Hacker News: quacked

New comment by quacked in "Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible"

quacked — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:50:46 +0000

A/B testing does not inherently lead you to good design. If you A/B test what people want based on their revealed user preference, you get gambling apps and doomscrolling.

New comment by quacked in "Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible"

quacked — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 12:42:27 +0000

I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying, but a lot of software platforms just can't be customized and mastered like they used to. Things like reorganizing columns, setting shortcuts, menus being consistently organized and accessible using the same command, clickable text and elements looking visually different from unclickable, a wide variety of colors being streamlined to color/pale-color/off-white trios, etc. I use a lot of operational software and every platform just can't be mastered like the old stuff. (And animation lags, too!) And I can watch my younger coworkers on the new software packages, they're certainly not faster on the new stuff than I was on the old stuff.

A few months ago my dad and I roused out the old Windows 2000 computer we used from 2002-2010 and while it took about 6 minutes to boot up, once it booted up, the software was all astonishingly fast (no telemetry) and way, way more "commandable" than their modern equivalents. It was like a tool shop.

New comment by quacked in "Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible"

quacked — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:53:24 +0000

All of these are examples of the physical performance of software or hardware limitations at the time. I find that software's reliability has increased a thousandfold in my lifetime, but its actual controllability/feel/UI-UX has been rapidly declining for about a decade.

New comment by quacked in "No more icons in every menu by default"

quacked — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 22:53:01 +0000

It's incredible. And the labels are all turned into pills or chips. Then they don't allow pivoted views of their lists, or if they do allowed pivots it's a visual nightmare.

New comment by quacked in "No more icons in every menu by default"

quacked — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 22:51:57 +0000

Drives me nuts. It makes everything feel like working on a poorly organized desk.

New comment by quacked in "No more icons in every menu by default"

quacked — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 22:51:15 +0000

I think it's this cargo cult attempt to tap into what Apple had pre-2010 on the iPod and first iPhone. They're missing that the design leadership and attention to detail was unparalleled at Apple in that era, so they just flatten everything for a streamlined look and miss every signifier Apple put in its UIs in those days

New comment by quacked in "No more icons in every menu by default"

quacked — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 21:58:04 +0000

The two things that pain me the most are:

(1) Clickable elements no longer visually signifying that they're clickable. Words aren't underlined or written in a special font, sometimes the profile avatar is the clickable link to the profile but sometimes the name is, etc.

(2) No more clean, compact directory trees. We used to have high-contrast compact UI design to look through nested ontologies. Now it's rounded-edges card-based, often without trace lines, and barely ever compact. RIP

New comment by quacked in "Smart people don't think others are stupid (2012)"

quacked — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:45:19 +0000

> There is not really that much deviation in intelligence among most adults.

I cannot think that you have a lot of experience with all social classes if you think this. I have extremely disordered family members with mental disabilities and I regularly come into contact with their friends and service-industry coworkers. A lot of adults struggle with memory, comprehension, logic, speed, and reasoning, which I would call "large deviations in intelligence".

New comment by quacked in "How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet"

quacked — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:28:05 +0000

I'm in the US and I gave up Amazon two years ago, and I haven't noticed any decrease in my quality of life.

New comment by quacked in "So, you’d like to sell your print issues of The Onion?"

quacked — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 01:21:36 +0000

On the night the Onion finally went out of print my friends and I went and took a few of the newspaper boxes they distributed them out of in Madison. One stayed at our friend's house, the other one we used as a distribution box for our own anonymous satirical newspaper we wrote for our high school.

New comment by quacked in "Couple was swatted 55 times in 2 years over a post about Norm Macdonald"

quacked — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 02:34:57 +0000

Ending the tax preparation industry as well

New comment by quacked in "Does Georgism work? Five years later"

quacked — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 16:31:26 +0000

I wouldn't say that's entirely true. I've changed my mind reading debates on the internet, and less frequently I've changed my mind months or years after having had a debate on the internet.

New comment by quacked in "The EPA is planning to scrap public review rules for data center pollution"

quacked — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 21:16:41 +0000

Is your opinion that the denizens of a locale ought to have no say in what happens to it?

New comment by quacked in "The EPA is planning to scrap public review rules for data center pollution"

quacked — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 11:26:41 +0000

Then maybe I used to wrong term. It was a building full of singles, built to look almost exactly like the classic 5-over-1.

New comment by quacked in "The EPA is planning to scrap public review rules for data center pollution"

quacked — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 23:17:14 +0000

That's what they're working on next.

New comment by quacked in "The EPA is planning to scrap public review rules for data center pollution"

quacked — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 23:17:03 +0000

As I understand it, NIMBYism is "don't ever build anything anywhere in the neighborhood/town", not "don't build in this one spot we all really like". As I said, there are tons of other buildings going up over town.

New comment by quacked in "The EPA is planning to scrap public review rules for data center pollution"

quacked — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 23:16:18 +0000

They weren't multifamily units.

New comment by quacked in "The EPA is planning to scrap public review rules for data center pollution"

quacked — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 22:30:25 +0000

I live near a small town of about 10,000 people that's about 30 minutes away from a "hot commodity" city. The crown jewel of this small town is the main street, which retains a bit of kitschy Americana that has remained charming for decades and even draws tourists, for whatever reason.

A local business owner bought up one of the blocks in the center of the street and announced plans to demolish it in order to build a 5-over-1 complex several stories higher than any of the other buildings.

Without the public comment process, he'd have been able to do this practically overnight, completely ruining the street. The public fought back long and hard for many months and eventually won by convincing the town council to vote against the rezoning that would permit this construction.

I can't say I'm opposed to the public comment process.

(Note that this was not a case of never-change NIMBYism; tons of other similar buildings are going up all over the town completely unopposed. It was the ugly, generic design and the sheer size put so blatantly in the middle of everyone's favorite part of town.)

New comment by quacked in "Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom"

quacked — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:03:04 +0000

I don't understand why this standard is always applied to westerners. When we go to other countries, are they explaining all the fundamentals of western music in addition to the theories of their own? "Yeah our students in Boston don't know anything about Carnatic rhythm, but over in Bengal they all learn counterpoint and fugue before they learn the traditional ornaments"

New comment by quacked in "Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit"

quacked — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:46:10 +0000

Sorry, are you saying that small direct action is pointless until you can overturn the entire governmental system?