> Instacart is both expensive and unreliable. I'll go back to in store once things die down, and I'm sure many others will too.
I can't stand Instacart but I begrudgingly use it (for now) because it's the safer option for everyone involved. I also haven't forgotten that they were stealing shoppers' tips for a long time.
I was going to mention the same thing. This happens on Reddit too.
If your posts are unpopular for any reason you're automatically penalized. Doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, you're penalized for posting anything that people disagree with or don't want to hear.
That's why sites like Reddit and HN will always be echo chambers. Dissenting voices are automatically silenced. Not 100% of the time, but often enough that most will probably never waste their time posting.
I find that Reddit is generally much worse about this kind of thing; perhaps it is the culture or maybe it is the fact that votes are public. If you say something people don’t like, they’ll quickly pile on you. For some reason people there really like going with the flow, and you can’t even reply to clarify without them coming after you. I have found it much less likely that this happens on Hacker News, and people are generally more willing to listen to a comment regardless of how others felt about it.
I don't think it's just reddit, I believe these systems are prone to triggering some primitive human instincts towards group interaction. I can think of a few plausible explanations for a discrepancy in outcomes across HN and reddit. Perhaps hidden scores or the per-comment floor HN uses suppresses it. Perhaps HN attracts a particular sort of personality while reddit attracts a more representative slice of humanity. Maybe reddit is harder to moderate, has worse moderator tools, worse mods, or just too many people. I'm not sure what the answer is, but one way or the other I consider these sort of systems to be failed experiments.
> Researchers from Hebrew University, NYU, and MIT explored herd mentality in online spaces, specifically in the context of "digitized, aggregated opinions".[4] Online comments were given an initial positive or negative vote (up or down) on an undisclosed website over five months.[5] The control group comments were left alone. The researchers found that "the first person reading the comment was 32 percent more likely to give it an up vote if it had been already given a fake positive score".[5] Over the five months, comments artificially rated positively showed a 25% higher average score than the control group, with the initial negative vote ending up with no statistical significance in comparison to the control group.[4] The researchers found that "prior ratings created significant bias in individual rating behavior, and positive and negative social influences created asymmetric herding effects".[4]
> “That is a significant change”, Dr. Aral, one of the researchers involved in the experiment, stated. “We saw how these very small signals of social influence snowballed into behaviors like herding.”[5]
They also edited a headline for a #1 ranked story about Blizzard and the Hong Kong issue, removing Hong Kong from the headline entirely.
HN sort of reminds me of China -- a dictatorship with zero transparency and a penchant for manipulation.
Edit: Can't forget the spineless bootlickers who are hopelessly devoted to the state! You know you've struck a nerve when the best 'reply' they can offer is a silent downvote.
I hope HN readers have gotten smart enough to notice how when commenters make grandiose claims like this about manipulation, they never provide links. That's because the facts never support the grandiose claim.
Curious to see what the real reason might have been, I skimmed through the last 30 or so titles with Blizzard in them and didn't find one we'd edited in this way, or even at all. Perhaps I missed it. But whatever we did with any such title, it would have been because of the site guideline: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
That's assuming an awful lot of unncessary bad faith. While the title guidelines are enforced here in an incredibly nonintuitive, nonobjective, nonconsistent way, that's no reason to imply malfeasance.
Thanks for the defense, but I feel a need to pipe up for HN moderators also. It's not true that the title guideline is enforced as you say. If it were, the threads would be full of complaints about titles, when in fact such complaints are an order of magnitude less common than they were, say, 5 years ago. This subthread is an exception, and you'll notice that we've attempted to accommodate the complaints by editing the title again.
We have spent years calibrating how we handle titles and it's one of the most consistent things we do. I know it can be nonintuitive to casual readers at times, but that's because applying that guideline is surprisingly complicated in practice. If it were your job, you'd soon find that as well. Also, people only notice the cases that stand out, which tend to be the edits they dislike and feel we got wrong (which maybe we did). That's a sample bias. Probably less than 5% of title edits even get noticed. Maybe even less than 1%.
It's nonobjective in that the title guidelines carry subjective judgements.
Its' nonconsistent because of the previous problem.
It's unintuitive for the reasons you described above.
I think the reason it sticks in my craw so much is what I'll call the "rake to the face" phenomenon. Much like stepping on a rake in a dark shed and getting whacked in the face, it's usually surprising, usually unexpected, and usually painful (though mentally rather than physically.. "where did that article I read earlier go? No way it got flagged off.. Oh, there it is, they messed with the freaking title again. That was a waste of 5 minutes.")
This is worse when a descriptive title that actually calls out why someone should be interested in the article is reverted to something generic, which IMO, actively makes the site worse in furtherance of The Rules, which is never a good thing.
----
That aside.. If I could float a feature request that doesn't require any rule changes? Put a [*] or some other signifier next to titles that have been modified, and have it grey out over time (kinda like how comments get lighter and lighter as their score falls) and eventually disappear. Per your own search example, title changes are rare enough that there likely wouldn't be many on the front page, and it would give people like me who lose track of renamed articles a place or two to look.
> Please take some time off for a vacation and return to a normal 40 hour work week.
You might as well say "Please win the lottery".
Seriously though, please tell me you're not so out of touch with reality that you actually believe the sentence you wrote is meaningful advice. People can't just snap their fingers and create a better job out of thin air.
People should and people have. A century ago, unions declared massive strikes for these and other issues.
A normal, sane job is not as rare as winning the lottery. Entire countries have people working very normal, sane hours. Americans need to stop tolerating these ridiculously long hours. Do 8 hours of good work for 5 days a week, then relax, sleep well, so you start your next day well-rested and ready to deliver another 8 hours of good work. This is a sane balance. Working more than you rest is not. Sacrificing your health and your life for your employer is idiocy.
For technically inclined people in the United States, it can be. It's just a matter of whether or not you want to maximize your income or maximize your quality of life. It is definitely possible to get a tech job at a large company where work-life balance is taken seriously.
Classic will never have the same revenue potential because players would revolt if they added in-game transactions.
Those transactions were a massive source of profit in later expansions and completely eclipsed subscription revenue. Even as the WoW playerbase dwindled, revenue grew thanks to things like game-time tokens, level boosts, mounts, cosmetic items, etc.
All of those things are 100% antithetical to the premise of Classic WoW.
I don't disagree, but isn't it a sign of much deeper issues if this "Shadow IT" land exists at your company in the first place? Why is it that experienced programmers can't efficiently solve a problem that a business user can handle in Access?
Are they under-staffed? Neck-deep in spaghetti code? Lacking business knowledge and the opportunity to acquire it? Bottle-necked by a lack of business analysts or testers?
I hear about this too often and nobody seems to think it's a major problem. IT departments can have a queue that's 2 years deep and people don't even bat an eye, they just think "Oh, that's how IT works!" And that's not even taking into account all the requests people aren't submitting because they've given up hope of getting any dev time.
The problem is most of the people writing code in Access (or monstrous Excel macros or in apps like MatLab etc) are not trained programmers. I think the article sums it up well by using "power user" to describe them - technical people with no formal programming training. Think Engineers (the non software kind), Accountants, Plant Technicians these kinds of people.
In my org (I'm an Engineer at a manufacturing plant) a long time ago someone senior made the decision our company was not in business of hiring programmers so any coding is done by contractors.
So yes people have implemented things (Engineering models for example) in MatLab, or Access, or as an Excel spreadsheet etc as "prototypes" ostensibly intended to be rewritten by a real programmer. At some point these models invariably find their way into production environment and suddenly you have some kind of mission critical thing written in Access (or VB6 or Matlab or Excel).
Then IT has minor panic a contractor is given the job of trying to translate the "prototype" into "real" code and has a battle on their hands.
Often programming contractor doesn't have technical understanding of what model is doing, regardless of choice of language the code engineers write tends to look like Fortran (i.e it's essentially all math formulas), even comments probably don't help when they say stuff like "/* Ergun's formula to calc Delta P */" that doesn't mean a lot to someone without a chem eng background. I've seen contractors produce bugs by doing things like misreading a spec and adding a variable called Fe203 (i.e Fe "two hundred and three) instead of Fe2O3 (Fe "Two Oh three" - a chemical formula). You can't really blame contractor he doesn't know anything about chemistry - he was just hired to rewrite this monster in java based on a spec.
So I don't think its a simple as turning problem over to an experienced programmer and expecting success.
I have seen all of these symptoms at numerous large companies. The backlog is years deep and the costs associated with engaging the professional programmers could be staggering. The truth is, not all solutions need anything more robust than what Office can provide.
Agreed, I think it's because developers like to over engineer everything and the managers like to over engineer the processes.
So many of these access excel solutions should be a days worth of work, simple perl cgi scripts with a minimalist UI deployed by rsync. Instead we have to use our super "productive" modern frameworks, split everything into a thousand files (god forbid you embed an sql query in the only place it's called), add unit tests, etc. There's certainly times for the later approach, but most businesses need much more of the former.
So because developers don't have a reasonable platform to pinch off random little projects others step in.
"So many of these access excel solutions should be a days worth of work"
I don't know why you think a lot of VBA would be replaced by a little perl. Of course, my perspective has a lot to do with the fact that it was essentially impossible to get a new perl module installed where I used to work.
But developers often don't appreciate the importance of presentation (and other) details in reports for managers. Your reference to "a minimalist UI" is telling.
Even though Access and Excel can be buggy, unstable, and annoying, it doesn't make much sense to use anything else if you are automating a report that was previously assembled by hand in Excel, and needs to match precisely.
And often IT types like to exercise power by gatekeeping - if you aren't doing "real" programming, you don't need a Turing complete solution, so Office ends up being the only option. I've been told that if I can select a list of columns from a dataset, and some filters, by pointing and clicking, that's all I, or my managers, need for reports.
Honestly, I think a lot of people find fulfillment in their work through being the person who can say "no" to people, particularly managers that are theoretically higher ranking. And also by expressing themselves through creative decisions when others fail to specify details. I think that using Office/Access/VBA may be correlated to rejecting the value system of most developers, rather than a technical judgment.
> But developers often don't appreciate the importance of presentation (and other) details in reports for managers. Your reference to "a minimalist UI" is telling.
We're talking access here, at best it's ugly and at worst you've got a gaudy background image(1) and a color scheme that would give the disability compliance officer a stroke. Throwing in bootstrap or a more minimal css framework is a huge step up in terms of presentation.
> Even though Access and Excel can be buggy, unstable, and annoying, it doesn't make much sense to use anything else if you are automating a report that was previously assembled by hand in Excel, and needs to match precisely.
I'm thinking of scenarios a bit more complex than that. Access apps generally have a few data input screens, multiple users, etc. Not complicated but not as simple as reports.
I'll admit that I do run away from anything to do with reports, but usually that's because they've installed some "easy to use, no developers required" reporting system that the non-developers can't use and makes life 10 times harder for the developers. If I can just write sql to shove data into an html table or excel template (where we can have the best of both worlds) I'm more than happy too.
1. I actually think of some of these old access programs when I look at windows new built in mail app, who the hell adds a background image?
"We're talking access here, at best it's ugly and at worst you've got a gaudy background image(1) and a color scheme that would give the disability compliance officer a stroke. Throwing in bootstrap or a more minimal css framework is a huge step up in terms of presentation."
I'm talking about creating Excel reports based on pulling stuff from (possibly a random assortment of) databases. Where you can use any feature of Excel. Not that the Access application is distributed to people who care what it looks like.
It seems like you can't even imagine a complex report that isn't an interactive application. So I think we're just talking different languages.
Honestly, I was just talking to someone in the organization I work in with the same lack of understanding. He was like "you have a point and click interface that lets you choose some columns from a table and some filters using simple boolean criteria, what else could you (or your manager) want?"
I want the ability to define all the business rules to produce the formatting and munge the data, I guess. And to structure the code in such a way that it's flexible enough to handle major changes. I need regular expressions. I need to run a diff algorithm on text. I need to use XML and REST to talk to SharePoint. I need to scrape information from a system that I only have access to through a web browser.
Basically, I'm using Access/Excel to do what I used to use Qlikview for, or just plain Perl, and it seems to be less of an "impedance mismatch" as people like to say. Also it doesn't cost as much as a car as Qlik licenses did.
Re: Why is it that experienced programmers can't efficiently solve a problem that a business user can handle in Access?
Because existing web UI standards suck rotting ass to hell and back. The standard was not meant for CRUD and still isn't even if you add gajillion layers of (buggy) JavaScript to emulate a real GUI.
I agree that if you tune it for shop conventions and know its warts well, one can indeed be productive in it. But getting to that point is not necessarily short or easy.
Sometimes it is budget or just needing someone to drive it through a heavy process.
It is also not always worth it if you cannot show a real business case. The thing might help you and it might be worth it if you hack something together yourself but if IT is suppose to build something that is available, has support, has disaster recovery, is patched etc. it might no longer be easy to find the business case for it.
Exactly, to get professional IT resources you need to demonstrate a business case, go through many decision boards and budget allocations, defend it for months, and be ready to be pointed out if it doesn't reach its promises.
So in the end people hack it in Excel or Access. No need to ask permission, no budget issues, no blame if it's not great.
Also: little or no waste happened if it doesn't pan out. Your Access prototype doesn't seem to make you and your team work faster? Copy out the little data you've put in there to Excel, SHIFT+DEL the Access file, and you're done. You've wasted few hours. That beats wasting several man-months of IT time only to not use the result in the end.
Access is agile in the truest form. It lets you prototype and refine in an extremely tight feedback loop, until what you have is a working solution for your specific problems.
To expand upon this, UiPath also announced acquisitions of ProcessGold (https://www.uipath.com/newsroom/uipath-acquires-process-gold...) and StepShot (https://www.uipath.com/newsroom/uipath-acquires-stepshot-add...) as a step towards bringing the process documentation and automation planning tasks down to the level of understanding that SMEs and BAs have about automation. These tools will be a really great addition to the ecosystem as I (and clearly they) have found the most difficult work in this space to be understanding the client's existing process and planning to automate it.
I can't stand Instacart but I begrudgingly use it (for now) because it's the safer option for everyone involved. I also haven't forgotten that they were stealing shoppers' tips for a long time.
Once this is over I'll never use it again.