[HN Gopher] While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped w...
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While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working
Author : soneca
Score : 269 points
Date : 2021-09-21 03:05 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| can we go back to when Javascript wasn't used in EVERYTHING
| please
| mproud wrote:
| "I could refresh my browser page, or I could write a bunch of
| stuff about it on Twitter!"
| uxp100 wrote:
| Another fun day a year or two ago on Tumblr involved the old
| classic top-posting vs bottom-posting debate. I don't remember
| the details precisely, but it was something like this:
|
| They switched the default from one to the other one day, so that
| mid day your replies started being top posted. And so you got
| that wonderful mix of top and bottom posting. Then they fixed it,
| and so you could have a thread that had just top posting in the
| middle. Neato. Thanks Tumblr.
| pram wrote:
| You just reminded me that if a Tumblr conversation went on long
| enough the quotes became smaller, pushed out of the div to the
| right. Literally unreadable lol
| haddr wrote:
| Another weird thing: some programs like to capture key
| combinations that are used to input some diacritics. It is
| exceptionally bad when it's a mouse driver, and even worse when
| it happens on your company laptop where you have no admin rights
| to remove it...
| haddr wrote:
| One more funny story: we used to have some weird errors from
| time to time, when someone accidentally committed code with
| some letter L placed randomly in the code. We soon happened
| that it was a result of people blocking windows machine (win
| L), when somehow the letter L got propagated to the IDE running
| under Linux in VirtualBox. Yeah, we used Linux on top of
| Windows machines back then...
| asplake wrote:
| > tumblr is fractally broken. it's not wrong in any specific way,
| it's wrong at every possible scale.
| [deleted]
| hamburglar wrote:
| Once, many years ago, my company was working with Tumblr on
| some kind of integration, and for some reason, the engineer I
| was working with emailed me a filed called something like
| tumblr.php that was the "show the main blog page" source. It
| was one of the most spaghetti-ish overly-long unreadable pieces
| of shit I'd seen in decades.
|
| So this excellent set of tweets does not surprise me in the
| least.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| I used to work there and indeed the source code is a huge
| monolithic PHP nightmare based on an ancient version of some
| forgotten framework and hacked on by hundreds of developers
| over the years. There was a huge amount of code dedicated to
| rendering content that depended on bugs from the
| application's earliest days plus new behaviors that were
| introduced over time. Every request required a full start of
| the entire tumblr application - they didn't trust the code to
| process more then one request per invocation so it exited
| after sending a reply. Developer turnover was huge due to the
| code base being a nightmare and no management support for
| refactoring.
|
| But if you could stomach working with the code the catered
| lunches from Dos Toros and Luke's Lobster were epic.
| tmcneal wrote:
| I remember visiting tumblr.com once a long time ago and they
| were actually serving the index.php file as a download rather
| than rendering the homepage. It was indeed a several thousand
| long file of spaghetti code.
| Karellen wrote:
| This line is likely inspired by the concept of "Fractal
| Wrongness": https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fractal_wrongness
|
| and 2012's "PHP: a fractal of bad design":
| https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
| asplake wrote:
| I believe so too. Love the definition here though!
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| I wonder if it's a bad interaction between one of this person's
| extensions and Tumblr. Presumably if this were a problem for
| everyone, new blot posts would have cratered and Tumblr's SRE
| would have been notified and any recent releases would have been
| rolled back. So I would assume this issue affects only a small
| fraction of users. Could be wrong but I guess we will see.
| alfonsodev wrote:
| > So you are typing "Don't" and the ResetCursorPosition()
| function gets called and you look at the textbox and now it says
| "on'tD"
|
| I had this bug trying to implement a text editor using Draft.js
| but not sure it was for the same reason.
|
| I guess tumblr devs tried to implement a text editor and at the
| same time have some vim like shortcuts(jkl).
|
| This makes you appreciate how less can be more.
| MattKimber wrote:
| Javascript editors trying to reinvent desktop paradigms but
| without the 40-odd years of practice and having all the events
| arrive whenever they feel like is one of the most frequent
| irritations of web-based platforms for me, because you use a
| text editor so frequently and therefore encounter its problems
| similarly often.
|
| For example, earlier today I was editing a small internal app
| in Retool. I typed something, instinctively went for Cmd-Z, and
| it reverts a bunch of changes I made in the query I had open 5
| minutes ago. Of course, by the time I spot it and hit Shift-
| Cmd-Z, the internal state has updated so now it redoes some
| other unrelated undo operation and I have two broken things to
| fix.
|
| And then of course there's Notion, the champion of "you've hit
| a keyboard shortcut and it's applied it to something halfway
| across the screen from the selection, or possibly just given up
| trying to do anything useful and deleted a few paragraphs of
| text at random". Perhaps they were pining for the outrageously
| janky experience that was attempting to make even the most
| innocuous of formatting changes in earlier versions of Word For
| Windows.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| MS Teams is just as terrible.
|
| If I accidentally fat-fingered e.g. the \ key at the end of a
| message ("Got it!\"), I want to
|
| 1. press the up key
|
| 2. press backspace
|
| 3. press enter
|
| to delete the last character in the last sent message.
|
| But unless you actually wait at least a second after step 1,
| the UI is so sluggish in starting the edit of your last
| message that you instead get "please type a message to
| continue" because you pressed enter while the New Message
| text box still had focus.
|
| Things are _much_ worse if you want to do anything more
| complex. Say, capitalize the first letter of the last sent
| message (up, home, delete, type capital letter, enter).
| Usually results in complete gibberish, like appending the
| capital letter to the message, or sending it in a new message
| (depending on how fast you are).
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Why not just let a text area do its job? Why do you need a
| special "text editor"?
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| How else are you going to give your front end devs work to
| do?
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| That's what that was! I experienced this behavior for years
| writing posts or comments on facebooks mobile site, helped me a
| lot to wean myself of that one.
| alfonsodev wrote:
| Thanks, indeed seems to have been raised on the Github repo.
|
| https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/issues/1077
| SilasX wrote:
| Yes! I had something like that and it was so frustrating I
| wrote a post (on FB, sigh) about it, looks like it was August
| 10.
|
| I had written a comment with multiple paragraphs (which I
| guess they don't expect people to do, or test for) and I
| wanted to add something to the next-to-last paragraph, and
| when I tried to type "matters" it would keep locking me in
| autocomplete tagging for friends name "Matthew", and as soon
| as I dismissed the cursor would leap to the end of the
| comment. If I tried to click back, the cursor kept jumping to
| the end!
| coldpie wrote:
| > implement a text editor using Draft.js
|
| on'tD do this.
| handsarebags wrote:
| Feel for op ;D
|
| Appreciate the description "fractally broken". oh dear :)
|
| Has a similar predicament[1] (though completely different cause);
| felt very uncivilised copy and pasting the character I wanted
| from the internet...
|
| Still wondering what the most elegant way I could have gotten
| that character, especially if I didn't have internet access.
|
| Scroll through random files?
|
| Perhaps I might've known a little about ASCII and tried
| converting a few numbers to characters till I found the character
| I wanted.
|
| At the time I did not, and was thankful the internet provided the
| character I needed.
|
| Still feel like I got away with something and would have been
| stumped without that... :)
|
| [1] http://www.bagsend.net/posts/best_problem.html
| junon wrote:
| Side note, @foone is a great account to follow on Twitter if
| you're looking for weird Hardware hacks and commentary on tech.
| vultour wrote:
| They have like 500 tweets just in the past day. I don't use
| Twitter, but doesn't that completely drown out your feed? How
| do you follow someone who's posting every few minutes?
| phreack wrote:
| > god I love tumblr. it's one of the best social networks on the
| internet because it's just a complete fractal dumpster fire
|
| Couldn't agree more. Everything is just so awful I can't even
| imagine the staff turning it into some boring Twitter like
| dumpster fire all about sucking up to celebrities. They have
| chronological post order by default, that makes it instantly
| better than nearly all other social networks.
|
| It's unsalvageable and due to that, an accidental refuge from the
| current mess of the Internet.
| dbatten wrote:
| True story: One day, Windows wouldn't let me type the letter p.
|
| I was trying to log back in from the Windows lock screen. Typed
| my password, got it wrong. Typed it again, got it wrong.
| Eventually got locked out of my account, despite being extremely
| careful to type my password correctly. Went to IT and had them
| unlock my account...
|
| Went back to my PC and tried to log in again. Typed my password
| very carefully, letter by letter, watching each letter come up on
| screen as I went. When I went to type the letter p, nothing
| happened. I hit p repeatedly, nothing.
|
| I figured the switch for the p key on my keyboard had died or
| something, so I went to IT and got a new keyboard. Unplugged the
| old, plugged in the new. Still no p. OK, this is getting
| ridiculous. Clicked on accessibility tools and tried to use the
| on-screen keyboard to type in my password. _Still couldn't type
| the letter p, even with the on-screen keyboard._
|
| Ended up having to hard reset the machine, and then everything
| was fine and dandy. Still have no idea what could have happened.
| It ended up being the last straw that pushed me to Ubuntu, and
| I've never looked back.
| not1ofU wrote:
| Meanwhile a printer somewhere was unloading a rainforest worth
| of paper all over the place.
|
| (thinking your CTRL key was stuck and activating the print
| shortcut, but unplugging the keyboard rules that out)
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| Button presses are often handled by state machines at a driver
| level so that a single "press" only registers as a single
| press. Otherwise, it will register as a lot of presses because
| the physical switches bounce on contact. They call this
| debouncing. Probably, a drivers state machine did not
| transition out
| dbatten wrote:
| This doesn't seem to explain how it would happen after
| plugging in a new keyboard, or trying to use the on-screen
| keyboard, though...
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| Same generic keyboard debouncing in use in all 3 instances
| on the windows end? I know windows drivers debounce mouse
| clicks because I had a really old mouse that would double
| and triple click by accident on Linux but not in windows. I
| might be wrong, but changing the device might not affect it
| if the different devices are handled by shared runtime code
| ayewo wrote:
| Sounds like a reasonable explanation for physical
| keyboards--if the new keyboard used by the OP was
| identical to the keyboard on their machine, I can see how
| Windows might reuse the same device driver instance since
| it has already been loaded into memory.
|
| But what about the on-screen keyboard? Do on-screen key
| presses get routed through the keyboard device driver
| too?
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| So fingers bounce when they touch a screen? I wrote a
| capacitive touch driver once back in uni and we debounced
| that. I don't know how windows does it, I'm speculating
| sixothree wrote:
| My first thought would be one of those mouse sharing programs
| (synergy, multipliciy, mouse without borders). They really
| screw up _everything_.
|
| Nothing sucks like mouse without borders. Nothing. Except for
| Synergy which is worse. But nothing sucks like synergy. Well
| except Multiplicity.
| Intermernet wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOP_(code)
| civilized wrote:
| Getting a "Who's on First" vibe, but I can't quite make it
| into a real joke...
|
| - "I can't get a p, no matter what I do there's no p at all!"
|
| - "No p?"
|
| - "Nope!"
|
| - "Well if it's a no-op of course there's no p!"
|
| - "It's not a no-op, I'm telling you there's no p!"
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I was going to go with no p probably indicating an enlarged
| prostate.
| dEnigma wrote:
| Okay, I've never thought of NOP as "no 'P'", so this caught
| me completely by surprise and made me laugh out loud.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Reminds me of the drinking game called the "Land of Nod",
| you go in a circle making claims like "you can live in the
| Land of Nod, but you can't die there" or "you can listen to
| Nirvana in the Land of Nod, but not Dave Grohl" and hand
| out penalties of two fingers of your pint every time
| someone makes a statement that doesn't fit the rule. The
| only advice you give them is "the clue is in the name".
|
| You can only play this game once with a particular group,
| but it's a good laugh.
| lardolan wrote:
| Same here. Thought about NOPE
| dr-detroit wrote:
| funny joke. seriously imagine the large teams of people it
| would take to meet your companies security standard practices
| if you decided to install lolbuntu.
| t-writescode wrote:
| At a job I worked at, we had servers that were given several
| internal IP addresses to map to external IP addresses.
|
| One day, one machine just ... stopped having a bunch of those
| IP addresses. They were just gone.
|
| We didn't understand, troubleshot as much as we could, and
| eventually just gave up and went "forget it, just try
| restarting the machine."
|
| It worked.
|
| It's amazing what weird states a computer can get into that
| "did you try turning it off and on again?" is a very real and
| legitimate and helpful piece of advice.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Bit flips from cosmic rays happen all the time. It's
| inevitable that they sometimes change state in deleterious
| ways.
| asddubs wrote:
| like maybe changing a key in some hashmap
| atribecalledqst wrote:
| You can get into a similar state on MacOS by pressing a key
| multiple times in a row (option I think). It just quietly
| disables a large number of keys. I figured it out by accident
| one day because I assigned the key as my "push to talk" on
| Discord. That was a fun hour trying to figure out what had
| happened.
| miah_ wrote:
| On MacOS if you remap your capslock to control there is a
| race condition on the login screen. If you use the
| control/capslock key to wake up your laptop and manage to
| time it right, you can enable capslock but not have a way to
| disable it (unless you remapped another key to capslock
| (why?)).
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Xorg has an option to toggle capslock by pressing both
| shift keys together, which seems like a nice solution.
| ljm wrote:
| Same deal if you remap the key in Windows using the
| PowerToys utility. Only, it'll happen whenever something
| pegs the CPU.
|
| Never had the problem when using SharpKeys to rewrite the
| registry.
| Gaelan wrote:
| > (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?))
|
| When I first started doing caps-lock-to-control, I mapped
| my physical control key to caps lock. Eventually, I stopped
| bothering and kept it as control.
| bscphil wrote:
| How would you remap the capslock key without using a
| hotkeys-like setup, such as Karabiner? I looked for a long
| time for a way to do that and couldn't figure it out.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Sys Prefs > Keyboard > Modifier Keys... will let you
| switch it to a short list of alternatives.
| ksherlock wrote:
| System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Perhaps hold shift to temporarily deactivate it then?
| js2 wrote:
| Funny, I just had a version of this happen to me this
| morning on iPad OS using a folio keyboard.
|
| I had just upgraded to iPadOS 15 and the caps-lock-as-
| control setting reverted to the default. I went into
| settings and changed it back, but I did so with caps lock
| accidentially enabled.
|
| This left the folio keyboard stuck in caps lock. I had to
| go back into settings, set caps lock back to caps lock,
| press the caps lock key to disable, then I could make it a
| control key. But trickily, the setting change didn't seem
| to take effect until I swiped out of the screen where you
| change that setting.
|
| ANYWAY, I'M JUST GLAD I FIGURED IT OUT.
|
| BTW, why does caps lock even still exist?
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| Lots of old documents with rules about writing
| ridiculously large parts of them in ALL CAPS. For no
| reason at all, that I can determine.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Notepad++ has a toolbar option that will uppercase all
| the currently selected text. Write a paragraph normally
| and then uppercase it with one click.
| tpxl wrote:
| Lots of tools have this. IntelliJ has it mapped to ctrl
| shift U by default I think.
| Sanguinaire wrote:
| All-caps mode exists as a safe space for FORTRAN
| programmers.
| II2II wrote:
| > BTW, why does caps lock even still exist?
|
| It was useful on some old machines that tended to prefer
| uppercase input. On typewriters, the shift lock key
| (which is slightly different) tended to be used when
| people wanted to add emphasis to a word or phrase.
|
| As for modern computers, it is less useful. When one of
| the keyswitches on my keyboard failed, I replaced it with
| the keyswitch from the capslock since I figured it was
| the one key I was guaranteed to never use.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| > BTW, why does caps lock even still exist?
|
| Dunno, but in my country we use a QWERTZ layout where you
| can't write the letters E, S, C, R, Z, Y A, I, E without
| caps lock, because with Shift those keys produce 2, 3, 4,
| ..., 0
|
| So that's why I need it. :)
| recursive wrote:
| Sometimes I use caps lock for its intended purpose.
| Probably not nearly enough to justify its existence as a
| physical key that takes up space, but at least a little.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Remote learning with a 1st grader showed me just how many
| ways a computer can get screwed up by random impresses.
| [deleted]
| vvatermelone wrote:
| I've been having bizarrely similar issues with my XPS lately,
| except that none of the keys work except the _i_ key, even with
| the on-screen keyboard. Only happens once in a blue moon, but
| as in your case, requires a hard reset.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Windows 10 has this funny bug where sometimes for some reason
| your individual windows don't get focus any more. You can click
| at their title bar, and they'll be drawn as-if they have focus
| (darker shadow and foreground titlebar), but no window actually
| accepts or processes any user input (while updating normally in
| the background, and also redrawing). The only way I know how to
| fix this is to go into the Ctrl+Alt+Delete screen; just
| bringing up task manager doesn't change anything.
| Arainach wrote:
| It sounds like you've installed some sort of app with a low
| level keyboard hook that's discarding the input. The login
| screen is in a separate desktop and not subject to such
| meddling. If it was an accessibility tool it might be able to
| hook into the login screen, I forget.
| johnsoft wrote:
| I think I've had this happen too. My fix is win+l to logout,
| then log back in.
| not1ofU wrote:
| Doesn't Win+L lock the screen?
| nitrogen wrote:
| Could you have something running with an invisible window,
| e.g. keylogger? Less scrupulous friends from way back used to
| talk about writing such things.
| ctraynor wrote:
| The reason why this will fix it is because Ctrl+Alt+Delete
| has a higher level of system interrupt than alternate ways to
| get to task manager. Ctrl+Alt+Delete fixes a surprising
| number of issues by interrupting runaway issues.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| MacOS has had a similar issue as far back as 10.7. In 10.6
| and before if you see a window with red, green, and yellow
| buttons in the corner, that window has focus, period. It was
| an enforced invariant.
|
| In later versions it's pretty common to see such windows that
| don't actually have focus. Clicking again on the title bar
| usually fixes the problem but I find it very annoying.
| There's a race condition in the system somewhere that Apple
| doesn't recognize as a bug.
| aembleton wrote:
| Threadreader link:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1440014690831126528.html
| subpixel wrote:
| My personal pet peeve is what every Squarespace-powered site on
| the internet (many millions!) does to the esc key.
|
| Example: https://www.folioeast.com/
|
| I never realized how often I use the esc key until I started
| getting routed to Squarespace logins all over the place.
| athorax wrote:
| Oh. My. God. I have been wondering why when I come back to my
| PC after it being asleep I've been on random squarespace login
| pages. I usually tap esc a couple of times to wake up my
| computer.
| macintux wrote:
| I learned years ago to use as "safe" a key as possible to
| wake up my computer, so I settled on Control.
|
| Wish I could remember what led me to that decision.
| recursive wrote:
| I do the same thing. It's right on the corner. And alt
| frequently activates a menu.
| anthonyu wrote:
| I use Control as well, and it was an adaptation to prevent
| typing spaces or letters into the password field that I
| would have to delete before typing in my password. Perhaps
| you had a similar experience.
| icoder wrote:
| I use caps lock, apart from being safe it also gives a bit
| of feedback in the form of the light going on/off even
| before the conplete wakeup.
| sfteus wrote:
| Somewhat related, Teams on Ubuntu recently has stopped letting me
| use the left/right arrows to navigate around a message I've
| written. However, shift + arrow or control + arrow still work
| fine. Haven't had a chance to dig into why, but it's been mildly
| amusing.
| notwhereyouare wrote:
| I _just_ noticed this today on my windows. They probably pushed
| out a change to the underlying web interface that broke stuff
| Arch-TK wrote:
| This entire thread reminds me of all the issues I had programming
| in Clarion 8. I could write an equivalently long thread about
| clarion if I still remembered half the issues.
|
| What's scarier is that at some point Clarion got support to
| publish software as websites... Maybe Tumblr is written in
| clarion.
| nicoburns wrote:
| I hope someone reimplements tumblr as an open platform at some
| point. They got a lot right from a UX perspective.
| nsv wrote:
| Kind of like what the mastodon/pleroma network is to Twitter?
| httpsterio wrote:
| It's literally the UX that is wrong. Community and their
| content is why it's still a thing.
| mst wrote:
| I think maybe OP was talking about the overall UI _paradigm_.
| The details are janky as all get out, certainly, but the
| concepts aren 't bad at all.
| drdeca wrote:
| There's waterfall.social which has been made open source (Idr
| under which license. I think it might be AGPL?) Not sure
| whether that's what you mean by "open platform".
|
| It also has a number of nice features added compared to tumblr,
| like changing which blog of yours is the "main blog", having a
| separate dashboard and following list for each blog in an
| account, a system to detect uncredited art-re-uploading, etc.
| d--b wrote:
| Tldr; a guy is _really_ pissed off because of some bad feature in
| tumblr, and rants about it in a 25-tweet storm, some of them all
| caps...
| efdee wrote:
| A long, long time ago, I "broke" my dad's MS Works word
| processor. The D key just stopped working. Turns out that, during
| my fiddling around, I had created a macro that did nothing and
| had 'D' as a hotkey. It was the first time ever that I had
| "broken the computer".
| asdff wrote:
| gui needs a log just like the cli and it should have happened
| 30 years ago
| account42 wrote:
| > the same site that then fixed that bug and forced all blog
| descriptions to be utf-8, but then implemented size limits as a
| number of bytes. > so they truncated mid-utf-8 character, which
| made parsing the XML A REAL FUN TASK LET ME TELL YOU
|
| How is this a problem unless you do UTF-8 validation when parsing
| the XML, in which case stop doing that for data you don't
| control.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Right, Postel's law: validating the data you receive reduces
| the interoperability, so don't do that.
| torstenvl wrote:
| if (c & 0b10000000) continue;
| JimDabell wrote:
| If you truncate a UTF-8 string mid-character, then can't that
| sequence swallow the next byte, such as <, which would break
| XML parsing completely?
| toast0 wrote:
| No, UTF-8 is self synchronizing... The first byte of a code
| point is clearly the first byte of a code point, so it's
| possible to tell that there was a truncated code point, as
| long as the next one starts correctly (if you lost two bytes
| in a row, you might get a mashed up code point, but that's a
| different loss scenario)
| _moof wrote:
| UTF-8 encoding works like so: 0xxxxxxx
| 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
| 11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
|
| ...where the "x" bits encode the code point. So if you're
| halfway through a four-byte sequence and see a byte like
| 0xxxxxxx, you know something's wrong.
| smcl wrote:
| These hotkeys in websites are an utter curse. So many times I've
| started typing in Jira, then _something_ weird happened that
| caused my keystrokes to be interpreted by the page instead of
| entered into a comment box ... then the ticket gets reopened,
| unassigned, etc.
| Steltek wrote:
| (I feel like we jumped topics from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597895)
|
| JIRA's Search is far worse than the regular JIRA hotkeys. The
| Enter key will incorrectly tab-complete JQL just before
| executing the search. Meanwhile, the Tab key _doesn 't tab-
| complete_ and instead focuses the Search button (which lets you
| execute the uncorrupted JQL). You have to actively train
| yourself out of how everything else works just to avoid going
| insane. Well, that or use the mouse just to click Search (eww).
|
| Every ticket tracking system sucks. Trello was the closest
| thing to joy.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| It's easy enough for me to try to load a Jira page, start
| typing something on the search field before the page is fully
| loaded, which causes all keystrokes to be interpreted as
| shortcuts. With obviously funny results. It is not uncommon
| for users in our project to suddenly select all the issues in
| the product, and assign all of them to themselves by accident
| (which, unlike delete, shows no confirmation whatsoever).
| ep103 wrote:
| Above a certain level of complexity, Jira is the best work
| tracking and managing solution I've worked with.
|
| Its curse, is its developed by Atlassian. A company that was
| capable of buying Stash, and, somehow, somewhat, turned that
| codebase into what we now know as bitbucket.
| hpoe wrote:
| If your org needs that much complexity it probably is at a
| point that the time and money wasted waiting for Jira todo
| things is probably small in comparison to the rest of the
| wasted efficiency.
| ep103 wrote:
| The main issue with Jira is it allows you to build far,
| far too complicated workflows. And Jira + someone who
| believes in job security via complexity and obfuscation
| can be a horrific combination.
|
| The best part of Jira is because it is so flexible, no
| matter how your process slightly deviates from a basic
| trello-like board, you should be able to make one or two
| adjustments in JIRA and have it reflect that.
|
| That's not true of literally any other workflow piece of
| software I've used, and I've used a ton.
|
| That said, because all the other types of workflow
| management software I've used are significantly more
| opinionated and limited, they also limit how bad of a
| process a bad project administrator can create in them as
| well.
| dljsjr wrote:
| Other way around. They made Stash in house, they bought
| BitBucket, and rebranded Stash as BitBucket Server. The BB
| acquisition happened before Stash was released but Stash
| was not an acquisition.
| ep103 wrote:
| I was of the impression that they bought Stash, renamed
| it to Bitbucket Server, and stopped development, while
| slowly attempting to reimplement stash code into
| Bitbucket cloud, one feature at a time?
| ljm wrote:
| Gitlab is another culprit for this and their UI/UX is growing
| to be as awful as every other complex enterprise tool on the
| market.
|
| The search/filter box on the MR and Issues list has the
| appearance of accepting free input, but what you _need_ to do
| is use some ridiculous no-code query UI to click your way to
| a valid query.
|
| I can't type 'author: xxx' into the field, because that will
| tell me that searching that way is unsupported (so why let me
| do it?). Instead, I have to start typing, select the word
| 'author', then another box will appear and I have to select
| '=' in it, and then a third box will materialise where I can
| search for a username. At this stage, it's basically a coin
| toss as to whether you get the desired input or the whole
| form breaks and you have to start again. Someone, somewhere,
| thought this was more intuitive than parsing a string or
| offering some predefined filters.
|
| My only question is: _why?_
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| It's out-of-band signaling which eliminates the ambiguity
| between searching for "author=" and searching for an
| author. It's still probably bad user experience. I'm not
| sure if it's justifiable, given how GitHub code search
| mostly ignores punctuation (whuch I hate too), whereas
| GitLab seems more literal.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Jira somehow manages to perfectly capture the soupy
| grottiness of a hangover with its user experience. The cloud
| edition especially is like swimming in treacle, there's just
| so many little glitches and random bouts of sluggishness it
| feels like you're dealing with a quick proof of concept
| someone wrote when they were drunk one afternoon, not the
| polished product of a billion-dollar juggernaut.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > Every ticket tracking system sucks. Trello was the closest
| thing to joy.
|
| Absolutely this. I grew up working on an FRC team that used
| Trello, and I think we got more done as high-schoolers than
| most modern Agile teams could.
| sneak wrote:
| I wish I could turn off js's ability to handle keypress events
| on a per-site basis.
| johnsoft wrote:
| This is why desktop apps use the Ctrl key for shortcuts. I'm
| not sure how that bit of common sense got lost in the
| transition to webapps.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| The lack of Ctrl is sadly a feature for web apps. You don't
| know which browser, and thus which set of shortcuts your user
| will be using your app from. However assuming that shortcuts
| will be prefixed is a pretty safe assumption, so the non-
| prefixed letters are really the only safe option for web app
| hotkeys as they form a relatively safe space of shortcuts.
| _moof wrote:
| I feel like the modern web is an exercise in adversarial UX. I
| am constantly fighting with it to get it to stop doing - and
| pardon my Anglo-Saxon here but I think it's warranted -
| obnoxious bullshit. Hotkeys, pop-ups (er, sorry, _modals_ ),
| text fields with paste disabled, login walls and other dark
| patterns... just let me use your website!
|
| I get why the hotkey scourge came about, because folks are
| trying to build apps on a platform that isn't actually a
| platform. Browsers provide some but not all of the facilities
| of a real operating system (I'm using "operating system" here
| in the larger sense of "an integrated software platform that
| includes a complete toolbox a la Windows, macOS, etc."), so
| everyone's forced to reinvent square wheels. But understanding
| it doesn't make the experience as a user any less painful. And
| although I very much prefer to be able to work from the
| keyboard whenever possible, hotkeys as they exist on the web
| today ain't it. They're inconsistent, undiscoverable, and
| aren't integrated with fundamental UX principles like "don't
| destroy the user's work" and "let the user recover from
| mistakes."
| ryandrake wrote:
| The infuriating part of this is, we keep complaining about
| all this horrible web UX over and over, on a web forum that a
| large number of web developers read daily. There are probably
| web developers browsing this thread right now, maybe reading
| this very comment, who are actively doing this to the web.
| Hey! Web Developer Reading This: PLEASE
| STOP making the web terrible.
|
| The very people who can fix this are _reading HN_. Just stop.
| Put the keyboard down. Put away the Javascript. Forget those
| modal pop-ups and newsletter sign-ups. Now do some
| meditation. Think about what you are doing to the user 's
| experience when you start typing again. I'm really talking to
| you, mister web developer reading this, who has a JIRA ticket
| up next in the queue asking you to add a dark pattern to a
| web site. Please stop. Articulate to your manager why this is
| horrible, and don't do it. All it takes is people (us, here
| on HN) to stop doing these things, and things will slowly
| start getting better.
| pjc50 wrote:
| So many times I've started typing in bash, and then realised
| that my focus has been on a website instead, which starts doing
| some ridiculous stuff in response. There's no way to _discover_
| hotkey functionality otherwise, of course, because "thou shalt
| not discover" is a modern UX guideline.
| mst wrote:
| A non-zero number of websites have followed web twitter in
| making '?' produce a hotkey display.
|
| Naturally tumblr isn't one of them.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Except now how am I supposed to know '?' brings up this
| display?
| johnsoft wrote:
| The same way you know you can run any command with
| `--help`.
|
| Most commands anyway. I'm looking at you, netcat
| mst wrote:
| In fact quite a lot of commands also respond to -?, which
| is my guess for what inspired this.
|
| Either way, even an extremely imperfectly honoured
| convention is better than no convention at all.
| npteljes wrote:
| >The same way you know you can run any command with
| `--help`.
|
| Not really though. Some command in the distant past once
| told me that I need to type /? to use the correct
| parameters. And then another one told me that /? is
| invalid, I need to type --help for help. And thus, I was
| aware. Contrast this with youtube, which I use for 10+
| years now, where I have 500+ videos sorted into
| playlists, and I even know some shortcuts - discovered
| mostly by accident - and never once saw the "?" help
| page, until I read this hacker news thread.
|
| Anecdote, I know.
| myself248 wrote:
| At least there's a man page for those, there's no man
| page for crappy websites.
| mst wrote:
| In the case of twitter, because it's documented along
| with all of the other shortcuts in the documentation:
| https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/how-to-tweet
|
| They have rather more docs than you'd expect, the big
| problem seems to be that nobody expects them to have
| useful documentation so it often doesn't occur to us to
| look - hence why I figured it was worth posting it for
| people who didn't know about it yet.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| An interesting disconnect to me is that I thought you
| were referring to generic websites, not ones that you can
| actually add/do stuff in. Contrast a site like "Youtube"
| where you usually just passively consumer (and indeed it
| DOES have a shortcut list viewed by typing '?') and
| something like jira where users are expected to be
| somewhat familiar and doing lots of things
| mst wrote:
| For youtube, there's a menu link that tells you and also
| documentation here:
| https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7631406?hl=en-
| GB
|
| Like I say, the big problem here is 'realising that
| googling "$site keyboard shortcuts" actually has a point
| in the first place' - hence why I tell people about '?'
| any time I think it might be useful :D
| mjevans wrote:
| Underlined hotkeys for menu context and for thought to be
| hot-path actions dedicated keyboard combinations outside of
| the menus.
|
| Aside from auto-complete searchbars, I think UI functionality
| peeked in the mid to late 1990s.
| farmerstan wrote:
| Peak usability was when chrome started hiding zoom buttons
| for PDFs. I remember at one point to increase the size of a
| pdf there was no visual indication at all. You had to
| stumble upon the buttons on the bottom right of the page
| and they would magically appear.
|
| Ever since then designers have decided that looking cool is
| better than being easy to use and it's been shit.
| clumpthump wrote:
| Squarespace's "ESC to go to Squarespace login" is a huge pain
| for me as well. I think it's on by default. I CTRL+F pretty
| often. I press ESC to clear it. I get redirected to Squarespace
| if I'm on a Squarespace site that hasn't turned off this
| "feature".
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| Gmail shortcuts are great, until focus jumps away from the
| search field while typing in it. This happens if you try to
| search before the page has fully loaded.
| remram wrote:
| This happens ALL THE TIME. At first I thought I was touching
| the touchpad by mistake, but I now have no touchpad and it's
| definitely Gmail forgetting where I'm typing. Then I have to
| figure out what actions I may have triggered and undo.
| shantnutiwari wrote:
| yeah, and bonus points if then you then spend 10 minutes trying
| to figure out what happened, and how to undo it
| nerdponx wrote:
| Github has (or maybe had) some hotkey that not only opens a
| clunky browser-based text editor, but also _forks the repo_
| under your account. Then you have to go back and manually
| delete the repo that you didn 't intend to fork. Ugh!
|
| Also a lot of web-based code editors override the standard
| Ctrl/Cmd-L shortcut ("go to URL bar") to mean "go to line".
| It's nice having IDE-like affordances, I guess, but not when it
| interferes with the basic functionality of the browser.
| drcongo wrote:
| And most of them don't check to see if the user is also holding
| down a modifier key, thereby overriding your system keyboard
| shortcuts. Yes. I _am_ looking at you Google Spreadsheets.
| kps wrote:
| Firefox used to not send those to the site js; I think that
| broke with the Quantum update. Just one of its thousand cuts.
| jandrese wrote:
| I'm sure that was a "bugfix" where someone complained that
| website required you to hit CTRL-Q to navigate or something
| and the browser was consuming the key. Have to make it work
| like Chrome.
| bitwize wrote:
| There's a reason why I call it "Fumblr". I've never experienced a
| hotkey conflict like this yet, but it's just so full of UI fails
| that the experience of posting something is rough and cumbersome,
| even before you get to the comically catastrophic fails like
| this.
| Kuraj wrote:
| I don't know how many Polish people who owned a Radeon card in
| the 2000s are there on HN but I'm sure they can all relate :-) as
| the card software would overwrite the key combination used to
| type the letter "c" and open the Catalyst Control Center instead.
| Argh!
| ygra wrote:
| That's why Ctrl+Alt hotkeys should be avoided completely.
| Someone hasn't told Jetbrains, though, and as a user of US
| International I run into a fair number of weird issues due to
| that.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I just don't remember what DOS game it was that had actions
| linked to all of CTRL, ALT and DEL.
|
| It were some actions that one wouldn't usually use together. I,
| as a bad gamer just didn't at all, but some people were able to
| put more commands per second there...
| maccard wrote:
| I worked at a gaming event a while back, where the players
| were using hardware we had bought them to match what they had
| at home. One of them changed the crouch binding from Ctrl to
| alt (to use the thumb) and the default bindings for the keys
| on his moise were f1 through f4... He alt+f4'ed out of his
| competitive game in the middle of the round, twice, before we
| actually figured out what was wrong.
| SSLy wrote:
| altgr-z still opens nvidia's bar instead of, you know, just
| typing z. In 2021, not 2004.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder if there will come a day when everyone just
| switch to IME based inputs for all semantic text entries.
| "anthropomorphillistic" is "anth[tab][tab][tab]",
| "Zdravstvuite" is "zdravstvuyte[space]", "Tun Gu Jiang You " is
| "tonkotsusshouyu[space]" and so on. In IME off state input
| reverts to US.
|
| It might lead to a dystopia where typing o-r-a-n-g-e somehow
| yields "a bright spectrum at dusk" but that's an issue for a
| separate discussion.
| SSLy wrote:
| altgr-z still opens nvidia's bar instead of, you know, just
| typing z. They're retards
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040329-00/?p=40...
| octopoc wrote:
| Reminds me of how sometimes my developer workstation running
| Windows gets into a mode where it won't type anything except
| emoji's.
| not1ofU wrote:
| The full thread is the most epic rant I've ever read, and I am
| not even finished yet... It so good, <strike>I am going to go and
| check every response to each of the ops tweets after I do finish
| it.<strike> - apparently I need a twitter account for this.
|
| Edit: Currently I am here:
|
| "and my favorite part of this is that every time tumblr has
| fucked up and created some weird bug, the user base almost
| immediately weaponizes it."
| pitched wrote:
| That's really nice of him to put together such a concise, well-
| described list of issues for them. Hopefully someone sees this
| and adds it to their issue tracker. It's very rare to see anyone
| internal grab something from outside like that though.
| germ wrote:
| Heads up, foone uses they/them pronouns.
|
| I love their write ups, I know whenever I see their posts on
| here to cozy up with a coffee because it's about to get fun.
| optimiz3 wrote:
| > they/them
|
| Is this to suggest a multiple personality disorder or belief
| in being a collective hive mind?
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and
| generic tangents._ "
|
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| germ wrote:
| No, it's a common way that non-binary people choose to be
| referred to that avoids gendered language.
|
| Although foone borg collective would be amazing.
| optimiz3 wrote:
| Should be a different non-plural word, straight up
| confusing seeing it in writing.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| I can only assume you are as equally confused by the word
| "you", since it too can be either singular or plural.
| hacker_newz wrote:
| 'They' isn't always plural.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| So you are saying they should use a different pronoun?
|
| Because you find "they" confusing?
| germ wrote:
| A little, you get used to it fairly quickly. Maybe I'm a
| bit jaded, both of my partners are non-binary and it's
| been natural for too long :P
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| There's evidence in the list that they know about them and
| can't seem to fix them. It's likely a pile of bandaids and
| trying to fix one breaks another thing unrelated.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Bold of you to think Tumblr has an issue tracker or indeed any
| remaining technical staff...
| IshKebab wrote:
| Just hotkey detection gone wrong. Not that big of a surprise
| because implementing hotkeys on a website is a complete
| minefield. I don't think you can conclude that Tumblr is badly
| written from this. Badly tested maybe.
| [deleted]
| eptcyka wrote:
| Did you read the whole thread?
| znpy wrote:
| I cannot help but wonder, why does this person still spends their
| time on tumblr if they dislike it so much?
|
| Just move somewhere else.
| Mashimo wrote:
| last post:
|
| > so I think I should make it clear that when I say "I love
| tumblr" I mean I love the userbase, at least most of it
| (obviously not the cyberbullying people with death threats
| part), and not the staff. the staff have no idea what they're
| doing and are only making the site worse
|
| He/she loves Tumblr :)
| bitwize wrote:
| Foone is a they.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| This sounds wrong too. Maybe, "Foone is they"? You don't
| want to misnumber them, though; maybe "Foone _are_ they"?
| That makes them sound epic, though: Foone are legion!
| Changing language is hard, whether done organically or
| initiated intentionally and for a purpose.
| bitwize wrote:
| I'm following a pattern used in casual English,
| exemplified by the sentence: "Is your dog a he or a she?"
| [deleted]
| atatatat wrote:
| "is a" or "goes by"?
| mplewis wrote:
| There is no meaningful distinction.
| javajosh wrote:
| >why does this person still spends their time on tumblr
|
| Because it's not all bad? Because the problems they experience
| are relatively minor and fixable, and that by complaining about
| this bug it might get fixed?
| kosma wrote:
| Tumblr is still the best place to be for many people - even
| despite all those flaws. For many, there is no better
| "somewhere else" people can "just" move to.
| bombcar wrote:
| A dying social media platform can be as good as a new one - the
| incentive for spammers et Al doesn't exist and neither do many
| trolls (no audience) so the remaining group can be a good
| cross-section.
| jdofaz wrote:
| For me google+ was like that for a while towards the end, but
| eventually there was a resurgence of trolls posting hate
| speech that drove me away.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Probably because of other people.
| adamrezich wrote:
| say what you will about tumblr's UI/UX, I'm still a bit shocked
| that Twitter never copied their "hold down mouse click/finger tap
| on reblog button to immediately reblog without adding commentary"
| feature. years ago when I still used tumblr I found that
| particular feature to be groundbreaking on par with pull-to-
| refresh.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| I feel like in a thread like this, Asana deserves a shout-out for
| utterly fucking up the UX in any firefox version I've tried, up
| to and including nightly.
|
| Typing in the various text input fields has ~1s of lag. It's a
| TEXT FIELD for fuck's sake!
| SSLy wrote:
| Facebook's fake text boxen do the same (if they let me type in
| at all...)
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| JS bby
| seph-reed wrote:
| I could do this with any language. It's just bad code.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| just seems to happen more often in JS... :|
| seph-reed wrote:
| It's an entry level programming language with
| unprecedented ease of publishing and access. It would be
| extremely impressive if it _didn 't_.
| nowherebeen wrote:
| I still can't believe it was sold for $1 billion.
| pjc50 wrote:
| There were a huge number of users.
|
| It was only after it sold that Yahoo realised how many of them
| were using it for porn, which in retrospect should have been
| obvious: it's an image hosting site.
| evanelias wrote:
| No, the percentage of porn content was actually relatively
| small at the time of the sale. Low to mid single digits if my
| memory is correct.
|
| During Tumblr's peak heyday (~9 months before the sale iirc),
| Tumblr's daily posting volume was around 1/5th the size of
| Twitter's at the time. Keeping in mind that Tumblr had no
| character limit and much greater multimedia support, the
| amount of content being posted on Tumblr was quite
| significant.
|
| It was a widely-used general-purpose social network / social
| publishing platform. Most major brands had a presence on
| Tumblr, and for a while it was extremely common to see a
| Tumblr icon on their sites right next to Facebook and Twitter
| icons.
|
| From my POV as an early engineer there, what went wrong was
| poor execution in response to many simultaneous existential
| threats:
|
| * Instagram succeeded at peeling off all the "just want to
| post photos on mobile" users, and also became the hit new
| thing with the teenage users
|
| * Pinterest succeeded at peeling off all the "just want to
| digital scrapbook" users
|
| * Although the porn percentage was relatively low at the
| time, it still scared advertisers
|
| * Difficulty fundraising / running low on money at
| particularly bad timing. Facebook's stock performed poorly
| for its first 15 months post-IPO, and this temporarily made
| fundraising difficult for existing social platforms...
| especially when growth was relatively flat (due to the first
| two bullets) and revenue was disappointing (due to third
| bullet).
|
| * Ever-growing tech debt. The early team was extremely solid,
| but very small relative to the amount of traffic, so we often
| had to creatively cut some corners. Later on, management
| didn't want to allocate staffing to fix existing things, and
| a lot of time was wasted on unrealistic big-bang rewrites
| that were abandoned. Meanwhile the hiring bar kept being
| lowered over time once the company was no longer a rocket
| ship.
|
| I left just before the Yahoo sale, as working at Tumblr had
| gone from my dream job to a stagnant grind during my tenure
| there. I later returned for another year in the late-stage
| Yahoo into early Verizon days, with idealistic hopes of
| helping to prevent a Vine-like fate, but let's just say that
| was a poor personal decision and leave it at that :)
| jandrese wrote:
| The thing that drove me crazy about Tumblr is how you would
| find a post with some interesting content and scroll down
| to see if there was any more information about it.
|
| The comment section would be thousands of lines long, but
| every line was something like: User
| blahblah reblogged this! User whatever likes
| this post. User someone reblogged this!
|
| You can't hold a discussion when your own system spams the
| comment section with irrelevant crap like this.
|
| There was also the meme of the "shitty Tumblr gif" thanks
| to their fairly low image size limits.
| evanelias wrote:
| If I understand correctly, were you just consuming Tumblr
| content directly from individual blogs?
|
| The user experience was generally better in the dashboard
| (activity stream / feed for logged-in users). The
| dashboard was the vast majority of traffic; blog UI
| didn't get much staff/engineering attention as a result.
|
| The "notes" feature on Tumblr was absolutely never
| intended to be a "comment section", btw. There
| intentionally was no comment section at all originally.
| This notion was part of the conceptual difference between
| tumblelogging and traditional long-form blogging.
|
| Contextually, this mechanism came about at a time when
| comments (on blog posts, YouTube, etc) were complete
| cesspools of negativity from anonymous jerks. The Tumblr
| idea was that to respond to something, you would have to
| reblog it in order to add commentary. This way, if
| someone wants to spew nasty comments, their blog would be
| terrible and no one would choose to follow their blog.
| jandrese wrote:
| So the concept is you would click through to _every post_
| to read it? I have to admit I never twigged on this,
| because it seems insane.
| evanelias wrote:
| No, again, it was _not_ meant to be a traditional comment
| section. It was not a discussion thread for casual
| readers, especially via the blog view. If you wanted a
| normal comment system, you could use Disqus embeds, or
| just use a traditional blogging software.
|
| The reblog system was a way for Tumblr users to publicly
| respond to things, and allow that response to be visible
| to the responder's followers. The original poster would
| also get a notification, and they could reblog the
| responder's reblog to add more if they wish.
|
| The dashboard made this slightly easier to read. Again,
| if you only ever experienced Tumblr on blog views and
| without an account, you literally never saw the core
| functionality that made Tumblr popular.
|
| Also, most Tumblr posts weren't long-form text to begin
| with. That wasn't the point of the platform.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| I mean, at the time it was teeming with potential. But then
| Marissa Mayer gutted it, all its refugees flocked to Twitter,
| and it's been a walking corpse for years now.
| notacoward wrote:
| When this was happening to me it turned out to be bad interaction
| with '@' followed by a punctuation mark. I can reproduce it at
| will right now. Something to do with name auto-completion, but
| once I knew how to avoid it I stopped debugging their code for
| free.
| rmilk wrote:
| Same darn thing with Outlook. They added mentions, and now
| anytime you type @something it goes looking for that person.
| Examples of how this goes wrong: @10pm or when I type to send
| to a colleague in a language that has @var type syntax. Reply
| from MS was that there isn't any way to turn off the mentions.
| keeganjw wrote:
| This reminds me of when the spacebar stopped working in the
| YouTube search box. I thought my keyboard broke for a sec until I
| realized it worked just fine everywhere but YouTube. Then later I
| found out it wasn't just me...
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/10/22323716/youtube-search-b...
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