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That's... a shocking level of lack of professionalism. I mean, as a software developer, when someone tells you to implement something, do you do it just based on the notes you took while your project manager discussed the task with you, or do you read the actual Jira ticket and use the information you (hopefully) find there? And we're (mostly) not writing software that handles nuclear waste...

Something to consider is that in a secure environment like LANL, and especially for a non-standard or one-off process, it's likely that there is no computer system that everyone has access to with all the information.

It would not be unusual for the person being told to write the process document to be brought into a room with a notebook, be shown written or electronic materials in the room, take notes in a provided notebook, have that notebook be handed over after the meeting for a (non-technical) security review, then receive the notebook pages some days/weeks later and have those notes be what is used to develop the document. Security culture is good for security but bad for error-free processes involving people.


Very often the notes contain a lot more information than the ticket. Tickets are often written by people who barely understand the problem.

And from the state of note-taking and summarizer bots on audioconferences it's going to become potentially worse. The number of times I've had to correct negations in the results of several of those applications in the last year or so... to add to annoyance of either sifting through the emmms and errrr, or through the summarizers' annoying tone...

Thanks for highlighting that, I missed that in the video and was wondering why "anorganic" should be something different than "inorganic" (in my native German it's "anorganisch").

But still, I'm a bit alarmed that a trained nuclear technician would simply follow these instructions and mix organic material with acid without having any second thoughts about it...


I think it's worth remembering that this was a storage procedure that was also already abnormal/odd because of the specifics of the existing shielding. I think it's somewhat understandable for a technician to trust that the chemists know what they're doing in that kind of circumstance. If they had concerns, they may have even voiced them, but as is often the case, if the authority confirms that even though it's strange it's correct, it's not surprising that a technician would follow the directive. Even the authority figure may have verbally confirmed, "you said an organic absorbent??" "Yes, that's right, inorganic absorbent." Maybe even in a meeting that was meant to clarify written procedures.

Yeah, that's the HN "anti-clickbait" feature that (amongst others) removes the "How" from titles like "How we managed to run Doom on a mechanical typewriter", but in this case it doesn't make sense at all...

If anything, it made it more clickbait-y due to being an unusual title.

Yes, it's imperfect that way.

How does removing the word "how" make a title less of a clickbait?

"I made 40,000 dollars in a week with one simple trick" is exactly as bad as "How I made 40,000 dollars in a week with one simple trick"


It removes repetition and imitation. To avoid a frontpage list full of "why I rewrote ___ in rust" , ,"how I use rust for filing my taxes", "how I switched from braille to rust"

I sort of get it, but overall I still get the impression this particular filter is hurting more than it helps.

Samba was written …instead of vibe-coded. ;)

There should be luminaries to whom this does not apply, and tridge is certainly among that small pantheon.

I would say in this case it makes it enigmatic.

Yeah, and like many engineering marvels, it was instantly misused for purposes its creators didn't intend and became a scourge on humanity (looking at you NodeJS & co).

> The only way it really fell short is in the way that a lot of people were predicting that it would become a sort of total replacement for JS+HTML+CSS for building web apps.

I for one hope that doesn't happen anytime soon. YouTube or Spotify could theoretically switch to Wasm drawing to a canvas right now (with a lot of development effort), but that would make the things that are currently possible thanks to the DOM (scraping, ad blockers etc.) harder or impossible.


> DOM (scraping, ad blockers etc.) harder or impossible.

This is a cat mouse fight, and Facebook already does some ultra-shady stuff like rendering a word as a list of randomly ordered divs for each character, and only using CSS to display in a readable way.

But it can't be made impossible, at the worst case we can always just capture the screen and use an AI to recognize ads, wasting a lot of energy. The same is true for cheating in video games and many forms of online integrity problems - I can just hire a good player who would play in my place, and no technology could recognize that.


> ultra-shady stuff like rendering a word as a list of randomly ordered divs for each character, and only using CSS to display in a readable way.

I wonder how much the developers writing that are being paid to be complete assholes.


I can't speak for FB. But I know a local (non-US) real estate company which does crap like this (they also love to disable right click and detect when browser tools are open and programmatically close the tab/page when that happens), and they're not paying much. I'm guessing it's double of minimum wage, which isn't high here.

Knowing what total comp is like for those companies, I'm sure Facebook more than exceeded the price one might put on ethics.

I've personally resigned from positions for less and it hasn't cost me much comfort in life (maybe some career progression perhaps but, meh).


Shouldn't this kind of thing be illegal as a matter of accessibility?

Can you link to the law you're talking about?

I'm not making a legal argument.

If someone else would like to make one, though, I'd be happy to read it.


Since this is about something nobody wants to see (ads) my guess would be that it might be legal here.

Shouldn't this kind of thing be illegal

I'm not making a legal argument.

Why would someone else make a legal argument for you? You're the one saying it should be illegal.


They say that they feel like it should be illegal. And you ask for the corresponding law, calling it a legal argument...

Can you genuinely not see the disconnect here?


> no technology could recognize that.

Perhaps require monitoring of the arm muscle electrical signals, build a profile, match the readings to the game actions and check that the profile matches the advertised player


I think that's hilarious. Can you point me to some documentation on that? Such as why they'd do it?

(To make scraping and automation harder, perhaps?)


I suspect this will be coming soon. For ad-driven companies, having an opaque deployment which would prevent ad-blockers would be ideal.

However ads still need to be delivered over the net so there is still some way to block them (without resorting to router/firewall level blocking).


They'd be raked over the coals for the lack of accessibility, I hope.

That's like the mafia being raked over the coals for not having accessibility ramps for wheelchairs in their clandestine distilleries.

Not gonna happen.


You are probably right. What will happen is that ad-blocker people will indirectly kill accessibility. That would make a lot of sense in this world. Its a reoccuring pattern. Spam killed a part of accessibility indirectly via CAPTCHA. And "it is my god-given right to block ads of free services I use" people will indirectly finally kill accessibility for good, now that we have <canvas>.

Add Accessibility to that list. Morally speaking, it is likely more important then scraping and ad-blockers.

Yes, however I reject the idea that a full WASM app would be strictly worse for accessibility in the long term. Native UI frameworks do have accessibility APIs and browsers could implement something similar.

I see it as an opportunity to do better.


So far, huge rewrites/rearchitecturings typically worsened the end user experience from an a11y POV. I even know people personally who have lost their job of 20 years because their employer decided to redo their IT, "accidentally" leaving the disabled employee behind. It is naiv to think a big rewrite will NOT make things much worse for years.

>>possible thanks to the DOM (scraping, ad blockers etc.) harder or impossible.

lol, you can scrape anything visible on your screen.


multiple web apps already work by rendering all to canvas - for example Google Docs and O365

The technology itself hasn't changed, but almost everything else (owner, headcount, moderation, userbase etc. etc., not to mention the name of course) has changed dramatically...

But most/all of those don't matter to the users -- the actual user experience is still largely the same.

Yeah... it's a bit unclear to me what hardware this was even supposed to run on? The home and arcade video games Atari was producing at the time (Pong and later Breakout) were based on discrete logic chips, so weren't "programmable" in any modern sense of the word. As you wrote, the 6502 was only introduced later in 1975, and designs using it came even later.

Sometimes you need an animation to turn your site into a special snowflake of a site, and what better way to do that than to use a snowflake animation? TBF, you can turn it off by clicking on the snowflake icon in the top right corner. But then the background turns from blue into an annoying shade of yellow. Ok, you can click on the sun icon to fix it by switching to night mode. But then... aaaaargh!

It seems like the author went out of their way to prove they can make an even worse UI than Apple. I suspect they succeeded.

This is exactly my thoughts. If you are reading this, author, please either make the snowflakes less distracting or toggleable. They are a pain on mobile.

> author, please either make the snowflakes less distracting or toggleable

They already did, as the grandparent comment already explained:

>> TBF, you can turn it off by clicking on the snowflake icon in the top right corner.


Did you see what happens when you do? I wouldn’t say it improves readability.

Yup: all the animation stops, the overlaid snowflakes disappear, and the background changes from blue to yellow. I haven't bothered to check the foreground/background contrast of the two versions, but I suspect that, although the yellow version will have less contrast, the removal of the snowflakes will make for a net benefit to readability for the average person.

Button doesn't do anything for me.

This is the biggest mistake, imo. The snowflakes should disappear immediately...

>Ok, you can click on the sun icon to fix it by switching to night mode, but then... aaaaargh!

TBF, I felt so perfectly trolled with this one I couldn't help but chuckle... :)


I genuinely went looking for an "off" button, and was very confused when the snowflake icon changed the background color instead. I didn't even notice that the snow stops being generated until I read your comment and tried again. I'm both impressed and annoyed.

> Sometimes you need an animation to turn your site into a special snowflake of a site, and what better way to do that than to use a snowflake animation?

<blink>


The dark mode action got an audible chuckle out of me.

The site has a history of trolling people, it used to be the cursor background.

Also do check his privacy policy https://tonsky.me/personal-information/


Additionally, in the good/bad old days of using StackOverflow, maybe 10% of the answers actually explained how that thing you wanted to do actually worked, the rest just dumped some code on you and left you to figure it out by yourself, or more likely just copy & paste it and be happy when it worked (if you were lucky)...

When O'Leary accuses others of "scamming and ripping off unsuspecting consumers", what he really means is that only Ryanair should have the right to scam and rip off Ryanair passengers...


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