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Comment by ableal | Hacker News Reader

Worth the read just for the horrible B-17 bit used as opener. Good hook.

Yeah I'm mentally filing that image [1] away for later use.

[1]: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/static-assets/images/blog-post/instr...

It reminds me of the accidental Hawaii nuclear missile alert a few years back. AIUI, the button to test the system was in close proximity to the button to send the real thing.

Or much lower stakes but the terrible UI that caused Citibank to accidentally give away $500M[1] (though they got it back on appeal [2]). I am always amazed to see the awful, awful software people put up with to do their jobs.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/citibank-just-go...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/citigroup-wins-appeal-ove...

that's the most obtuse UI for a money transfer (especially one so large) that I've ever seen.

And THREE PEOPLE all signed off on it!

There were some choices gif/memes to come out of that, though like the top one here:

omg, that gif is triggering me.

I CANNOT STAND UI's that are interactable before they have completed their layout rendering! Or things like notifications that suddenly push everything down, right when you were about to tap on one of those elements! Why is this still a thing? Any UI element that shifts or appears should have like a user-adjustable half-second delay before it becomes interactable again

Yeah I love when I click a thing then a different think appears under it 0.5ms before click registers.

> Why is this still a thing?

HTML/CSS/JS stack makes that the default and coding your way out of that is hard

> Yeah I love when I click a thing then a different think appears under it 0.5ms before click registers.

Its just the worst

I suspect the real reason it's still a thing is that it makes users more likely to click on ads, which is after all how most of the internet makes its money.

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." -- Jeff Hammerbacher

Former frontend performance guy here – "Cumulative Layout Shift" is the measure of this jank, and yes, it is the absolute worst.

Conversely, it's hard to overstate how magical sites become when you get that down to 0. Once stuff stops shifting, users are effectively fooled into believing that sites are finished loading. Sites just feel fast, even if things are still happening. It's sadly hard to get there, and very easily worsens.

Hilariously, I was trying to enable the minimal JS needed to view that page, and UMatrix DID THE EXACT SAME THING, it shifted down a site I wanted to block under my mouse button. :)

For all you dystopian fiction writers:

the end of all humanity, caused by lazy loading JavaScript.

It shouldn't take more than a weekend, and the "Terrifyingly realistic!" reviews will write themselves.

“That’s one heck of a nurse” after hitting the Nuke button which was right next to the “Nurse” button.

Can you guess which music video that’s from?

Land of Confusion

I really like that music video.

+1. The B-17 design flaw analogy is one of the best I’ve seen. The title is great as well, very catchy.

Personally I was more impressed by the director being a dolphin, altho they coud've found better photo of him, he looks a bit fat.

But to be fair It's not that bad when you realize using flaps and gear is time correlated - you slow down, enable flaps, get near the airport, then put the gear down.

There is no "I want to put the gear down in situation when enabling flaps would fuck stuff up too much"

> There is no "I want to put the gear down in situation when enabling flaps would fuck stuff up too much"

Unless, maybe, you just limped your plane in because it’s missing a big chunk of a wing.

One thing the military does is try to make it hard to make a simple mistake and kill a bunch of your own troops.

During the last Iraq invasion I was running around with a fuel tanker which had a pony motor to offload the fuel. It was pretty complicated with a bunch of levers and valves you had to set to get the fuel flowing the right way (and not on the ground) but had a data plate to tell you what to do, easy peasy. One day we were at a bag farm dumping fuel and this staff sergeant wandered up and says I’m doing it wrong. “Data plate” I say and point at the data plate but she started to get all huffy so, whatever, do what she says which was all fine and good until the tanker starts filling up because it is set up backwards. She made some lame excuse for not following the law of the one true god, the data plate, and wandered off to bother someone else.

I mean, the changes are clear improvement, the whole panel is basically "random stuff barely related to eachother" but I feel author is overstating how bad it actually is

I've never seen that example and reading it, I was surely mouth-agape dumbfounded that anyone thought that would be OK to design like that

To my ignorance, didn't know this gentleman before. Nice article, pure substance. Would love to learn more about him.

He also could have used Chernobyl as an example.

Chernobyl was very different, due to the negligence factor. "Hold my vodka and watch THIS" is no way to run a nuclear power plant.

I guess they're arguing that the "fail deadly" design was a design flaw, even if it should never have been encountered in actual operation.

Indeed. See "Why INSAG has still got it wrong" by Anatoly Dyatlov himself. The money quote:

> How and why should the operators have compensated for design errors they did not know about?

Dyatlov is clearly biased here, but he raises excellent questions.

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