window system in 1990, which supported mousing ahead, suppressing the pie menu display and pop-up animation until you stopped moving, showing light weight feedback on the overlay plane, and executing commands instantly without any animation or even popping up the menu, when you make a smooth quick gesture without hesitating.

NeWS Tab Window Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4

https://donhopkins.com/home/movies/TabWindowDemo.mov

Transcript of the relevant part of the demo:

Now you can press the right button to pop up a pie menu on the tab or on the frame itself. And that has commonly used commands like front and back in mnemonic directions. Back is down, and front is up.

When you make a menu selection by mousing ahead, it doesn't display the menu.

As long as you're moving, it suppresses the menu display.

And it gives you feedback on the overlay plane of the slice that you're in, and the label of that slice, so you can actually see what you're going to get before you choose it without even seeing the menu itself.

And when you wait, it pops up the menu once you stop moving.

So if you waste some time by just waiting around, it will waste a bit more time by giving you some stupid animation.

And this is meant to be negative reinforcement, to encourage you to mouse ahead.

The sub-menu pops up. This is "move to" which is unconstrained move.

You can always get that from the tab by mousing left and right.

That's an easy gesture. Just quickly...

Or mouse there and wait. There it is. It pops up the one you're at first.

This is constrained horizontal move.

And this is constrained vertical move.

So constrained horizontal... We'll wait.

Constrained vertical...

So, I mean, once you're there, and you know what you want, why wait?

This is "beam me up": put it in the next layout position. To tidy the windows.

So, if you've clicked the menu up and haven't moved, it will just spin it, because it's confused, and doesn't know what you're going to do.

----

In other words: As it pops up and scales up the round menu, it also tilts it along the axis perpendicular to the direction of movement to reinforce the selected direction, or spins around the center if you haven't moved to show no direction is selected.

And you only ever see any animation if you actually stop moving -- once you make a selection, the command always executes or the submenu always activates immediately.

You can mouse ahead smoothly through multiple levels of sub-menus, without popping any of them up or seeing any animation, as long as you never hesitate.

By "lead, follow, or get out of the way", I mean that pie menus can lead novice users by giving them feedback and animation when they pause, follow intermediate users who move in the right direction then pause for the feedback to make sure they got it right, and get out of the way of expert users who know the right direction and can quickly articulate gestures without pausing or waiting for feedback.

----

Here's another demo showing pie menus, mouse ahead gestures, and display pre-emption in SimCity:

X11 SimCity Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA

----

And here's a really old demo from June 1986 of the "uwm" window manager for the X10 window system, that I hacked to support pie menus with mouse-ahead and display pre-emption.

X10 Pie Menu Window Manager:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJhvB6kwmog

---

More info here:

The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus -- Dr. Dobb's Journal, Dec. 1991:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-...

llanowarelves · 2 years ago
Thanks. A lot of good stuff here that may go overlooked.

Deleted Comment

llanowarelves commented on X/Twitter has updated its terms of service to let it use posts for AI training   stackdiary.com/x-can-now-... · Posted by u/skilled
llanowarelves · 2 years ago
As with any business/product, consumers are also free to say what they think to the business, other users, competitors, and anyone else.

u/llanowarelves

KarmaCake day822February 27, 2019View Original