In my opinion, a separate software should be used for the end-to-end encryption than for the communication, although there are other things to do for security other than only programming the computer correctly (such as securely agreeing the keys and ciphers in person).
I mostly agree (although sometimes it is necessary to talk to someone about it); it would be better to actually have good documentation (so that you do not need to talk to someone about it).
A warning label like you mention is a possibility if that is considered to be necessary, although I think it might be better to have a file that you can download and read (or request by mail or telephone or fax, if this becomes necessary in some circumstances; do not assume the computer always works and is compatible with your file), instead of a searchable wiki.
Status lights can be helpful, although they should be dim, and should be red or green (or possibly yellow) rather than blue or white (unless you have already used the other colours and now you need more colours).
Red and green, if the color has some meaning, should be avoided. 10% of males have problems with that colors (dyschromatopsia) specially with led colors. For indicators blue and white are very easy to see, even in not optimal lightning. The option to disable them is nice.
> unless you have already used the other colours and now you need more colours
In that case you will end up with Christmas decorations. Better solution is usually placement and form.
Mixing red and green should be avoided. There’s no problem using either alone. Human color vision is the least sensitive to blue light, so a blue indicator led has to be made brighter than an equivalent red or green led to be as visible in bright ambient lighting. But that makes blue leds disastrous in low light, where the opposite is the case (vision is the most sensitive to blue). Of course there never was any reason for blue standby lights except the fact that blue leds had novelty value and looked futuristic compared to boring old red and green leds.
> The issue with this type of design is that it completely tanks discoverability.
There are still ways to help, such as having a menu bar, and having good documentation. (Documentation is more important, in my opinion; but both are helpful.)
> After nearly 30 years of tech life myself, I've come to the realization that the best UIs are not graphical. They can have graphical elements mostly for visualization purposes, but all of them should be as minimal and unobtrusive as possible. Any interactivity should be primarily keyboard-driven, and mouse input should be optional.
I agree, that the interactivity should be primarily keyboard-driven. However, mouse input is useful for many things as well; if there are many things on the screen, the mouse can be a useful way to select one, even if the keyboard can also be used (if you already know what it is, you can type it in without having to know where on the screen it is; if you do not know what it is, you can see it on the screen and select it by mouse).
> Forcing users to click on graphical elements presents many challenges: what constitutes an "element"; what are its boundaries; when is it active, inactive, disabled, etc.; if it has icons, what do they mean; are interactive elements visually distinguishable from non-interactive elements; and so on.
At least older versions of Windows had a more consistent way of indicating some of these things, although sometimes they did not work very well, often they worked OK. (The conventions for doing so might have been improved, although at least they had some that, at least partially, worked.)
> A good example of bad UI that drives me mad today on Windows 11 is something as simple as resizing windows. ... it's not clear where the "grab" area for resizing a window exists anymore
I had just used ALT+SPACE to do stuff such as resize, move, etc. I have not used Windows 11 so I don't know if it works on Windows 11, but I would hope that it does if Microsoft wants to avoid confusing people. (On other older versions of Windows, even if they moved everything I was able to use it because most of the keyboard commands still work the same as older versions of Windows, so that is helpful (for example, you can still push ALT+TAB to switch between full-screen programs, ALT+F4 to close a full-screen program, etc; I don't know whether or not there is any other way to do such things like that). However, many of the changes will cause confusion despite this, or will cause other problems, that they removed stuff that is useful in favor of less useful or more worthless stuff.)
I have used both Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Windows 95 does have some significant benefits (e.g. you can start Windows programs from the DOS prompt (I seem to remember that you cannot do this in Windows 3.1 and in Windows 95 you can, but I am not sure if I remember correctly), and the WIN+R shortcut, and some others), but also many problems (although some can be avoided by changing stuff in the registry; I had done that to force it to display the file name extensions for all file names, rather than hiding them even if you tell it to display them; I also dislike their decision to use spaces in file names).
> You could change the option to hide file extensions in the explorer settings windows; no registry tweak was needed.
The is a setting in Explorer, but it does not affect all file types; some (such as .lnk) are not affected by that setting and hide the extension anyways.
I don't have strong feelings either way, but I can see the perspective that underscores should suffice, and that introducing white space into filenames makes certain file and data management tasks more difficult and unpredictable.
> So where the old toolbar used to hint you the keyboard shortcut in a tooltip every time you rested your mouse over a button, the new one doesn't
Although it is bad that it does not display the keyboard shortcuts, you can push ALT and then it will tell you which letter to push next. (I just guessed that pushing ALT might do something (possibly display a menu?), and I was correct (it did not display another menu, but it did help).) This is not quite as good as using the other keys such as CTRL, or numbered function keys, but it is possible.
(I do not use those programs on my own computer, but on some other computers I sometimes have to, and this helps, although not as well as it would to use menus and other stuff instead. However, in some cases I was able to use it because of knowledge of older versions of Microsoft Office; many of the keyboard commands are the same.)
I think the menu bar is much better, and toolbars should not be needed for most things. With the menu bar it will underline the letters to push with ALT and also will tell you what other keys to use (if any) for that command. (One thing that a toolbar is helpful for is to display status of various functions that can change, such as the current font. Due to that, you might still have a toolbar, but you do not need to put everything in the toolbar. Perhaps combine the toolbar with the status bar to make it compact.)
(Something else that would improve these word processing software would be the "reveal codes" like Word Perfect. A good implementation of reveal codes would avoid some of the problems of WYSIWYG. For spreadsheet software, arranging the grid into zones, and assigning properties (including formatting and formulas) to zones, and making references work with zones, etc, would be helpful, but I don't know that any existing software does that.)
In my own software I do try to make the display compact so that there is more room for other stuff, instead of needing to put all of the commands and other stuff taking up too much space in the screen. Good documentation is helpful to make it understandable; this would work much better than trying to design the software to not need documentation, since then the lack of doumentation makes it difficult to understand.
I would prefer to do the opposite, where everything is displayed in chronological order (with an option to display by threads or not; even if not you can still find what each one is a reply to) regardless of voting and regardless of who wrote them.
I've been wishing for a News (NNTP) portal for HN. Would solve that as well as making it easier to follow larger threads by allowing you to track read/unread.
I also thought of that too. It would allow what I mentioned and what you mentioned. If you want to hide messages from specific users (or other criteria), then that would also be possible.
Some people have said, use a unadorned staff for zero, and six being a triangle in the other direction instead; that is what I thought too, and some other people also do.
I also wrote a program in PostScript to draw Cistercian numbers (which uses the nonstandard sign for 6):
I would agree that binary formats can be much better. Sometimes you can use fixed fields, but there are also structured formats such as DER (which is generally better than JSON in my opinion). JSON has many problems, including that it does not have a non-Unicode type (so you must use base64 encoding or hex encoding instead and that isn't very good), and other problems. Parsing it will also mean that you must handle escaping.
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