> If people could understand what computing was about, the iPhone would not be a bad thing. But because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that Guitar Hero is the same as a real guitar.
-- Alan Kay
Direct your complaints to the source of your problem, namely the shitty browsers on mobile. Even suggesting to let HN fix their abysmal stylesheet would be wrong. Go to the source -- and if it turns out they don't care about requests to provide actual tools, tell them off.
> yet they want better and cheaper products - even free if possible.
I want good things, I have them, and now I want greedy, needy people to stop pushing their mediocre, poorly understood imitations to drown out the really good things we might use and nurture instead, hurting us all and even themselves in the process.
> How do you think a company gets to improve and optimize their product? By surveys?
If what you make serves a purpose other than generating needs to make a profit from, then you'll probably be fine with mostly simply paying attention to what you're making, using it yourself, and occasionally making surveys and collecting metrics from volunteers to see if there's anything you missed.
> It seems that search engines now are always trying to guess your intent, and always think they know better.
I complained about this from day one, and not once did I get anything but patronizing handwaving in response.
If I want to buy a pizza, I'll enter "buy pizza in $city" or something, but if I just enter "pizza", I want to see what every person on the planet would see if they used the English language version of the search engine (and then on top of that have the option of personal customization that I can undo or suspend anytime). IMO the convenience of "just typing 'pizza' when you want directions to the nearest pizza place" is nothing at all compared to the fracturing of the public space, for lack of a better way to put it.
Anyone remember Opera Mini, and how it could squeeze just about any site into just about any viewport width? I never used it on a smartphone, but I enjoyed playing with it on the desktop, it was like magic. Not always pretty, but very functional.
I would say the opposite is true, sanity and integrity can't prosper much without one another. Everybody dies, at some point, and to give up oneself to live in infinitely short amount longer (compared to eternity) is shitty a consolation price for those who don't really have themselves to begin with, who were compromised in childhood or youth, and live the rest of their lives slapping rationalizations on that.
> Of course it is "more useful" to commit an injustice than to be victim of it; for the sake of the thinking dialogue with myself, this point of utility must be abandoned.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Wahrheit und Politik"
> Natürlich ist es "nützlicher", Unrecht zu tun als Unrecht zu leiden; um des denkenden Dialogs mit mir selbst willen muss gerade dieser Nützlichkeitsstandpunkt aufgegeben werden.
> Why do we travel? Among other things so we meet people who don't think they know us once and for all; so we may again experience what is possible in this life.
-- Max Frisch
> Warum reisen wir? Auch dies, damit wir Menschen begegnen, die nicht meinen, daß sie uns kennen ein für allemal; damit wir noch einmal erfahren, was uns in diesem Leben möglich sei.
It's hard to impossible to figure out the "suitability" of a person for something until they actually did that thing, in this case become a parent. Just like dating and marriage can be very different. Hindsight is 20/20.
That is the reason the world is burning. Instead of running from where you don't see it, run to attack where you do see it.
It's better to fail as a good person than to succeed as a charlatan, and a bit of money can't plaster over the faculties of the mind drying up, among that the ability to resist charlatans in other contexts, including the political. "Business sophistry" is simply sophistry, brownnosing your boss is just brownnosing, and either you feed sophistry and naked emperors, or you don't. Everybody has "reasons", but more importantly, every day new people come into the world, and they deserve a clean shot at life more than crooked people deserve respect and comfort. Save your soul, you just have the one.
> Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
The forces of chaos certainly seem to be in the ascendant in the West. A British woman makes thousands a month taking her clothes off online and selling her bathwater to perverts etc., yet if I call this out I'm liable to being labelled a dinosaur, misogynistic, hateful, etc. etc. In today's society possessing what were once considered traditional morals is liable to leave one at best socially isolated and at worst destitute.
There is a very good reason for that - "traditional morals" frankly are full of horrifying things accepted without comment and harmless things called the great Satan.
Wars of colonialism, soldiers paid in plunder and rape, massacre of those only trying to defend their besieged home? Fine or even righteous when we do it. When others do they are foul invaders.
Meanwhile, anything remotely lurid or new culturally is treated as an apocalyptic issue and the well of all sins. A streamer making money selling bathwater and being widely mocked doesn't even belong on the map of moral problems even when compared to petty examples of actual problems like parking ticket fixing rings. While limited in impact they are a clear warning sign of growing corruption.
> actual problems like parking ticket fixing rings
Personally I'm more worried about this, which I suppose makes me a hateful bigot: 'Asian grooming gang free to roam streets because officers were told to 'find other ethnicities' to investigate, detective claims '
> If every Chinese topic turns into the same "China vs. the rest of the world" discussion—or to put it more generally, if every thread gets sucked into whatever generic black hole happens to be nearby—then it becomes impossible to discuss anything specific on HN.
The trouble is that issue is that earnest discussion of these serious issues has been suppressed for more than a year, and that by now, talking about this "cute" stuff while pretending said suppression is going leaves a certain aftertaste. I guess in your mind, ignoring an elephant on the couch is just the thing a curious intelligent person acting in good faith would do. But that's just you.
> The generic discussions are always the same
That's just as true for many articles about social media, node, golang, whatever. It can be demonstrated in 5 minutes that what you criticize consistently in one context, isn't even worth a mention in many, many others.
It has probably been the most-discussed topic on HN in the last year, so you're not going to get very far calling it "suppressed".
The basic problem is that such discussions are repetitive, this is a site for curiosity, and curiosity doesn't go with repetition.
For sure the problem of generic discussion is similar across all the hot topics. But some are more prone to flamewar, and those require more moderation.
-- Alan Kay
Direct your complaints to the source of your problem, namely the shitty browsers on mobile. Even suggesting to let HN fix their abysmal stylesheet would be wrong. Go to the source -- and if it turns out they don't care about requests to provide actual tools, tell them off.