Hacker News Reader

Comment by gullywhumper | Hacker News Reader

It seems that so many minor parts of the day don't work as expected and my attention is destroyed by a thousand annoyances. My watch only unlocks my computer 1/3 of the time. My car only recognizes my phone 1/2 of the time. 3/4 of the time I go to press/click on a song I want to hear, the data in the UI updates between the time I start to move to the song and I press/click and I end up hearing something I don't want. Annoying feature that I've disabled n times was re-enabled, and I have to disabled it again. Fighting autocorrect on my phone. I was signed out a service unexpectedly and have to re-authenticate. Programs X, Y, and Z are unresponsive. My VM says my network connection is unstable. My new car beeps because it thinks I'm distracted and then I get more annoyed and distracted.

View on HN

I like to use my iPhone to read text articles. It's amazing to me how bad it's become at this task.

I get various emails with curated links to various stories, and I will click a link to go read that story. First, it often takes me to a browser re-direct that sometimes successfully redirects, sometimes doesn't. Then sometimes the redirect is to an app that I've subscribed to. Which would be great. Except for the times it opens the app but fails to redirect to the specific article. Then if the article is on a web page, it commonly fills the page with more and more ads slowing down my phone and giving me a tiny keyhole opening to read the text through.

Then I often want to go back to the email and pick up where I left off. Which works >50% of the time, but fairly often will skip to a different email.

I truly believe that for reading news and articles the state of software was much better 10 years ago than today.

I prefer to read HN on Firefox Android. If I so much as blink away from the browser the page refreshes and I lose spot in the thread.

The comment box is a unique piece of cursed garbage. For starters, it's monospace when the end result isn't monospace, the first time I focus the box autocorrect/suggestions won't work. I have to focus away/back again for it to work. It has no misspelling highlight so my comments always end up with a steady trickle of misspellings.

I can't believe how a textboox on a supposedly hacker-oriented no-frills link aggregator can be this broken.

also when I remember to put by phone away not to get distracted, then the 2FA requires me to go fetch it...

my car has an AI assistant. I don't know what the wake word is, but it will wake up and be useless with no obvious way to turn it off. I'm sure I could search for it, but it happens while I'm driving and I forget about it. It happens just infrequently enough to not remember, but often enough to be really annoying.

My wife turned on a meditation feature on our very old Alexa. I guess the app was deleted or something, but every morning Alexa turns on and says "Starting your meditation times ... Sorry, this is no longer available". If I tell Alexa to turn this off, it has no idea what I'm talking about and it shows up nowhere in the iOS app. Instead of meditation, I got a nice dose of minor annoyance every morning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com