And I very much appreciate that feature, and hope it never changes.
However when I make comments here, I do it with the intention of reading what people have to say in response.
If I am making a comment with the intention to ignore the responses to it, then that’s a good signal for myself that what I am writing is likely not an appropriate comment for HN, and then delete it.
> Why do you speak about yourself in the third person?
When you submit a link to HN, there is an entry field for text in addition to the url.
It does not really describe what the text is used for. For links, the content of that field is simply added as the first comment.
Someone who is unfamiliar with the submission process may assume this field should describe what they are submitting, and not format it like a comment.
Then that text gets posted as the first comment and tons of people downvote it, jumping to the conclusion that the weird summary comment is from an AI, and not the submitter describing their own submission.
(I also assumed these comments were AI until someone else pointed this out)
I can't speak for this developer, but as someone who dabbles in App Store applications, EU trader laws require that the App Store publicly displays an address for the app developer if they want to make their apps available in the EU.
It's possible this developer didn't want to do that, so they chose to not publish in the EU.
If you are willing to wing it, 6£/mo address from https://www.ukpostbox.com provides you with a document that Apple accepts.
You won't be able to actually read the mail though, so depends on the seriousness of the project. If it's an actual business then best get a proper business address.
Or at least get the higher tier where they scan your mail and send it to you.
I wonder if the reason why the screensaver process doesn’t exit has something to do with the live wallpapers they added to macOS a few versions ago.
The live wallpapers become your screensaver, playing the video. Then when you move your mouse, the video continues until it finds a “good” stopping point.
Might explain why the screensaver process lives on forever for seemingly no reason.
They laid off SDETs circa 2014 (I was one). I don’t think Windows ever had QA people, but it did have automated testing and dedicated people to write and monitor those tests, then file bugs if something broke. But not anymore since 2014.
These days, the only testing any release of Windows gets is from Microsoft employees (Dev/PM) and Windows Insiders.
They have rules of how many hours of self-hosting are required before they can release, but that’s the only requirement. That there exists telemetry of it running.
You might see a gap with that testing methodology, but it might also explain how things like this happen. If it’s a bug that doesn’t prevent boot, it’s easy to ignore.
(I knew a few devs who would just put builds of windows on one of their computers and play a 72 hour long video of a black screen on repeat to get self hosting hours. Then they would proceed with their feature release. And nobody saw any problem with that.)
MS needs a 'windows xp sp2' moment. Where they stop jamming new things in and just fix as much junk as possible. They still have a mixed control panel situation. Things just randomly work/break for no real reason. Camera here one day gone the next oh look its back again. Hey my sound is broken again. Linux/MacOS in many benchmarks is faster. Hundreds of old programs now just flake out for random reasons. But then will work again sometimes. Backwards compat is a reason to stick with them. But if it doesnt work, why am I here? SteamOS is going to remove one of the large reasons people keep windows.
MS is losing the people who cared about using them. Those people are migrating to linux/macos. I dont blame em.
They still had Software Test Engineers (a different role from SDET) in 2001, when I was an STE intern in MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit), which at that point, was basically a compliance department in the wake of the US DoJ's massive anti-trust ruling against MSFT a few years before. Every month, the MacBU STE team lead would award "Scariest Tester" for whoever had found the best (scariest) bug.
We were also, essentially, Apple's Mac OS X post-release testing team (10.0 Cheetah was released while I was there, but I missed the party because my grandmother had died and I was back home for her funeral) - we ran into all sorts of exciting problems with basic OS functions.
One of the things MacBU prided themselves on was having fewer people putting out the whole Office suite PLUS Internet Explorer for Mac than there were working on Word for Windows alone, yet still managing.
Years ago I lived in an apartment with intermittent connection issues.
I phoned xfinity support who said they’d send a tech out at no cost to me.
The tech comes, finds bad connections in the shared external apartment box, fixes them, leaves without entering my apartment.
Xfinity sends me a support bill for the tech.
I call xfinity support to complain saying they said the tech would be free. The support agent says there’s nothing they can do and also that I should sign up for their support plan to get a 50% discount on the fee.
I tell them to cancel my internet subscription because I won’t support a company with deceptive billing practices. They give me 3 retention offers (the last one being an additional 25% discount on the tech fee). I decline because they told me it would be free. My internet is scheduled to be cancelled.
I go to twitter (as it was called at the time), and @ xfinity support with this same story.
Someone from that Twitter account DMs me and I told them that if they cancel the technician fee, they can leave my internet subscription active.
They do so with exactly no fuss.
I don’t know why, but apparently publicly @‘ing xfinity on Twitter gets you better support than calling them and actually cancelling your internet.
Twitter support escalation worked in the mid 2010s, but basically now the only effective escalation is to send a letter via overnight mail to the CEO office. This has worked for me for major ISPs, cell phone companies, furniture retailers, hell - even the government after some vital records I asked to get duplicates of came unreadable 5 times in a row.
I inherited this trick from my father who had probably used it since the 1950s. It can work wonders. Except Cash App who closed my account for "contacting employees outside of the support chain."
Priority or Express mail. FedEx or UPS can also send documents. The idea is to bypass the normal mail room as much as possible and to get the thing on the desk of someone who is not limited by stupid rules.
Which is particularly effective in this day and age when many businesses don’t handle a lot of incoming physics mail —- send a FedEx to a particular individual at a particular location and it is not like they have a ‘mailroom’ that handles this routinely, it is a non-routine event that somebody shows up at the front desk to deliver something and inherently memorable.
I had issues too that they sent a tech support out for while warning me "If they find it's your fault, you will be assessed a charge". The tech came out, climbed my local pole and then went down the street and climbed another one. He said it was a busted port and he moved me to a new one, and put in a service request to upgrade as it was out of ports.
CenturyLink sends me a bill for maintenance. After tons of back and forth I got to the point where I said "So can you state for the record since I'm recording this phone call, that I the customer should have climbed the telephone pole to remedy the issue".
After that he finally decides to get in touch with the fiber contractor they use who emphasized it was no fault of my own and they cleared the charge.
I often post comments on HN, just to delete them 5 minutes later when I realize I don’t care to deal with the replies I’ll eventually get.
You have to be quick because if someone does reply, you can no longer delete your message.
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