20 ms·

While posting to Tumblr, E and W keys just stopped working

364 points by soneca 5y ago

IshKebab 5y ago
Just hotkey detection gone wrong. Not that big of a surprise because implementing hotkeys on a website is a complete minefield. I don't think you can conclude that Tumblr is badly written from this. Badly tested maybe.
- eptcyka 5y ago
  Did you read the whole thread?
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    No because Twitter makes it completely unreadable.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
znpy 5y ago
I cannot help but wonder, why does this person still spends their time on tumblr if they dislike it so much? Just move somewhere else.
- nixpulvis 5y ago
  Probably because of other people.
- javajosh 5y ago
  >why does this person still spends their time on tumblr Because it's not all bad? Because the problems they experience are relatively minor and fixable, and that by complaining about this bug it might get fixed?
- kosma 5y ago
  Tumblr is still the best place to be for many people - even despite all those flaws. For many, there is no better "somewhere else" people can "just" move to.
- Mashimo 5y ago
  last post: > so I think I should make it clear that when I say "I love tumblr" I mean I love the userbase, at least most of it (obviously not the cyberbullying people with death threats part), and not the staff. the staff have no idea what they're doing and are only making the site worse He/she loves Tumblr :)
  - bitwize 5y ago
    Foone is a they.
    - atatatat 5y ago
      "is a" or "goes by"?
      - mplewis 5y ago
        There is no meaningful distinction.
    - JasonFruit 5y ago
      This sounds wrong too. Maybe, "Foone is they"? You don't want to misnumber them, though; maybe "Foone _are_ they"? That makes them sound epic, though: Foone are legion! Changing language is hard, whether done organically or initiated intentionally and for a purpose.
      - bitwize 5y ago
        I'm following a pattern used in casual English, exemplified by the sentence: "Is your dog a he or a she?"
      - spaztastical 5y ago
        ee/ee's? or ze?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- bombcar 5y ago
  A dying social media platform can be as good as a new one - the incentive for spammers et Al doesn’t exist and neither do many trolls (no audience) so the remaining group can be a good cross-section.
  - jdofaz 5y ago
    For me google+ was like that for a while towards the end, but eventually there was a resurgence of trolls posting hate speech that drove me away.
  - floatboth 5y ago
    > the incentive for spammers et Al doesn’t exist Ha ha ha. Tumblr is the place where you get followed (sometimes even messaged) by porn spam accounts regularly. This problem is so infamous that even some ARG creators literally used the "spam bot aesthetic" (but with weirder messages) to pull people in: https://youtu.be/ZaYioM_bsb0 https://youtu.be/ZaYioM_bsb0
asplake 5y ago
> tumblr is fractally broken. it's not wrong in any specific way, it's wrong at every possible scale.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hamburglar 5y ago
  Once, many years ago, my company was working with Tumblr on some kind of integration, and for some reason, the engineer I was working with emailed me a filed called something like tumblr.php that was the “show the main blog page” source. It was one of the most spaghetti-ish overly-long unreadable pieces of shit I’d seen in decades. So this excellent set of tweets does not surprise me in the least.
  - tmcneal 5y ago
    I remember visiting tumblr.com once a long time ago and they were actually serving the index.php file as a download rather than rendering the homepage. It was indeed a several thousand long file of spaghetti code.
  - zxcvbn4038 5y ago
    I used to work there and indeed the source code is a huge monolithic PHP nightmare based on an ancient version of some forgotten framework and hacked on by hundreds of developers over the years. There was a huge amount of code dedicated to rendering content that depended on bugs from the application’s earliest days plus new behaviors that were introduced over time. Every request required a full start of the entire tumblr application - they didn’t trust the code to process more then one request per invocation so it exited after sending a reply. Developer turnover was huge due to the code base being a nightmare and no management support for refactoring. But if you could stomach working with the code the catered lunches from Dos Toros and Luke’s Lobster were epic.
- Karellen 5y ago
  This line is likely inspired by the concept of "Fractal Wrongness": https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fractal_wrongness https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fractal_wrongness and 2012's "PHP: a fractal of bad design": https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
alfonsodev 5y ago
> So you are typing "Don't" and the ResetCursorPosition() function gets called and you look at the textbox and now it says "on'tD" I had this bug trying to implement a text editor using Draft.js but not sure it was for the same reason. I guess tumblr devs tried to implement a text editor and at the same time have some vim like shortcuts(jkl). This makes you appreciate how less can be more.
- awiesenhofer 5y ago
  That's what that was! I experienced this behavior for years writing posts or comments on facebooks mobile site, helped me a lot to wean myself of that one.
  - alfonsodev 5y ago
    Thanks, indeed seems to have been raised on the Github repo. https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/issues/1077 https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/issues/1077
  - SilasX 5y ago
    Yes! I had something like that and it was so frustrating I wrote a post (on FB, sigh) about it, looks like it was August 10. I had written a comment with multiple paragraphs (which I guess they don't expect people to do, or test for) and I wanted to add something to the next-to-last paragraph, and when I tried to type "matters" it would keep locking me in autocomplete tagging for friends name "Matthew", and as soon as I dismissed the cursor would leap to the end of the comment. If I tried to click back, the cursor kept jumping to the end!
- MattKimber 5y ago
  Javascript editors trying to reinvent desktop paradigms but without the 40-odd years of practice and having all the events arrive whenever they feel like is one of the most frequent irritations of web-based platforms for me, because you use a text editor so frequently and therefore encounter its problems similarly often. For example, earlier today I was editing a small internal app in Retool. I typed something, instinctively went for Cmd-Z, and it reverts a bunch of changes I made in the query I had open 5 minutes ago. Of course, by the time I spot it and hit Shift-Cmd-Z, the internal state has updated so now it redoes some other unrelated undo operation and I have two broken things to fix. And then of course there's Notion, the champion of "you've hit a keyboard shortcut and it's applied it to something halfway across the screen from the selection, or possibly just given up trying to do anything useful and deleted a few paragraphs of text at random". Perhaps they were pining for the outrageously janky experience that was attempting to make even the most innocuous of formatting changes in earlier versions of Word For Windows.
pitched 5y ago
That’s really nice of him to put together such a concise, well-described list of issues for them. Hopefully someone sees this and adds it to their issue tracker. It’s very rare to see anyone internal grab something from outside like that though.
- bombcar 5y ago
  There’s evidence in the list that they know about them and can’t seem to fix them. It’s likely a pile of bandaids and trying to fix one breaks another thing unrelated.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Bold of you to think Tumblr has an issue tracker or indeed any remaining technical staff...
- germ 5y ago
  Heads up, foone uses they/them pronouns. I love their write ups, I know whenever I see their posts on here to cozy up with a coffee because it's about to get fun.
  - optimiz3 5y ago
    > they/them Is this to suggest a multiple personality disorder or belief in being a collective hive mind?
    - germ 5y ago
      No, it's a common way that non-binary people choose to be referred to that avoids gendered language. Although foone borg collective would be amazing.
      - optimiz3 5y ago
        Should be a different non-plural word, straight up confusing seeing it in writing.
nowherebeen 5y ago
I still can’t believe it was sold for $1 billion.
- pjc50 5y ago
  There were a huge number of users. It was only after it sold that Yahoo realised how many of them were using it for porn, which in retrospect should have been obvious: it's an image hosting site.
  - evanelias 5y ago
    No, the percentage of porn content was actually relatively small at the time of the sale. Low to mid single digits if my memory is correct. During Tumblr's peak heyday (~9 months before the sale iirc), Tumblr's daily posting volume was around 1/5th the size of Twitter's at the time. Keeping in mind that Tumblr had no character limit and much greater multimedia support, the amount of content being posted on Tumblr was quite significant. It was a widely-used general-purpose social network / social publishing platform. Most major brands had a presence on Tumblr, and for a while it was extremely common to see a Tumblr icon on their sites right next to Facebook and Twitter icons. From my POV as an early engineer there, what went wrong was poor execution in response to many simultaneous existential threats: * Instagram succeeded at peeling off all the "just want to post photos on mobile" users, and also became the hit new thing with the teenage users * Pinterest succeeded at peeling off all the "just want to digital scrapbook" users * Although the porn percentage was relatively low at the time, it still scared advertisers * Difficulty fundraising / running low on money at particularly bad timing. Facebook's stock performed poorly for its first 15 months post-IPO, and this temporarily made fundraising difficult for existing social platforms... especially when growth was relatively flat (due to the first two bullets) and revenue was disappointing (due to third bullet). * Ever-growing tech debt. The early team was extremely solid, but very small relative to the amount of traffic, so we often had to creatively cut some corners. Later on, management didn't want to allocate staffing to fix existing things, and a lot of time was wasted on unrealistic big-bang rewrites that were abandoned. Meanwhile the hiring bar kept being lowered over time once the company was no longer a rocket ship. I left just before the Yahoo sale, as working at Tumblr had gone from my dream job to a stagnant grind during my tenure there. I later returned for another year in the late-stage Yahoo into early Verizon days, with idealistic hopes of helping to prevent a Vine-like fate, but let's just say that was a poor personal decision and leave it at that :)
nicoburns 5y ago
I hope someone reimplements tumblr as an open platform at some point. They got a lot right from a UX perspective.
- httpsterio 5y ago
  It's literally the UX that is wrong. Community and their content is why it's still a thing.
  - mst 5y ago
    I think maybe OP was talking about the overall UI paradigm. The details are janky as all get out, certainly, but the concepts aren't bad at all.
- nsv 5y ago
  Kind of like what the mastodon/pleroma network is to Twitter?
- drdeca 5y ago
  There’s waterfall.social which has been made open source (Idr under which license. I think it might be AGPL?) Not sure whether that’s what you mean by “open platform”. It also has a number of nice features added compared to tumblr, like changing which blog of yours is the “main blog”, having a separate dashboard and following list for each blog in an account, a system to detect uncredited art-re-uploading, etc.
- NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  The UX is designed from a user perspective, a lot right. The implementation is from a developers perspective mostly wrong.
smcl 5y ago
These hotkeys in websites are an utter curse. So many times I've started typing in Jira, then something weird happened that caused my keystrokes to be interpreted by the page instead of entered into a comment box ... then the ticket gets reopened, unassigned, etc.
- shantnutiwari 5y ago
  yeah, and bonus points if then you then spend 10 minutes trying to figure out what happened, and how to undo it
- drcongo 5y ago
  And most of them don't check to see if the user is also holding down a modifier key, thereby overriding your system keyboard shortcuts. Yes. I _am_ looking at you Google Spreadsheets.
  - kps 5y ago
    Firefox used to not send those to the site js; I think that broke with the Quantum update. Just one of its thousand cuts.
    - jandrese 5y ago
      I'm sure that was a "bugfix" where someone complained that website required you to hit CTRL-Q to navigate or something and the browser was consuming the key. Have to make it work like Chrome.
- Steltek 5y ago
  (I feel like we jumped topics from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597895) JIRA's Search is far worse than the regular JIRA hotkeys. The Enter key will incorrectly tab-complete JQL just before executing the search. Meanwhile, the Tab key doesn't tab-complete and instead focuses the Search button (which lets you execute the uncorrupted JQL). You have to actively train yourself out of how everything else works just to avoid going insane. Well, that or use the mouse just to click Search (eww). Every ticket tracking system sucks. Trello was the closest thing to joy.
bitwize 5y ago
There's a reason why I call it "Fumblr". I've never experienced a hotkey conflict like this yet, but it's just so full of UI fails that the experience of posting something is rough and cumbersome, even before you get to the comically catastrophic fails like this.
notacoward 5y ago
When this was happening to me it turned out to be bad interaction with '@' followed by a punctuation mark. I can reproduce it at will right now. Something to do with name auto-completion, but once I knew how to avoid it I stopped debugging their code for free.
- rmilk 5y ago
  Same darn thing with Outlook. They added mentions, and now anytime you type @something it goes looking for that person. Examples of how this goes wrong: @10pm or when I type to send to a colleague in a language that has @var type syntax. Reply from MS was that there isn’t any way to turn off the mentions.
keeganjw 5y ago
This reminds me of when the spacebar stopped working in the YouTube search box. I thought my keyboard broke for a sec until I realized it worked just fine everywhere but YouTube. Then later I found out it wasn't just me... https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/10/22323716/youtube-search-bar-space-bug-safari-firefox-chrome https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/10/22323716/youtube-search-b...
- greenyoda 5y ago
  Interesting... I've seen spacebar not work in Flickr's search box too. It happens to me sporadically.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Spacebar fails to work in the PocketBook e-book reader search dialog, when using an attached Bluetooth keyboard. Rather than insert a space in the search term, it scrolls the document. The backspace key fails to work in Pocket when editing tags. Instead it's necessary to either use the <delete> key (if available), or to highlight and overwrite text to be replaced.
dbatten 5y ago
True story: One day, Windows wouldn't let me type the letter p. I was trying to log back in from the Windows lock screen. Typed my password, got it wrong. Typed it again, got it wrong. Eventually got locked out of my account, despite being extremely careful to type my password correctly. Went to IT and had them unlock my account... Went back to my PC and tried to log in again. Typed my password very carefully, letter by letter, watching each letter come up on screen as I went. When I went to type the letter p, nothing happened. I hit p repeatedly, nothing. I figured the switch for the p key on my keyboard had died or something, so I went to IT and got a new keyboard. Unplugged the old, plugged in the new. Still no p. OK, this is getting ridiculous. Clicked on accessibility tools and tried to use the on-screen keyboard to type in my password. _Still couldn't type the letter p, even with the on-screen keyboard._ Ended up having to hard reset the machine, and then everything was fine and dandy. Still have no idea what could have happened. It ended up being the last straw that pushed me to Ubuntu, and I've never looked back.
- Intermernet 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOP_(code) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOP_(code)
  - dEnigma 5y ago
    Okay, I've never thought of NOP as "no 'P'", so this caught me completely by surprise and made me laugh out loud.
    - lardolan 5y ago
      Same here. Thought about NOPE
    - BoxOfRain 5y ago
      Reminds me of the drinking game called the "Land of Nod", you go in a circle making claims like "you can live in the Land of Nod, but you can't die there" or "you can listen to Nirvana in the Land of Nod, but not Dave Grohl" and hand out penalties of two fingers of your pint every time someone makes a statement that doesn't fit the rule. The only advice you give them is "the clue is in the name". You can only play this game once with a particular group, but it's a good laugh.
octopoc 5y ago
Reminds me of how sometimes my developer workstation running Windows gets into a mode where it won’t type anything except emoji’s.
asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
I wonder if it's a bad interaction between one of this person's extensions and Tumblr. Presumably if this were a problem for everyone, new blot posts would have cratered and Tumblr's SRE would have been notified and any recent releases would have been rolled back. So I would assume this issue affects only a small fraction of users. Could be wrong but I guess we will see.
d--b 5y ago
Tldr; a guy is _really_ pissed off because of some bad feature in tumblr, and rants about it in a 25-tweet storm, some of them all caps…
Kuraj 5y ago
I don't know how many Polish people who owned a Radeon card in the 2000s are there on HN but I'm sure they can all relate :-) as the card software would overwrite the key combination used to type the letter "ć" and open the Catalyst Control Center instead. Argh!
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  I just don't remember what DOS game it was that had actions linked to all of CTRL, ALT and DEL. It were some actions that one wouldn't usually use together. I, as a bad gamer just didn't at all, but some people were able to put more commands per second there...
  - maccard 5y ago
    I worked at a gaming event a while back, where the players were using hardware we had bought them to match what they had at home. One of them changed the crouch binding from Ctrl to alt (to use the thumb) and the default bindings for the keys on his moise were f1 through f4... He alt+f4'ed out of his competitive game in the middle of the round, twice, before we actually figured out what was wrong.
- SSLy 5y ago
  altgr-z still opens nvidia's bar instead of, you know, just typing ż. They're retards https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040329-00/?p=40003 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040329-00/?p=40...
- numpad0 5y ago
  Sometimes I wonder if there will come a day when everyone just switch to IME based inputs for all semantic text entries. "anthropomorphillistic" is "anth[tab][tab][tab]", "Здравствуйте" is "zdravstvuyte[space]", "豚骨醤油" is "tonkotsusshouyu[space]" and so on. In IME off state input reverts to US. It might lead to a dystopia where typing o-r-a-n-g-e somehow yields "a bright spectrum at dusk" but that's an issue for a separate discussion.
  - 5y ago
uxp100 5y ago
Another fun day a year or two ago on Tumblr involved the old classic top-posting vs bottom-posting debate. I don't remember the details precisely, but it was something like this: They switched the default from one to the other one day, so that mid day your replies started being top posted. And so you got that wonderful mix of top and bottom posting. Then they fixed it, and so you could have a thread that had just top posting in the middle. Neato. Thanks Tumblr.
- pram 5y ago
  You just reminded me that if a Tumblr conversation went on long enough the quotes became smaller, pushed out of the div to the right. Literally unreadable lol
aembleton 5y ago
Threadreader link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1440014690831126528.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1440014690831126528.html
account42 5y ago
> the same site that then fixed that bug and forced all blog descriptions to be utf-8, but then implemented size limits as a number of bytes. > so they truncated mid-utf-8 character, which made parsing the XML A REAL FUN TASK LET ME TELL YOU How is this a problem unless you do UTF-8 validation when parsing the XML, in which case stop doing that for data you don't control.
- JimDabell 5y ago
  If you truncate a UTF-8 string mid-character, then can’t that sequence swallow the next byte, such as <, which would break XML parsing completely?
  - toast0 5y ago
    No, UTF-8 is self synchronizing... The first byte of a code point is clearly the first byte of a code point, so it's possible to tell that there was a truncated code point, as long as the next one starts correctly (if you lost two bytes in a row, you might get a mashed up code point, but that's a different loss scenario)
  - _moof 5y ago
    UTF-8 encoding works like so: 0xxxxxxx 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx ...where the "x" bits encode the code point. So if you're halfway through a four-byte sequence and see a byte like 0xxxxxxx, you know something's wrong.
- Joker_vD 5y ago
  Right, Postel's law: validating the data you receive reduces the interoperability, so don't do that.
- torstenvl 5y ago
  if (c & 0b10000000) continue;
mproud 5y ago
“I could refresh my browser page, or I could write a bunch of stuff about it on Twitter!”
phreack 5y ago
> god I love tumblr. it's one of the best social networks on the internet because it's just a complete fractal dumpster fire Couldn't agree more. Everything is just so awful I can't even imagine the staff turning it into some boring Twitter like dumpster fire all about sucking up to celebrities. They have chronological post order by default, that makes it instantly better than nearly all other social networks. It's unsalvageable and due to that, an accidental refuge from the current mess of the Internet.
Arch-TK 5y ago
This entire thread reminds me of all the issues I had programming in Clarion 8. I could write an equivalently long thread about clarion if I still remembered half the issues. What's scarier is that at some point Clarion got support to publish software as websites... Maybe Tumblr is written in clarion.
not1ofU 5y ago
The full thread is the most epic rant I've ever read, and I am not even finished yet... It so good, <strike>I am going to go and check every response to each of the ops tweets after I do finish it.<strike> - apparently I need a twitter account for this. Edit: Currently I am here: "and my favorite part of this is that every time tumblr has fucked up and created some weird bug, the user base almost immediately weaponizes it."
black_puppydog 5y ago
I feel like in a thread like this, Asana deserves a shout-out for utterly fucking up the UX in any firefox version I've tried, up to and including nightly. Typing in the various text input fields has ~1s of lag. It's a TEXT FIELD for fuck's sake!
- shrimp_emoji 5y ago
  JS bby
  - seph-reed 5y ago
    I could do this with any language. It's just bad code.
    - black_puppydog 5y ago
      just seems to happen more often in JS... :|
      - seph-reed 5y ago
        It's an entry level programming language with unprecedented ease of publishing and access. It would be extremely impressive if it didn't.
        black_puppydog 5y ago
        Well then we agree I guess... I'm not impressed. :D
      - Nextgrid 5y ago
        If you were writing pure JS you'd probably need to intentionally delay text entry with setTimeout/etc to achieve this effect - I don't think you can achieve this outcome by accident. The problem is that the front-end ecosystem encourages pulling in megabytes of third-party crap for every little thing (including poorly reinventing existing browser functionality) and the result is that some interaction between all that mess causes an entire page redraw upon every keystroke or similar.
shreyshnaccount 5y ago
can we go back to when Javascript wasn't used in EVERYTHING please
subpixel 5y ago
My personal pet peeve is what every Squarespace-powered site on the internet (many millions!) does to the esc key. Example: https://www.folioeast.com/ https://www.folioeast.com/ I never realized how often I use the esc key until I started getting routed to Squarespace logins all over the place.
- athorax 5y ago
  Oh. My. God. I have been wondering why when I come back to my PC after it being asleep I've been on random squarespace login pages. I usually tap esc a couple of times to wake up my computer.
  - macintux 5y ago
    I learned years ago to use as “safe” a key as possible to wake up my computer, so I settled on Control. Wish I could remember what led me to that decision.
    - recursive 5y ago
      I do the same thing. It's right on the corner. And alt frequently activates a menu.
    - icoder 5y ago
      I use caps lock, apart from being safe it also gives a bit of feedback in the form of the light going on/off even before the conplete wakeup.
      - gpm 5y ago
        I've also discovered that capslock is a useful way of detecting (linux) kernel panics. If everything freezes, and capslock stops toggling that light, your kernel is dead.
        smichel17 5y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key
junon 5y ago
Side note, @foone is a great account to follow on Twitter if you're looking for weird Hardware hacks and commentary on tech.
- vultour 5y ago
  They have like 500 tweets just in the past day. I don't use Twitter, but doesn't that completely drown out your feed? How do you follow someone who's posting every few minutes?
  - fknorangesite 5y ago
    They're arranged in threads. You just scroll up to the top of the thread you want to read.
- superasn 5y ago
  And ironically @foone hates Hacker news with a passion(1) for some reason and yet these threads make the front page of HN every 3 months or so! (1) https://twitter.com/foone/status/1310432709273989120?lang=en https://twitter.com/foone/status/1310432709273989120?lang=en
  - fknorangesite 5y ago
    > @foone hates Hacker news with a passion(1) for some reason Here's their most recent thread (in response to this post) on why: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1440703149585563652 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1440703149585563652
efdee 5y ago
A long, long time ago, I "broke" my dad's MS Works word processor. The D key just stopped working. Turns out that, during my fiddling around, I had created a macro that did nothing and had 'D' as a hotkey. It was the first time ever that I had "broken the computer".
- asdff 5y ago
  gui needs a log just like the cli and it should have happened 30 years ago
- egoisticalgoat 5y ago
  That's something I discovered the other day on my pc. At some point during the last year or so, I accidentally assigned a macro to the C key that did nothing but press the C key, so it was pretty much impossible to notice during normal use, except that holding it down behaved out of the ordinary.
haddr 5y ago
Another weird thing: some programs like to capture key combinations that are used to input some diacritics. It is exceptionally bad when it’s a mouse driver, and even worse when it happens on your company laptop where you have no admin rights to remove it…
- haddr 5y ago
  One more funny story: we used to have some weird errors from time to time, when someone accidentally committed code with some letter L placed randomly in the code. We soon happened that it was a result of people blocking windows machine (win L), when somehow the letter L got propagated to the IDE running under Linux in VirtualBox. Yeah, we used Linux on top of Windows machines back then…
handsarebags 5y ago
Feel for op ;D Appreciate the description “fractally broken“. oh dear :) Has a similar predicament[1] (though completely different cause); felt very uncivilised copy and pasting the character I wanted from the internet… Still wondering what the most elegant way I could have gotten that character, especially if I didn’t have internet access. Scroll through random files? Perhaps I might’ve known a little about ASCII and tried converting a few numbers to characters till I found the character I wanted. At the time I did not, and was thankful the internet provided the character I needed. Still feel like I got away with something and would have been stumped without that… :) [1] http://www.bagsend.net/posts/best_problem.html http://www.bagsend.net/posts/best_problem.html
sfteus 5y ago
Somewhat related, Teams on Ubuntu recently has stopped letting me use the left/right arrows to navigate around a message I've written. However, shift + arrow or control + arrow still work fine. Haven't had a chance to dig into why, but it's been mildly amusing.
- notwhereyouare 5y ago
  I just noticed this today on my windows. They probably pushed out a change to the underlying web interface that broke stuff
adamrezich 5y ago
say what you will about tumblr's UI/UX, I'm still a bit shocked that Twitter never copied their "hold down mouse click/finger tap on reblog button to immediately reblog without adding commentary" feature. years ago when I still used tumblr I found that particular feature to be groundbreaking on par with pull-to-refresh.
NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
>this is the site which used to let you figure out who sent you anonymous questions because you could block anonymous users, and that user would then appear in their uncensored name in your blocklist. >They fixed this by completely changing how anonymous blocking worked, so that it worked by IP address instead of by username, but for a while that information was exposed to the user >which meant if someone sent you an anonymous question you could block them and then find out their IP address lmao! What a dumpster fire. I'm glad I never used it for anything remotely serious and exclusively consumed content second-site by people who actually went to tumblr.com.
spaztastical 5y ago
That is an amazing thread. Thank you for posting it.
10GBps 5y ago
Reminds of of reddit. Man that text edit box is so dysfunctional. Sometimes you type and nothing happens. Sometimes typing will start selecting random stuff on the page, hiding comments, saving some, and other weird stuff. Cut and paste is a 100% gamble. Random keys won't work some times. Sometimes you post a comment and only half shows up or other weird things. It's really bizarre and I think has to do with some sort of logging/spyware they run on the site.
TonyTrapp 5y ago
I really wish websites would stop using single-letter hotkeys. I regularly accidentally mute people on Twitter because the mute hotkey is in the position where my fingers naturally rest when using a trackpoint for scrolling. I think there was a guidelines (from W3C or WHATWG probably) that such hotkeys should not be used or at least should be turned off by default, but I guess noone sticks to those recommendations these days.
avnigo 5y ago
The missing 'e' is definitely on brand, at least!
nonsince 5y ago
Can we please stop posting Foone to HN? They’ve stated multiple times that they don’t want to be posted here and every time they end up posted they complain and ask for it to be taken down.
masswerk 5y ago
BTW, for an ironic twist, as this is posted on Twitter: On Safari/macOS, you can't refocus on a Tweet by clicking anymore (if not signed-in already), as this inevitably brings up a sign-in dialog, which resets the view selection in the same instant. As this is not the case with other browsers, I guess, it's not the intended behavior. However, as it has been so for a while now, Twitter seems to be happy with this.

364 points by soneca 5y ago

Just hotkey detection gone wrong. Not that big of a surprise because implementing hotkeys on a website is a complete minefield. I don't think you can conclude that Tumblr is badly written from this. Badly tested maybe.

eptcyka 5y ago
Did you read the whole thread?
- IshKebab 5y ago
  No because Twitter makes it completely unreadable.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

znpy 5y ago

I cannot help but wonder, why does this person still spends their time on tumblr if they dislike it so much? Just move somewhere else.

nixpulvis 5y ago
Probably because of other people.
javajosh 5y ago
>why does this person still spends their time on tumblr Because it's not all bad? Because the problems they experience are relatively minor and fixable, and that by complaining about this bug it might get fixed?
kosma 5y ago
Tumblr is still the best place to be for many people - even despite all those flaws. For many, there is no better "somewhere else" people can "just" move to.
Mashimo 5y ago
last post: > so I think I should make it clear that when I say "I love tumblr" I mean I love the userbase, at least most of it (obviously not the cyberbullying people with death threats part), and not the staff. the staff have no idea what they're doing and are only making the site worse He/she loves Tumblr :)
- bitwize 5y ago
  Foone is a they.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    "is a" or "goes by"?
    - mplewis 5y ago
      There is no meaningful distinction.
  - JasonFruit 5y ago
    This sounds wrong too. Maybe, "Foone is they"? You don't want to misnumber them, though; maybe "Foone _are_ they"? That makes them sound epic, though: Foone are legion! Changing language is hard, whether done organically or initiated intentionally and for a purpose.
    - bitwize 5y ago
      I'm following a pattern used in casual English, exemplified by the sentence: "Is your dog a he or a she?"
    - spaztastical 5y ago
      ee/ee's? or ze?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
bombcar 5y ago
A dying social media platform can be as good as a new one - the incentive for spammers et Al doesn’t exist and neither do many trolls (no audience) so the remaining group can be a good cross-section.
- jdofaz 5y ago
  For me google+ was like that for a while towards the end, but eventually there was a resurgence of trolls posting hate speech that drove me away.
- floatboth 5y ago
  > the incentive for spammers et Al doesn’t exist Ha ha ha. Tumblr is the place where you get followed (sometimes even messaged) by porn spam accounts regularly. This problem is so infamous that even some ARG creators literally used the "spam bot aesthetic" (but with weirder messages) to pull people in: https://youtu.be/ZaYioM_bsb0 https://youtu.be/ZaYioM_bsb0

asplake 5y ago

> tumblr is fractally broken. it's not wrong in any specific way, it's wrong at every possible scale.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hamburglar 5y ago
Once, many years ago, my company was working with Tumblr on some kind of integration, and for some reason, the engineer I was working with emailed me a filed called something like tumblr.php that was the “show the main blog page” source. It was one of the most spaghetti-ish overly-long unreadable pieces of shit I’d seen in decades. So this excellent set of tweets does not surprise me in the least.
- tmcneal 5y ago
  I remember visiting tumblr.com once a long time ago and they were actually serving the index.php file as a download rather than rendering the homepage. It was indeed a several thousand long file of spaghetti code.
- zxcvbn4038 5y ago
  I used to work there and indeed the source code is a huge monolithic PHP nightmare based on an ancient version of some forgotten framework and hacked on by hundreds of developers over the years. There was a huge amount of code dedicated to rendering content that depended on bugs from the application’s earliest days plus new behaviors that were introduced over time. Every request required a full start of the entire tumblr application - they didn’t trust the code to process more then one request per invocation so it exited after sending a reply. Developer turnover was huge due to the code base being a nightmare and no management support for refactoring. But if you could stomach working with the code the catered lunches from Dos Toros and Luke’s Lobster were epic.
Karellen 5y ago
This line is likely inspired by the concept of "Fractal Wrongness": https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fractal_wrongness https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fractal_wrongness and 2012's "PHP: a fractal of bad design": https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

alfonsodev 5y ago

> So you are typing "Don't" and the ResetCursorPosition() function gets called and you look at the textbox and now it says "on'tD" I had this bug trying to implement a text editor using Draft.js but not sure it was for the same reason. I guess tumblr devs tried to implement a text editor and at the same time have some vim like shortcuts(jkl). This makes you appreciate how less can be more.

awiesenhofer 5y ago
That's what that was! I experienced this behavior for years writing posts or comments on facebooks mobile site, helped me a lot to wean myself of that one.
- alfonsodev 5y ago
  Thanks, indeed seems to have been raised on the Github repo. https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/issues/1077 https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/issues/1077
- SilasX 5y ago
  Yes! I had something like that and it was so frustrating I wrote a post (on FB, sigh) about it, looks like it was August 10. I had written a comment with multiple paragraphs (which I guess they don't expect people to do, or test for) and I wanted to add something to the next-to-last paragraph, and when I tried to type "matters" it would keep locking me in autocomplete tagging for friends name "Matthew", and as soon as I dismissed the cursor would leap to the end of the comment. If I tried to click back, the cursor kept jumping to the end!
MattKimber 5y ago
Javascript editors trying to reinvent desktop paradigms but without the 40-odd years of practice and having all the events arrive whenever they feel like is one of the most frequent irritations of web-based platforms for me, because you use a text editor so frequently and therefore encounter its problems similarly often. For example, earlier today I was editing a small internal app in Retool. I typed something, instinctively went for Cmd-Z, and it reverts a bunch of changes I made in the query I had open 5 minutes ago. Of course, by the time I spot it and hit Shift-Cmd-Z, the internal state has updated so now it redoes some other unrelated undo operation and I have two broken things to fix. And then of course there's Notion, the champion of "you've hit a keyboard shortcut and it's applied it to something halfway across the screen from the selection, or possibly just given up trying to do anything useful and deleted a few paragraphs of text at random". Perhaps they were pining for the outrageously janky experience that was attempting to make even the most innocuous of formatting changes in earlier versions of Word For Windows.

pitched 5y ago

That’s really nice of him to put together such a concise, well-described list of issues for them. Hopefully someone sees this and adds it to their issue tracker. It’s very rare to see anyone internal grab something from outside like that though.

bombcar 5y ago
There’s evidence in the list that they know about them and can’t seem to fix them. It’s likely a pile of bandaids and trying to fix one breaks another thing unrelated.
pjc50 5y ago
Bold of you to think Tumblr has an issue tracker or indeed any remaining technical staff...
germ 5y ago
Heads up, foone uses they/them pronouns. I love their write ups, I know whenever I see their posts on here to cozy up with a coffee because it's about to get fun.
- optimiz3 5y ago
  > they/them Is this to suggest a multiple personality disorder or belief in being a collective hive mind?
  - germ 5y ago
    No, it's a common way that non-binary people choose to be referred to that avoids gendered language. Although foone borg collective would be amazing.
    - optimiz3 5y ago
      Should be a different non-plural word, straight up confusing seeing it in writing.

nowherebeen 5y ago

I still can’t believe it was sold for $1 billion.

pjc50 5y ago
There were a huge number of users. It was only after it sold that Yahoo realised how many of them were using it for porn, which in retrospect should have been obvious: it's an image hosting site.
- evanelias 5y ago
  No, the percentage of porn content was actually relatively small at the time of the sale. Low to mid single digits if my memory is correct. During Tumblr's peak heyday (~9 months before the sale iirc), Tumblr's daily posting volume was around 1/5th the size of Twitter's at the time. Keeping in mind that Tumblr had no character limit and much greater multimedia support, the amount of content being posted on Tumblr was quite significant. It was a widely-used general-purpose social network / social publishing platform. Most major brands had a presence on Tumblr, and for a while it was extremely common to see a Tumblr icon on their sites right next to Facebook and Twitter icons. From my POV as an early engineer there, what went wrong was poor execution in response to many simultaneous existential threats: * Instagram succeeded at peeling off all the "just want to post photos on mobile" users, and also became the hit new thing with the teenage users * Pinterest succeeded at peeling off all the "just want to digital scrapbook" users * Although the porn percentage was relatively low at the time, it still scared advertisers * Difficulty fundraising / running low on money at particularly bad timing. Facebook's stock performed poorly for its first 15 months post-IPO, and this temporarily made fundraising difficult for existing social platforms... especially when growth was relatively flat (due to the first two bullets) and revenue was disappointing (due to third bullet). * Ever-growing tech debt. The early team was extremely solid, but very small relative to the amount of traffic, so we often had to creatively cut some corners. Later on, management didn't want to allocate staffing to fix existing things, and a lot of time was wasted on unrealistic big-bang rewrites that were abandoned. Meanwhile the hiring bar kept being lowered over time once the company was no longer a rocket ship. I left just before the Yahoo sale, as working at Tumblr had gone from my dream job to a stagnant grind during my tenure there. I later returned for another year in the late-stage Yahoo into early Verizon days, with idealistic hopes of helping to prevent a Vine-like fate, but let's just say that was a poor personal decision and leave it at that :)

nicoburns 5y ago

I hope someone reimplements tumblr as an open platform at some point. They got a lot right from a UX perspective.

httpsterio 5y ago
It's literally the UX that is wrong. Community and their content is why it's still a thing.
- mst 5y ago
  I think maybe OP was talking about the overall UI paradigm. The details are janky as all get out, certainly, but the concepts aren't bad at all.
nsv 5y ago
Kind of like what the mastodon/pleroma network is to Twitter?
drdeca 5y ago
There’s waterfall.social which has been made open source (Idr under which license. I think it might be AGPL?) Not sure whether that’s what you mean by “open platform”. It also has a number of nice features added compared to tumblr, like changing which blog of yours is the “main blog”, having a separate dashboard and following list for each blog in an account, a system to detect uncredited art-re-uploading, etc.
NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
The UX is designed from a user perspective, a lot right. The implementation is from a developers perspective mostly wrong.

smcl 5y ago

These hotkeys in websites are an utter curse. So many times I've started typing in Jira, then something weird happened that caused my keystrokes to be interpreted by the page instead of entered into a comment box ... then the ticket gets reopened, unassigned, etc.

shantnutiwari 5y ago
yeah, and bonus points if then you then spend 10 minutes trying to figure out what happened, and how to undo it
drcongo 5y ago
And most of them don't check to see if the user is also holding down a modifier key, thereby overriding your system keyboard shortcuts. Yes. I _am_ looking at you Google Spreadsheets.
- kps 5y ago
  Firefox used to not send those to the site js; I think that broke with the Quantum update. Just one of its thousand cuts.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    I'm sure that was a "bugfix" where someone complained that website required you to hit CTRL-Q to navigate or something and the browser was consuming the key. Have to make it work like Chrome.
Steltek 5y ago
(I feel like we jumped topics from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597895) JIRA's Search is far worse than the regular JIRA hotkeys. The Enter key will incorrectly tab-complete JQL just before executing the search. Meanwhile, the Tab key doesn't tab-complete and instead focuses the Search button (which lets you execute the uncorrupted JQL). You have to actively train yourself out of how everything else works just to avoid going insane. Well, that or use the mouse just to click Search (eww). Every ticket tracking system sucks. Trello was the closest thing to joy.

bitwize 5y ago

There's a reason why I call it "Fumblr". I've never experienced a hotkey conflict like this yet, but it's just so full of UI fails that the experience of posting something is rough and cumbersome, even before you get to the comically catastrophic fails like this.

notacoward 5y ago

When this was happening to me it turned out to be bad interaction with '@' followed by a punctuation mark. I can reproduce it at will right now. Something to do with name auto-completion, but once I knew how to avoid it I stopped debugging their code for free.

rmilk 5y ago
Same darn thing with Outlook. They added mentions, and now anytime you type @something it goes looking for that person. Examples of how this goes wrong: @10pm or when I type to send to a colleague in a language that has @var type syntax. Reply from MS was that there isn’t any way to turn off the mentions.

keeganjw 5y ago

This reminds me of when the spacebar stopped working in the YouTube search box. I thought my keyboard broke for a sec until I realized it worked just fine everywhere but YouTube. Then later I found out it wasn't just me... https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/10/22323716/youtube-search-bar-space-bug-safari-firefox-chrome https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/10/22323716/youtube-search-b...

greenyoda 5y ago
Interesting... I've seen spacebar not work in Flickr's search box too. It happens to me sporadically.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Spacebar fails to work in the PocketBook e-book reader search dialog, when using an attached Bluetooth keyboard. Rather than insert a space in the search term, it scrolls the document. The backspace key fails to work in Pocket when editing tags. Instead it's necessary to either use the <delete> key (if available), or to highlight and overwrite text to be replaced.

dbatten 5y ago

True story: One day, Windows wouldn't let me type the letter p. I was trying to log back in from the Windows lock screen. Typed my password, got it wrong. Typed it again, got it wrong. Eventually got locked out of my account, despite being extremely careful to type my password correctly. Went to IT and had them unlock my account... Went back to my PC and tried to log in again. Typed my password very carefully, letter by letter, watching each letter come up on screen as I went. When I went to type the letter p, nothing happened. I hit p repeatedly, nothing. I figured the switch for the p key on my keyboard had died or something, so I went to IT and got a new keyboard. Unplugged the old, plugged in the new. Still no p. OK, this is getting ridiculous. Clicked on accessibility tools and tried to use the on-screen keyboard to type in my password. _Still couldn't type the letter p, even with the on-screen keyboard._ Ended up having to hard reset the machine, and then everything was fine and dandy. Still have no idea what could have happened. It ended up being the last straw that pushed me to Ubuntu, and I've never looked back.

Intermernet 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOP_(code) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOP_(code)
- dEnigma 5y ago
  Okay, I've never thought of NOP as "no 'P'", so this caught me completely by surprise and made me laugh out loud.
  - lardolan 5y ago
    Same here. Thought about NOPE
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    Reminds me of the drinking game called the "Land of Nod", you go in a circle making claims like "you can live in the Land of Nod, but you can't die there" or "you can listen to Nirvana in the Land of Nod, but not Dave Grohl" and hand out penalties of two fingers of your pint every time someone makes a statement that doesn't fit the rule. The only advice you give them is "the clue is in the name". You can only play this game once with a particular group, but it's a good laugh.

octopoc 5y ago

Reminds me of how sometimes my developer workstation running Windows gets into a mode where it won’t type anything except emoji’s.

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago

I wonder if it's a bad interaction between one of this person's extensions and Tumblr. Presumably if this were a problem for everyone, new blot posts would have cratered and Tumblr's SRE would have been notified and any recent releases would have been rolled back. So I would assume this issue affects only a small fraction of users. Could be wrong but I guess we will see.

d--b 5y ago

Tldr; a guy is _really_ pissed off because of some bad feature in tumblr, and rants about it in a 25-tweet storm, some of them all caps…

Kuraj 5y ago

I don't know how many Polish people who owned a Radeon card in the 2000s are there on HN but I'm sure they can all relate :-) as the card software would overwrite the key combination used to type the letter "ć" and open the Catalyst Control Center instead. Argh!

marcosdumay 5y ago
I just don't remember what DOS game it was that had actions linked to all of CTRL, ALT and DEL. It were some actions that one wouldn't usually use together. I, as a bad gamer just didn't at all, but some people were able to put more commands per second there...
- maccard 5y ago
  I worked at a gaming event a while back, where the players were using hardware we had bought them to match what they had at home. One of them changed the crouch binding from Ctrl to alt (to use the thumb) and the default bindings for the keys on his moise were f1 through f4... He alt+f4'ed out of his competitive game in the middle of the round, twice, before we actually figured out what was wrong.
SSLy 5y ago
altgr-z still opens nvidia's bar instead of, you know, just typing ż. They're retards https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040329-00/?p=40003 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040329-00/?p=40...
numpad0 5y ago
Sometimes I wonder if there will come a day when everyone just switch to IME based inputs for all semantic text entries. "anthropomorphillistic" is "anth[tab][tab][tab]", "Здравствуйте" is "zdravstvuyte[space]", "豚骨醤油" is "tonkotsusshouyu[space]" and so on. In IME off state input reverts to US. It might lead to a dystopia where typing o-r-a-n-g-e somehow yields "a bright spectrum at dusk" but that's an issue for a separate discussion.
- 5y ago

uxp100 5y ago

Another fun day a year or two ago on Tumblr involved the old classic top-posting vs bottom-posting debate. I don't remember the details precisely, but it was something like this: They switched the default from one to the other one day, so that mid day your replies started being top posted. And so you got that wonderful mix of top and bottom posting. Then they fixed it, and so you could have a thread that had just top posting in the middle. Neato. Thanks Tumblr.

pram 5y ago
You just reminded me that if a Tumblr conversation went on long enough the quotes became smaller, pushed out of the div to the right. Literally unreadable lol

aembleton 5y ago

Threadreader link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1440014690831126528.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1440014690831126528.html

account42 5y ago

> the same site that then fixed that bug and forced all blog descriptions to be utf-8, but then implemented size limits as a number of bytes. > so they truncated mid-utf-8 character, which made parsing the XML A REAL FUN TASK LET ME TELL YOU How is this a problem unless you do UTF-8 validation when parsing the XML, in which case stop doing that for data you don't control.

JimDabell 5y ago
If you truncate a UTF-8 string mid-character, then can’t that sequence swallow the next byte, such as <, which would break XML parsing completely?
- toast0 5y ago
  No, UTF-8 is self synchronizing... The first byte of a code point is clearly the first byte of a code point, so it's possible to tell that there was a truncated code point, as long as the next one starts correctly (if you lost two bytes in a row, you might get a mashed up code point, but that's a different loss scenario)
- _moof 5y ago
  UTF-8 encoding works like so: 0xxxxxxx 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx ...where the "x" bits encode the code point. So if you're halfway through a four-byte sequence and see a byte like 0xxxxxxx, you know something's wrong.
Joker_vD 5y ago
Right, Postel's law: validating the data you receive reduces the interoperability, so don't do that.
torstenvl 5y ago
if (c & 0b10000000) continue;

mproud 5y ago

“I could refresh my browser page, or I could write a bunch of stuff about it on Twitter!”

phreack 5y ago

> god I love tumblr. it's one of the best social networks on the internet because it's just a complete fractal dumpster fire Couldn't agree more. Everything is just so awful I can't even imagine the staff turning it into some boring Twitter like dumpster fire all about sucking up to celebrities. They have chronological post order by default, that makes it instantly better than nearly all other social networks. It's unsalvageable and due to that, an accidental refuge from the current mess of the Internet.

Arch-TK 5y ago

This entire thread reminds me of all the issues I had programming in Clarion 8. I could write an equivalently long thread about clarion if I still remembered half the issues. What's scarier is that at some point Clarion got support to publish software as websites... Maybe Tumblr is written in clarion.

not1ofU 5y ago

The full thread is the most epic rant I've ever read, and I am not even finished yet... It so good, <strike>I am going to go and check every response to each of the ops tweets after I do finish it.<strike> - apparently I need a twitter account for this. Edit: Currently I am here: "and my favorite part of this is that every time tumblr has fucked up and created some weird bug, the user base almost immediately weaponizes it."

black_puppydog 5y ago

I feel like in a thread like this, Asana deserves a shout-out for utterly fucking up the UX in any firefox version I've tried, up to and including nightly. Typing in the various text input fields has ~1s of lag. It's a TEXT FIELD for fuck's sake!

shrimp_emoji 5y ago
JS bby
- seph-reed 5y ago
  I could do this with any language. It's just bad code.
  - black_puppydog 5y ago
    just seems to happen more often in JS... :|
    - seph-reed 5y ago
      It's an entry level programming language with unprecedented ease of publishing and access. It would be extremely impressive if it didn't.
      - black_puppydog 5y ago
        Well then we agree I guess... I'm not impressed. :D
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      If you were writing pure JS you'd probably need to intentionally delay text entry with setTimeout/etc to achieve this effect - I don't think you can achieve this outcome by accident. The problem is that the front-end ecosystem encourages pulling in megabytes of third-party crap for every little thing (including poorly reinventing existing browser functionality) and the result is that some interaction between all that mess causes an entire page redraw upon every keystroke or similar.

shreyshnaccount 5y ago

can we go back to when Javascript wasn't used in EVERYTHING please

subpixel 5y ago

My personal pet peeve is what every Squarespace-powered site on the internet (many millions!) does to the esc key. Example: https://www.folioeast.com/ https://www.folioeast.com/ I never realized how often I use the esc key until I started getting routed to Squarespace logins all over the place.

athorax 5y ago
Oh. My. God. I have been wondering why when I come back to my PC after it being asleep I've been on random squarespace login pages. I usually tap esc a couple of times to wake up my computer.
- macintux 5y ago
  I learned years ago to use as “safe” a key as possible to wake up my computer, so I settled on Control. Wish I could remember what led me to that decision.
  - recursive 5y ago
    I do the same thing. It's right on the corner. And alt frequently activates a menu.
  - icoder 5y ago
    I use caps lock, apart from being safe it also gives a bit of feedback in the form of the light going on/off even before the conplete wakeup.
    - gpm 5y ago
      I've also discovered that capslock is a useful way of detecting (linux) kernel panics. If everything freezes, and capslock stops toggling that light, your kernel is dead.
      - smichel17 5y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

junon 5y ago

Side note, @foone is a great account to follow on Twitter if you're looking for weird Hardware hacks and commentary on tech.

vultour 5y ago
They have like 500 tweets just in the past day. I don't use Twitter, but doesn't that completely drown out your feed? How do you follow someone who's posting every few minutes?
- fknorangesite 5y ago
  They're arranged in threads. You just scroll up to the top of the thread you want to read.
superasn 5y ago
And ironically @foone hates Hacker news with a passion(1) for some reason and yet these threads make the front page of HN every 3 months or so! (1) https://twitter.com/foone/status/1310432709273989120?lang=en https://twitter.com/foone/status/1310432709273989120?lang=en
- fknorangesite 5y ago
  > @foone hates Hacker news with a passion(1) for some reason Here's their most recent thread (in response to this post) on why: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1440703149585563652 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1440703149585563652

efdee 5y ago

A long, long time ago, I "broke" my dad's MS Works word processor. The D key just stopped working. Turns out that, during my fiddling around, I had created a macro that did nothing and had 'D' as a hotkey. It was the first time ever that I had "broken the computer".

asdff 5y ago
gui needs a log just like the cli and it should have happened 30 years ago
egoisticalgoat 5y ago
That's something I discovered the other day on my pc. At some point during the last year or so, I accidentally assigned a macro to the C key that did nothing but press the C key, so it was pretty much impossible to notice during normal use, except that holding it down behaved out of the ordinary.

haddr 5y ago

Another weird thing: some programs like to capture key combinations that are used to input some diacritics. It is exceptionally bad when it’s a mouse driver, and even worse when it happens on your company laptop where you have no admin rights to remove it…

haddr 5y ago
One more funny story: we used to have some weird errors from time to time, when someone accidentally committed code with some letter L placed randomly in the code. We soon happened that it was a result of people blocking windows machine (win L), when somehow the letter L got propagated to the IDE running under Linux in VirtualBox. Yeah, we used Linux on top of Windows machines back then…

handsarebags 5y ago

Feel for op ;D Appreciate the description “fractally broken“. oh dear :) Has a similar predicament[1] (though completely different cause); felt very uncivilised copy and pasting the character I wanted from the internet… Still wondering what the most elegant way I could have gotten that character, especially if I didn’t have internet access. Scroll through random files? Perhaps I might’ve known a little about ASCII and tried converting a few numbers to characters till I found the character I wanted. At the time I did not, and was thankful the internet provided the character I needed. Still feel like I got away with something and would have been stumped without that… :) [1] http://www.bagsend.net/posts/best_problem.html http://www.bagsend.net/posts/best_problem.html

sfteus 5y ago

Somewhat related, Teams on Ubuntu recently has stopped letting me use the left/right arrows to navigate around a message I've written. However, shift + arrow or control + arrow still work fine. Haven't had a chance to dig into why, but it's been mildly amusing.

notwhereyouare 5y ago
I just noticed this today on my windows. They probably pushed out a change to the underlying web interface that broke stuff

adamrezich 5y ago

say what you will about tumblr's UI/UX, I'm still a bit shocked that Twitter never copied their "hold down mouse click/finger tap on reblog button to immediately reblog without adding commentary" feature. years ago when I still used tumblr I found that particular feature to be groundbreaking on par with pull-to-refresh.

NaturalPhallacy 5y ago

>this is the site which used to let you figure out who sent you anonymous questions because you could block anonymous users, and that user would then appear in their uncensored name in your blocklist. >They fixed this by completely changing how anonymous blocking worked, so that it worked by IP address instead of by username, but for a while that information was exposed to the user >which meant if someone sent you an anonymous question you could block them and then find out their IP address lmao! What a dumpster fire. I'm glad I never used it for anything remotely serious and exclusively consumed content second-site by people who actually went to tumblr.com.

spaztastical 5y ago

That is an amazing thread. Thank you for posting it.

10GBps 5y ago

Reminds of of reddit. Man that text edit box is so dysfunctional. Sometimes you type and nothing happens. Sometimes typing will start selecting random stuff on the page, hiding comments, saving some, and other weird stuff. Cut and paste is a 100% gamble. Random keys won't work some times. Sometimes you post a comment and only half shows up or other weird things. It's really bizarre and I think has to do with some sort of logging/spyware they run on the site.

TonyTrapp 5y ago

I really wish websites would stop using single-letter hotkeys. I regularly accidentally mute people on Twitter because the mute hotkey is in the position where my fingers naturally rest when using a trackpoint for scrolling. I think there was a guidelines (from W3C or WHATWG probably) that such hotkeys should not be used or at least should be turned off by default, but I guess noone sticks to those recommendations these days.

avnigo 5y ago

The missing 'e' is definitely on brand, at least!

nonsince 5y ago

Can we please stop posting Foone to HN? They’ve stated multiple times that they don’t want to be posted here and every time they end up posted they complain and ask for it to be taken down.

masswerk 5y ago

BTW, for an ironic twist, as this is posted on Twitter: On Safari/macOS, you can't refocus on a Tweet by clicking anymore (if not signed-in already), as this inevitably brings up a sign-in dialog, which resets the view selection in the same instant. As this is not the case with other browsers, I guess, it's not the intended behavior. However, as it has been so for a while now, Twitter seems to be happy with this.