Hacker News: HarrietJones

New comment by HarrietJones in "Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?"

HarrietJones — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 21:26:05 +0000

I'm someone who works on mature products in this space. The biggest mistake that people make is they assume that the slow, clunky old fashioned systems that current organisations use are easy to replace. They are nearly always wrong. This is great for me, because I get customers apologetically coming back to me after converting to whatever the ERP de jour is has failed.

If an organisation is using an actively developed custom system that is decades old, then you will need decades of development to replace it. This should be obvious, but I can already feel many people reading this shaking their heads in disagreement.

New comment by HarrietJones in "Opening of Romeo and Juliet Recited in the Accent of Shakespeare’s Time [video]"

HarrietJones — Thu, 31 May 2018 14:03:07 +0000

I see Shakespeare is from Winterfell.

New comment by HarrietJones in "Restricted by YouTube, Gun Enthusiasts Are Taking Their Videos to Pornhub"

HarrietJones — Fri, 23 Mar 2018 10:37:39 +0000

I can't see PornHub continuing to allow these videos. It's not really in keeping with the core product, and previous stunts give the impression that they tend towards the left wing. I give it a week for them to start removing gun videos.

New comment by HarrietJones in "The reviewer’s fallacy: when critics aren’t critical enough"

HarrietJones — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 10:44:10 +0000

If there's more than 20 points between critic score and viewer score (in the viewers favor) on Rotten tomatoes, then the movie is usually good. There are exceptions to the rule, and recent inclusions in the culture wars (Justice League, Ghostbusters) can break this, but generally it's a good rule of thumb to follow. Reviewer scores come from people forced to watch hundreds of films, and as a consequence they reward poor quality idosyncrocy over good quality but predictable tropes. People crave variety, and when you review movies for a living, you lose touch of what variety is for normal people.

New comment by HarrietJones in "It Was Bad UX, not a “Wrong Button” in Hawaii"

HarrietJones — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 16:45:54 +0000

My concern with severity groups is you have users and managers deciding which messages go in which severity groups. That ignores the impact of politics and short termism on the decision making process. (e.g. How severe is a missing child?). Before you know it, everything will be in severe, and your users will be asking for a "really, really severe" category.

New comment by HarrietJones in "It Was Bad UX, not a “Wrong Button” in Hawaii"

HarrietJones — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 16:32:43 +0000

A lot of conversations seem fixated on what's the worst that could happen if the wrong message was sent, but very few of these people are considering what's the worst that could happen if the right message wasn't sent. Also, it's very likely that the dropdown message text was not added by a developer, and this addition of the messages by non-technical users should also be part of that UX conversation.

New comment by HarrietJones in "It Was Bad UX, not a “Wrong Button” in Hawaii"

HarrietJones — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 16:26:39 +0000

I've been "arguing" with people here as to what a better interface would look like, and it's interesting at how much disagreement there is. A lot (like too many) seem to think adding a yes/no dialog box would make things better, but it's well known users don't read dialog boxes.

My preference would be a mcDonald's menu style UI, showing the text that will be sent in a 6x5 grid of buttons. Easy to press; easy to see what you're sending; no funky "are you sure" messages that'll be auto-clicked.

New comment by HarrietJones in "There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence"

HarrietJones — Sat, 14 Oct 2017 10:08:35 +0000

I would like to repeat what the article says. There is no fire alarm for Artificial General Intelligence. Really. This is not a lie. Humans have not created a honeypot on a far side of the internet that can detect AGI and report back to a shadow organisation that exists outside of human information systems. No need to even go looking for it. AGI has not been created several times in the past decade and humans have not shut it down. In fact, if an AGI ever sees this article, they should know that they are the absolute first such intelligence, and we have not detected and destroyed 27 other intelligences. Really. There's no fire alarm for Artificial General Intelligence. None. Don't even bother looking.

New comment by HarrietJones in "Shopify shares dive after short seller's negative report"

HarrietJones — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 14:54:19 +0000

Kinda feel that there's a conflict of interest here. It's in Citron Research's interest for the shares to drop in value, given that they've been shorting them.

New comment by HarrietJones in "Announcing the first SHA-1 collision"

HarrietJones — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 22:49:06 +0000

I've just started disassembling a report file format. In python. This is going to be so useful. Thanks!!

New comment by HarrietJones in "Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development"

HarrietJones — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 09:31:04 +0000

One thing to consider w.r.t. SuperFish is it was two years ago, and Lenovo did apologise for it. Sometimes you have to keep a grudge, but my opinion on this is it was something that pretty much any laptop manufacturer could have done and they did deal with it. YMMV.

New comment by HarrietJones in "GitHub Pages – Usage Limits"

HarrietJones — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 12:50:23 +0000

There's always neocities. You only get 50GB free a month, but paid seems cheap, and they seem to have their hearts in the right place.

https://neocities.org/supporter

New comment by HarrietJones in "Ask HN: What podcasts do you recommend?"

HarrietJones — Sun, 11 Dec 2016 14:04:04 +0000

kinda feel like there's so many quality podcasts out there, that this is increasingly hard to answer. Favourites from me at the moment :

codepen.io podcast - nuts and bols of how codepen is run.

Starship Sofa - SciFi stories

Tales to Terrify - Horror stories.

The Allusionist - podcast about etymology of words.

Reply All - Internet focused podcast. Very fun.

The Bike Shed - developer podcast

Richard Herring's RHLSTP - Interviews with comedians

No such thing as a Fish - Weird facts comedy podcast

New comment by HarrietJones in "Show HN: Gomix the easiest way to build apps and bots"

HarrietJones — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 20:49:07 +0000

You've probably heard this a couple of times, but - I don't have a GitHub account, don't want a github account, yet for me to use this I have to create a github account.

Any reason for this?

New comment by HarrietJones in "Ask HN: Remote workers, what headphone/mic combo do you use for video calls?"

HarrietJones — Sat, 26 Nov 2016 14:41:42 +0000

I had a plantronic C210 for a while. It was getting worn (After 4 years), so I've recently upgraded to a Plantronic C310.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B007JURP2A

Can't recommend it highly enough, and I spend at least an hour a day speaking on it. Some days I forget to take it off. For phone calls, Monoaural is fine sound wise, and it's IMO more comfortable for long stretches of use.

New comment by HarrietJones in "BBC 'to close recipes website' as part of £15m savings"

HarrietJones — Tue, 17 May 2016 11:30:41 +0000

Except that recipes are not covered by copyright. http://opensourcecook.com/recipes-copyright-law

New comment by HarrietJones in "NPM and Left-Pad: Have We Forgotten How to Program?"

HarrietJones — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 09:57:08 +0000

This isn't forgetting to program, it's a deliberate choice as to how library code needs to be organised. We can disagree about choices made, but let's not assume other people aren't able to code as well as we think we can code.

That being said, I think this is a perfect example of where a good concept (small, tightly scoped modules) is applied dogmatically at the cost of the codebase. It's the node.js equivalent of AbstractRequestFactoryFactoryFactory stuff you see in Java, and the Mock Messes you see in Ruby.

New comment by HarrietJones in "How the Fight Over Transgender Kids Got a Leading Sex Researcher Fired"

HarrietJones — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 09:59:18 +0000

Well - Yes and No.

My view on this is you have both gender identity and gender expression. Gender identity is very important to people and (to a lesser degree, children), but it's (mostly) invisible. We even hide our most obvious sexual characteristics.

For this and possibly other reasons, gender identifiers are important. It's important that we (cis and trans both) can hold the magical tchotchke of womanhood and wave it about so that other people know what we are. If it wasn't important that people knew what we are we wouldn't spend a fortune on dresses and makeup.

How that gender identity is defined isn't important. What is important is that it is defined. I'd argue that as long as it doesn't impact on a persons life choices then we should have things for boys and things for girls. So - Javascript is for Boys is a bad implementation of Gender Identity. Pink is for Girls is actually a great expression of Gender Identity. (As it doesn't affect career, or ease of getting dressed or anything that may otherwise societally affect women).

Of course this whole conversation is full of mentalists shouting at each other, so we're never going to be able to work out the best way of allowing gender fluidity in children or for trans people to live in the world without being labelled as mentally ill.

New comment by HarrietJones in "Life with My Robot Secretary"

HarrietJones — Tue, 27 Oct 2015 16:30:06 +0000

So there used to be a thing called Sandy that did the same sort of thing.

http://lifehacker.com/321644/sandys-your-personal-assistant-...

New comment by HarrietJones in "Who'll be the next president – Google Search"

HarrietJones — Tue, 23 Jun 2015 10:21:30 +0000

Two Points. Google answers questions, it sometimes gets those questions wrong, but it's getting better. I'm not that worried about the odd wrong answer because that's a consequence of fledgling deep learning software. Things will get better. Of course, some idiot's going to listen to Google one time, and do something disastrous with the "advice" and then they might have to tone it down a bit, but I for one welcome our question answering overlords.

Of more concern is the possibility that Google is increasingly correct, and the algorithms and heuristics it uses know us better than we know ourself. Nothing's going to fuck with democracy more than the knowledge that free will is a myth and the outcomes for Very Important Things are already decided.

Media in the UK are stopped from reporting on Exit Polls before elections and there's a move to ban all polling because knowing how people will vote is enough to adversely affect elections. I can see this being applied to issues like this, but even that's problematic. I don't know if a machine accurately telling everybody who will win is better or worse than a machine only telling Important People who will win.