220lbs is a surprisingly low payload... Depending on height it's not at all difficult for even a healthy person to be that weight, let alone someone that lifts or is a bit chubby.
very few people with low body fat percentage will be 220 lbs unless they are 99th percentile height. (6'4''+)
i would say the average athletic/fit person who is fairly lean (10-14% bf) [1] at a height of 6'0'' to 6'3'' will be anywhere from 165-205 lbs depending on frame, but very rarely more than 205 lbs
now there are definitely healthy and athletic and strong people who are at or above 220 at those heights but they will most probably be "overweight"[2] (have excess body fat) or on exogenous hormones enabling them to gain a lot of extra muscle mass (most bodybuilders, nfl players, college football players,etc) [3]
I disagree that I'm being bigoted. That's an extremely strong accusation to lever, when you are the only person in this entire chain bringing up fat hate.
You call it dog whistling, for some reason, when usually that term is used in an occasion to rile up bigotry. I'm actually just discussing the seemingly low weight restriction on the device. Weirdly, it as if I'm actually targeting low-weight restrictions as an issue, so you've gone and broadsided someone who might actually be an ally to your cause.
And to what end? Clearly it has something to do with being seen doing it, as you rejected my offer to have a private conversation with another unsourced ad hominem.
I took a look at your other comments, because I was curious about the sort of personality that red herrings an engineering discussion into a weird attack against an entire forum for the comments of about four people. I have seen you repeatedly post direct insults that add absolutely nothing to the discussion - calling people idiots, challenging someone's knowledge about computer functionality without any attempt to source your own argument about why they were supposedly wrong.
What is the source of the vitriol? Do you feel hatred for this forum, and the people here? If so, why are you here? Why do you relentlessly violate the as-written etiquette of this forum? What's your objective?
As before, I'm happy to talk about this over email or even over a beer if you'd like. I think we'll soon hit that comment depth limit that HN seems to have (but I can never sort when that (kicks in)
First of all, motors exist that can support more than 220 pounds, Mr. "Engineering Discussion". The conversation was absolutely not about engineering when I entered -- it was about how unhealthy anyone who weighed more than 220 pounds was -- implying they are not worth as much and/or don't deserve to have Segways. All of these sentiments were being upvoted, which means HN at large supports them.
This is bigotry, and you are even now supporting and defending it.
I'm not sure you understand how dog whistling works--the term isn't used to "rile up bigotry". In fact, it's used to call it out. You provided a classic example. You're more than happy to shit on "heavy" people, but you get upset when somebody exposes you as actually hating "fat" people. This is just like racists who openly hate on "immigrants" but will deny they have a problem with "mexicans" until they're blue in the face.
I never called anyone an idiot; how dare you lie about me. As for "direct insults", I'm not doing anything the rest of HN doesn't already do. For example, StavrosK and the guy who doesn't seem to understand resource sharing are both obliquely implying I'm an idiot quite overtly; you seem A-OK with that.
What's the source of the hypocrisy? Do you get something from bullying me, or have you somehow identified me as a low-status individual who it's ok to shit on?
I'm not interested in talking to you any further, you seem to have some moral superiority complex that results in you doing logical backflips to justify your behavior and vilify mine. I guess I'm not part of the popular crowd here -- but I'm not violating the guidelines any more than anyone else and I don't appreciate your abuse.
I am not saying there aren’t any athletic people who weight over 220lbs. I am just saying that the vast majority of humans are not 6’2” so those who weight 220lbs+ Are mostly overweight than athletic
As one person I worked with in the health area BMI isn't that helpful when it comes to large guys 6 2 and up who do sports - the example they gave was the props in a premiership rugby team.
BMI is a pretty poor indicator. Raw bodyfat is probably the best measure of "obese or not."
Someone at 15% bodyfat and 6 feet, 1 inches tall can easily hit 220 pounds, if they have high muscle mass.
As another commenter pointed out, this isn't even considering the weight of clothing and carried items. My backpack usually weighs at least 15 pounds, sometimes up to 25. Clothes adds another, what, 3, 5, maybe even 8 pounds if I'm wearing boots?
Actually after you reach a certain point with respect to financial independence (which I am sure Dean Kamen has done), it might be more rewarding to actually generate really amazing prototypes of what could be done and then let other people put the actual money on the line to make it a reality. Then in your own mind, you get to claim thought leadership on 'high mobility carless cities' when you are reflecting back on your life without any actual financial risk and go about creating the next prototype for some completely unrelated industry.
I’ve ridden a Segway and a scooter and the scooter is MUCH more fun for me. The Segway is like “whoa this is cool” but the score is like “Wheeeee!” Makes me feel 5 years old again.
You know, the logical next step is a fleet of mechanical turk self-driving Segways. When the inconsiderate rider drops it off and blocks the sidewalk, just have someone take control over LTE+wide angle camera, and drive the Segway back to the nearest rental hotspot. Which could even have charging docks for the Segway to drive onto, like a Roomba.
Probably not that far off. The current generation of mini segways are already controllable by bluetooth through the app. You can connect to it and drive it over to the sofa where you're sitting with ease.
I'm not really making a point. Making comparisons like this or the OPs flagrant political comparison is silly at best and completely dishonest at worst.
vscode can only be customized by an extension. There's a bunch of one off plugins you have to install to get little bits of functionality that you can get by pasting 15 lines of elisp from the emacs wiki. If no one has built that extension yet, you have to learn to build one yourself. You could always create private "personal" extension and keep it local, but that workflow is tedious.
I'm not saying vscode is less extensible or customizable though, I'm saying there's a barrier to ad-hoc personalization that's will keep it from ever being more easily customized (unless you and I have different definitions of what is "easily customized").
Script Commands[1] is an interesting plugin that attempts to address this shortcoming, but I'd like to see something official at some point.
I'd argue this is a feature more than a bug. I haven't done much with VSC, but I have done a lot with both atom and emacs (via spacemacs). How do you find out even the name of what you are looking for to find it on the wiki? Is that snippet of elisp tested (or even testable?) What does it do exactly? Is it a passive effect, or something you have to execute a command to run?
In atom, you can find packages on the website or in the dedicated search in the editor. Popular packages get featured, so you can hear about things you wouldn't even know to ask for. Instead of static code, you get free updates whenever they're available. The code in most packages is tested. All the information on how it works is in the Readme.
Emacs is awesome, and currently more customizable than anything else. Tramp and Magit and Evil are best in class. But it's super difficult for a newbie to get started, and the windows compatibility is only so-so.
If you really want to just use code snippets to customize atom, you can! They have an init file for code changes, and a css file for style changes. There's even a website where you can find some of these little scripts: https://www.atom-tweaks.com/
I've found it way easier to customize Emacs, and you can do so much more. Though Atom has pretty great customizability also. This is not true of Visual Studio Code, which has much stricter plugin points.
That said, I know Lisp as well as JavaScript. Obviously, more people know JS, so might find tweaking Atom easier.
In emacs though, I don't even need the internet to figure out how to customize things. C-h is all you need. There's a book bundled in, all functions and variables have amazing built in documentation. You can search for any binding, function or var by regex, go to their code, read their doc, redefine them at runtime.
The only place where Atom wins for me is in theming.
At the end of the day though, I had to go back to Emacs for performance and memory footprint reasons. Atom was just too slow, and used up too much memory.
For a newbie you only need to navigate, copy/paste/delete. Then you learn how to manage (multiple) buffers. It took me about a year of regular use to really feel like I could "use" emacs. Full disclosure: emacs fan. Once I started getting used to lisp prompt (M-x) or w.e its like a portal opened up to another level of understanding, realizing that you can write and execute elisp functions from right there in the editor: ex. `replace-string` or `rot13`.
it has a great undo system (multiple undo histories) and a effectively unlimited copy paste delete history. search ( C-s ) is also a pleasure to use. Magit is on a whole diff level and offers the most comprehensive and organized git interface I've ever seen shy of CLI git. And all these things are interacted with common controls, so knowing the basics from the beginning of my comment opens up the rest of the fancy stuff relatively quick.
> Popular packages get featured, so you can hear about things you wouldn't even know to ask for. Instead of static code, you get free updates whenever they're available. The code in most packages is tested. All the information on how it works is in the Readme.
Sure, and Emacs has this with MELPA (And Atom with... whatever they have). It's great paradigm and all editors should have it.
But I'm not talking about thousands of lines of copied elisp. I'm thinking about molding your editor to fit your needs. Here's an example:
We use hosted Gitlab at work. I like to highlight a line in my editor, call a command in the editor and get a URL for that line in that file in that branch on our internally hosted Gitlab server (with a custom path segment prefix). This is literally maybe ~40 lines lines of very compact elisp in a global configuration file. It would probably be less in JS because I'm better at JS than elisp. It's very specific to my circumstances and doesn't really need to be generalized to anyone else.
There are ~5 different plugins in the marketplace that purport to do this, but none of them fit my use case. Which is fine, I can do this myself...
However to do this vscode I have to create an extension, edit the package.json to register the command and few other things (this is tedious, believe me), re-read/remember the plugin API, re-read/remember how to build vsix files for production, install that plugin with the command line tools, reload vscode.
If I need to make a change, do it all again. But there is no reason that the Emacs behavior couldn't be included in vscode. And maybe some day it will. But the idea that not having it and claiming that is a _feature_ or (as others have done) claim that emacs is losing to vscode in configurability misses the multitude of use cases that emacs users have benefited from for decades.
As far as testing and code quality goes, I can't really argue with that but neither can vscode users? Do you know what all your plugins are doing in the background? All of these centralized plugin repositories are significant attack vectors. Which language do you think the first big own will be written in?
The upside for anything like this is that the barrier to entry being higher, the people who do this tend to create higher quality things overall and maybe even share them.
Have you looked at the VS Code marketplace? It is not great. The LSP modes are great and then here and there you get interesting extensions, but a bunch of it I would not call higher quality by any means.
(I use vscode all day for my work projects and generally enjoy it and am not trying to drag it, just trying to be honest about this aspect of it.)
I have, and I'd fault the immaturity of the ecosystem more than anything. VS Code was launched just 3 years ago. I don't even know if it had extensions from the beginning.
The extensions I've generally used were quite solid, haven't had many problems with them.
Folks can data dredge and present their results as significant. Lay people trust the conclusions. They had the data, but they didn't understand that the data presents a narrow view. They trust it blindly.
Worse are the people that treat conclusions drawn from polling and surveys as scientifically rigorous.
Happens all the time with Vox, NYT, Quartz, you-name-it articles. Policy is enacted from information like this.
I think you are mis-understanding what I wrote. Having seen a couple of lives of states-side friends ruined by what would have been minor (but still serious from a medical perspective) issues in Europe I'm all too aware of the differences in the various health-care solutions.
I've also lived in enough places with various levels of health-care and insurance (and lack of insurance) to see this as a potential problem.
So, instead of reading imperiousness, how about worry?
> There's nothing more annoying than a web designer saying "I know better than you" and re-implementing features. Because they're usually wrong.
It's not just that they are saying "I know better than you", they are saying they know better than HCI teams that have spent years tuning interfaces in response to actual research and testing. Most of the web and app designers I've worked with have never watched a person use their designs, much less considered their work in the context of the entire OS experience.
This is a battle I've fought a zillion times. It's just so hard for some designers, who are used to a world where originality is a good thing, to understand that in UX originality is a liability.
The solution here is simple -- lobby W3C to include custom scrollbar colors in the CSS specs, then call out Mozilla for not following the standards.
As it is, colored scrollbars are not part of any standard, so asking for them are like asking Google or Mozilla to support ActiveX for your webapp -- if you rely on non-standard, proprietary features, you're locked in to your non-standard browser.
If the "designer" only cares about the look of their site, then they're an artist, not a designer. Usability and accessibility are intrinsic parts of web design.
And if their brand is "confusing and hard to use" or worse, "glitchy" then I guess making their own scroll bars is appropriate.
Back when splash pages were popular I pretty much closed any tab that presented a splash page -- life is too short. Likewise whizzy Flash sites. What I miss about Flash is that it was an excellent bozo avoidance system.
Obvious solution is obvious. If the user is using Firefox, instead of replacing the scroll bars, replace the page with a message telling them to switch to a better browser. That way everybody wins and it's so much less work.
Or more obviously - if a browser works a certain way, and the user has chosen to use it, let it be. If the designer doesn't like it, well - the user chose to use this browser, and they choose to use your site. If you start trying to change one of their choices, they might change the other.
Maybe fix it then? Or better yet, don't fiddle with users' UI items. The scrollbar is the same everywhere on my desktop, why fiddle with a thing that the user's really used to?
Because designs on the web are different from those on desktops and big white scrollbars on a dark design look horrific? Also, because you want your design to work nicely irrespective of the browser and scrollbars and dropdowns make that really hard.
It sucks, but there's a reason that people choose to try to replace these elements (unfortunately, with mixed results).
For future reference, you can actually get rid of nasty scrollbars without ruining the normal scroll behaviour by having an outer div(overflow:hidden, width:x) containing the content div(width:x+scrollbar-width).
> Because designs on the web are different from those on desktops and big white scrollbars on a dark design look horrific?
Where do you draw the line, though? The scrollbar is not part of the website, it's part of the window where the website is being rendered, and the window is itself part of a desktop environment. Would you try to override the look and feel of the desktop environment if you could?
>Would you try to override the look and feel of the desktop environment if you could?
The answer to this question is almost always yes by short sighted designers who try to control scrolling behavior. In fact optimally they'd like to control your hardware look and feel also.
There's a difference between changing behaviour and changing the design. I'd imagine that most designers that design without scroll bars have no idea what the devs are going to do to change behaviour.
I hate it when the scrolling feels unnatural. At the same time, it's good when the design looks nice. It's possible to achieve both of those things.
There's a difference between the whole window and an element within the page. We have a single page app that still had scroll bars for subsections in the sidebar and quick frankly, it's embarrassing.
It truly sucks, as you said. Also, the web pages are within my browser's chrome, which occupies about a third of my screen, and behind it there's my wallpaper, and behind my screen I've a nice champagne-colour wall and some books, pens, and other stuff. What will you do if your design looks off in front of them? Change them too? Should the browser allow you to change the wallpaper?
Nasty scrollbars. OK. What if I want to scroll down about a third of a hypothetical long page? I'd either use the wheel/touchpad and make multiple gestures to reach there, or hit space/page down multiple times, or hit end and page up a bit less times, or just point the mouse cursor to about where I want to go on the scrollbar and click on the blinking thing. That nasty scrollbar is mine.
This is not really a bug but a wontfix (seemingly). Firefox has its own toolkit so it should be easier than writing a whole slew of JS to fix that bug (a.k.a. add this feature).
Would not it be better to style the scrollbar with CSS only in browsers that support it? That would be an example of progressive enhancement and adaptive markup.
For me, fast scrolling is more important than colored scrollbar.
It seems there's only a small overlap between the people suffering and the people being able to solve this.
If a "normal" web developer struggles with that, they can provide JavaScript workarounds, perhaps many, but they usually aren't that intimate with C/C++ and the whole framework on which Firefox is based.
Also, as with most projects, if a webdev can solve this problem with a workaround now, they don't invest time to provide a proper long-term solution. If if they are capable of improving Firefox, they'd still need to create the JS workaround, because short-term is what they are paid for.
