5 ms·

And, to be clear, this has nothing to do with "classroom". The problem is people design these things without any sort of actual testing in actual conditions wh

by cnst 7y ago

And, to be clear, this has nothing to do with "classroom". The problem is people design these things without any sort of actual testing in actual conditions where the software is supposed to be used. Displaying 5 results per page is a bug, not a feature. Having restrictions on filetypes is a bug, not a feature. The same could go on to the rest of their "features". (My biggest pet peeve is date formatting — just give me ISO8601 dates, please; HackerNews, you, too!) At SXSW, there was a coffee-bot vendor. They didn't bother testing with an adequate number of folks, so, the whole thing overflowed on first day. Predictable? Yes. Would be noticed by a committee? Not a chance.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> just give me ISO8601 dates, please; HackerNews, you, too! Strongly seconding. It's an annoying UX antipattern, especially as it loses precision over time ("28 minutes ago" is fine, but "yesterday" or "5 days ago" or - even worse - "2 years ago" is not; having the date specified to hours or minutes is actually useful, especially in context of a site with international audience). Doubly so on HN, which doesn't even bother with giving the actual date/time in the tooltip, which is the usual cop out (not an actual solution, since there are no tooltips on mobile).
- anderspitman 7y ago
  I'd prefer both.
- mbreese 7y ago
  I prefer the HN method of 28 min, yesterday, 2 hours ago, etc... for HN. The older a comment or post, the less relevant it is to a particular discussion. This site is for real-time discussions of articles, so it is optimized for that use-case. The older a comment, the less relevant it is towards the immediate discussion. Thus, older comments have less precision, because those details don't matter for the discussion. I'd expect a site/application that is designed for students to manage homework would have different date/timestamp requirements.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    HN may be optimized for current discusions, but is also a repository of knowledge; I frequently land on years old threads from Google searches. For older times, an explicit ISO timestamp has at least two benefits: 1) I can compare it easily to other dates (e.g. is that comment older or more recent that event X, or software version Y), and 2) time of the day is a half-decent proxy for telling whether the US or Europe was awake then. And while you can justify the inprecise stamp on HN, there's no excuse for GMail and a score of other messaging software doing the same. When I'm looking at the date of an old e-mail, I almost always need the exact date and time. "2 weeks ago" is useless. "2019-09-27 08:43" tells me it happened before work, on a day after an important meeting, etc.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    ISO8601 date/time can easily be transformed into the fuzzy format HN uses, but not vice versa since the fuzzy format is lossy. If HN sent dates to the client in ISO8601, the client could then transform that format into the format of their choosing with client-side javascript (either a userscript, or delivered to the user by HN.)
  - Jedd 7y ago
    It's hard to be sure this isn't satire. You mentioned 'for HN' twice in the same sentence. Your 2nd, 4th, and 5th sentence all try to assert the same thing - older comments are less relevant than newer comments - despite there being no evidence, anywhere, that this is the case. Your 3rd sentence is partly true, though there's some historical record aspect to HN comment threads that you're discounting. Your second paragraph is a non sequitur. Sites that correlate points in time with timestamps are ubiquitous, and there's rarely a compelling case for using wildly different approaches to displaying same.
  - MertsA 7y ago
    They could easily do it the Reddit way and still provide a timestamp but keep the simplicity and relative time format. Just have it pop up the timestamp on mouse hover. That's still very simple and can be effectively done using just CSS.
- bdamm 7y ago
  Personally I like HN the way it is. Very little UI clutter. If we start doing ISO dates and maybe options to switch between high precision and default low precision, we lose the good feel that HN has produced.
- jake-low 7y ago
  Definitely agree about the loss of precision. It's also a problem for machine readability and SEO. The solution I like is using the HMTL5 <time> element for semantic markup of timestamps. If you do something like this: <time datetime="2019-10-11T13:53:36.861" title="Fri Oct 11 2019 13:53:36 GMT-0700">2 minutes ago</time> Then you get what in my opinion is the best of both worlds: machine readable timestamp in the datetime field, human-friendly detailed timestamp as a tooltip (the title field shows when you hover over the element), and relative time as the default display. Bonus points if your React component or ERB template or whatever switches from relative time format to absolute for the inner text when the timestamp is older than a day or so.
  - bigiain 7y ago
    "when you hover over the element" On the website I'm looking at Google Analytics for right now, fewer than 35% of the visitors are from devices where "hover" means anything...
    - lstamour 7y ago
      Well, it would require JS, but you could turn it into a button to show/hide an HTML tooltip or additional displays of the time. That iOS supports a mouse (in accessibility settings) or an Xbox controller but doesn’t properly support an “abbr” tag... it was acceptable in 2007 when we were happy to see the phone load nytimes.com with all its columns. It’s feeling very out of date in 2019, when 12 years later we’re adding downloads and “desktop safari” but we never finished the “desktop-equivalency” parts of the HTML5 spec. It would be amazing if Apple ported some of their iOS native components to web components or to enhance HTML5 elements. The farthest we’ve gotten so far are keyboard search button hints, if I recall correctly. Which is really quite disappointing, that an app made for jQuery UI would work as well as an app from today if you flatten and modernize the design, and add a bit of offline caching...
- avip 7y ago
  I have one word to tell you: timezone
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    What about them? ISO8601 supports time zones.
shinjitsu 7y ago
> Having restrictions on filetypes is a bug, not a feature. It should be - but for many school IT security types it really is a feature to limit file types
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Security: it seems to me that in the wild, 40% of it is security theater, another 40% exists primarily to ruin your mood and control you the user, and remaining 20% is actually around the right trade-off between utility and safety.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I agree that it is mostly theatre. I understand not allowing an exe, but if you have to download the file and rename it, how much of that would be unintentional?
- thisisbrians 7y ago
  Agreed, but trusting the extension at the end of the filename for this purpose screams, "amateur hour."
  - usrusr 7y ago
    Extensions were important to filter when Windows explorer was still lacking rules to forbid file execution based on provenance, but was already defaulting to a) hide the file extension and b) display whatever pixels were embedded in an executable as the file icon. The combination of a) and b) was making even moderately security aware users utterly defenseless.
- MarcScott 7y ago
  I fought this during my entire teaching career. Blocking file types by extension is pointless. as you can just change the file type. If you're worried about kids being able to run arbitrary python scripts on your network, then the security problem is not the kids, it's your shitty network. People are given cash as bug bounties for finding security flaws in systems, but in schools they are punished!
flarg 7y ago
I'd disagree a little, the problem is not testing, it's building the software in the first place when it doesn't solve a real problem.
- cnst 7y ago
  This so much. Sadly, what you describe as the anti-pattern is actually the industry standard. And you don't have to go far to see examples — Slashdot and Reddit redesign come to mind. Both are unusable.
AnAnonyCowherd 7y ago
> The problem is people design these things without any sort of actual testing in actual conditions where the software is supposed to be used. I’ll do YOU one better. </Drax> I work in an industry where software is still created by good, old-fashioned, by-the-book waterfall process, by outsourced developers. You know: the industry-proven, rock-solid, 20-year-out-of-date, slowest-and-least-agile methodology. Not only do the people who write the software never use it anger, they have no clue what the software is supposed to actually be doing. They don't understand our product, don't understand HOW these KINDS of products work, don't understand what engineers are doing TO the products, and don't understand what would be useful to have from software to help DO that. How many steps removed from actually USING the software is that? Well, you can imagine the frustration that end users experience on a DAILY basis, with ALL the tools they're supposed to be using, both home-grown, and customized commercial. Gee… I wonder why there are so many shared Excel workbooks functioning as ad-hoc database applications on the network drives… The most damning part of this is that there were some studies done on our engineering processes in relation to our competitors, and the numbers were bad. Really bad. You would think that senior management would sit up, take notice, and connect the dots. But they don’t seem to be doing that, which leads to one of two conclusions, and neither are encouraging.
- MetalGuru 7y ago
  Sounds god awful. What industry do you work in?
- jmcdl 7y ago
  I find it hard to understand how a business like this stays alive. Really, how?
marcosdumay 7y ago
HN? Let Oracle and SQL Server databases start using that without one forcing them to. There's a long list of stuff to be bothered with before even looking at HN.

by cnst 7y ago

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> just give me ISO8601 dates, please; HackerNews, you, too! Strongly seconding. It's an annoying UX antipattern, especially as it loses precision over time ("28 minutes ago" is fine, but "yesterday" or "5 days ago" or - even worse - "2 years ago" is not; having the date specified to hours or minutes is actually useful, especially in context of a site with international audience). Doubly so on HN, which doesn't even bother with giving the actual date/time in the tooltip, which is the usual cop out (not an actual solution, since there are no tooltips on mobile).

anderspitman 7y ago
I'd prefer both.
mbreese 7y ago
I prefer the HN method of 28 min, yesterday, 2 hours ago, etc... for HN. The older a comment or post, the less relevant it is to a particular discussion. This site is for real-time discussions of articles, so it is optimized for that use-case. The older a comment, the less relevant it is towards the immediate discussion. Thus, older comments have less precision, because those details don't matter for the discussion. I'd expect a site/application that is designed for students to manage homework would have different date/timestamp requirements.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  HN may be optimized for current discusions, but is also a repository of knowledge; I frequently land on years old threads from Google searches. For older times, an explicit ISO timestamp has at least two benefits: 1) I can compare it easily to other dates (e.g. is that comment older or more recent that event X, or software version Y), and 2) time of the day is a half-decent proxy for telling whether the US or Europe was awake then. And while you can justify the inprecise stamp on HN, there's no excuse for GMail and a score of other messaging software doing the same. When I'm looking at the date of an old e-mail, I almost always need the exact date and time. "2 weeks ago" is useless. "2019-09-27 08:43" tells me it happened before work, on a day after an important meeting, etc.
- catalogia 7y ago
  ISO8601 date/time can easily be transformed into the fuzzy format HN uses, but not vice versa since the fuzzy format is lossy. If HN sent dates to the client in ISO8601, the client could then transform that format into the format of their choosing with client-side javascript (either a userscript, or delivered to the user by HN.)
- Jedd 7y ago
  It's hard to be sure this isn't satire. You mentioned 'for HN' twice in the same sentence. Your 2nd, 4th, and 5th sentence all try to assert the same thing - older comments are less relevant than newer comments - despite there being no evidence, anywhere, that this is the case. Your 3rd sentence is partly true, though there's some historical record aspect to HN comment threads that you're discounting. Your second paragraph is a non sequitur. Sites that correlate points in time with timestamps are ubiquitous, and there's rarely a compelling case for using wildly different approaches to displaying same.
- MertsA 7y ago
  They could easily do it the Reddit way and still provide a timestamp but keep the simplicity and relative time format. Just have it pop up the timestamp on mouse hover. That's still very simple and can be effectively done using just CSS.
bdamm 7y ago
Personally I like HN the way it is. Very little UI clutter. If we start doing ISO dates and maybe options to switch between high precision and default low precision, we lose the good feel that HN has produced.
jake-low 7y ago
Definitely agree about the loss of precision. It's also a problem for machine readability and SEO. The solution I like is using the HMTL5 <time> element for semantic markup of timestamps. If you do something like this: <time datetime="2019-10-11T13:53:36.861" title="Fri Oct 11 2019 13:53:36 GMT-0700">2 minutes ago</time> Then you get what in my opinion is the best of both worlds: machine readable timestamp in the datetime field, human-friendly detailed timestamp as a tooltip (the title field shows when you hover over the element), and relative time as the default display. Bonus points if your React component or ERB template or whatever switches from relative time format to absolute for the inner text when the timestamp is older than a day or so.
- bigiain 7y ago
  "when you hover over the element" On the website I'm looking at Google Analytics for right now, fewer than 35% of the visitors are from devices where "hover" means anything...
  - lstamour 7y ago
    Well, it would require JS, but you could turn it into a button to show/hide an HTML tooltip or additional displays of the time. That iOS supports a mouse (in accessibility settings) or an Xbox controller but doesn’t properly support an “abbr” tag... it was acceptable in 2007 when we were happy to see the phone load nytimes.com with all its columns. It’s feeling very out of date in 2019, when 12 years later we’re adding downloads and “desktop safari” but we never finished the “desktop-equivalency” parts of the HTML5 spec. It would be amazing if Apple ported some of their iOS native components to web components or to enhance HTML5 elements. The farthest we’ve gotten so far are keyboard search button hints, if I recall correctly. Which is really quite disappointing, that an app made for jQuery UI would work as well as an app from today if you flatten and modernize the design, and add a bit of offline caching...
avip 7y ago
I have one word to tell you: timezone
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  What about them? ISO8601 supports time zones.

shinjitsu 7y ago

> Having restrictions on filetypes is a bug, not a feature. It should be - but for many school IT security types it really is a feature to limit file types

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Security: it seems to me that in the wild, 40% of it is security theater, another 40% exists primarily to ruin your mood and control you the user, and remaining 20% is actually around the right trade-off between utility and safety.
- scarface74 7y ago
  I agree that it is mostly theatre. I understand not allowing an exe, but if you have to download the file and rename it, how much of that would be unintentional?
thisisbrians 7y ago
Agreed, but trusting the extension at the end of the filename for this purpose screams, "amateur hour."
- usrusr 7y ago
  Extensions were important to filter when Windows explorer was still lacking rules to forbid file execution based on provenance, but was already defaulting to a) hide the file extension and b) display whatever pixels were embedded in an executable as the file icon. The combination of a) and b) was making even moderately security aware users utterly defenseless.
MarcScott 7y ago
I fought this during my entire teaching career. Blocking file types by extension is pointless. as you can just change the file type. If you're worried about kids being able to run arbitrary python scripts on your network, then the security problem is not the kids, it's your shitty network. People are given cash as bug bounties for finding security flaws in systems, but in schools they are punished!

flarg 7y ago

I'd disagree a little, the problem is not testing, it's building the software in the first place when it doesn't solve a real problem.

cnst 7y ago
This so much. Sadly, what you describe as the anti-pattern is actually the industry standard. And you don't have to go far to see examples — Slashdot and Reddit redesign come to mind. Both are unusable.

AnAnonyCowherd 7y ago

> The problem is people design these things without any sort of actual testing in actual conditions where the software is supposed to be used. I’ll do YOU one better. </Drax> I work in an industry where software is still created by good, old-fashioned, by-the-book waterfall process, by outsourced developers. You know: the industry-proven, rock-solid, 20-year-out-of-date, slowest-and-least-agile methodology. Not only do the people who write the software never use it anger, they have no clue what the software is supposed to actually be doing. They don't understand our product, don't understand HOW these KINDS of products work, don't understand what engineers are doing TO the products, and don't understand what would be useful to have from software to help DO that. How many steps removed from actually USING the software is that? Well, you can imagine the frustration that end users experience on a DAILY basis, with ALL the tools they're supposed to be using, both home-grown, and customized commercial. Gee… I wonder why there are so many shared Excel workbooks functioning as ad-hoc database applications on the network drives… The most damning part of this is that there were some studies done on our engineering processes in relation to our competitors, and the numbers were bad. Really bad. You would think that senior management would sit up, take notice, and connect the dots. But they don’t seem to be doing that, which leads to one of two conclusions, and neither are encouraging.

MetalGuru 7y ago
Sounds god awful. What industry do you work in?
jmcdl 7y ago
I find it hard to understand how a business like this stays alive. Really, how?

marcosdumay 7y ago

HN? Let Oracle and SQL Server databases start using that without one forcing them to. There's a long list of stuff to be bothered with before even looking at HN.