For a lot of articles like these, looking at the answers to see if they're interesting is futile. The real insight is in the questions. In this case, you can reflect on your own friendships, and how the other side of them might see them differently.
It does. Because junctions still slow them down, as do groups of 30 tourists all getting on at once, asking questions about whether this bus goes to the castle.
You can tell exactly where you live based on the castle reference. Happened to me once when a tourist in front asked about the castle and I couldn’t quite believe it was real.
This is also mostly fixable, with signal priority. Except at complex intersections where different roads each have transit lines fighting for priority.
"as a goodwill gesture" has to be the most condescending wording imaginable. Basically translates as "we are shutting down this PR nightmare in the early stages, here is your hush money, but you were still 100% at fault all along and nothing about this episode will make us re-evaluate that.
Why allow them to book if the place is literally on fire? That's like me going to a cafe, ordering and paying and immediately the staff tells me that electricity has been down for 3 hours and they can't fulfill the order. They also won't be able to refund my money because they have a strict no-refund policy.
> Why allow them to book if the place is literally on fire?
The hosts inside the disaster area have much more pressing things to think about than to disable a listing on AirBnB - primarily not to die in a fire. And AirBnB reasonably can't keep up with wildfires and other natural disasters because they don't have people on the ground across the world and there is barely any effort to develop global standards and interfaces to provide even something as basic as road closures to maps providers, much less about evacuation orders and their legal consequences.
However, and this is where AirBnB fucked up, their support agents aren't empowered to use their brains, to look up "xyz evacuation orders" and cancel reservations when they see a government issued evacuation order!
>And AirBnB reasonably can't keep up with wildfires and other natural disasters because they don't have people on the ground across the world
This is a trick big techs played on the world. AirBnB can and should keep up with wildfires! If they need to hire more staff to do this, so be it. Imagine if traditional hotel sold you a room that is on fire, and said that they don't have enough people to monitor all their properties so it's your fault.
Facebook and other social media do the same thing for moderation (yeah there's a lot of scam, but we can't do anything because we just don't have enough people). Either hire enough people to do your job properly, find an automated solution that works, or go out of business.
Or just process these events and their consequences through their support. They already do allocated considerable attention/resources, but mostly just to make sure they get paid.
> Imagine if traditional hotel sold you a room that is on fire, and said that they don't have enough people to monitor all their properties so it's your fault.
That can and does happen with regular hotels. For them as well, the priority is the safety of the guests already there (aka, to get them out), and the pipeline of new bookings can be dealt with once the immediate danger is passed.
> Why allow them to book if the place is literally on fire?
Speculation on my part, but presumably a natural disaster has several rings of declining danger around it.
"Literally on fire" at the centre, "mandatory evacuation/no electricity" around that, "strongly advised to evacuate by firefighters" around that, "advised to evacuate by a politician covering their ass" around that, "Safe for now but monitor the situation" around that, "heavy traffic and poor air quality" around that.
All of these rings could be called "the wildfire-effected area" but some are more wildfire-effected than others.
This is completely incomprehensible and very funny. It's also amusing how different this is to what Twitter has done. It seems incredibly unlikely that any consultants (overpriced or otherwise) were involved in Twitter's rebranding, whereas the Pepsi document seems like outsiders trying very earnestly to deliver to an executive they don't understand.
Not everyone writes with you in mind as their ideal reader. Some people write for themselves and publish to keep themselves honest, though I don't presume to know what OP's motives and goals are in this case.
It's still not a bad idea for the OP to know conventions/standards in case (s)he decides to write something for the public. The OP's HN profile does point to the blog, which tells me other people were in mind during the writing process.
If I put a note in my profile that I like full-width text (like HN) and think the font size (larger than HN) is reasonable, do you think that'll stop me getting these same comments every time I post something to HN?
Since you're posting your articles to HN, you obviously want people to read what you write. If you want more people to read your writing, then consider making it more accessible and easier on the eyes.
People exist with visual disabilities and giant walls of text in layouts such as yours might as well be a magic eye puzzle.
Yes, you like it and can do what you want, but you're throwing sand in the eyes of people you want to read your stuff.
HN itself has wider text and smaller fonts than my site. So it should be in line with what the HN readership (taken as a whole) likes. (Yes, I see more complaints than compliments, but that's always to be expected)
Visual disabilities are an argument for having a font size consistent with the rest of the web and a site where browser zoom works, not for making your text larger than the rest of the web.
"So it's ironic that, despite all these established old-media recommendation engines, there was nothing for one of my favourite media - online articles."
It's feels great to be able to blame managers when something goes wrong, but that's the only real difference between having or not having your 'accountability chain'. And if your company is structured to have someone to blame when things go wrong, you're not really building for success.
I get that everyone is afraid of prioritization going out the window without managers, but in my experience (and ymmv), managers are no better than productives at prioritizing. Grown-ups are used to taking responsibility.
