Hacker News: busywaiting

New comment by busywaiting in "Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices"

busywaiting — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:24:16 +0000

> a website is even more viable now, it's better for AI scraping

That's not necessarily the endorsement you think it is.

New comment by busywaiting in "Mozilla Thunderbolt"

busywaiting — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:00:43 +0000

I also love that it's a .io domain. Just to maximize the chance that you'll confuse Thunderbolt dot io with Thunderbolt the I/O standard.

New comment by busywaiting in "LotusNotes"

busywaiting — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:44:10 +0000

Lotus/IBM took an extremely flexible, encrypted, document-oriented database with a powerful RAD client platform and tried to sell it as a competitor to Outlook-Exchange. And Outlook-Exchange won, because as terrible as it was (and it was much worse then than it is now) it still had a better user experience than Notes Mail.

Notes insisted on a UI paradigm with widgets and controls that didn't work at all like regular OS widgets and controls. Properties boxes were tiny and hard to resize. Selecting from lists or menus required hitting tiny hidden checkmark targets. Keyboard shortcuts were divorced from the host platform. And the error messages -- and you'd get lots of them -- constantly referenced obscure internal Notes object model constructs that had no relationship to the user's mental model.

Everyone uses email. Even top executives who don't bother with the ERP system or the content management system have to use the company email program. And executives hated having to use use Notes-Domino.

New comment by busywaiting in "LG UltraFine Evo 6K 32-inch Monitor Review"

busywaiting — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 17:26:27 +0000

Exactly. Their ten-point scales have no obvious relationship to the underlying measurements, where measurements are even provided, and they rescale the points every so often. (They call this their "methodology version.")

I've noticed that, when a new (expensive, high-commission-generating) product comes out, it often has middling scores at first, and then, a few months later, they've revised their methodology to show how much better the pricey new product is.

New comment by busywaiting in "When someone says they hate your product"

busywaiting — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 19:12:51 +0000

> The original phrase "The customer is always right" had an important caveat: "... in matters of taste".

This is not true. This is fairly recent Internet revisionism with no historical basis, an attempt to "well ackshually" the phrase into something else to make a point.

"The customer is always right" has always meant, "It's better to appease occasional assholes than to risk ever disappointing a customer with a legitimate grievance." Of course, TCIAR is not a natural imperiative. It's an unproven philosophical proposition that may or may not be appropriate at any given time and in any given industry.

To the extent that there is an "original" formulation, it might be Marshal Field's "Give the lady what she wants," which is (probably intentionally) vague on exactly how it should be applied. (And remember that "lady" in Field's time had some classist connotations that are less present today.")

New comment by busywaiting in "Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help"

busywaiting — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 13:22:34 +0000

> The function of the icon is to have distinct shape so you are able to visually distinguish menu items quickly in future (more you use the app).

In theory, yes. But if you look at the examples in the article, the shapes are basically all similarly-sized circles.

In the Apple example, "System Settings" is circle (A gear with barely discernible teeth.) "Recent Items" is a circle (a clock.) "Force Quit" is a circle (a rounded! octagon.) "Sleep" is...a circle with a line through the bottom third. "Log Out" is...a human silhouette in a circle! (Why?)

It doesn't matter what the icon is as long as the icons are distinct, and today's icons aren't.