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Comment by shazzzm | Hacker News Reader

For one of my first phone interviews, my motorola had a helpful feature where it would mute notifications during a calendar event. Since I'd put the interview in my calendar, it put the phone on silent so I missed the call!

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I recently sat through an hour-long "Continuing Legal Education" webinar and, in order to get CLE credit, they need to confirm you're paying attention. About 40 minutes in I got a pop-up with a 30 second timer: "Please confirm your attendance" with two buttons "yes" and "no".

Well I actually was paying attention to the presentation and I instinctively hit "no" so that I could see the content again.

Guess who didn't get credit for attending?

Why.... why would there be a no button

It's like the old joke about the rookie cop who's too nervous to investigate a big spooky warehouse at night. He shouts into the darkness "is anybody here?"

A few seconds later, he hears a voice say "......no". So he relaxes with a sigh, and goes to report the all clear to his superior.

That's pretty funny, and would be better without the old "blonde" trope. I forgot that was ever a thing.

You think so? I thought joke culture says you need to pick a pre-approved reason to explain dumbness. I changed it to "rookie".

Off the cuff, a better user experience altogether might be to prompt attendees afterwards to submit their biggest take-away, instead of a patronizing poke.

That way, not only does it confirm paying attention, but you can also get a signal of course effectiveness.

Proof-of-work really is a nice system

If I had to guess, it's because the programmer couldn't find out (soon enough) how to do another kind of dialogue box and then went with the standard yes/no but then didn't look up how to handle "no" and assumed everyone would do "yes".

If I had to guess it's probably because not everyone attending the webinar needs CLE credits reported. I can imagine people intentionally selecting no if they're not an attorney or if they're licensed in a jurisdiction that doesn't require it.

Or perhaps it's to teach the most valuable CLE of all - too hasty a response risks a critical mistake. I can't even recall the specific topic of the webinar but I definitely learned a lesson!

To make sure you're paying attention and not just clicking buttons at random on the screen, of course!

My old Nokia phone had a few feature I discovered during my first class in front of a new professor. I turned off my phone at start of class, but little did I know that the Nokia will ring the morning alarm even if your phone is off.

It was very loud in the quiet classroom, he gave me a look of “now I hate you”, and I didn’t even try to explain that actually, the phone is off.

I had the exact same problem as a 12 year old kid, only I was in assembly where Auschwitz survivor Emerich Roth was telling us about his hardships. He stopped with annoyed patience and waited for me to silence the alarm before continuing. I don't think I've ever felt so bad.

A few years ago I missed a very important work engagement because it discovered the opposite.

The LG Nexus wouldn’t ring the alarm when the phone was set to silent.

I literally had to show it to my manager which was furious.

I remember my first Android phone would (I was not aware at the time) keep the alarms turned on even while in silent mode.

During the final exam of my calculus course, which takes place through two class sessions, my alarm went off to remind me of my second class session. Despite the professor promising to tear up our exams up if our phones made any noise or appearance the hour before, I'm assuming he ignored it because I was literally the only person in class that made any attempt at engaging with his lectures. Unrelated, I had also completely given up studying for the exam since I knew I was going to fail and had plans to retake the course (but be at least present to take mental notes on the final), but he clearly bumped me up to a minimally passing grade for what I can only assume was the same reason.

Meh, I was a mediocre Calc student and walked out of the final feeling like I'd utterly bombed it, but had the same prof for Calc II and apparently I'd managed a solid B on the final so something had stuck.

Similarly, on the iPhone, there's that switch on the side that silences it, but I've been burned by not realizing it that hides the existence of a phone call and sends it straight to voicemail, and only later alerts me that it happened at all.

Edit: it doesn't seem to do that anymore, but it definitely did at least twice, when I didn't have DND on.

It shouldn’t do this. You can go to Settings -> Phone -> Silence Unknown Callers, which will send callers not in your contacts to voicemail, but the silencer simply mutes audio. It still vibrates and receives calls. Or maybe there’s something I’m missing?

Well, it did do that. I checked, and that setting is off.

Almost like Apple products can have unintended bugs like disabling your alarm on OS update.

Easy now. I didn’t say it didn’t do it, I said it shouldn’t do it. You made it sound like you thought this was what was supposed to happen, and I just wanted to help you out.

Edit: Apologies if the last sentence in my first message seemed rude. Not my intention.

That's weird, that's not the case for me. Mine still goes through the length of ringing with the call on the screen.

You must have it on do not disturb. I exclusively keep my phone on silent (but within view) and have no problems answering calls because it pops up on the screen.

No, it wasn't on that at the times it happened.

That's too bad, but I can't help to think that it's a nice feature.

Maybe that was a bug, wrongly promoted as a 'helpful feature' :).

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