People expect technology to suck because it sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#171

Post by bsanr2 » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #111

_qulr wrote: post #81

The problem is with the idea of "continuous delivery". Many people fail to understand that technological advances only increase productivity if the innovations, the great leaps forward, are relatively rare, with long periods of stability and refinement in between. There's always an adjustment period, where people have to spend time learning a new technology, and any issues with the new technology need to be resolved.…

> The worst idea ever in technology is regularly scheduled updates. Innovation has never and will never happen on a schedule. This is simply greed-driven, promotion-driven, pointy-haired-boss-driven development. this is sort of uncharitable. the development/maintenance cycle for software is incompatible with the traditional way of monetizing a product (ie, design it up front, manufacture at scale, and then the buyer…

No, subscriptions introduce the perverse incentive to release unfinished products and slowly drip-feed fixes. Having to test extensively before a one-and-only release may not drive nearly as much revenue, nor provide a running deliverable stream for a given engineer/product manager's CV, but it is clearly the better user experience.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#172

Post by poulsbohemian » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:09 PM UTC

efitz wrote: post #83

I have worked for software companies for over 25 years, mostly on teams building software, and I hate software. I find bugs in every software I use (my freaking microwave oven control panel!). In addition to questionable quality, software is often downright hostile (lose all the data you typed into a web form if you accidentally backspace while not in a text field, because it navigates off the page). Ironically softw…

>I don’t know what has to happen for people to stop tolerating software as it is.

What we've got here is a question of cost and choice. If my choices are all equally bad, IE: vendor one is not any worse than vendor two, then inertia or cost become determining factors. In terms of consumer software - consumers have been conditioned to have low expectations, and these costs are further reduced because prices are so often free or very low-cost. In regards to commercial-focused packages - again, so often we put up with it because the systems we're using are so complicated and specialized that the pool of options are limited and/or the domain is so complicated that problems are inevitable.

So long as this is the landscape, few software producers have incentives to do the things necessary to improve, and/or believe they can spread the cost of improvement over a long period, IE: don't make the investment until the pain is too great.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#173

Post by leetcrew » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:09 PM UTC

LolWolf wrote: post #162

leetcrew wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one fully expect the backspace button to work if I do not currently have a text field focused. once you learn keybindings for an application, there's usually no way to perform that function as quickly/efficiently with a mouse. please do not break the conventional ones. ctrl-s is probably fine to break though. even when it does "save" the page, it rarely does so in a useful way.

On Mac the other default for navigating backwards is Cmd-[, if that helps any! (It's also a default in many applications for navigating backwards in whatever sense the app may intend.) I don't use Windows other than for gaming, so I'm afraid I don't know if there are other shortcuts other than backspace.

fyi, you can get pretty far on the basic shortcuts subbing ctrl for cmd.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#174

Post by leetcrew » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #165

leetcrew wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one fully expect the backspace button to work if I do not currently have a text field focused. once you learn keybindings for an application, there's usually no way to perform that function as quickly/efficiently with a mouse. please do not break the conventional ones. ctrl-s is probably fine to break though. even when it does "save" the page, it rarely does so in a useful way.

I’ve just tested on Chrome: backspace on its own does nothing, going to the previous page is bound to cmd-LeftArrow.

I'm one of those holdout firefox users. every day I come across more websites that only work on chrome though :/

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#175

Post by dsjoerg » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

we're talking here about the Total Cost of Ownership of software. people are learning to evaluate for themselves how well stuff works, and buy/notbuy or use/notuse accordingly.

someday there may be a market opportunity for software that is less broken than the usual.

arguably Apple used to occupy some of that niche.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#176

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #168

TeMPOraL wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> buyers of software expect the product to at least mostly work in the first place, but they also expect bugs to continue to be fixed after the sale, Contrast that to traditional physical goods, where buyers expect the product to work as advertised, right out of the box, or their money back . Software in the Internet era has it easy, because it gets to release shitty half-finished versions, and then keep charging mon…

> Because software does not decay on its own (despite the misleading term "bitrot" being popular in tech circles). in theory yes, in practice no. I work on a product that targets windows and macos. on windows yeah, a version of our software from 2015 probably works as well as it did the day it was released. apple deprecates stuff in their API every year that we have to go back and update. they also break a lot of stu…

Sure, but until quite recently, OSes were not updated at such breakneck pace. At this point we're hitting what can be seen as industry-wide, self-justifying scam: software needs subscriptions because it's being continuously updated; it's being continuously updated in big part because every other software is being continuously updated.

Still, as a Linux and Windows user, I've absolutely grown to expect my desktop software to work 10 years or more without updates. After that, I can always spin up a VM with an older Windows version.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#177

Post by x0x0 » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

julianlam wrote: post #133

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there are things that don’t work, but it’s not nearly comparable. In my life I’ve never had a problem with a refrigerator, had maybe two problems with washer/dryer, my closet Just Works, books Just Work (with an ink smudge maybe every 50-100 reading hours) etc. I can expect each of those things to last decades. Looking at the goods I’ve bought on Amazon recently, digital electronics/software as a category doesn’…

> In my life I’ve never had a problem with a refrigerator, had maybe two problems with washer/dryer I think blaming software for this is a little naive. Take a look at consumer reports for any modern fridge, stovetop/oven, washer/dryer, etc, and you will see complaints about fridge motors dying, touch panels going on the fritz, etc. -- none of which involve anything more than low level firmware. If you want to put a…

Right, but my $400 bose headphones have a broken integration with my $2400 mbp. Swiping the volume controls on the headphones also moves the balance.

Conveniently, because macos is ass, it's nondeterministic whether the balance controls display in Sound Preferences to fix the balance issue. You just have to open and close the settings panel in the hopes that it will display.

I'm a software engineer and I don't even know where to begin to debug this idiocy.

Duolingo regularly freezes audio in chrome. Once this happens, no audio will play in chrome until you restart or kill "Utility: Audio Service" with the chrome task manager.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#178

Post by jmholla » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

LolWolf wrote: post #162

leetcrew wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one fully expect the backspace button to work if I do not currently have a text field focused. once you learn keybindings for an application, there's usually no way to perform that function as quickly/efficiently with a mouse. please do not break the conventional ones. ctrl-s is probably fine to break though. even when it does "save" the page, it rarely does so in a useful way.

On Mac the other default for navigating backwards is Cmd-[, if that helps any! (It's also a default in many applications for navigating backwards in whatever sense the app may intend.) I don't use Windows other than for gaming, so I'm afraid I don't know if there are other shortcuts other than backspace.

Alt-Left is back and Alt-Right is forward. Sadly, their equivalents on Mac are also for navigating to the beginning and end of the line so if you're in a text box you lose that control.

Your alternative is handy. I wonder if it also works on Linux.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#179

Post by bsanr2 » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

airza wrote: post #16

I feel like the slow decline of software quality has been in lockstep with the gradual transition from (expensive and non-measurable) manual software/hardware testing and QA to automated frameworks and rollout-based quality assurance. I constantly encounter broken functionality, buggy or unpleasant UIs, just as the author has. It feels like many of these problems could be avoided if you just had one person whose job…

This, but also remember that we're living through a transition from SAAP to SAAS, where the "service" is actually data extraction for advertisers. For that, software must be minimally useful to a user, but the true aim of UX is not user-satisfaction but data extraction or subscription lock-in.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#180

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

philipkglass wrote: post #161

TeMPOraL wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not only have a number of devices that used to be purely electro-mechanical been reworked to use microcontrollers (cars, everything in the kitchen), Yup, and in most cases this not only did not improve them, but made them less useful and more fragile . Let's be honest: the software is there only because it can save on manufacturing costs, and sometimes can be used for extra marketing benefit. No attention is being…

I have to disagree in the case of car engines. When I was a kid my dad and uncles spent hours each month fixing minor problems with their purely electro-mechanical cars. I don't miss carburetors or mechanical ignition timing one bit. Electronically controlled engine functions are much better both in terms of efficiency and consistency.

That's true. I don't have that much experience with car repair so I might be wrong in perceiving the 90s and the 2000s models as the optimum in terms of car reliability - the stuff mostly works without funky issues, parts are cheap, repairs can be made by anyone who spent some time with a wrench, and you don't have to visit a shop with a license for poking around car's computer over every minor issue. That is to say: advances in computer control don't have to go hand in hand with making the cars expensive to service and not end-user repairable. But they do, because greed.