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.
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.
At a job I worked at, we had servers that were given several internal IP addresses to map to external IP addresses.
One day, one machine just ... stopped having a bunch of those IP addresses. They were just gone.
We didn't understand, troubleshot as much as we could, and eventually just gave up and went "forget it, just try restarting the machine."
It worked.
It's amazing what weird states a computer can get into that "did you try turning it off and on again?" is a very real and legitimate and helpful piece of advice.
Well, bit flips happen all the time, and we call that "cosmic rays". It is not obvious that bit flips from cosmic rays in the more usual sense of "cosmic rays" happen all the time.
That's actually testable and determinable from several perspetives.
- Isolate any other sources of ionising radiation.
- Check to see if prevalence increases or decreases with increased or decreased cosmic ray exposure (atitude, shielding, detected cosmic ray storms).
- Are the characteristics those of single-bit flips? (E.g., power-of-two changes to values, or similar.)
- Are the errors nott repeated for the same hardware component. (E.g., under increased cosmic-ray influence, bits flip at an increased rate, as predicted, but which bits flip is random and has no detectable pattern, as predicted.)
You end up with very strong circumstantial evidence of altered bits due to cosmic ray influence.
You can get into a similar state on MacOS by pressing a key multiple times in a row (option I think). It just quietly disables a large number of keys. I figured it out by accident one day because I assigned the key as my "push to talk" on Discord. That was a fun hour trying to figure out what had happened.
On MacOS if you remap your capslock to control there is a race condition on the login screen. If you use the control/capslock key to wake up your laptop and manage to time it right, you can enable capslock but not have a way to disable it (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?)).
Funny, I just had a version of this happen to me this morning on iPad OS using a folio keyboard.
I had just upgraded to iPadOS 15 and the caps-lock-as-control setting reverted to the default. I went into settings and changed it back, but I did so with caps lock accidentially enabled.
This left the folio keyboard stuck in caps lock. I had to go back into settings, set caps lock back to caps lock, press the caps lock key to disable, then I could make it a control key. But trickily, the setting change didn't seem to take effect until I swiped out of the screen where you change that setting.
Dunno, but in my country we use a QWERTZ layout where you can't write the letters Ě, Š, Č, Ř, Ž, Ý Á, Í, É without caps lock, because with Shift those keys produce 2, 3, 4, ..., 0
It was useful on some old machines that tended to prefer uppercase input. On typewriters, the shift lock key (which is slightly different) tended to be used when people wanted to add emphasis to a word or phrase.
As for modern computers, it is less useful. When one of the keyswitches on my keyboard failed, I replaced it with the keyswitch from the capslock since I figured it was the one key I was guaranteed to never use.
Capslock exists to make typing in allcaps easy. I use it most when I'm in a C project with lots of macros. I use it about as often as I use ten-key -- just enough to justify its existence, not enough to find alternatives in every os/editor/browser/etc that I use.
Sometimes I use caps lock for its intended purpose. Probably not nearly enough to justify its existence as a physical key that takes up space, but at least a little.
This is a rabbit hole that I followed as well. There's some good articles if you search for it.
Auto doesn't make total sense to me, but it seems originally the Romans had only the letters we know as capitals, and none of the extra characters like semicolon.
IIRC sometime in the middle ages lower case letters were added, but it's not clear to me why and how it ended up getting a bunch of different rules (eg German capitalises nouns but in English it's only proper nouns).
There are also theories out there about why our names appear in all-caps on government documents, relating to the concept of treating an individual as a 'corporation'.
Yeah, back when I was using Windows, I had RAlt mapped to Compose with WinCompose, and RAlt would get stuck occasionally when the system was under significant load, so I’d need to manually disable WinCompose, tap RAlt to clear its spurious down state, and then enable WinCompose again.
> (unless you remapped another key to capslock (why?))
When I first started doing caps-lock-to-control, I mapped my physical control key to caps lock. Eventually, I stopped bothering and kept it as control.
I'm using Caps Lock key to switch between input languages, but I can still use the caps lock mode by pressing Shift + Caps Lock. This is macOS built-in functionality.
How would you remap the capslock key without using a hotkeys-like setup, such as Karabiner? I looked for a long time for a way to do that and couldn't figure it out.
Windows 10 has this funny bug where sometimes for some reason your individual windows don't get focus any more. You can click at their title bar, and they'll be drawn as-if they have focus (darker shadow and foreground titlebar), but no window actually accepts or processes any user input (while updating normally in the background, and also redrawing). The only way I know how to fix this is to go into the Ctrl+Alt+Delete screen; just bringing up task manager doesn't change anything.
It sounds like you've installed some sort of app with a low level keyboard hook that's discarding the input. The login screen is in a separate desktop and not subject to such meddling. If it was an accessibility tool it might be able to hook into the login screen, I forget.
Alt+Tab (switch between open programs) - might help change the focus
Windows 10 has an advanced version of ^ as I understand, which uses the key combo: Win + Tab. The cycle of these commands can be reversed by adding "shift" to the mix (in case of many open programs / windows and you dont want to cycle through all of them)
Win+x has different, but equally useful menus for win 8 / win 10 - I was overjoyed when i first discovered this, as it retired many many other shortcuts I used over the years. (to get to device manager / control panel / event viewer)
and if all else fails: Alt+F4 - closes active (focused) program / window. If no programs or windows are in focus, then it will bring up the "shut down" dialog box, which allows for reboot / signout / shutdown / Switch user / sleep and hibernation if its enabled.
MacOS has had a similar issue as far back as 10.7. In 10.6 and before if you see a window with red, green, and yellow buttons in the corner, that window has focus, period. It was an enforced invariant.
In later versions it's pretty common to see such windows that don't actually have focus. Clicking again on the title bar usually fixes the problem but I find it very annoying. There's a race condition in the system somewhere that Apple doesn't recognize as a bug.
Could you have something running with an invisible window, e.g. keylogger? Less scrupulous friends from way back used to talk about writing such things.
The reason why this will fix it is because Ctrl+Alt+Delete has a higher level of system interrupt than alternate ways to get to task manager. Ctrl+Alt+Delete fixes a surprising number of issues by interrupting runaway issues.
My favourite W10 bug is that if I maximise an Office window and then try to close it by mashing the mouse right into the top right corner, it actually clicks past and closes whatever window is underneath.
Button presses are often handled by state machines at a driver level so that a single “press” only registers as a single press. Otherwise, it will register as a lot of presses because the physical switches bounce on contact. They call this debouncing. Probably, a drivers state machine did not transition out
Same generic keyboard debouncing in use in all 3 instances on the windows end? I know windows drivers debounce mouse clicks because I had a really old mouse that would double and triple click by accident on Linux but not in windows. I might be wrong, but changing the device might not affect it if the different devices are handled by shared runtime code
Sounds like a reasonable explanation for physical keyboards—if the new keyboard used by the OP was identical to the keyboard on their machine, I can see how Windows might reuse the same device driver instance since it has already been loaded into memory.
But what about the on-screen keyboard? Do on-screen key presses get routed through the keyboard device driver too?
So fingers bounce when they touch a screen? I wrote a capacitive touch driver once back in uni and we debounced that. I don’t know how windows does it, I’m speculating
It wouldn't be the same debouncer, keyboard input is usually debounced before it reaches the OS, let alone whatever windowing system that an on screen keyboard sends events to.
Pretty sure this would be done at the hardware level, as otherwise this behavior would differ between the BIOS, Windows, Linux & Mac. As far as I know no such debouncing code exists in operating systems for HID keyboards.
I have actually seen this before. It wasn't the P key; it was a different key. X or C, I think. However, the symptoms otherwise seem to match. I don't remember if we tried a second keyboard, but we definitely tried the on-screen keyboard and were confused when it, too, didn't work.
The only things we could guess were something related to the Windows Search, Cortana, or telemetry services. Unfortunately, it's been since the early days of Win10 since that happened so I don't remember any other details. We also had to physically restart the system to fix the problem.
I've been having bizarrely similar issues with my XPS lately, except that none of the keys work except the i key, even with the on-screen keyboard. Only happens once in a blue moon, but as in your case, requires a hard reset.
Wow, I'd nearly forgotten about this. The exact same thing happened to my sister-in-law a few years ago when she visited with her Windows 10 laptop and couldn't connect to our wifi.
Eventually we figured out the 'p' (or maybe it was 'n'? Can't remember for sure.) in the password was getting skipped, but it was hard to tell with the password masking. Tried a USB keyboard, onscreen keyboard, same thing. I think we might have given up and let her use one of our computers at that point. It was (and still is) very confusing.
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.
I use Control as well, and it was an adaptation to prevent typing spaces or letters into the password field that I would have to delete before typing in my password. Perhaps you had a similar experience.
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.
I use control. It's neutral to password entry on Windows and Linux lock screens, and either neutral or an escape key from a VM back to the main desktop.
> 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.
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!
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.
I would hate to type my language in English letters. Which English letter do I use for ח? How about ע? What about needing to add a צירי to a letter? How about the occasional RLM mark?
And forget about the technical aspects, the cultural aspects of suggesting to use a foreign alphabet to write in one's native language is insulting. This is a technique often used by conquerors, just ask any southern ex-Soviet state. Even if the Japanese have accepted it due to technical limitations.
That's why Ctrl+Alt hotkeys should be avoided completely. Someone hasn't told Jetbrains, though, and as a user of US International I run into a fair number of weird issues due to that.
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...
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.
Wait you mean the GeForce Experience overlay? I must have reassigned that right after installation so I didn't remember. But at least this one warrants having a hotkey in the first place!
I've reassigned it to Ctrl+Shift+Alt+] because that is one of the key combinations I'll never press accidentally... or intentionally, for what it matters: what do I need this overaly for anyway? Also, it's also somehow easily memorizable, after all, I still remember it after 4 years since I've bought my NVidia graphics card.
While I agree that the specific hotkey used for the overlay is unfortunate,
> what do I need this overaly for anyway?
The overlay allows you to access a number of functions in games, much like the Xbox overlay. You can turn it off entirely if you don't need it, but otherwise the global hotkey is an integral part of it, because it's the only way to invoke it.
Contrast that with Catalyst Control Center which was a regular windowed application that you usually opened when performing first-time setup and then never needed to fiddle with those settings again. And it had a global hotkey AND a context menu shell extension, which took a couple seconds to load every time you right-clicked the desktop. It was insane. Loosely quoting Raymond Chen - noone ever got promoted for _stopping_ a feature from shipping.
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...
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.
> Fractally wrong people are often immune to the stopped clock rule because they are not exactly stopped clocks. More like clocks losing a random number of seconds a day, in the wrong time zone of the wrong planet, in the wrong solar system.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Since a few years ago ruining text fields seems to be a rite of passage for front-end developers. I echo the Asana issue and I also noticed Slab (some kind of Notion alternative) both managed to make text lag.
Asana uses ProseMirror and Slab uses QuillJS, and neither of them lag by default if you look at the standalone libraries.. so :shrug:
If you have free time, I'd pop open Chrome Dev Tools, run a performance monitor on both and try to diff out what each of those products do that cause the additional input lag (if there's no code obfuscation).
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.
To be fair to authors of those third-party libraries, some of the blame has to do with browser quirks, and for a rich text editor, bugs in the implementation of content-editable that have to be normalized across all browsers (unless you pull the engineering-heavy route of rewriting everything in canvas).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gitlab is another culprit for this and their UI/UX is growing to be as awful as every other complex enterprise tool on the market.
The search/filter box on the MR and Issues list has the appearance of accepting free input, but what you need to do is use some ridiculous no-code query UI to click your way to a valid query.
I can't type 'author: xxx' into the field, because that will tell me that searching that way is unsupported (so why let me do it?). Instead, I have to start typing, select the word 'author', then another box will appear and I have to select '=' in it, and then a third box will materialise where I can search for a username. At this stage, it's basically a coin toss as to whether you get the desired input or the whole form breaks and you have to start again. Someone, somewhere, thought this was more intuitive than parsing a string or offering some predefined filters.
It's out-of-band signaling which eliminates the ambiguity between searching for "author=" and searching for an author. It's still probably bad user experience. I'm not sure if it's justifiable, given how GitHub code search mostly ignores punctuation (whuch I hate too), whereas GitLab seems more literal.
It's easy enough for me to try to load a Jira page, start typing something on the search field before the page is fully loaded, which causes all keystrokes to be interpreted as shortcuts. With obviously funny results. It is not uncommon for users in our project to suddenly select all the issues in the product, and assign all of them to themselves by accident (which, unlike delete, shows no confirmation whatsoever).
Above a certain level of complexity, Jira is the best work tracking and managing solution I've worked with.
Its curse, is its developed by Atlassian. A company that was capable of buying Stash, and, somehow, somewhat, turned that codebase into what we now know as bitbucket.
Other way around. They made Stash in house, they bought BitBucket, and rebranded Stash as BitBucket Server. The BB acquisition happened before Stash was released but Stash was not an acquisition.
I was of the impression that they bought Stash, renamed it to Bitbucket Server, and stopped development, while slowly attempting to reimplement stash code into Bitbucket cloud, one feature at a time?
When BitBucket was acquired they were cloud only, and when Stash launched it was on-prem only. We used Stash and BitBucket Cloud around that time at the place I was working and I can definitely tell you that on-prem Stash was definitely not a reskinned on-prem BitBucket Cloud; for one I’m pretty sure BitBucket Cloud was written in Python (Django) and Stash was a typical Atlassian Java product.
If your org needs that much complexity it probably is at a point that the time and money wasted waiting for Jira todo things is probably small in comparison to the rest of the wasted efficiency.
The main issue with Jira is it allows you to build far, far too complicated workflows. And Jira + someone who believes in job security via complexity and obfuscation can be a horrific combination.
The best part of Jira is because it is so flexible, no matter how your process slightly deviates from a basic trello-like board, you should be able to make one or two adjustments in JIRA and have it reflect that.
That's not true of literally any other workflow piece of software I've used, and I've used a ton.
That said, because all the other types of workflow management software I've used are significantly more opinionated and limited, they also limit how bad of a process a bad project administrator can create in them as well.
Jira somehow manages to perfectly capture the soupy grottiness of a hangover with its user experience. The cloud edition especially is like swimming in treacle, there's just so many little glitches and random bouts of sluggishness it feels like you're dealing with a quick proof of concept someone wrote when they were drunk one afternoon, not the polished product of a billion-dollar juggernaut.
So many times I've started typing in bash, and then realised that my focus has been on a website instead, which starts doing some ridiculous stuff in response. There's no way to discover hotkey functionality otherwise, of course, because "thou shalt not discover" is a modern UX guideline.
Peak usability was when chrome started hiding zoom buttons for PDFs. I remember at one point to increase the size of a pdf there was no visual indication at all. You had to stumble upon the buttons on the bottom
right of the page and they would magically appear.
Ever since then designers have decided that looking cool is better than being easy to use and it’s been shit.
They have rather more docs than you'd expect, the big problem seems to be that nobody expects them to have useful documentation so it often doesn't occur to us to look - hence why I figured it was worth posting it for people who didn't know about it yet.
An interesting disconnect to me is that I thought you were referring to generic websites, not ones that you can actually add/do stuff in. Contrast a site like "Youtube" where you usually just passively consumer (and indeed it DOES have a shortcut list viewed by typing '?') and something like jira where users are expected to be somewhat familiar and doing lots of things
Like I say, the big problem here is 'realising that googling "$site keyboard shortcuts" actually has a point in the first place' - hence why I tell people about '?' any time I think it might be useful :D
>The same way you know you can run any command with `--help`.
Not really though. Some command in the distant past once told me that I need to type /? to use the correct parameters. And then another one told me that /? is invalid, I need to type --help for help. And thus, I was aware. Contrast this with youtube, which I use for 10+ years now, where I have 500+ videos sorted into playlists, and I even know some shortcuts - discovered mostly by accident - and never once saw the "?" help page, until I read this hacker news thread.
Github has (or maybe had) some hotkey that not only opens a clunky browser-based text editor, but also forks the repo under your account. Then you have to go back and manually delete the repo that you didn't intend to fork. Ugh!
Also a lot of web-based code editors override the standard Ctrl/Cmd-L shortcut ("go to URL bar") to mean "go to line". It's nice having IDE-like affordances, I guess, but not when it interferes with the basic functionality of the browser.
I feel like the modern web is an exercise in adversarial UX. I am constantly fighting with it to get it to stop doing - and pardon my Anglo-Saxon here but I think it's warranted - obnoxious bullshit. Hotkeys, pop-ups (er, sorry, modals), text fields with paste disabled, login walls and other dark patterns... just let me use your website!
I get why the hotkey scourge came about, because folks are trying to build apps on a platform that isn't actually a platform. Browsers provide some but not all of the facilities of a real operating system (I'm using "operating system" here in the larger sense of "an integrated software platform that includes a complete toolbox a la Windows, macOS, etc."), so everyone's forced to reinvent square wheels. But understanding it doesn't make the experience as a user any less painful. And although I very much prefer to be able to work from the keyboard whenever possible, hotkeys as they exist on the web today ain't it. They're inconsistent, undiscoverable, and aren't integrated with fundamental UX principles like "don't destroy the user's work" and "let the user recover from mistakes."
The infuriating part of this is, we keep complaining about all this horrible web UX over and over, on a web forum that a large number of web developers read daily. There are probably web developers browsing this thread right now, maybe reading this very comment, who are actively doing this to the web. Hey! Web Developer Reading This:
PLEASE STOP making the web terrible.
The very people who can fix this are reading HN. Just stop. Put the keyboard down. Put away the Javascript. Forget those modal pop-ups and newsletter sign-ups. Now do some meditation. Think about what you are doing to the user's experience when you start typing again. I'm really talking to you, mister web developer reading this, who has a JIRA ticket up next in the queue asking you to add a dark pattern to a web site. Please stop. Articulate to your manager why this is horrible, and don't do it. All it takes is people (us, here on HN) to stop doing these things, and things will slowly start getting better.
> Put away the Javascript. Forget those modal pop-ups and newsletter sign-ups.
This would make a lot of careers obsolete though (and even entire companies - I'm sure there are "newsletter popup as a service" startups). It's hard to make someone understand something when their paycheck depends on not understanding it.
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.
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.
Squarespace's "ESC to go to Squarespace login" is a huge pain for me as well. I think it's on by default. I CTRL+F pretty often. I press ESC to clear it. I get redirected to Squarespace if I'm on a Squarespace site that hasn't turned off this "feature".
The lack of Ctrl is sadly a feature for web apps. You don't know which browser, and thus which set of shortcuts your user will be using your app from. However assuming that shortcuts will be prefixed is a pretty safe assumption, so the non-prefixed letters are really the only safe option for web app hotkeys as they form a relatively safe space of shortcuts.
Gmail shortcuts are great, until focus jumps away from the search field while typing in it. This happens if you try to search before the page has fully loaded.
This happens ALL THE TIME. At first I thought I was touching the touchpad by mistake, but I now have no touchpad and it's definitely Gmail forgetting where I'm typing. Then I have to figure out what actions I may have triggered and undo.
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.
If I accidentally fat-fingered e.g. the \ key at the end of a message ("Got it!\"), I want to
1. press the up key
2. press backspace
3. press enter
to delete the last character in the last sent message.
But unless you actually wait at least a second after step 1, the UI is so sluggish in starting the edit of your last message that you instead get "please type a message to continue" because you pressed enter while the New Message text box still had focus.
Things are much worse if you want to do anything more complex. Say, capitalize the first letter of the last sent message (up, home, delete, type capital letter, enter). Usually results in complete gibberish, like appending the capital letter to the message, or sending it in a new message (depending on how fast you are).
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.
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!
Users who don't wish to learn markdown can simply spend two seconds hovering over a "Markdown guide" tooltip at the bottom of the textarea whenever they want to do that. They'll still end up saving time from the UI actually being responsive instead of loading 50 different JS libraries just to render a textbox.
Spotify sometimes manages to somehow get into a state where typing in the search box will end up typing everything in reverse, so instead of "Don't" the box contains "t'noD". The only thing that seems to get it out of this state is losing window focus. Just losing focus on the search box doesn't help.
I had similar issues in Ontraport where if I typed too quickly my cursor would suddenly jump to the start of the textbox. I noticed I had to slow down like a hunt and peck typist and it wouldn't happen. I wonder if it was better for people who live near the server since it could be due to cross-Pacific latency.
I did try copy/pasting from another program, but formatting bugs made that unreliable.
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.
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.
>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.
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."
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?
> 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.
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)
...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.
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.
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 :)
The thing that drove me crazy about Tumblr is how you would find a post with some interesting content and scroll down to see if there was any more information about it.
The comment section would be thousands of lines long, but every line was something like:
User blahblah reblogged this!
User whatever likes this post.
User someone reblogged this!
You can't hold a discussion when your own system spams the comment section with irrelevant crap like this.
There was also the meme of the "shitty Tumblr gif" thanks to their fairly low image size limits.
If I understand correctly, were you just consuming Tumblr content directly from individual blogs?
The user experience was generally better in the dashboard (activity stream / feed for logged-in users). The dashboard was the vast majority of traffic; blog UI didn't get much staff/engineering attention as a result.
The "notes" feature on Tumblr was absolutely never intended to be a "comment section", btw. There intentionally was no comment section at all originally. This notion was part of the conceptual difference between tumblelogging and traditional long-form blogging.
Contextually, this mechanism came about at a time when comments (on blog posts, YouTube, etc) were complete cesspools of negativity from anonymous jerks. The Tumblr idea was that to respond to something, you would have to reblog it in order to add commentary. This way, if someone wants to spew nasty comments, their blog would be terrible and no one would choose to follow their blog.
No, again, it was not meant to be a traditional comment section. It was not a discussion thread for casual readers, especially via the blog view. If you wanted a normal comment system, you could use Disqus embeds, or just use a traditional blogging software.
The reblog system was a way for Tumblr users to publicly respond to things, and allow that response to be visible to the responder's followers. The original poster would also get a notification, and they could reblog the responder's reblog to add more if they wish.
The dashboard made this slightly easier to read. Again, if you only ever experienced Tumblr on blog views and without an account, you literally never saw the core functionality that made Tumblr popular.
Also, most Tumblr posts weren't long-form text to begin with. That wasn't the point of the platform.
That explains it then. I never felt the need to make an account since I was just reading. They didn't make it clear that the service was incomplete without an account.
Well, the alternative is an aggressive full-page signup nag that intentionally breaks product functionality when logged out -- an approach used to various degrees by Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, and others. Is that really preferable?
I mean, at the time it was teeming with potential. But then Marissa Mayer gutted it, all its refugees flocked to Twitter, and it's been a walking corpse for years now.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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…
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
>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?
> 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
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.
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.
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.